Does Photonic Officer III have a point?

sophlogimo · March 2017

I ask because currently, I don't se it: POIII reduces cooldowns by 70%, but there is a minimal cooldown for every ability that is at best 50%. In other words, you will be just as fine with POII as with POIII.

preiko · March 2017

You look at this the wrong way
Reducing a cooldown by 70 % does not mean what you think it means...

Ability: Tactical Team
Duration: 10 seconds
Cooldown: 30 seconds
Minimum CD: 15 seconds

100% cooldown reduction = equals = 15 seconds
70 % = 10.5 seconds

Each tree can reduce the CD by ... i think it was ... 20%
So you are very close to 100

But it is almost impossible to get
Photonic Officer III
Because you get it only by having this super expensive and rare bridge Officer
I would say the most expensive traininhgg manual in sto
And every Sciene ship owner needs can commander slot for much more important things

renimalt · March 2017

"70% cooldown reduction" is most likely implemented like other cooldown reduction abilities: it's actually an increase to the ability recharge rate. Thus, 70% cooldown reduction means that your abilities recharge in 1 / 1.7 = 58% of the time they would normally take to recharge. If you get 30% cooldown reduction from other sources (skill tree + one krenim boff?), then your abilities would cooldown in 1/2 the time that they normally would (subject to duplicate ability cooldowns, of course).

(Also: hi Sophlogimo!)

mustrumridcully0 · March 2017

If it was a real 70 % reduction in cooldown length however, it might be useful in edge cases, like when some effect increases your cooldown length. (Subnucleonic Beam or Reroute Power from LIfe SUpport?)

Mustrum "that's a long-winded way to say it's not useful" Ridcully

mustrumridcully0 · March 2017

Yeah, seems like a more accurate description to me, too.

carasucia83 · March 2017

As someone who has used PO a LOT over the years, I can report that PO3 is now really only useful* in the event that you have no more than 1 point in Readiness skills and NO other cooldown reducing stuff such as 2pc MACO, Delta rep console, etc. You don't even need to DOff it now because (as far as I can tell) it's at it's 2min global and so doesn't appear to affect itself anymore (used to be that you used 2-3 DOffs to get 1min up and 1min down).

Did a little PO test last night and I have found that PO2 works well to reduce most things to global CD with 1-2 points in X-Readiness combined with Delta rep Console, or other CD reducing thing (5-15% on top seems to be the thing to aim for here), PO1 will obviously need a little more help. Perhaps Krenim BOffs?

None of them are really worth slotting though if you do have points in Readiness skills and use Temporal Spec with anything that reduces your CDs by 10-15% ish, and to be honest, the benefit is marginal compared to how it used be when there weren't so many ways to reduce CDs. It works, it does what it's supposed to, just we have so many more efficient and less costly/more beneficial ways of doing the same thing that it's kinda obsolete unless you don't have ANY Cooldown reducing BOffs, traits or consoles and such. In that case I think it might well be worth using in the imterim while you accumulate Temporal Spec points, or think about getting AHOD, or Reciprocity, Krenim BOffs, or which rep traits to slot, or how to skill your character, or any one of the abslolute miriad of available ways to reduce your cooldowns.

I'd really only slot PO3 if I had 0 points in Readiness skills and nothing else to reduce CDs, but to be honest, there are far better ways than PO3 (this unfortunately includes PO1/2) and far far better things to go in its place that it would always seem like a waste of a slot. I can't imagine anyone but a Sci even considering slotting it, and anyone interested in doing as much damage as possible would likely never really gain a net benefit from PO in any form.

IDK. I used to swear by it and franken-tweak builds in order to fit it in. I dropped it shortly before the skill revamp. A thing came out, can't remember what it was, but it basically became unnecessary for me, and with locked global CDs in the coming patch, probably more so.

*As opposed to other versions of PO

hajmyis · March 2017

carasucia83 wrote: »

As someone who has used PO a LOT over the years, I can report that PO3 is now really only useful* in the event that you have no more than 1 point in Readiness skills and NO other cooldown reducing stuff such as 2pc MACO, Delta rep console, etc. You don't even need to DOff it now because (as far as I can tell) it's at it's 2min global and so doesn't appear to affect itself anymore (used to be that you used 2-3 DOffs to get 1min up and 1min down).

Did a little PO test last night and I have found that PO2 works well to reduce most things to global CD with 1-2 points in X-Readiness combined with Delta rep Console, or other CD reducing thing (5-15% on top seems to be the thing to aim for here), PO1 will obviously need a little more help. Perhaps Krenim BOffs?

None of them are really worth slotting though if you do have points in Readiness skills and use Temporal Spec with anything that reduces your CDs by 10-15% ish, and to be honest, the benefit is marginal compared to how it used be when there weren't so many ways to reduce CDs. It works, it does what it's supposed to, just we have so many more efficient and less costly/more beneficial ways of doing the same thing that it's kinda obsolete unless you don't have ANY Cooldown reducing BOffs, traits or consoles and such. In that case I think it might well be worth using in the imterim while you accumulate Temporal Spec points, or think about getting AHOD, or Reciprocity, Krenim BOffs, or which rep traits to slot, or how to skill your character, or any one of the abslolute miriad of available ways to reduce your cooldowns.

I'd really only slot PO3 if I had 0 points in Readiness skills and nothing else to reduce CDs, but to be honest, there are far better ways than PO3 (this unfortunately includes PO1/2) and far far better things to go in its place that it would always seem like a waste of a slot. I can't imagine anyone but a Sci even considering slotting it, and anyone interested in doing as much damage as possible would likely never really gain a net benefit from PO in any form.

IDK. I used to swear by it and franken-tweak builds in order to fit it in. I dropped it shortly before the skill revamp. A thing came out, can't remember what it was, but it basically became unnecessary for me, and with locked global CDs in the coming patch, probably more so.

*As opposed to other versions of PO

Wow you seem to know and fully understand PO, and cd cheese. Welcome to the 1%.

With that said PO1 should be fine with using some other form of CD cheese. Maybe PO2 if you have a sci heavy ship. But PO still has a place as you said if you are not using other stacking cd cheese.

I have gotten to a place where I dont even remember the base cds on my sci abilities

* Remember Kids, just because a skill doesn't do "Space Magic" does not mean it is useless

Does Photonic Officer III have a point?

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