I just wanted to pop on quickly tonight for a quick – spoiler free – recap of my first experience with Star Trek Online’s Season XI: A New Dawn.  Based on my experience, the launch was relatively glitch free, lag-free (for me), and my first battle with the RNG Gods was ultimately very successful.  They’re still tweaking a few elements here and there, but for the most part my first few hours in New Dawn was completely enjoyable – as in nothing to gripe about 😉

The new Featured Episode Sunrise offered exploration, a first contact scenario, lots of science and we meet up with something that’s bigger on the inside.  A nice nod to both TNG and ENT, the mission has a number of really neat moments and a surprising appearance by an old foe.  I avoided reading about the spoilers for the missions, and this caught me initially off guard.  Yeah, yeah – a review is in the works but I want to wait a week or so before discussing the spoilers.

The new queues are a lot of fun as well, although I didn’t spend enough time learning the walk-through’s to understand the mission requirements.  I plan to spend some time this week getting a handle on the new missions, to begin the process of collecting Terran marks across all of my alts.

The Admiralty System was fairly easy to adapt to, although I wish that Dry Docking was active now.  The system is essentially doffing with ships with a few interesting changes that allows you to have some control on the outcome.  My only real complaint is setting up per toon.  The process of adding ships I previously let go, then dismissing them took almost an hour and a half on one toon and I’m still not done.  With 65+ ships in my Admiralty Roster, I’m dreading doing this ten more times for each alt.  Not all will have this many, but damn I need to create a spreadsheet for each alt.  But once this is done, it’s done®.  I can live with the process.

Check out Primar13’s great guide, posted on the forums for some detailed guidance on how to set Admiralty up safely.

As for the Herald Lockbox, the quality of the items are improving with each release.  The new Herald Kits (at least for TAC’s – I have not seen SCI or ENG yet) offer a base energy type bonus to damage. As for the big prize I lucked out, although i fully admit I set my focus on getting the Vonph Dreadnought Carrier.  2 ISA runs and I was breaking 30K without effort.  Timberwolf had a similar experience with his Herald Quas Flight Deck Cruiser (it was practically naked).

Hands-on Reviews will be coming this weekend for both ships!

A few quick vanity shots of my new monster: