Q: Multiple BOff space skills

Comments

• crimpson7 Member Posts: 76 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  No, also if you have two copies of Beam Fire at Will III they will have a 15 second cooldown between uses (the cooldown of the individual skill is not reduced)

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• tribbles2rule Member Posts: 3 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  So there is 0 benefit for having the same BOff skill twice or more. Well that sux.

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• scoustar Member Posts: 39 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  Simple answer: No
  
  When you use (for instance) one of your Beam Array: Fire at will 1 skills, the other 2 will enter a "cooldown" phase, and take time to become available again. During this time only 1 version of the skill is running, not all 3 as it might seem. Thus it's probably best not to use the same skill 3 times. However cooldown reduction is, sort of, affected as your 2nd version of the skill will be available before the 1st version you just used. In this sense, again, the 3rd version of the skill is wasted as the 1st skill will have returned to use before the 2nd is finished.
  
  Perhaps try thinking of the Boff layout as 2 sets of 4 (4 and 3+1) initially and designing your layout on the principle that once you've used one set of 4 skills, you can start using the next set of 4.
  
  Example:
  Commander Tac:
  Tac Team 1
  Beam Array: Fire at will 2
  Torpedo Spread 2
  Attack Pattern Beta 3
  
  Ensign Tac:
  Tac Team 1
  
  Lieutenant Commander Tac:
  Beam Array: Fire at will 1
  Torpedo Spread 1
  Attack Pattern Omega 1
  
  With the above setup (please no screaming that I'm a noob; it's just a simple example (and I already know :P)) you can see that you effectively have the same plan twice, just slightly differently set up. I've included Attack Pattern Omega in the 2nd set of 4 purely as an example of how you might want to change one of the skills to give a different outcome.

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• supersharks Member Posts: 91 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  There can be, it can allow you to keep a buff up longer as though it procs a cooldown on the other versions the cooldown isn't as long as the standard cooldown. Depends if you weight the benefit as superior to two different skills. I keep two copies of attack pattern omega on one Boff so I can have the buff up for a longer period of time.

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• smokeybacon90 Member Posts: 2,252 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  There certainly are benefits to running two of one power. For example, you can run 4 emergency powers (2 of 2 types) for 100% uptime on two systems. Granted, Aux2Bat can also do this. No power can be reduced to shorter than 15 seconds, which indeed means Tac Team will never be on 100%. In your case, running 2 copies of FAW will mean that after casting it once, the next copy will be 15 seconds away from being available (5 seconds after the current one runs out).

  

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• vimzul Member Posts: 0 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  There are 3 types of cooldowns:
  Ability cooldown
  System cooldown
  Duplicate ability cooldown
  
  You mentioned Fire at Will. it starts with an ability cooldown of 70 seconds and reduces down to 30 seconds as you level up.
  
  Once you use FAW (any rank) it will begin the ability cooldown. It also begins a duplicate ability cooldown of 20 seconds so you can't use a different FAW (of any rank) until that 20 seconds is up, you can however, use a different FAW after 20 seconds.
  
  The third cooldown that begins when you use FAW is a 15 second system cooldown on Beam Overload abilities and all Target X Subsystems abilities.
  
  Some duty officers and various things can reduce various ability cooldowns but not system or duplicate ability cooldowns.
  
  You gain a significant advantage with using the same beams with the same damage type when you stack them with tactical consoles, however, it does restrict how much additional damage you can do with boff abilities.
  
  Using beam abilities does not lock out cannon or torpedo abilities. If you use dual beams and beam overload they can work well with a torpedo launcher using Torpedo High Yield) given they have the same firing arc and beam overload doesn't impact multiple arrays.
  
  Generally speaking, there is no point having more than two FAW abilities (or 1 with a Aux2Bat setup which speeds up the ability cooldown to match duplicate ability cooldown).
  
  This may seem like a negative, however, things like Attack Patterns are also very good abilities which you shouldn't ignore and Tactical Team is handy if you use beams or cannons.
  
  I do not like the Fleet Tactical Escort because it has too many Tactical BOFF slots, as you have seen, 3 is overkill.

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• noroblad Member Posts: 2,624 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  tribbles2rule wrote: »

  So there is 0 benefit for having the same BOff skill twice or more. Well that sux.

  
  It depends on the skill. Some skills, or some *builds*, you can, and want, two copies of certain skills.
  
  Builds... mostly, this is which active duty officers you have, but some of those can reduce cooldowns.
  
  Which skill? A great example is gravity well. I have 2 GW on my sci ship, and when the first one still has a 20 sec timer the second one is ready. 20 sec is a long time in a fight. Others... my cannon escort has 2 copies of rapid fire and scatter. Here again, the second one is up before the first, and while its a shorter gap than GW, it is significant in battle and I do not really have much else to put there (I have no torps, one mine pattern is sufficient, and one BO3 is sufficent for my one beam bank -- this on a ship with 3 tac officers).
  
  One thing that is frowned upon is having a bunch of 'team' skills, as they share across all 3 officer types. So sci team puts tac team on cooldown, etc. You can do it with some active duty officers to support it, but having a sackful of team skills is not optimal under most conditions.
  
  So, its not worthless. It just depends on your needs, and whether having the second copy to slip in under the normal cooldown is worthwhile to YOU for YOUR setup.

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• tribbles2rule Member Posts: 3 Arc User

  January 2014 edited January 2014

  Oh okay. I get how this works now. I'm aware of shared cooldowns between different skills like science team and eng team for example. But I had no idea about a duplicate cooldown. This info will help me to make a nice set-up for my weapon skills.
  
  I choose the 2 science and 2 eng skills on my ship that would not impact one another and all healing based/ damage resistance. This is the fastest ship in the fleet outside of shuttles but not much hull compared to bigger ships, a .9 shield mod, and only 50 crew. I am aware its a hard ship to play (esp since I only own 1 ship) but the idea of commanding a defiant class ship is just... WOW.
  
  But thank you all for helping me to learn an advanced tid-bit of information.

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