Boarding party generally worthless and buggy?

momaw · February 2013

First off the fun bug. Sometimes I click the button, it starts doing the countdown for launch like shuttles should be taking off, .... and no shuttles take off. I pay the full cooldown time and nothing happens. Wheeeee.

Second, is this ability basically worthless or is it just me? It's like a really gimpy Viral Matrix with extra vulnerabilities i.e. your shuttles may never even get to the target. You pay a minute cooldown for your target to maybe have a random subsystem go offline briefly. It kills crew, but so what, crew is irrelevant. How hard would it be to pack those disposable shuttles with explosives before they leave?

Please tell me I'm just not seeing the diamond through all the rough...

romuzarii · February 2013

I ASSUME that boarding party requires crew to be alive to launch. If you try to use it under a specific crew %, then it won't launch until you reach that %. For my recluse it's near 500 crew alive. Anything below that and the boarding party will never launch.

I've found it quite useful. Taking other player's debuffs into consideration in the back of my mind that may or may not be effecting what I see, boarding party spam and subsystem targeting of the recluse carrier do a fantastic job of shutting down borg bosses. This has proven true everytime I've tried it which is dozens and dozens of STFs. It makes tanking far easier.

baelogventure · February 2013

Boarding Party does require a certain number of crew to be alive before you can use it.

I suppose Carriers/Flight-Deck Cruisers can use it to make them feel more, Carrier-y?

If the annoying short reset that Boarding Party can inflict on skills would actually bother mobs or cause them to not use certain skills, it would be more effective, or if instead of Boarding Party it was Demolitions Team, which caused Hull Damage by planting explosives when they beamed aboard, it would be leagues better.

You could even up the damage with the Explosives DOff if this were all implemented.

Or, hey, take regular Boarding Party and it changes to Demo Team while you're using a specific DOff.

Could even make the damage a flat percentage based on total hull, so it wouldn't be horribly OP against Escorts/Frigates and not utterly useless against Dreadnoughts/Batttleships.

mandoknight89 · February 2013

The really pesky thing about the power on the receiving end is that if it hits you when your Tac Team is down, it can escalate itself, and essentially shut off your ship by disabling all your Boff powers and maybe a subsystem, leaving you sufficiently helpless for the opponent's followup attack.

momaw · February 2013

mandoknight89 wrote: »

The really pesky thing about the power on the receiving end is that if it hits you when your Tac Team is down, it can escalate itself, and essentially shut off your ship by disabling all your Boff powers and maybe a subsystem, leaving you sufficiently helpless for the opponent's followup attack.

I PVE. The AI doesn't work like that.

Also: The description of the ability doesn't say anything about needing your crew to be above 25%. It says it consumes 10 crew per shuttle, so obviously if I have more than 30 crew members I should be able to launch 3 shuttles.

kalvorax · February 2013

the klinks in SB24 and the mirror feds in the Terran DSEs use BP....its such a pain if your not ready for it. but its so freaking useful in STFs

...and to the subsystem targeting.....i wish there was a better visual for IF a subsystem gets shutdown...like it does for the jem'hadar console thing where it shows it all big and stuff

mandoknight89 · February 2013

cynder2012 wrote: »

the klinks in SB24 and the mirror feds in the Terran DSEs use BP....its such a pain if your not ready for it.

They're mostly only a threat when it happens because there tends to be a whole lot of them. The Negh'var NPC is programmed to spit out those pesky shuttles whenever possible, and the worst times for them to get through are when you're trying to kill the ones guarding the Cubes in Cure (because now you have TWO battleship-class enemies wanting to kill poor debuffed you... and the Raptor might not be otherwise engaged, either...), or in SB24, where again, there's likely to be the Negh'var, a Vor'cha or two, and maybe three Birds of Prey and a Bioneural Warhead.

In PvP I've seen it disable a JHAS by chance, allowing the user to score a solo kill. (I think it was a non-JHAS Escort using Party 1)

notapwefan · February 2013

I'd rather not rely on any power which works on probability and chance.
It seems more powerful when AI uses on you.

f9thaceshigh · February 2013

if you use one of the new Jemhadar assault squad officer doffs (I think that's it), it gives each shuttle a random chance to carry a phaser turret. I've found that useful in itself. If I know I'm about to get hit by a target-able torpedo, like a borg heavy plasma, and my normal CIWS powers (BFAW, PDS, etc) are on CD, I'll pop a boarding party, more often then not, I'll get lucky and at least one of them is armed and it'll knock down the incoming torpedo.

futurepastnow · February 2013

momaw wrote: »

I PVE. The AI doesn't work like that.

