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Could boarding party get an overhaul?
dahminus
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Give them tractor beams/weapons/instant transport.
Just a dead power as is...
Just a dead power as is...
Post edited by dahminus on
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If you think about it, why is it an engineering/ops ability in the first place? If any, it should be a tactical ability. I get that boarding shuttles that are fit with a kind of gizmo to get through enemy shields are a viable thing and I understand why they are unarmed. It wouldn't make much sense for them to be armed, they wouldn't make much damage, although I could imagine a point defense phaser/disruptor beam to target small craft/heavy torps/mines.
The way it works is fine (aside from deactivated subsystems in PvE do absolutely nothing), there should however be a DOFF with a chance to placate the enemy ship upon succesful boarding (essentially making it attack an ally for a few seconds, simulating a succesful capture of key systems/weapon control).
But on a further note, I'd like to see tactical team becoming an offensive/defensive ability. Defensive clears boarding parties and maybe buffs damage a bit, offensively it should be used on enemies with shields down on at least one facing and debuff their damage and sent a boarding party to their vessel. The shield distribution effect of TT would make more sense with ET or ST anyway.
In a better game, a succesful boarding action on an enemy with low health would result in capture of the enemy, disabling the vessel and defeating it without blowing it up
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In most cases the shuttles never reach the enemy vessel. They are blown up before they ever get there. The sacrifice or waste of people and material for the higher cause of what, makes me think this is so totalitarian and so unfuturistic, let's forget it
There are DOFFs that give abilities to Boarding Parties. I seem to recall one gave them defensive turrets or something like that.
First to NPC's. Frigates die too fast for some good use of BP. Cruisers, they could be useful (since BP is probably only used by player cruisers). Battleships, depends on your timing and if they take down shields, otherwise useless. Dreadnoughts overcome anything in 1 second, so no use there.
To players. If you use BP against players, you're in a PvP. That means you are in a big mess of scatter volleys, Repulsors, Gravity Wells, beams firing at anything moving, photonic ships, fighters and so on. The boarding parties have almost no chance of being succefully deployed in PvP. That being said, if you can get directly over an enemy firing a full broadside, launching your shuttles then just does the trick in severely disrupting your enemy.
So what we really need, is NPC resistance dropped and Boarding Parties with a bigger hull. Then that ability would rock the world down.
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and all the torps/abilities killing the crew down to zero within several seconds.
A bit of an investment, probably not too cost effective, but I found it useful enough.
This would make Boarding Party 3 really effective against anyone that did not have Tactical Team 3. People would then have to take this into account when setting up their bridge officer layouts.
Any thoughts?
It would make sense, a larger, stronger boarding party would defeat a smaller, weaker tac team.
But nobody would go for it, no one wants to have to slot TT above TT1, tac slots are at a premium.
Then people would have to make a decision. Do they prefer to use more powerful tactical abilities and be vulnerable to Boarding Party or would they prefer to have a way to counteract Boarding Party and make do with less powerful tactical abilities? People should have to make decisions when building their characters and setting up their crews. Having to make tough decisions should be a part of the challenge. It does not seem very challenging to me to be able to have everything and give up nothing.
I do believe that if something like this were done, the complaining from some people would be loud, though.
Personally, I think this could be a way to balance the Tactical and Engineering specialties against each other. Engineers would be able to take a bite out of the dominance of Tactical play by forcing the captains of those tactical-focused ships to make tough decisions about what they do with their coveted Lt. Commander tactical skills.
It would also make the Transporter duty officers more important than they currently are, since they would provide an alternative means to get rid of boarding parties of any level.
EDIT: typo
Not like Tactical Team doesn't do enough already...I mean cleanses tac debuffs, shield redistribution, and a small damage buff to boot.
When a shield facing of a target is below 20%, attacker is facing the weak shield, the attacker can use 'Boarding Party'. Transporter effect, and then the victim is subject to the boarding party's effects. As well, Boarding Party should have a DoT on the victim's crew count depending on the level used.
If the victim's able crew reaches 0, then Boarding Party would trigger something akin to how the Borg assimilate players in the Infected ground STFs. You lose control of your ship, and it starts attacking your allies, and self-destructs after a period of time. Only against players, though.
This would give activating Tactical Team on other players an actual purpose. Allies popping tactical team on a victim would be able to cancel out the boarding party hijacking effect and auto-destruct, as well as the typical boarding party effects.
that would be awesome. I always wished we had more confuse powers in game.
