What makes a ship fire freely or limited?

starshine

Ok, so sometimes your ship will blaze all it's weapons at every enemy surrounding you
and sometimes it will just fire at the one ship you've got selected and ignore all others that are in range of the weapons that dont have the selected in arc

What ship youre using, abilities or skills dont seem to effect it?
Is there anyway to make it so you are always firing at everything possible?
Thanks

Unknown

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protoneous

starshine#7408 wrote: »

Ok, so sometimes your ship will blaze all it's weapons at every enemy surrounding you
and sometimes it will just fire at the one ship you've got selected and ignore all others that are in range of the weapons that dont have the selected in arc

What ship youre using, abilities or skills dont seem to effect it?
Is there anyway to make it so you are always firing at everything possible?
Thanks

Have a look at this link BFAW. The ability works much better at higher ranks. BFAW3 is preferred when possible. This is one of several (and the most common) bridge officer abilites used to enhance your beam attacks. This particular one is multiple target. It's often used in conjunction with attack pattern beta.

Is there a way to keep this ability running all the time? No, but there's lots of things that can reduce an ability's cool down (CD). Everything from active duty doffs, captain abilities (if you're a tactical officer), your ship's gear, your skill tree, your specialization choices, your ship's build (i.e. Auxiliary to Battery or A2B in combination with active duty doffs), reputation and starship traits, or even using 2 copies of the ability.

A big part of the game is trying to get your ship's bridge officer abilities as close to their minimum cool down as possible so you can use them more often for maximum effect.

Having a look at that first link again, there are other abilities such as beam overload that will but your BFAW into a CD as soon as you active them, as well as different types of CD's.

If you're looking at your ship's bridge officer abilities in your tray and they are counting down with a spiral animation it's in a normal CD. If you see them counting down with a horizontal line animation that starts at the top and moves downwards you've reached that minimum CD and further reductions aren't possible.

starshine

Thanks, I was sure it was happening without it but no worries.
I'll read all those links thanks

arionisa

Not in the game at the moment to get exact wording but there is a setting for "only fire when target selected" or something like that. If you turn that option off, your ship will fire at just about everything around within a weapons firing arc. There is another option that prioritizes targets but I don't remember what it is called. Basically, with those settings, your ship will fire at the priority target with all weapons that it's within the firing arc of and fire your other weapons at pretty much any other target within their arcs.

I usually play with this set up and I have noticed that there are random times that, even with no target selected, the game will "lock on" a specific target and only fire if/when that target is in the arc. When that happens, I manually select a target and then promptly unselect and it will resume firing at anything an everything again.

Unknown

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starshine

I have the discovery pew pew lasers that probably makes it all feel like there's alot more action happening than there really is.

protoneous

starshine#7408 wrote: »

I have the discovery pew pew lasers that probably makes it all feel like there's alot more action happening than there really is.

They are a good light show when you activate beam fire at will.

echatty

For cannons there's also Cannon: Scatter Volley that fires at multiple ships.

But as everyone said, no way to keep it turned on, nor should it be. I usually try to focus on one enemy at a time, and I've become fond of running turret builds, so I run Cannon: Rapid Fire.