Making of the Jem’Hadar Strike Ship

Many of us here on the Star Trek Online team are quite fond of the current Jem’Hadar Attack Ship and we know players who have earned this coveted starship are as well. It’s been around for a long while and is a top notch escort. We also knew at some point we would want to make a Tier 6 version of the ship and we wanted to respect its original design. One of our key goals when designing the new Jem’Hadar Strike Ship was to make sure it was capable of doing everything the original version could, but in addition, make it more versatile instead of strictly more powerful than its T5-U version.

On the design side of things, we knew what this new ship was going to look like long before we would begin work building the ship’s stats. While its visuals still look similar to the original ship, it also has a lot of new visual elements and to that end we wanted to give it a new name.

Bridge Officer Seating

Since this ship is a Tier 6 starship we needed to give it a 13^th bridge officer ability slot. We decided to upgrade one of the Lieutenant Universal seats to Lieutenant Commander Universal. We also knew we wanted to do something special with this ship’s seating. The Jem’Hadar Strike Ship will be the first T6 ship with dual specialization. It features both a Lieutenant Commander Tactical/Intel seat and a Lieutenant Universal/Command seat. This also means that this ship is also the first Tier 6 vessel with this kind of bridge officer seat. These seats can slot any Command specialist bridge officer regardless of their primary profession. This means the seat accepts Tactical/Command, Engineering/Command and Science/Command specialist bridge officers. This makes this ship incredibly versatile.

Special Abilities and Items

Lastly we needed to come up with some special abilities for this starship’s special trait and console. Since the Jem’Hadar Strike Ship is already incredibly offensively focused, we decided to give it a defensive console. The Dominion Defense Screen makes the user’s shield nearly impenetrable. However, attacking while this ability is active will reduce the duration of the Defense Screen’s effect. So a choice needs to be made: don’t attack and be nearly invincible or attack and sacrifice a portion of the ability’s duration. 

The Jem’Hadar Strike Ship’s Starship Trait is called Go for the Kill. It causes your critical hits while Cannon: Rapid Fire is active to extend the duration of this ability’s effect by 3 seconds. This can be triggered once every 5 seconds. With a little luck, you have the potential to greatly extend the duration of Cannon: Rapid Fire.

The Jem’Hadar Strike Ship is a truly amazing Tier 6 Escort and we can’t wait to give players a chance to earn this fantastic new ship!

Phil “Gorngonzolla” Zeleski
Lead Systems Designer
Star Trek Online

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