i think you have a great point, and im inclined to agree with you

I'd love it if there'd be a response as to whether the concentrated tachyon mines are being looked at. If they're not increased in potency along with the others, well then you're essentially nerfing an item that is paid for via Lobi which is in turn paid for with real money. I wouldn't be too happy if you did that as I paid quite a bit of money to get enough Lobi to buy them!!

@ borticuscryptic: While you are on your crusade to make Mines more viable, and reduce the number of BOff skills needed to run both Torpedoes and Mines on a ship;

might we ask that you come up with a few new "Ensign and above" abilities, especially for Tactical BOffs ? There was talk of separating the "shield frequenty rotation" and "boarding party clear" abilities from the Tactical Teams. I use Tactical Team almost exclusively for the shield rotation ability. Unfortunately for me, it looks rather cluttered on some of my ships when I got both Tactical Team II, and 2 Tactical Team I's, since I often get stuck with a relatively useless "Ensign" BOff.

Some new abilities across the board would be nice. Perhaps lower quality versions of the "class abilities" ? New Engineer BOff ability: Miracle Worker, New Science BOff ability: Subnucleonic Beam etc.

The attempt is laudable but I think the problem with Mines is quite simply endemic: they just don't fit in a game such as this (at least not in PvE), the idea of laying Mines and waiting for the foe to trigger them doesn't quite work.
They'd have to provide extreme utility or damage to justify wasting a Weapon Slot on them.


Alternate idea: give all Ships ('cept the Freighter, maybe) another Weapon Slot that can ONLY fit Mines. You can call it whatever you want.
Mine Launchers placed in that slot are unaffected by BOFF abilities.
With no opportunity cost, everyone would use at least use 1 Mine Launcher and could still opt to use more.




On the aforementionned Tac Ensign issue: at the very least, making Subsystem Targetting availlable to Cannon-type weaponry would be nice.
That's never going to be game-breaking, but would solve the problem of the 3rd Ensign Tac slot.

while i get the necessity of it (given the overall lack of use of mines), i will say i am none too fond of the idea of getting rid of the dispersal patterns entirely.

flying my escort for fun, in certain pve runs i tend to line up on a target, then queue up the following skills : crf, hyt, and dpb. i launch the mines as i make my attack run and then as i pass the ship i go on and fire off a rear mounted transphasic torpedo cluster, doing something that i call a "transphasic sandwich". is it powerful? not really. useful? thats debatable. fun to watch? you bet it is.

with the removal of the skills and addition of them into the torpedo boff powers, one simply cannot do that anymore due to shared cooldown, or at the very least, pulling it off in the way that it currently works proves to be more difficult.

Fine, but the problem is there are literally few tactical skills at higher ranks. The only Cmdr. tactical skill is APOmega 3 ...and even 2 is sufficient. Now you want to take out 2x3 skills out of the tactical skill pool, leaving less variety than tacs already have.

Seriously, please come up with good new skills instead of taking more away first

over 2 1/2 years and we have seen not one new skill addition. This is aweful.

Well, in my opinion mines should be removed. In space there where little practical application because space is so big. The only useful application is to mine off choke points, like the worm hole. plus they have to be cloaked otherwise they will get shot down. Mining an entire planet is a joke, you need literally millions of them, otherwise you can just fly around them. Dropping them in the wake of a pursuer, pointless, just use a torpedo.

Get rid of them completely, the make no sense and only clutter up the screen.

That would make sense if per say excluding spheres/probes that move in infected and KA but the rest of the game you do not have enemies moving to intercept you in this game. I would disagree based on anyone who has seen my b'rel setups that mines are not useless its the person behind the keyboard that determines how any power/item including mines are found useful. I beg to differ because one or more have not experimented with ways to use them effectively to call them "Useless".

A good example is how on my main KDF sci officer in a b'rel I can use 4 plasma torpedoes front and either 2 plasma mine launchers rear or 1 plasma and the lobi story tachyon mine launcher with it and i can virtually bring down probes/spheres in Infected/KA better than most people using beam boats can and much faster.

In conclusion you may not know how to use them but that does not mean that its valid to say they need to be gotten rid of.

I can't really add much to this discussion that hasn't already been done, but I agree that the Boff skills should NOT be rolled together. There isn't enough option on the tactical class as it is. Regarding the amount of mines and changing how they work, I do quite like that.

Since you're talking about using mines as flares and such, why not add that into the rotation? Mines which are specifically designed to draw away enemy fire. I'm not sure how this would work on the coding side, perhaps by applying a stacking -acc to vessels in range which aren't targeting them, or a cumulative defense bonus to allies in range? Regardless, I would like that idea for the device.

Personally... I disagree with the other players. Bumping the damage would be great, but I think that, if anything, we need to lay more mines, or at least get them spread farther out. We plow through the mines because we CAN'T lay a true minefield. Mines are not designed for single deployment, but in dozens or hundreds. Regarding the object numbers, again I don't know if it's a hard-cap on objects, or a draw drain that deals with polys and textures, but the current mine seems very, very overdrawn for its size. Maybe reduce its poly-count and texture number to allow more on-screen?

yes mines have a purpose in pvp it helps against cloaks . amd i thing that they should be made stronger fewer but stronger will help with spamming causing game crashes the only mine type that needs more launched at once is the tricobalt i think at least 4 should be launched at same time but further apart. and the breen transphasic cluster mine torpedo since it is already both how will it be affected.