As I mentioned in a different thread, there are several of these that are meh, or aren't fun, or even cause gameplay/reflex-action problems. So here's my take on these things:
- Helmsmanship: This is one of the worst ones. It takes the normal reflex action of "hit vent when you've killed every target around you and are getting ready to move to the next area of the battle" and makes it a wrong choice, because you lose zero-flux while venting, but keep it if you're just dissipating flux normally. It's also quite rare that it has an impact on battle - generally if I have non-zero flux and am in combat, gaining the zero-flux speed boost is not worth turning off shields and PD.
- Combat Endurance: Very strong, but situational. A good pick with low-tech or phase ships, fading to nearly-irrelevant if piloting high-tech shield-focused vessels. My main complaint with this elite effect is that I don't feel like it's on-theme: this should be attached to Damage Control, or maybe something under Industry.
- Impact Mitigation: This one's good, assuming your officer is assigned to a cruiser or capital. In some ways, this one is too good, though: between this and helmsmanship, there's little reason to consider installing the Auxiliary Thrusters hullmod. I'd be happier if the maximum combined bonus to ship maneuverability got reigned in some.
- Damage Control: Kindof arguably decent in strength, especially combined with Combat Endurance's elite effect, but I still don't like it. For the player, this isn't exciting: if this triggers for your flagship, it's because you messed up. For the AI - well, it's actually really hard to tell when this has triggered, so I'm not really sure how much of an impact it has on gameplay.
- Field Modulation: This elite effect is good; no complaints here.
- Point Defense: This elite effect is also good.
- Target Analysis: Exactly counters one of the regular effects of Impact Mitigation. Probably decent in terms of strength, but kinda boring. On the other hand, the base skill is one of the basically-mandatory ones, so having its elite effect also be really good would probably be a bad call.
- Ballistic Mastery: Certainly nice to have, but also at the very bottom of the list for prioritizing elite skills on officers.
- Systems Expertise: A grab bag of random stats that I don't care about. Not thematic. Not really useful, either, outside of ridiculous niche cases like SO Hyperions.
- Missile Specialization: This one's pretty much perfectly on point. Massive increase to missile system DPS - but when you factor in ammuntion concerns, well, then sometimes there are higher priorities.
- Gunnery Implants: Bleh. No direct effect on the ship that has the elite skill, and in far too many cases, no effect at all. Also it's a weird place to put an incentive to put officers into frigates - I'd be happier if this was, say, just 2% regardless of hull size, and (officered) frigates/destroyers got additional ECM bonuses from Electronic Warfare.
- Energy Weapon Mastery: Boring but useful; in conjunction with (non-elite) ordnance expertise, this can push some flux-heavy builds over to being functional. I don't think this one needs a change.
- Ordnance Expertise: Not quite bottom of the barrel for elite effects, but close. May be higher priority if I'm specifically raising an officer to be installed in a frigate, though. (Or phase ship, I suppose, but I probably wouldn't be giving them ordnance expertise at all for a phase ship.)
- Polarized Armor: This one's good - sometimes good enough to justify the player taking the skill even if they aren't planning to pilot an armor-tank type ship.
And now for part two, specific suggestions. Note that I'm not addressing all of my own complaints with this, just the particular bits that I have actual ideas for.
Helmsmanship: Drop the 'keep zero flux at any flux level' bit. Replace with "Shield maintenance cost reduced by 100% if hard flux level is below 5% and the ship system is not active*" and "gain the zero flux boost while phased out regardless of flux level**" and maybe even some sort of third bonus category for ships that have neither shields nor phase cloaks. Then change the AI so that a ship with forward shields and elite helmsmanship will turn shields on at zero hard flux (and ships with SO and forward shields will turn them on when at zero flux) regardless of whether or not they think there's anything dangerous around.
* Caveat added explicitly because of Fortress Shield.
** This would probably also require a re-tuning of the speed boost from Phase Coil Tuning.
Gunnery Implants: Fixing this requires, as a first step, fixing ECM. The big problem here is the flat-value nature of it: if you've got too much, then adding more doesn't matter. If you don't have enough, then adding more also doesn't matter. There's a very narrow band in which it does matter, and that band is much smaller than the possible variance in total ECM level.
While there are a number of ways this could be resolved, my suggestion is simple:
Make ECM reduce enemy ballistic/energy weapon ranges by 20*ECM/(ECM+10)% - regardless of enemy ECM level.At which point, how much ECM you bring to the fight will always matter - having an overwhelming ECM advantage against someone who didn't bring ECM at all can push you up towards (but never quite reaching) the 20% range advantage you used to be able to get, while bringing
some ECM even when the enemy's ECM is overwhelmingly strong will still be worth doing.
