Obsidian Beacon

Tholian Tarantula Dreadnought Cruiser

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Tilor's Builds

Build Overview and Focus

In many games that I have played, I've always enjoyed the tanking or support roles. I get a sense of pride knowing I am lifting my teammates to victory. It's also a way I feel I can serve my friends and teammates. It's not as bright and flashy as a 1M DPS build, but there is something satisfying about taking tons of damage and just shrugging it off.

Originally, my main was in a Tarantula as a tank. I supplied healing, damage, and a really big ship to follow ("What do we do in this one?" Follow the big ship!). As the game has progressed, healing allies has dropped off being needed. I have a dedicated tank on another character, but this is still by far my favorite ship to fly. As such, I put a few restrictions on this ship and started flying it as a thematic Heavy Tank.

This is part of a build series I will finish someday of thematic but fully functional ships. Tholians use Tetryon weapons, and there are several far more "META" picks that I could use in several locations, but this is sufficiently capable. If you want to see other thematic builds, check this out:

Federation Phaser - Legendary Excelsior, Typhoon
Klingon Disruptor - Coming Soon!
Romulan Plasma - Rallus
Tholian Tetryon - This build!
Jem Hadar Polaron - Coming Soon!
Alliance Antiproton - Fleet Cyclone (Alliance Vessel coming soon!)

This is a premium build, with the highest available budgets and resources utilized in its creation. See the build costs page for more detail.

Namesake

This ship is meant to be a flagship for others to follow, and is there to benefit the team. It has a history of being a guide to fleetmates in other queues... "Follow the drillbit big ship". So, covered in a looming, dark skin, we get the Obsidian Beacon

Meta Analysis

ISA:
ISE:
HSE:

Budget Analysis

Each category is sorted by priority of contribution. Something that applies to generally more builds will be rated higher than archetype or build specific contributions. Warning: This is not a cheap build.

T6 C-Store Ships

Emergency Weapon Cycle Starship Trait - Arbiter Battlecruiser
Entwined Tactical Matricies Starship Trait - Gagarin Miracle Worker Battlecruiser

Legendary Ships - None

Event Items/Ships

Custom Power Matrix Universal Console - Eleos

Lockbox Gear & Duty Officers

Lobi Gear

Lobi Ships

Lockbox Ships

This ship: Tholian Tarantula Dreadnought Cruiser

R&D Promotional Ships

Change History

March 2025 - Initial Release (Full revamp of Support Tarantula)

Build Breakdown

I started out with this thing off the charts on theme - and it was terrible. With a bit more refocusing, I now have a survivable tank based on Tetryon Beams. There's really no support, agility (it is a cruiser after all), or exotic powers to speak of. However, we do have the one hangar and one torpedo on this build that we cater to a little bit.

Skills

Since this skill tree is shared amongst many builds, I made a separate page for it and the discussion of it.

Tilor's Skill Tree

Build

Starship Weapons

Starship Equipment

Notes:

The primary focus for this build is Kinetic Support. As such, I am differing from the normal energy weapons on supports (Disruptors). Altamid Plasma has a chance of -15 Kinetic and Plasma DRR. The Altamid Omni (Lobi) that I have always procs on a critical hit, so this has pretty good uptime. The Experimental Romulan beam still has the disruptor proc available, while still doing Plasma damage. This would be a more budget-friendly way to mimic this build with Plasma weapons. The Lukari Plasma beam has a 5% proc for healing in an AoE. The Dark Matter torpedo is a "token" torpedo. What this means is that it's there to trigger many other abilities. You'll see many supports not wanting a torpedo to not "steal" Concentrate Firepower. However, this one has a DoT that triggers Atrophied Defenses, will use Torpedo Spread so I can use Entwined Tactical Matrices as a way to get 100% uptime on Fire at Will, and trigger the Gamma Deflector. The Nukara Mines are more on theme than anything, but the hold will benefit anyone running the Tholian Webspinner.

For the Drive Train, I went for the Gamma 3pc for the team Kinetic damage, but also the deflector for the -DRR kinetic damage when firing torpedoes. The other pieces are mostly just there for the set bonus. The 4pc wasn't strong enough for me to slot all 4 pieces, so the shield was the easy choice to replace with the Tilly shield, which increases shield damage.

Devices are pretty standard, and most are situational for when I am not primarily supporting. Deuterium Surplus is for when I need maneuverability and Evasive Maneuvers and Emergency Power to Engines are on cooldown. The Exotic Batteries and Beam Batteries are extra damage when needed. The Large Auxiliary Batteries are specifically for the web cannon, since I lose a lot of damage due to using Aux2Batt and draining my Aux. I make sure to use one of these before firing the Web Cannon.

Each piece of equipment is covered in the table below, but the highlights are the Torment Engine and Web Cannon as these are some of my favorites for this build.

Finally, the pets are exclusive to Tholian ships, but they each have Attack Pattern Beta III so they are tough to beat.

Starship Consoles

Set Bonuses

Bridge Officers

Meta Notes

Bridge Officer Power Selection is something that has the largest swing in any build. If you don't pick your BOff powers correctly (and drag them to tray), you won't do anything. Each one of these has been hand-picked to interact with every aspect of the build for maximum performance. You'll see no duplicates here, cooldowns are managed so that maximum uptime is achieved with one copy of each power. There's not room for more than one!

...well, except for Auxiliary to Battery, but that's simply how that power works best as a cooldown

Traits

Personal Traits

Starship Traits

Reputation Traits

Active Reputation

Duty Officers

Miscellaneous

Ship Stats

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