Add secondary environmental armor slot on the captain equipment tab?

mournblade

It's an annoyance when I'm doing ground missions that require an environmental suit and I have to swap out armor from inventory for myself and my away team. Not to mention, if you're running any set bonuses, you lose those when you swap out the set armor piece for the environmental one. My suggestion is to add a secondary armor slot on the captain equipment tab, just like we have for primary and secondary weapons. That way, if we go someplace that requires the environmental suit, it's essentially already equipped - all we'd need to do is activate it as normal. Additionally, this could allow us to preserve set bonuses of the primary armor (if we have them). And of course, it will save inventory slots.

ihatepwe735

I thought the environmental suits were specifically there to force the set bonuses to break for those maps.

If you want to keep the set bonus there is a quest quite early on that gives you a breather device that *seems* to provide all the protection of an environmental suit for the cost of a device slot.

Its worth discussing wether or not it is desirable to have, as a game mechanic - environmental suits that force players to lose their set bonuses. Certainly there are no missions with ships that force players to swap out a piece of gear crucial to their build - in space the whole idea would be deemed unacceptable by the player base.

So, rather than an environmental armor slot - which would be confusing to manage and understand which armor bonuses from what items were applying at any one time I would suggest:
- higher tier craftable environmental suit alternatives that are used as equipped devices.
- craftable environmental suit modules that can be applied to any existing set or other body armor to give it implicit environment suit capabilities.

mournblade

I don't know if I agree with the notion that environmental armor is designed to break up ground sets, considering that on a first playthrough where you're doing missions that require environmental suits (such as in the Solanae Dyson Sphere arc), you likely haven't reached tier V in any reputation yet to even have armor with ground set bonuses. On subsequent playthroughs with alternate characters, sure, you're probably tier V rep at that point, but then that would presume Arc/Cryptic is trying to hinder players on alt character playthroughs, which makes absolutely no sense. So no, I'm not buying that.

As for the confusion, you could make the same argument about the secondary weapon slot, which seems pretty straightforward to me. In this particular case, they could easily code a secondary armor slot to only accept environmental armors, and even add a tooltip when you hover your mouse over it or select it on a console controller. The only complication I foresee is maintaining a ground set bonus when the environment armor is actually activated in your wheel/toolbar.

As for your suggestion about modules, I think that would be viable as well, but it seems far more intrusive than simply adding a secondary armor slot. Regardless, I think we can both agree that something needs to be done to improve equipping environmental armors in this game.

angrytarg

Reputation armour should qualify as a environmental suit. That would also make them more distinct from regular/fleet gear.

mournblade

angrytarg wrote: »

Reputation armour should qualify as a environmental suit. That would also make them more distinct from regular/fleet gear.

I somewhat agree with this idea, although not all reputation armors include a helmet (e.g. Delta), which of course wouldn't make sense for it to be considered environmental armor without one. But then again, they could just add helmets for rep sets that are missing them.

mournblade

I was gone for a year on a military deployment, but wanted to bump this post because I've heard more players in my Armada asking for this feature since I've been back.

Cryptic/Arc....I know you guys are listening. Would you please consider this QoL suggestion?

mournblade

So I noticed when I finally completed tier 5 in Discovery reputation that they have an EV armor you can craft that shares the ground set bonuses. In other words, when you equip it, it doesn't break the ground set. So this puts to rest the theory that EV armor was intended to break up ground sets. And it also addresses the issue of losing your ground set bonus when equipping EV armor, at least for this particular rep set.

It still doesn't address the annoyance of having to equip it from inventory and then activate it. And so I think the suggestion to add a secondary armor slot on the captain UI specifically for EV armors still has merit.