Good day, Joe and STOers! This past week kicked off Star Trek Online‘s 14th Anniversary event! The reward is always a ship, and this year is no different with the Alliance Rex Pilot Escort.
…You don’t seem too enthused about it. (Or maybe you are and are jumping for joy that someone else is covering it. I can’t see into your rooms…at least, you don’t know that I can’t, anyway. :p )
Well, let me give you a few reasons why you should be ecstatic about this new ship!
(I’ll note that I’m using MCStu’s video covering the Rex to pull screenshots for each subsection except the final couple, including for the leading photo. He bought out the Event, so he has the ship on the live Holodeck server [others, too, but I wanted to just go with one creator!]. The Ten Forward Weekly stream for it is a Twitch VoD, so the link would eventually time out, and it would have shown stats from their internal Engineering test server and wouldn’t have necessarily been final.)
Building Up Your T6 Fleet
If you’ve been following what I’ve been able to post about my Free-to-Play (“F2P”) account, you know I’m doing a F2P challenge: Can I get the 10th Anniversary Bundle within 2 years from a fresh character starting just after the Summer Event?
To do that, I have to limit my Z-Store purchases. Considering I hate the setup of the Jem’Hadar characters’ default Jem’Hadar Escort (a T5-U, slightly revised version of the original T5 Jem’Hadar Attack Ship) and the lack of extra help for the ship, I decided I’d make 1 ship-based purchase: the Jem’Hadar Vanguard Starter Pack. With it, I got a T6 ship that has a Hangar Bay and the Vanguard Wingmen mechanic. Ohhh, those helped a ton! More targets for enemy fire, more things attacking my targets…it’s a great ship for a new account.
But whether you’re following in my footsteps or are a bit more timid about your Z-Store purchases while being a F2P player, you’ll see a commonality: that’s only maybe 1 Tier 6 ship.
Then the Winter Event came around, giving us the Tamarian Deep Space Cruiser (a capable platform of its own for F2P players, but I love having combat pets around me if I’m not capable of a ton of damage myself).
So now you’re at 1-2 T6 ships, and even at 2, it’s 2 similar setups: both are Cruisers of some kind.
Then the Anniversary Giveaways gave us a free T6 Z-Store Ship Coupon (CONSOLE PLAYERS: You’ll get this around early-mid March), so you may have as many as 3 T6 ships if you used the coupon and got that Gamma Starter Pack or as few as 1 if you didn’t use the coupon (yet) and have been saving your Zen this entire time.
Enter…the Rex!
Funny that I brought up the Jem’Hadar Escort/Attack Ship, because this design is basically a blend of 2 of among the best overall Escorts in the game (IMO): the Jem’Hadar Attack Ship and the Defiant/”Tactical Escort.” Because of that, you know this thing will be fast, nimble, and full of firepower, probably in line with what your Jem’Hadar was trying to start out with, just doing it better.
But if nothing else, you now have an extra T6 account-wide ship (puts you at 2-4 T6 ships now from after the Summer Event 2023), a new style of ship to try (previously had been, at most, a Dreadnought Cruiser, a Deep Space Cruiser, and a wildcard from your T6 coupon if you used it), and an extra Admiralty card for your account (Admiralty is such a help with the Dilithium grind! I’ll try to get an article on that somewhere down the line).
A $25-$30 ship for free is hard to argue, especially with a fun historical TFO as part of the ways to get progress. 🙂
Firepower: 5 is better than 4, and 2 is better than 0
1. Weapons
The Rex has a 5/2/1 setup (5 forward, 2 aft, and 1 Experimental Weapon), which on paper matches the Jem’Hadar Escort’s 4/3/1 for total weapons.
However, the Rex’s configuration is better: 5 forward-facing Dual Heavy Cannons can pack quite the punch! Even 5 Dual Beam Banks (which generally are cheaper than Beam Arrays, especially for Lockbox-released weapons) will net you better numbers than a 4/3 using standard Beam Arrays.
