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Upgrading Bridge Officers

captainhunter1captainhunter1 Member Posts: 1,640 Arc User
Any chance we could see an ability to 'upgrade' Bridge Officers? What I mean by 'upgrade' is change them from Green quality to Blue quality, or Blue quality to Purple, or from Purple to Epic, etc.

Running a new character through the story arc progressions shined a light on this. We are awarded new Bridge officers as we complete missions and in the Klingon arc cases are actually part of the story themselves. However they come in various lower grade qualities (Green, Blue, etc.). I would like to keep them as my core team, however I also would like to have the best bridge crew available. I know I can simply dismiss them, and buy a Purple BOff to replace them using their name, but it isn't the same. "Hey Riker, you've been with me for a while now, but sorry, you are only Purple quality and I really need an Gold officer, so bye bye. Computer, generate generic BOff #347 and name it Riker." See what I mean?

There should be some way to 'upgrade' existing BOffs to higher quality, because like our captains, couldn't BOffs learn new abilities as they grow? I don't know if we could use Expertise points (like we do to promote them), or some other 'currency' to improve them, but there should be some way to do this in-game.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on

Comments

  • eladonwarps#6040 eladonwarps Member Posts: 231 Arc User
    I think in order for that to work, we'd have to revisit why BOFFs have the qualities they do. And the only thing is traits and the quality thereof. You can train any BOFF in anything you want, so making it about skills isn't it. Potentially it could be giving them more than 4 abilities at a given time, but I'm not sure the AI could handle that well, they already have a tendency to activate them in almost useless ways. That's assuming ground, since space ones are manual and tied into Ship Seating, and if you added more to that you'd break everything about Space Combat Balance.

    So if there were a way for me to take someone with, say, Basic Efficient, and turn it into regular Efficient, that would be a way. I can pretty much guess that anyone looking for things like Pirate, Romulan Operative, etc, would want to make them as high a quality as is allowed would do so. Some Traits would need to have Superior added for this to work, too, and the developers may not want to for balance reasons.

    That all said, if they wanted to tie in new traits or BOFF abilities to such an upgrade system, then it might be worth doing. Might be a good Dil sink if the player cost vs. performance gain balance were right.

    Currently, I have so many BOFF candidates eating up my inventory just trying to get Recruitment XP that I'd rather have a better use for them than just upgrading old ones.
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  • rattler2rattler2 Member, Star Trek Online Moderator Posts: 59,174 Community Moderator
    As of right now the only way to "upgrade" a BOff is to get a BOff of the same species and gender, save the old BOffs appearance, dismiss old BOff, and apply the appearance to the new one, renaming to match old one.

    Its clunky, and not exactly a straight upgrade, but its... well... something. I did that with a blue quality human Sci one time, bumping her up to purple.
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