Enhancement: Bridge Officers

tobywitczak

I have been playing STO for almost three years now. I can honestly say that I spend most of my time doing character maintenance vs actually playing the game. This comes down to four areas. DOFF Missions, Admiralty Missions, Accolade Hunting, and reward Hunting. For the purposes of this discussion I will only discuss the BOFF Improvements.

My Previous discussion on DOFF Missions can be found
My Previous discussion on Admiralty Missions can be found
My Previous discussion on Enhancement for Accolades and Reward

First, There should be an in game option to use a BOFF types (Tac, Sci, Eng) to complete class specific tasks in game like the Stranded In Space and The Doomsday Device episodes or Romulan Mystery and Cardassian Struggle Arcs with the unique abilities brought by your away team.

Second, with more and more ground kits being added to STO I think it is time to allow the Special Kit Frames and Modules to be equipped by the BOFFs directly. This it as a late game bonus to use some of the Special Kit Frames and Modules collected are earned as part of the missions played. (This would also require a tweak to some episodes so you can pick up no class specific frames or modules). This would make the existing ground kit systems for BOFF a bit redundant, however a solution might be to keep the existing ground kit but give a bonus to the kit if the BOFF know how to use the kit. The other solution might simply be to allow the Slotted module override the BOFFs default Kit.

Another and probably more controversial idea would allow for leveling BOFF. BOFF would still start with the default traits like now, however the player should be able to level the BOFF by real Exp on missions (you need to use the BOFF on ground missions). This would convert a common Bridge Officers to uncommon, rare and then to very rare over time. The player can still skip the level process of by just picking up very rare BOFF like now. The real justification for this leveling is to level the original BOFFs from early in game. As the BOFF is leveled additional traits could be unlocked (Racial traits still apply) traits can be acquired by converting acquired BOFFs into manually s just like the kit ability’s now. If the available traits that can be created and the same as the BOFF is the is going to be converted then this should address the big concern of BOFF on the exchange going to Zero

In the chance that someone from Crypic or Perfect World sees this, please consider making this enhancement, in an upcoming release.