CHANGES TO PILOT BRIDGE OFFICER ABILITIES

baddmoonrizin · February 2023

We're giving the Pilot Bridge Officer Abilities some much needed love. Take a look at the potential changes within.

https://www.playstartrekonline.com/en/news/article/11536183

pottsey5g · February 2023

Wonder if this will make small Pilot Escorts with Reinforcements Squadron better Carriers then Carriers. Any chance Carriers can have some love next?

applederry · February 2023

Are those two changes the shield rework Kael spoke of during last week's ten forward or can we expect more? Even with those changes shields will still be way too weak. A massive regeneration, hardness and/or capacity boost would be needed to change that.

Are there no re-classifications of some Pilot abilities as control abilities, like it was done with the Intel rework?

jcsww · February 2023

I have always thought that the Picard Maneuver from TNG should have been a Pilot ability.

questerius · February 2023

I am a little worried that the changes to engineering abilities could wreck drain builds which are already in rough waters.

fleetcaptain5 · February 2023

Emergency Power to Shields
Now also grants Immunity to Shield Drain when your Shields are reduced to 20/35/50% total Capacity

This isn't a good change.

Although shield drains are very potent, they're also one of the few things that make certain enemies threatening. And players didn't need more sources of immunity, even if it's only to shield drains.

In the end, this is just another buff to players that will further encourage power creep, as it will shift players' preferences even more from survivability to DPS/damage dealing.

If anything, some enemy abilities should be made more powerful, not less.

xceptionalzero · February 2023

when date/time is this on tribble?

anubis77c · February 2023

jcsww wrote: »

I have always thought that the Picard Maneuver from TNG should have been a Pilot ability.

It already exists as a 1 minute cooldown universal console though. You could do something similar with "Form Up" though.

I'm an avid PvPer, so I'm looking at these changes through that lens:

-Attack Pattern Lambda - Exitus was already a non-factor with the right boff layout, but 750 perception for Lambda 3 is going to kill off whatever was left of it - the only remaining question is, does it also deal -750 perception to the target you hit? If so Exitus will still be dominant in 1v1's. I hope that is not the case. Great change overall, making pilot the direct counter to intel stealth.

-Clean Getaway - duration now up to 8/10/12 seconds. I'm not sure how I feel about that, it's already pretty easy to just run away from a fight if you don't want to die and this pushes that even further. We'll have to see how this goes, but I'm worried that fast escorts are already a bit too fast in comparison with the strength of control abilities used to slow them down.

-Reinforcement Squadron - not really a pvp ability, but what counts as "extra" accuracy? My ship has about 220 acc alone, not even counting "extra severity." With the formula they show in the notes, that means my reinforcement squadron will have 660% bonus damage. I have no idea what the base damage even is off the top of my head but that sounds pretty insane.

-Form Up - teleport to a teammate at 20km for any rank. Interesting - could be a useful escape ability in a pinch because that's an insane range to be able to teleport, not even counting the extra damage buff. 5km range for the damage buff won't work well because ships are too fast to stay that close consistently.

-Hold Together - Scaling from throttle doubled. They should make it remove more than one hazard debuff per second, have it remove all debuffs each second like hazard emitters, for situations where you have 5x grav wells on you. Either way that's a huge buff to escort healing and it was already an ability a lot of dogfighter pilots were using (this or clean getaway 3).

-Pilot Team - Immunity to placate during the effect. Does this mean, the 2/4/6 second effect (immunity to movement impairing effects) or the full 10 seconds of the pilot team? If it's the full 10 seconds, with Fresh from RR, that effectively means a pilot ship can be immune to placates 100% of the time. Coupled with Lambda, exitus is gone - could be some wild times for pvp and honestly I'm looking forward to it. We may see a return of cannon/dual cannon fighting, and the expense of getting into pvp reduced as well since one of the most expensive/sought after items in pvp was the aux2sif placate doff which runs anywhere from 5-150 million EC depending on the day, as well as Pseudo-Submission placate trait which is around 15-25 million EC. Placates may still be useful against non-pilot ships such as science control/drain builds.

-Reroute Reserves To Weapons - That's crazy haste, 225%. I feel like that has to be reduced, because that will outperform any other single target fire mode in the game. With pvp having fewer placates, it might even perform strongly there, which is an environment where haste is usually not very important. Can't wait to see it in action anyway.

This looks great and I can't wait for our arenas on Friday since by then, the patch will be live. I may bring back out my old Elachi DHC's and give them a try with Rapid Fire again, or maybe try RRTW.

anubis77c · February 2023

I also have to comment the Cryptic team for this statement:

These changes are currently slated to go live in an update this week on PC, and then hit Console when we've had some time to see how they work on PC, and address any issues that arise from feedback or otherwise.

It's good to see that they are aware large scale mechanics changes like this require a little bit of "baby sitting" after release to check performance and find bugs/issues. After the Intel Revamp, we waited nearly 5 months for things to get fixed from that and it was really awful honestly. I hope that mistake isn't repeated if we find something broken with Pilot.

gynxmonkeypaw · February 2023

The BOFF skills are NOT the issue i dont use Pilot ships.... the PILOT SHIPS handling erratically when trying to manuveuer normally is why i DON'T use Pilot ships and therefore BOFF Pilot specialities. IT is FRUSTRATING trying to MOVE the ships NORMALLY and the ship roles or jumps back and forth when i dont WANT to do those manuvers.

realdarklord · February 2023

gynxmonkeypaw wrote: »

The BOFF skills are NOT the issue i dont use Pilot ships.... the PILOT SHIPS handling erratically when trying to manuveuer normally is why i DON'T use Pilot ships and therefore BOFF Pilot specialities. IT is FRUSTRATING trying to MOVE the ships NORMALLY and the ship roles or jumps back and forth when i dont WANT to do those manuvers.

By default the manuvers are triggered by double-tapping the dirction-keys. This is perfectly fine if you use the mouse to steer your ship.
I can imagine when you steer with the keyboard you would cause a lot of unintentional activations, which seems to be your problem - but this behaviour can be disabled:
Go to Settings -> Controls, make sure "Region" is set to "space" and disable "Tab movement direction twice to roll"
That should solve your problem.

CHANGES TO PILOT BRIDGE OFFICER ABILITIES

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