Greetings and salutations 44th, welcome to your State of the Fleet for July 2020.

As I’m on the road, I’m hammering this out on a dodgy laptop with intermittent WiFi, so this brief will be… brief.
As is our custom, first a warm welcome to our newest members. Give them a wave and a friend invite when you see them in-game.

Also a welcome back to several familiar names returning to the game.

= Season 20: The Year of Klingon =

By the time of this writing STO’s Year of Klingon update is underway, and as it happens our 44th Assault Squadron finally completed its Colony to Tier 5, making the 44th AS a fully maxed Level 85 fleet.

Congratulations and thank you to all who donated over the years ! However a very special thank you to 44th fleet veteran @russelca for donating an absolutely staggering 17,000,000 worth of fleet credits ! Your generosity truly matches your bravery sir, our thanks.

STOs Klingon arc update has been positive overall, with many visual cutscene updates, map streamlining and some new missions/TFOs that reintroduced J’ula with her Discovery-era Klingons which are turning out to be just annoying enough to be a proper challenging mob.

Let your inner Trek nerdism get tickled on July 11th for STO’s grand Year of Klingon podcast which will have Robert O’Reily and J.G. Hertzler reprising their roles as Gowron and Martok respectively. Personally I’m looking forward to the Rick Sternback interview as he was one of the original Next Generation designers of the overal Klingon look and feel we know today.

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11472043

= Free Stuff ! =

A head’s up from fleetmate TBjarnason that Cryptic is celebrating it’s 20th anniversary and is giving away some free gear. For STO, you can claim the following:

New Title: Cryptonian
Epic Quality Platinum Discovery Era Sniper Rifle (note: once per account!)
Platinum Vanity Shield
Platinum Tardigrade Non-Combat Pet
Featured TFO Reward (x3) (once per account)

You can claim these by going to the Zen Store > Mudd’s Market > Bundles Tab. They are available until July 16th.

Full details and free items for other Cryptic games here:

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11465713

= Other STO news =

The in-game calender is gone. As in alpha-striked, air-locked, eaten by tribbles and will not return. Keeping it updated in these times of constant changing situations was just too big a hassle for Cryptic. We are going to try to re-launch our own calendar here on this website, to give you a general idea when to expect what.

On that note, the 2020 Summer Event should be going live soon as the Lohlunat Festival usually runs from July to August (last year it was July 2 to Aug 15), but we haven’t heard an official announcement yet. What we did see was a first look at this year’s Tier 6 Summer Event Ship.

If and when the Summer Event goes live, it is a simple daily flying game that is worth the time. Besides the ship it earns you, there are the usual trinkets in the form of uniforms, emotes but especially the traits and kit modules often have a gem in there that is worth picking up. We’ll come back to that later.

= Ba’ul weapons =

The Angel’s Wake lockbox has dropped, and the impressive Tier 6 Ba’ul Sentry Vessel is certainly an awesome ship by sheer presence and it’s unique clicky. Not going into details here, but check out Augmented Dictator Games build discussion.

What is more of interest are the new Ba’ul Antiproton weapons. Balthazar, Holyschit and myself have tested these and the consensus is that they are worth picking up.

These antiproton weapons have Ba’ul Refraction: each shot chains to an additional target for 5% of attack damage which obviously is not much at all, but the strength of the Ba’ul AP weapons is that they carry your modifiers like Kemocite, Suppression Barrage, Directed Energy Modulation etc to the next target as well.
The standard lockbox Ba’ul weapons reflect once, with the Lobi set twice *plus* it let other Antiproton weapons (like the Herald AP) also refract, which makes for a very interesting combination (…)

Their price on the exchange will fluctuate, but if you can pick up some cheap ones as their price will no doubt go up once people start to copy the DPS builds – some recent ISA parses with Kemocite III have been quite interesting.

= 44th Fleet Events =

Last month our intrepid Commodore Veratisu spearheaded the return of the Nimbus Naked Marathon which was a hoot, as was the accolade run on the roofs of Paradise City. Check out the awesome pictures by Commdore AnganySamavu, our official Fleet photographer, of the event in the link below.

THE “RETURN” OF THE NIMBUS NAKED MARATHON

Not to sit back and relax on his scattered empty ramen packages, Veratisu is organizing two unique contests this July.
First of a 44th Meme contest on Discord. If you can’t control the meme-dropping on discord, might as well take full advantage. Details here.

44th Discord Meme Contest

The second one is the truly unique 44th meme ship build contest. A what you say ? Just read up here, and see the awesomesauce meme infographic you can win !

44th Meme Ship Build Contest

I wish I could give more info on what to expect this month, but with the removal of the in-game STO calendar and even the usual STO back channels in disarray due to the Beer Bug, nothing is set or follows the regular programming. The Summer Event will come, but probably end of July/all of August, with another Klingon update following after. Upgrade weekends, sales and other promotions are more random than normal, and probably dropped whenever there is room in Cryptic’s secret calendar. What I do know is that 2021 is already mapped out with some episodes being written. Right now Cryptic is finishing the updates to the Winter Event coming December (don’t expect too much.

Last but certainly not least, a BIG thanks to the 44th Fleet Admiralty for keeping the fleet running like a finely tuned Singularity Core: Akula, BreakingForce, Damix, Phoenix, Veratisu, AnganySamavu, Sargon, Paradoxical, Shohom, Gallifreycaptain, and a very special thanks to our very own Miracle Worker Palcioz for keeping the website up and running.

May the Meme be with you.
Marcase

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