Yeah, the AI won't use tac team to clear it.

Boarding Party can shut down a PVE enemy pretty effectively, but most PVE enemies will be dead long before the shuttles reach them. So it's really only usable against dreadnought-class boss enemies... and why carry around a power that can only be used against them?

jellico1 · February 2013

Be close

Target weapons
Boarding party
use the boarding party purple Doff doubles the amout of shuttles
add viral matrix
Add sub nuke

Game over

it works best with combined disabling attacks

lordmalak1 · February 2013

I think the application of boarding party is wrong.

1. Boarding shuttles can penetrate an enemy ships shields where torpedoes explode on impact with shields.
2. Boarding shuttles obviously don't land in the enemy's hangar bay, the boarders 'beam' onboard from the shuttle.
3. When boarding shuttles are destroyed along with their passengers the launching ship only needs to stay out of combat long enough to reconstitute those dead, floating in space crewmen back into the ships healthy crew compliment.
4. The attacking ship never runs out of shuttles to launch.

Boarding party needs a complete revamp, make it a consumable item as well as take up an item slot (for the shuttles) and incapable of boarding an enemy ship unless a shield drops.

wesleycrasher · February 2013

Also the doffs for it are bugged and don't double the number of shuttles launched, they just give you an additional one.

It's too bad, it could be useful and fun in pvp, but everyone is chaining tac team constantly so its almost impossible to make it work.

sander233 · February 2013

lordmalak1 wrote: »

I think the application of boarding party is wrong.

1. Boarding shuttles can penetrate an enemy ships shields where torpedoes explode on impact with shields.
2. Boarding shuttles obviously don't land in the enemy's hangar bay, the boarders 'beam' onboard from the shuttle.
3. When boarding shuttles are destroyed along with their passengers the launching ship only needs to stay out of combat long enough to reconstitute those dead, floating in space crewmen back into the ships healthy crew compliment.
4. The attacking ship never runs out of shuttles to launch.

Boarding party needs a complete revamp, make it a consumable item as well as take up an item slot (for the shuttles) and incapable of boarding an enemy ship unless a shield drops.

Shuttles can modulate their own shields in order to penetrate the shields of an enemy ship, and then beam personnel onboard from within in the enemy's shield envelope.

I like the consumable idea though - it would free up a Boff skill slot.

shinysalmon · February 2013

jellico1 wrote: »

Be close

Target weapons
Boarding party
use the boarding party purple Doff doubles the amout of shuttles
add viral matrix
Add sub nuke

Game over

it works best with combined disabling attacks

The target weapons and viral matrix are largely unnecessary here. And "Game Over" is not an understatement. A doffed boarding party with a full aux subnucleonic beam will cripple anything in PvE for over a minute. The cooldown on boarding party is less than a minute.

ursusmorologus · February 2013

yeah the CD on boarding party is shorter than the CD on tac team

let them purge the first, send another wave they cant do anything about

crownvic2door · February 2013

No keep it a skill, and make it so EVERY ship can launch a squad of fighters if the ship has a hangar bay, most of them do I did my research (watched the show, all of them) and make it so the carriers can launch one full sized ship. carriers just for two squads of fighters is a joke.

mneinth · February 2013

Wouldnt try using this skill if you fly a carrier,would never be able to send anything out(after a few minutes of fighting I spend rest of an stf with 1 white alive crewman and rest yellow)

If they fixed this i would try it for sure.

misslithany · February 2013

The problem with boarding party is that the shuttles are to slow. If your not lauching them from point blank range chances are the target will be dead before they even reach it if they are shot down first. And if their target is destroyed before they get to it, they just head to its last location and sit there. High yield torpedos at least know to change to a new target and keep going. Also all the abilities of the boarding party are random %, so most of the time they don't do much or even anything because of the RNG.

nicha0 · February 2013

The ability might be half decent if the crew mechanics of the game weren't so buggered up, but every ship is flying around with no crew left the entire game, actually removing someone's crew would be useful if there were crew left to remove. These torpedo blasts hitting ships, doing no damage but killing hundreds of crew really need to stop.

cmdrscarlet · February 2013

Consumable? Heck yes!

Otherwise, c'mon ... little shuttles flying between ships ... that's cute and fun

Boarding party generally worthless and buggy?

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