How to reproduce this bug 100% of the times:


Grab a carrier. I use VoQuv.

Set Flight Deck Officer that grants defense bonus to carrier when Recall order is given to active space duty.

Launch into space, set full speed to engines, set engine power to max. Fly straight.

Launch one pet. Doesn't matter which.

Set pet order to anything except recall. Open ship status menu, click Defense tab, see the defense bonus. To illustrate the bug I'll use simple numbers and say my ship's defense is 50% at this speed setting.

Now, set RECALL order for pet.

What happens:

The defense bonus from the pet -IS- applied ... so it does work. However it flickers on and off every second.

So, for example, if the duty officer is purple and gives 10% bonus, the moment you click Recall the bonus jumps from 50% to 60%.

A second later it flicks down to 50% again. A second later it goes back up to 60%. This continues nonstop until you remove the recall order and the defense setting settles back to a solid, unchanging, 50%.



Cause of the bug seems to be the carrier sending 'recall' order every second and the game 'flickering' the bonus on and off for the carrier itself.

Rather than change the way the carrier commands are sent (and break the AI even more... as it was the last time the AI was tinkered with).. Instead, CHANGE the way the duty officer bonus works. If the purpose of the DOFF is to give the carrier extra survivability while the pets return to help the carrier then there are two ways the DOFF can be changed:

1- Change the Doff bonus to be: '150% increase to pet speed under Recall order' .

Voila! Pets return FAST to the carrier's side.

150% is the purple doff bonus of course. common would be 50%, green 75%, blue 100%

-or-

2- Change the Doff bonus to be: '+50% chance of applying +5 defense bonus when recall order is activated. Maximum of 2 stack per duty officer'.

That way each 'tick' that carrier sends out acts as a chance trigger and since the recall order is left activated to get this bonus its guaranteed. This workaround uses the glitch itself to achieve the same bonus defense without messing with the AI itself.



Finally, a word about the Birds of Prey for the devs:

Fix them. Fix them. Fix them.

The flight pattern makes no sense and it is completely diluting the BoPs into a slow version of the Scorpion fighters.


1- Attack order has the BoPs decloak and start an attack run. If you devs have not noticed, decloaking gives the AMBUSH bonus to the BoPs..which is utterly wasted since they NEVER now are in firing range or have their noses pointed to target in time for that bonus to be used because the BoPs are too busy flying half-circles to nowhere.

2- When BoPs fly to a target they almost always fly a half-moon to either side and end up firing on the target from different shield facings. In short, their damage is diluted into useless attacks and there is no alpha strike of any sort.

3- Recall order has the BoPs stop in midair, cloak and CRAWL back to carrier. Yes, CRAWL as in 1/4th impulse. The irony of this is that they fly at half speed back to carrier when there is no red alert and at 1/4th speed back to carrier when red alert is up.

4- When the BoPs return to carrier side they sit next to the carrier with their noses facing completely random directions. This is a HUGE problem because when you order them to attack they will fly off in those random directions at top speed and this results in them being scattered all over the place.

These changes to the BoP flight pattern and attack pattern was completely uncalled for and unnecessary.

Before the BoPs would:

1- Fly to target CLOAKED and at about half speed. At 5km range they would decloak and fire. This made us of their ambush bonus, let the BoPs be ideal (and canon) attackers as they could fly cloaked through enemy ships and hit the selected target.

2- The attack flight path was DIRECT. All four BoPs would all fly straight to target and most amazingly, they would most of the time fly TOGETHER in a formation as they did their passes.

3- Recall order would give BoPs (and all other pets) the order to engage FULL IMPULSE (not top speed but full impulse) and return to carrier's side within seconds. This was incredibly useful to recall pets that were at 30km ignoring the carrier's orders (which they still do ignore most of the time).

4- When the BoPs returned to carrier side they would turn to face the same direction the carrier was facing. This had the awesome effect of not only looking cool but also the fact that when the carrier issued an attack order again the BoPs would fly off in the same direction, together and have the same flight pattern approach to target.



So, how about you devs try this:

1- Put back the 'recall order = full impulse' .

2- Have the BoPs/all pets FACE the same direction the carrier is facing when they come to rest near the carrier.

3- Change BoP flight pattern to CLOAK and fly half speed to target, at 5km decloak, accelerate to top speed while firing...and to prevent the BoPs from entering into the stupid circle-of-idiocy pattern where they only shoot turrets how about you have the BoPs kick in an Emergency Power to Engines III right after they shoot a weapon power (high yield, rapid fire) so that the BoP's firing run will result in it 'overshooting' the target at high speed.

When the Emergency power to engines wears off the BoP will have gained about 5 or 6km separation distance. Since the BOP flight pattern is to point nose back to target, doing so under such high speed would make the BoP's attack run becoming a 5-6km ellipse back and forth from target... not a circle pattern... and the result of that ellipse is that the BOP will actually have its nose (torps and guns) aimed at target most of the time..not the silly turret pecking away while it circles.

Been testing other flight deck duty officers and they all seem to have the same bug although it is hard for me to confirm it since the bonus does not show up as a stat displayed in-game but rather it pops up through parsing of combat logs.


+10% damage to pets on escort mode: Also seems to 'flicker' on and off. Bird of Prey and Slavers parse data show almost exactly a 50% split between hits that did 'normal' damage and hits that did 10% extra damage. This is consistent with the bonus activating and de-activating every second as the carrier 'sends' the escort order repeatedly.

Have not been able to get parse results from intercept flight deck doff as its just too random since the +acc would only show in the damage log through crit hit rates.



Please fix this bug as it makes the flight deck officers almost useless. A bonus that works half the time flickering on and off is no good.


...and fix the pet AI

the BOP problem deserves its own thread, I was wondering why my Br'otlh BOP refits weren't hitting as hard lately.

Thanks for pointing out the "flickering" buff bug. Was pretty easy to track down with your repro steps above, and has been fixed internally.

I've noticed that when I have been using my vo'quv setup with bops that the beams on my ship, as well as pets seem to only be doing double digit damage only where as before i was atleast hitting like 1k-2k damage per hit. In the fleet events but when using my b'rel with cannons there is no change in damage.

Not sure exactly what the problem is because most of the time when its happening they don't have any damage reduction to shield buffs activated. It did start happening though when the plasmonic leech problem came about though. I'm usually using the intecept purple doff or an escort one when this happening though I am not sure if this has anything to do with it either.

Oh yeah btw all the fixes and stuff for testing is all great and stuff but for anyone who has more than 6 characters a lot of us kind of umm can't transfer the toons we want to test over because it gives for me 6 out of 15 characters and the main characters I would want to test on cannot be transfered/copied.