Edit: Especially considering how it would make crew an actual factor in battle. They need to fix that. Even if it's as simple as crew are the ability to operate your ship, and once your crew die you're inert until you have at least one able crewman to fly the ship to safety, or are open to being boarded a-la this version of boarding party
I like that idea. You figure boarding parties have at least some skilled marines (are they marines in Star Trek? It's naval. I don't know what Federation troops are called
I might prefer if all tactical teams had at least a chance of removing any level of boarding party, say 25% chance of tac team 1 removing boarding party 3, 50% chance for tac team 2 to remove boarding party 3, 50% chance for tac team 1 to remove boarding party 2.
But either way I like the idea. Boarding party is pretty much useless as is.
Starfleet has no "marines", most operations are performed by Security Officers (ops division) or Tactical Officers (command/ops) on a few occasions. Simple reason is that Starfleet doesn't have "soldiers" just like they don't have "battleships".
But I like that idea and I actually would like to port it over to Engineering and Science Team as well. A level 3 science debuff should be countered by an level 3 science team, same with engineering team.
Yes, everybody would whine because they would have to do something DIFFERENT but seriously, suck it up. I'm tired of that
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That's a pretty good modification of the idea. It would make it so those who just use Tactical Team 1 (especially for ships with only a Lt. level tactical station) can still have a chance to fight back against higher tier boarding parties. It would also reflect the random possibility that the tactical team does an exceptional job or that it gets lucky and catches the boarding party off balance.
Keep the ideas coming!
They're all considered security or tactical? I've never seen much of them in the shows or movies but I was assuming the federation had specialized combat personnel, and because the federation is naval they'd be called marines. Shows what I know. I've never seen boarding parties either though, if anything tactical teams would wait until enemy shields were down then transport over.
Those changes to engineering and science teams are good ideas too.
Notrhing really hints at specialized combat personnel in Starfleet, judging by the shows and movies. The most combat heavy show, Deep Space Nine, actually shows quite the contrary in it's episode "The Siege of AR-115" which shows Starfleet personnel, albeit equipped with dedicated combat gear, hopelessly overburdened with the task of fighting battles against Jem'Hadar soldiers on a planet surface. It was established in The Next Generation that ground warfare was something that effectively didn't exist anymore at least in the realms of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants where the UFP operated.
While every crewmember in Starfleet had to have some sort of basic and in some cases advanced tactical training, every sort of "combat" on-screen was mostly done by Security Teams and the protagonists of the shows. In The Original Series, Security personnel (referred to as "guards") would accompany landing parties (and usually die within ten minutes of the episode
As far as specialized combat personnel goes I'd favour the PC game "Star Trek Voyager Elite Force"'s approach that Starfleet at one point formed essentially SWAT security details to deal with such situations. It alll boils down to Starfleet Officers represent police officers more than marines or soldiers in terms of combat.
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I used to take interest in creating a boarding party boat, but there were many cons to the ability that made it unreliable. To summarize:
- Can be straight countered/cleared by Tac. Team
- Can be cleared by a DOff'd Transfer Shield Strength
- Can be shot down before it reaches its target
- Does not switch target after its primary target is destroyed
- Engi Team clears the subsystem disables
- Consumes 10 crew per shuttle (and we all know how fragile crew is in this game...)
- Won't launch if crew % is too low (below 20-30%?)
- High cooldown in comparison to its counter abilities
- Inconsistent subsystem disables
As an additional side note, the wiki does mention that boarding party damages a ship, but that is clearly not the case right now. Perhaps this is the basis of the idea of a "Demolition boarding party".
Boarding party, while useful in its ability to shut down an entire ship, is too easily countered by many other BOff abilities/ play-styles.
This ability is fairly useful in PvE where the NPCs aren't smart enough to use a Tac. Team or a DOff'd TSS to clear them...nor shoot them down. However, all but the largest of NPC ships are generally destroyed before the boarding parties even reach their target, thus further reducing the usefulness of this ability. Its glaring weaknesses are emphasized even more in PvP where 90% of players have a full cycle of Tactical Team and an abundance of AoE damage skills. Even if the previously mention isn't so, most players are able to outmaneuver these shuttles for ample amounts of time to blow them out of the sky.
And thus, with all of the flaws mentioned above, we have an ample amount of proposed fixes to address these issues:
- Increase the speed of the shuttles
- Reduce the cooldown (and/or global) of the ability
- Implement a direct transport instead of shuttles (like the Borg)
- Remove the crew requirement and/or % lockout of the ability
- Standardize subsystem disables
- Lower/remove the Tac Team counter ability against BP
- Make Engi Team only repair one disabled system
- Make BP a Tac. ability (!?!?)
There are numerous other solutions that have come up on the forums that I couldn't remember off the top of my head, but these are a few.
Increasing the speed of the shuttles would probably be a fairly simple buff to the ability without breaking it entirely. I do like the idea as opposed to making it a direct transport. Reducing the cooldown of the ability itself would be a welcomed change since its current cooldown is about 1 min 30s (45s with 2 copies). As for removing the crew requirement or changing the % crew up requirement, the problem doesn't lie with Boarding Party itself as much as it lies in the way crew is treated in the game. I would propose that crew regenerated faster in/out combat instead.