2. Wingmen
This is the main reason the Rex will be better than your default Jem’Hadar Escort (or other faction’s T5 ship).
“Jem’Hadar Wingmen” is a mechanic that gives that specific ship 2 extra NPC combat pets. They’ll attack your target, reinforce your shields, or to help reduce an opposing ship’s shield effectiveness. On PC, you can link their commands together so you only need to press 1 options for both pets to do the same thing (on Console, I believe they’re automatically linked and can’t be unlinked in order to simplify their execution there).
These are a variant of that mechanic, using 2 other Rex ships and firing Antiproton weapons rather than Polaron. Otherwise, they should behave the exact same.
Regardless, considering you have 8 weapons already, Wingmen are an automatic boost to your damage output compared to a ship without them.
If you could put 1 extra hard-hitting forward-focused weapon and 2 Wingmen onto a Jem’Hadar Escort, you’re getting closer to what this can do for no additional cost (while the Event lasts).
New Console for All Ships’ Use
(This, the Trait, and Experimental Weapon’s information comes from this review video from MCStu.)
1. Extra passive stats are always helpful!
Even just having an extra Console can add to your damage potential and/or survivability. Seriously…from the Rex’s console, you’ll add 8% to your Critical Severity and 10% to your Flight Speed, helping your overall damage (imagine if half of your 40 1,000-damage hits were Critical Hits: that makes 80 extra damage x 20 = 1,600 extra damage) and your maneuverability (get to your next target a tad faster).
But you know Consoles aren’t all just “stat sticks.”
2. MOAR COMBAT PETS!
The Rex may not be a pet-based ship on its own, but its Console sure does imply it could do more (or help your Jem’Hadar Vanguard Dreadnought Cruiser, if you got that Starter Pack). You get 4 Alliance-based Escorts to come in and fight alongside you for 45 seconds (or until destroyed, I’m sure), and they’ll respond to Wingmen commands if the ship has them (hmm…I don’t think this one does OH WAIT!).
Consider what I’d said about Wingmen and the Dreadnought Cruiser and you can see why this could be a very helpful Console. And unlike most Distress Beacon-style items, this only has a 2-minute cooldown, though I’m unsure if it puts other Beacons on cooldown as well.
CasualSAB just did a stream recently where he takes a Rex into an Infected: The Conduit on Elite and sees how the Console does. I’ve put the time stamp near where he starts talking about the parse.
Starship Trait: Damage Resistance Debuffs Rule!
There’s a reason why Attack Pattern: Beta is such a useful ability. It lowers opposing ships’ Damage Resistance Rating. It’s also why pets like the Tholian Mesh Weavers are fine to use, since they’ll throw out their own “AP:B”, further lowering enemy NPCs’ “DRR.”
So when we see Intertial Supremacy effectively giving an additional AP:B for being in a specific style of firing mode, it’s not hard to see why you can effectively increase your (and others’) DPS by using this to fill in some of your unused Starship Trait slots.
Whether it’ll be effective enough to see meta use, I’m unsure, but I’d say for a relatively new account without a lot in the way of usable Starship Traits, you could do far worse. This will let you be a bit more useful in TFOs, if nothing else.
Experimental Weapon: Polaron Builds’ Newest Friend?
It’s usually rare we get an Energy Weapon type among Experimental Weapons, so to get one that synergizes well with Polaron Damage buffs is great! In fact, for the most part, you could probably just port over the Jem’Hadar Escort’s default setup to the Rex, leave this Experimental Weapon on (and the included Console!) and just be a straight-up DPS gain on those 2 changes alone!
Plus, it’s not the “bug zapper,” so even if your ultimate build doesn’t include Polaron Damage-boosting items, you may want to switch to this just for the visual change. 😉
“Do A Barrel Roll!”: Pilot Maneuvers on a Free Ship!
