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Improved ship separation hud, please.
foxrockssocks
Member Posts: 2,482 Arc User
Something I've been more than a little spoiled by playing my Jem'Hadar recruit is the Vanguard cohort ships. They have this wonderful little hud that shows shields and hull so you can actually heal them and notice they need healing. This is really valuable and useful to me.
Contrast this with the old saucer separation and MVAM mechanics and these pets you don't even know if they are still alive at any given point in time.
So, I'd love to see ship separation updated to have a vanguardesque HUD so we can actually support the other sections if they are taking a lot of damage, or reform the ship if they were destroyed.
Contrast this with the old saucer separation and MVAM mechanics and these pets you don't even know if they are still alive at any given point in time.
So, I'd love to see ship separation updated to have a vanguardesque HUD so we can actually support the other sections if they are taking a lot of damage, or reform the ship if they were destroyed.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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When it's pinned on the top you can also see shield status, hull health and whatever is going on with it in general.
But a better system would be nice, yeah.
OP's suggestion is great, if the coding is already in place on JH ship mechanics, why not port it to apply to separated ship sections.
A side-request, if I may: allow the T5 Odyssey's aquarius escort to be deployed at the same time as the saucer. Perhaps once upon a time years ago, this restriction served some ship balance, now it's just another self-nerfing console for some insignificant set bonus on an obsolete old tier Federation Flagship no one would buy over it's T6 just to save some zen. These consoles have no passive bonuses as their replacement "enhanced" T6 variants, only the underwhelming set bonuses, so at the very least make it fun, allow both to function at the same time.
I don't know that I'd go that far, but I do get the impression the vanguards are far more potent than ship separations which were designed in an era when Cryptic kinda almost cared about balance. I'd at least like them to inherit your weapon type and try to fight alongside you on your target, though. I don't think they are that potent on their own as they are now, unlike vanguards so they could stand to be more than a gimmick.
I agree, but realistically they won't do that without a money incentive. I suppose the question is will they revamp it and release more separation ships? Or do they think the number of people with tier 6 versions of separation ships and not the tier 5, where the separation console is, warrants enticing them to buy the tier 5 with a separation revamp?
It is why I'm kinda aiming low on just asking for a hud element.
Our idea what might be "aiming low" does not necessarily match what is actually "easy" or "low" for Cryptic to do.
Also, sometimes it leads to describing an easier way to do a specific workaround, instead of cutting straight to what you actually want.
That isn't to say that your initial post was bad. I think it should be pretty helpful in understanding what you want to accomplish.
An alternate take and even suggestions:
I would like to be able to keep my pet alive longer by healing it. But this is difficult, because I have no way to constantly monitor its health, nor can I quickly target it.
Possible improvements could be:
I see your point, as the problems with separation pets aren't just that you can't heal them with any reliability or that I have no idea what they are doing. They seem outdated in AI, UI, and overall capability.
They seem to largely be treated as an NPC ship in terms of AI, fighting whatever it wants to, and only after everything nearby is dead will they try to catch up to you. They really should function like hangar pets/vanguard wingmen in the way they work with and target through the player, abandoning their target to assist the player at all times if the player has a target.
The UI I already covered, there's no hud element telling you the status of your separated section(s), and that makes it nearly impossible to know they need healing, are dead, or anything else. Of course if they had enough healing to be self sufficient this might not matter so much, but they definitely do not.
Their capability seems remarkably weak in terms of damage and survivability. Hangar pets are ridiculously fragile themselves, of course, and that is another problem with enemy power creep, but it seems to me that separated sections die quite a lot easier than my part of the ship, and seem to die easier than wingmen, who even get infinitely replaced. There are already at least three traits that give heals to hangar pets/allies/nearby people, but I would make separated sections work uniquely that any heal you use on yourself they also execute on themselves.
Separated sections also don't seem to have much in the way of damage output, though I don't parse so I can't be sure. Obviously they shouldn't be doing player levels of damage, but what are they doing? Vanguard wingmen do seem to do quite solid damage themselves.
They also seem to lack utility, no special abilities that would make up for weaker damage output. I can't be sure about this, though, but that is the impression I get. Certainly vanguard wingmen are very potent for what they are, and with their commands have a lot of utility, and don't take up any console slot.
I really don't want to see a copy/paste system from vanguard wingmen to separated sections, but I'm not sure that would be a bad outcome, I'd just rather see them have their own flavor and value. A full rework would be preferable, but I don't know why it would be hard to just add a hud element for them versus that full rework.
Not sure if there's enough sep pets in game to make it seem worthwhile for them to spend dev time on though
For sure the bean counter problem with that right now is most of these separation ships are tier 5 ships and thus very few people are interested in buying them if they don't already have them.