What Temporal Powers are (still?) good?

dracounguis

I've messed around with temporal powers a bit but was never impressed. Admittedly, I've not spec'ed and overloaded on the right consoles to buff them a lot (don't have any particular set of powers buffed really when testing), but even taking that into consideration, I just don't see where they are as powerful as people are saying they are. First off, DPS is so high now, that using powers that needs ~10 seconds to put 5 stacks of entropy on a target seems pointless on anything that's not boss-sized. And even then it's of dubious use compared to other powers you could be slotting. Someone said timeline collapse was great, but GW does the same thing and doesn't 'need' to have some other power spend 10 seconds buffing it w/ entropy.

Am I missing something about the greatness of temporal powers? Or is it's stacking entropy mechanic just too slow now that most NPCs get killed before you can get stacks on them? What combo of powers should I try?

tom61sto

If it was recent talk of Temporal being impressive, they're likely talking about the Temporal Ship abilities, not Bridge-Officer abilities. A full-Temporal ship has a series of three performance changing modes (ex. Tac orientated one gives more turnrate and speed at the cost of durability) that charges up a large energy blast that can do a fair bit of damage to larger enemies.

If it was older talk, it may have also meant BOff abilities, but those got nerfed in Season 13. Right now, it's more a gap filler outside of high EPG builds. For ships needing a damage ability in Commander Engineering/Temporal spot, a heal in a Tactical/Temporal or just having spare space you don't have any conventional abilities that suit you, it can be a good option.

Entropy has always been largely ignore-able, even pre-nerf. There are plenty of times where I was running two consumers or two builders on their own, or even just single abilities to decent effect.

As for Timeline Collapse doing the same thing as Gravity Well, keep in mind that you can double-dip by firing Timeline Collapse into a Gravity Well, since they don't share a cooldown. Also, on Temporal Cruisers or Escorts, there might not be any way to conventionally get a Gravity Well, so it could be slotted instead.

I've not done much with Temporal on a high Exotic Particle Generator build recently, since the only ship with any Temporal BOff abilities that use very often is a Vengeance (Kelvin Timeline Intel Dreadnought), but EPG might be worth looking into boosting Temporal and seeing what damage you can crank out of it, preferably on an Temporal Science ship.

dracounguis

Pretty sure they were talking about powers, but I could have been wrong. Glad to know I'm not so inept as to not be able to see that 'the powerful' spec was powerful. I'll stop trying to find the right combo for OP damage since it seems to not exist.