Anyone who’s been around a while remembers the great kerfuffle surrounding the Risian corvette. Cryptic decided to try putting a full-spec version of it into the Fleet Shipyards, but you could only buy it if you owned the Event version of the corvette.
That made people mad, and that was the last time we essentially got an Event ship with a free spec mechanic included.
Now, following in the footsteps of the Hysperian Intel Battlecruiser (Intel’s “Gather Intelligence” ship abilities included) and the Tamarian Deep Space Cruiser (Command’s “Inspiration” ship abilities included), the Alliance Rex Pilot Escort released with Pilot’s “Pilot Maneuvers” ship abilities included despite not having a Commander-level Pilot specialist seat.
If you’re not familiar, for Pilot Maneuvers you have a set of forward, backward, left, and right maneuvers you can do to boost your speed and move in that direction, and you gain a slight window of invulnerability while doing so. Just double-tap in that direction to get the maneuver (or on Consoles, I believe it’s left-stick double moved to the direction in which you want to go).
Having a free ship able to give you some invulnerability for a short period (and easily repeatable a few seconds later) is a nice “gimmick” to have when you’re struggling to get good ships into your fleet. 🙂
Get Moving: Free-to-Earn Time’s Almost Up (PC)!
You need to get 2 points’ worth of progress per day to hit the 40-point Event minimum for the Rex. That’s basically anything listed except the Omega Molecule Stabilization (1 point per completion, but you can do that on 2 characters to get the 2 total points).
As of this blog post’s publishing, you have the rest of today plus 22 full days plus until ~3 PM Eastern/Noon Pacific the final day of the Event, so that’s 22-24 days to get 20 days’ worth of progress done. If you haven’t started by the time of this post’s publishing, you’ve used up most of your “grace days” for the ship but you can still get the ship for free.
For Consoles, you’ll get this Event on March 12th (and likely to run until April 11th or 12th), giving you ~30 days to get 20 days’ worth of progress.
If you start a couple days beyond the fully-free period, I don’t think that’s too bad a deal Zen-wise. Personally, I feel anything under 3,000 Zen is acceptable if you treat this as a T6 Z-Store ship being offered on discount (down to being free). However, free beats any Zen amount to Buyout the Event (Content Creators notwithstanding), so go do what you can while you can! 😉
Now I Need a Ko-Fi
And finally, this is a reminder that I have a Ko-Fi page up and going for my STO content. My goal currently is the expected 14th Anniversary Bundle, and the current $150 amount is what I’m expecting to pay for the Bundle plus all expected taxes and fees from most everyone who’d want a chunk of my income.
If mini-goals or the overall Total goal are met, random contributors to the fund will get things like Tier 5 Lockbox ships (1 per contributor up to I think 4-5 people), the “A Good Day to Die” Personal Space Trait, a choice of Personal Ground Trait (for up to 2 contributors), and maybe a couple more things along those lines.
Plus, again if I meet mini-goals for individual ships or the overall Total goal, you’ll get to help direct the order of ships being reviewed for the blog and the general build direction of that ship! Budget or Expensive, Live testing or on the Tribble test server, energy weapon type, role, etc. While I may not be able to fill every specific build request, I’d do what I could with what I have or what I can acquire relatively easily.
And of course, everyone gets credit for donating in each blog post (and I’m hoping I can learn DaVinci enough to add credits to videos I post).
That’s all I have for now. I hope this has convinced some of you who were on the border of doing the Event to get the Rex to get started or continue your progress even if you think you may not like it.
Remember, this is mostly for F2P/budget players, so higher-end players may view this and still not be impressed (though there may be some promise for the Console?). That’s fine. Not all ships are for everyone’s style. 🙂
But it’s free, so my overall thought is, “Why not?”
Regardless, until my next post (likely to be a F2P account update, but could be what I picked for my free T6 coupon), you all have a great rest of your day and continue enjoying Star Trek Online! 🙂
Joe and STO 