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Ships could use Role bonuses

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I'll start off by listing some facts about this game.

Fact 1: There is no reason to use a lower tier ship in this game once you have access to higher tier ones because they're inferior in every measurable sense aside from turning rate.

Fact 2: There are many skills dedicated to boosting a single, SPECIFIC ship's effectiveness. Given that we have limited skillpoints and won't be using lower tier ships more than 10 levels each, it means putting points in these skills is counterproductive and detrimental to your character overall until you start putting points in the final tier of ships.

Fact 3: Many players out there are unhappy that their favorite ship becomes inferior as they level up and dislike the fact they have to stop using it to remain on par with other players. This is especially true for ships like the Galaxy Class, Defiant Class, and Intrepid class, all of whom have loyal fan followings and to a lesser extent the Nova Class, and even some (poor misguided souls that lack taste :p) who enjoy the MIranda class.

Knowing and accepting all this. What do we do about it? The most obvious solution is to simply have ships be upgradeable and allow you to increase their potential weapons, consoles, and officer stations by some means after ranking up so they remain competitive and useful at higher levels. However, this has been suggested many many times before and Cryptic hasn't really said or done anything about it, so we can assume they are ignoring this because of their misguided belief that using the same ship more than 10 levels somehow takes away from the feeling of "progression".

So instead, here is an alternative solution. What if we gave each ship a specific role-bonus so they excel in one particular task. They still have the same versatility they do now, but they also have role bonuses that make them even more useful or equally useful to a T5 ship at a specific task.

For example, perhaps the T3 Science ship has a bonus to Science team, reducing it's cooldown and shared cooldown by half making it incredibly useful for boosting allied ship shields at any level of the game.

Perhaps the T4 escort ship, the defiant, could gain an innate Ablative Armor ability it can activate making it more resilient and harder to take down than it's T5 counterpart for a duration.

Or the T4 cruiser... The galaxy... Which galaxy fans everywhere were dismayed when they found out it was an a T4 ship and inferior to the sexier Sovereign class at t5 in every single way (which I found amusing). Even it could have some role bonus making it better at something, perhaps giving it an innate boost to all power levels at all times, or even for a duration, it doesn't really matter.

The role bonus strength depends entirely on how many points you put into the skill that corresponds to that specific ship, so you'd have to really like that ship or the specific ability to invest that many points into it. Also the ones I listed obviously are just loose examples without much thought put into them.

T5 ships still have the advantage of being more durable, more stations (which means more versatility), more consoles, more weapons. But the lower tier ships would become useful in the end game by specializing in very specific roles to offset their reduced firepower and versatility.

Not only would players be able to keep their favorite ships end game and not be too penalized for it as they are now, but it would also greatly increase the diversity among ships you see in combat because as of right now you only see a few per faction and that's it.

So anyway, just an idea.
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