It would be great if a forum GM could forward this on to the relevant dev team for them to have a look at?:rolleyes:
I will start by saying I breed tribbles for my fleet and I enjoy it, as it gives something extra to do with one's time but I have the following suggestions/annoyances with how they work:
FEDERATION
I think that the tribbles, how they are bred and used on your own character is all fine apart from:
BUG: The tribble buff icon has come back in the space based UI - ie when you are on your ship - this should be removed as it doesn't make sense
The way that your BOffs use tribbles does not work as well.
SUGGESTION: Improve the way that the BOffs use their equipped tribbles
If a BOff has a T1/2 regular 40% heal tribble equipped and is out of combat with <100% health then they should use the tribble automatically. If a Boff has a buff tribble equipped they should immediately buff up upon beaming to a ground based map (as long as they are out of combat) and if the current buff is within 10mins of expiry they should rebuff (provided that they are out of combat). Also in the case of multiple buff tribbles being equipped, they should use the higher tier ones in preference to lower tier ones and secondly DPS > Damage resist > Health regen. (ie Yu > Daxter and Nielson > zinc)
KLINGON
I think that Tribbles on the KDF side of things is not right at the moment. For a start Klingons and Gorn cannot use any tribbles apart from the Riviera/Tribble of Borg (?) and do not get any buff from other tribbles. Although the size of the buff is small (2.5%) for someone interesting in min/maxing their character this is extremely annoying. This is also the case for BOffs of those races, whereas Orions/Aliens can use all tribbles.
The easy fix to this would be just to allow all races to use tribbles as you can o the fed side, but this is not truely canon.
SUGGESTION: Give the KDF their own form of "breeding" that will give them ground devices that can give the same buffs - namely D'k taghs!
Right so here is the main suggestion, tribbles should not work for any KDF officers, whether they are player characters or BOffs. Instead they will be able to find/craft ceremonial blades such as the D'k tagh, that count as equippable ground devices, like a tribble only to be used out of combat. Upon activation of the power the character takes out the blade and cuts his palm, before doing a fist pump (not a complicated emote to programme into the game) but this would activate a similar buff to that of a tribble.
In terms of the "breeding" or crafting of these items, I suggest that a similar chart/tiering of items is in place, with every tribble breed having a ceremonial blade counter part (so the buffs/effects are duplicated across factions). The names of the item could be things like Ceremonial Blade (House of X) so like the breeds of trbbles you have different klingon houses (Duras/Martok/Worf/Kahless) and the items themselves could have different markings/colours, added gemstones, etc.
It doesn't make sense for a knife in your inventory to suddenly replicate upon being left there with some food

so this is where the similarities between the two would end. However, for the crafting I would suggest some simple system involving an NPC on Q'onos, whereby you take a blade of one quality and a recipe of some other collectible objects, and you are returned a blade of higher quality. This would be a type of crafting that the KDF officers could do, and given that they don't have access to Memory Alpha would be a nice addition to their games.
PROBLEMS
OK, so I can see several issues with what I just suggested. In terms of the recipe items, types of alloy/precious stones would make sense for crafting further types of blades, but that would involve programming in an entirely new class of item. So perhaps the data samples used for fed side crafting could be used? (My Klingon has some from bugged explore instances, but obviously they would need to have more random anomalies in explore missions and the cluster/expanse areas.) Also unlike the tribble breeding where you keep the previous level creature after it has multiplied, here you would be using up your old blade to craft into a new one. So perhaps once "unlocked" that particular blade can be repurchased for EC from the "Swordsmith" NPC vendor? You could take this crafting further and perhaps look at crafting batleths/mekleths with special statistics - but that is digressing slightly as I think the tribble mirroring ground item idea is one that has more need to be looked into.
It is just a suggestion and I would like to know what other members of the community thinks about it, but any systems that add to the games longevity and endgame content would be good for retaining members, so I would think it was win-win (or am I just too optimistic! :rolleyes:)
FINAL SUGGESTION: Reaction to the Tribble of Borg
When a KDF officer uses a tribble it squeaks and the character shys away from it. I love the sound effects of the tribble of borg, but the characters reaction (Fed and KDF) should be the same shying away in horror emote. It is a tribble that is borg, would you pet it?!