Should Abilities Be Toggled?

lapprenticel

Starship weapons can be set to autofire, and cloak is either on or off, but pretty much everything else has to be manually activated every time you want it. If you have a bunch of abilities with short duration it's possible to spend so much time activating them that by the time you're finished some have already expired. Why not make some of them a toggle option instead? Take High Yield or Torpedo Spread as options. They have longer effects than some powers, but what if you made them a permanent ability (if toggled) but costing say 5 energy whilst enabled? Obviously not all powers suit an 'always on but sequester power' option, but many do.

Thoughts? And yes this is probably influenced by SFC.

arionisa

This is a joke right ? Between auto fire and key binds, space combat is already as simple as not much more than fly towards the enemy and mash the space bar every now and then, and you basically want to take the space bar mashing out of the equation.

Of course from the sound of it, you have not yet learned what key binds are, how they work, or even that they exist. short version, keybinds can "automate" just about everything except for actually flying the ship for you, but they do require you to actually mash a key every now and then.

I personally don't use them as actually deciding what power to activate and when, and then actually activating them, is the only thing that makes combat any different than just flying around in circles in sector space.

leemwatson

Auto-fire...the destroyer of fun and skill. Whilst saving on wear and tear, there should be no auto-fire (and macros) at all IMHO. I prefer firing my weapons and abilities as I choose. The problem in this game is objectives where you need to disable a ship are poorly achieved by giving the objective invunerability when it gets below a certain %age of HP. You just can't fail. You also can't disable systems like you can do in the SFC series, where you can tactically take out individual systems.

asuran14

Some kinds of abilities could use some function of a toggle, but more as a rework of their function. Yet in the idea of setting an forgetting abilities to fire on cooldown, that would be better left to macros an keybinds than merely adding a auto-fire mechanic to them via a toggle.

An example of an ability that could be switched into a toggle format, and would actually improve it imo at least would be Beam overload. What I mean is turning it into a toggle that while active gives a boost to the damage output, critical chance as well as critical damage severity of the player's slotted beam weapon/s while it is active, while this buff would be distributed among the players slotted beam weapons. You could have it that it has a mechanic in which it increases the weapon power drain of your slotted beam weapons while it is toggled on, and that if thru weapon power drain it knocks your weapon power to zero of below it toggles it off an gives you a debuff that disallows you to toggle it on for a certain period of time.

rattler2

I don't think so. Part of ship building is selecting the BOff abilities. And sometimes you get some that share a cooldown, like High Yield and Spread. Having one on autofire could mean it gets wasted if you're not in a position to use it, or you might be wanting to use Spread to hit a group or a cube and an incoming Heavy Plasma, only to have High Yield activate and prevent you from using Spread.

BOff abilities should be manual only, as that means you have more freedom to choose what gets activated when. Autofire works fine with energy weapons like beam arrays.