I for one would like to see Tac Team still counter Boarding Party, but instead, clear only once during the activation. This would allow of a more instantaneous and skilled response to the boarding party rather than giving everyone who runs Tac Team an 66% uptime immunity to this skill. The same applies to the DOff'd TSS which has a chance to remove boarding parties every second for its duration.
As for the last two ideas....just no. Nerfing Engi Team even further isn't doing anyone justice. Giving BP to the Tactical BOffs would deprive the Engineering BOffs of another unique skill, and that is the last thing we all need.
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We need a doff that either gives the shuttles mask signature, or increases their speed and defense. Heck even both would be awesome.
Yea...as if TT didn't do enough already.
But one thing I forgot to mention above was the idea of a "demolition boarding party". I think this idea has a lot of potential, but requires careful implementation to avoid being called OP.
From in-game, we know that there are already 3 DOffs for Boarding party:
- Chance to Launch 1/2/3 extra shuttles ("double")
- Chance for the shuttles to come with a point defense turret
- Reduced Cooldown for launching boarding party / hangar pets
Now, I don't know the effectiveness of the point defense turret, but if it's anything as powerful as the bio-neural warhead, we'll have to be careful about how to approach another buff to the boarding parties. This is probably not the case though.
How to implement the damage is also up for debate. Will it be damage over time or instantaneous? Will the damage apply as soon as the shuttle hits the target, a few seconds after hitting the target, or after the crew transports back? There are pros and cons regarding this mechanic, namely giving the target time to clear the demolition or not.
As for implementing the demolition boarding party, one way is to simply buff the existing skill (no doffs required) and scale the damage based on the rank of the ability. The positive side of this implementation is that we'll see an increased effectiveness of boarding parties builds in general. This would allow for Engi heavy vessels to get the most out of this buff.
Another way to implement this change is to make it a DOff ability. The positive side to this is that devs can regulate how many DOffs of this type someone can put onto the ship. This will let players decide what perks they want on the boarding party (up to a certain limit). However, damage scaling will have to rely on a different modifier, as it is no longer based on rank (perhaps the rarity of the DOff).
The chance of a demolition proc can be implemented for both DOff passives or ability change.
And of course, the last thing on the list of balance to consider is "how will this change stack with whatever is already out there". Devs will have to account for the fact that players can already more than double their boarding party shuttles by stacking DOffs AND lower the cooldown timer on BP to shared timer caps. Have fun picturing what happens when all of the BP doffs are stacked together.
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To clear / prevent the effects of Boarding Party, an equal "level" of Tactical Team or higher is required to clear / prevent it. To clear Boarding Party 3, you need Tactical Team 3. To clear Boarding Party 2, you need Tactical Team 2 or 3.
Similar requirements for Engineering Team to clear / prevent the Subsystem Disables from Boarding Party.
Simplest thing that I can think of to do here is that the shuttlecraft are only necessary if there is an active (ie. HP greater than 0) Shield Facing on the Target facing your ship. If the shield is DOWN however, the shuttlecraft do not launch and instead Transporters are used ... meaning no shuttlecraft to shoot down.
Assigning a Transporter Officer to your Space Roster will raise the threshold for how low the Shield Facing your ship will have to be in order to be able to use Transporters to attack an enenmy "instantly" with a Boarding Party (no shuttlecraft required).
White: 10% Shield HP remaining
Green: 20% Shield HP remaining
Blue: 30% Shield HP remaining
Purple: 40% Shield HP remaining
Note that a Flight Deck DOff would still reduce the cooldown time on use of Boarding Party as normal.
There are, of course, other variations as to what you could potentially do with a Transporter Officer (random chance to skip the shuttlecraft transfer step).
Easiest thing to do there would be to tack on an additional modifier to the Boarding Party variant of the Flight Deck Officer such that they still have the chance to double the number of shuttlecraft launched, but they also consistently increase the speed at which those shuttlecraft fly to target ... so you wind up with not only more pilots (and therefore more shuttles), but faster flying pilots of those shuttles.
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For example, imagine a PVP player with Tac Team running 100% of the time. They get boarded. The Tac Team goes to fight off the boarders and can no longer focus on redistributing shields, giving the attacker a a few seconds to take down a shield facing.
Essentially, this buffs Boarding party and makes it a counter to TT--in other words, makes Boarding Party actually useful, albeit on a long cooldown. And since players can really only keep two copies of TT running because of the shared cooldown, they will need to rely on team mates to help clear Level 3 Boarding Parties (if the Boarding Party doesn't get shot down first).