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[Wyvern]

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.

[Amoebka]

I think elite ordnance expertise is perfectly fine. One of the few elite effects that's good on high-tech ships.

[Grievous69]

Do we even need ECM as a gameplay thing? Imo it's a boring lever just to make Remnant fights harder. On capture points it's a neat thing to fight over but if you already know that capping the point won't change the -10% debuff then why should I even care. Both ECM skill in Tech and Gunnery Implants elite effect could be gone and I wouldn't miss it one bit.

I never understood Systems Expertise elite effect, it's a capstone Combat skill and you get a lootbox in a roguelite. Nothing important really. Base effect is 95% of the power honestly, unless the ship doesn't even need the skill in the first place.

[Hiruma Kai]

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.)

On many capital ships, it's roughly the equivalent of base level Field Modulation.  Take Onslaught with base 17,000 flux capacity.  Slap 200 DP of weapons on (along with 50 vents, 30 caps and say 80 OP worth of hullmods).  27,000 flux capacity / 23,000 flux capacity (those 30 caps apply to both) = 1.17.

1/0.85 = 1.17.  Now taking less damage is better for shields, but more flux capacity is better for firing guns.  Of course, gets better the less capacitors you took and the more guns you put on.

[BigBrainEnergy]

I like the helmsmanship elite bonus a lot, but it is pretty niche in terms of ships that actually benefit from it. Not sure what to do about that. Maybe instead of a flat 5 speed you get 10 but only while the 0 flux boost is inactive, although that may be too much on capitals. Or maybe remove all its current effects and instead it gives you the 0 flux boost while venting.

Combat endurance is annoying since it only kicks in below 50% hull which makes it utterly useless on many ships. Maybe it could kick in earlier on smaller ship classes and I wouldn't hate it so much... like have it start immediately for frigates, below 75% for destroyers and stay at 50% for cruisers and capitals.

[prav]

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.

I don't think the problem is the combined effect (let the ship spin like a top if it really wants to invest in it) but how much you get from a single one. I'd look at reducing both to +25%, at least for Cruiser/Cap - yes we want elite skills to be effective, but we also want large ships to take a while to turn around, something I feel is a bit missing in the last few versions, with so many large ships having at least one 50% maneuverability buff.

Which all in all might mean that IM could use some other elite effect instead (or in addition).

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.

I never really liked this one, it didn't feel like I was specializing in my ship's systems. A grab bag, yeah, or possibly a discount bin. 99c everything's got to go.

[SCC]

Elite Combat Endurance is nice for flagships operating on their own, where you will be taking damage on the hull even if you try to avoid it. Getting a buffer helps in bad situations and extends the time you can stay in combat. For officers, it's not as useful.
Elite Ordnance Expertise is fine.
Elite Systems Expertise is something you pick as your own skill, to squeeze some extra performance out of your skill point, and never for an officer because it's not worth giving up any other elite skill.
Elite Gunnery Implants is not good because ECM is often rather binary. You either win the EW war or you don't.

[Megas]

My thoughts at the moment:

Helmsmanship is nice if someone needs to backpedal after dropping shields or decloaking.  I do not know if the AI does this, but I have.  Handy on ships without conventional shields when I need to backpedal (with Ziggurat) or simply moving a big lug like Invictus around to bring their big guns to bear while flux is non-zero.  It is better than the 1% or 5% max flux we previously had (because it was either overpowered or useless on few edge cases).

Agreed on usefulness of Combat Endurance.  I love it on Invictus with boosted hull or Onslaught with max armor.  It has saved my flagship, and my Neural Linked Onslaught the few times I used it, before.

I like Impact Mitigation.  It and Helmsmanship makes piloting capitals so much more pleasant.  Leave this one alone, or at least don't nerf it.

No comment on Damage Control, other than it is annoying when bombing an enemy for scratch damage.

The one thing I dislike about Field Modulation is the elite effect is required for normal phase ships to make use of Phase Anchor's double speed benefit.  It takes too long to cloak again after popping off AMBs or phase lances (because cloak is still cooling down after the attack is done), which makes the double speed reload benefit from Phase Anchor dubious.  Ziggurat cloaks quickly enough to not need this effect.  That aside, this is great, too good for phase ships, or rather fixes a deficiency in the phase cloak.  Would be nice if Phase Anchor reduced cloak cooldown too.

Point Defense combined with IPDAI was so good for ships that could use this as an alternative to Ballistic Rangefinder.  Today, with IPDAI requiring an s-mod to enable assault PD, it is much greater opportunity cost, but it is still good for ships that still get ePD+sIPDAI.  Also, with ePD, Devastator gets enough range that if the ship has high recoil reduction, Devastator can function like a HAG with much better efficiency and PD capability, and it does not require sIPDAI, just Gunnery Implants and Armored Turret Mounts for recoil reduction.  +200 range is a game changer for some ships.  I consider elite PD one of the best elite effects last release.

Target Analysis makes Ordos so dangerous.  Impact Mitigation (or getting Damage Control plus Automated Repair Unit to make repairs too fast) is required just for ships not to lose weapons or engines from a stray bullet that got past shields when fighting Ordos or anything with elite Target Analysis.  I am not sure how useful it is for the player, but it is very dangerous when used by the enemy.

Ballistic Mastery is nice to have, but easily passed over for other skills for officers.  Faster bullets is not significant enough.

System Expertise is a bunch of minor things I will not waste a pick for officers.

Missile Spec. is good, who says no to more damage.  One of my top picks.

Gunnery Implants is useless against Ordos, they stack more than you can (because every one of their ships has elite Gunnery Implants, and they have more ships and DP than you).

The elite effect Energy Mastery is the only good thing about the skill.  Base skill is useless for big ships that stay around 1k range to snipe with beams or 700 range heavy weapons boosted by capital-grade ITU.  If anything, the base and elite effects should be reversed because that the flux reduction is universally useful for everyone with an energy weapon, while the scaling damage is only useful for a subset of energy users.  But then again, reversing base and elite would make the base-turned-elite useless the ships that are not fast close-range specialists.

Ordnance Expert is good.  I can divert OP from caps to something else if I need OP elsewhere.  I definitely need it for Ziggurat if I only have two s-mods and try to use Omega weapons on it.

Polarized Armor, I would take it for the elite effect alone on any ship I pilot because venting is never fast enough.  AI does not vent as much, so it has much less priority there even if I use the base skill for armor tanks.

[intrinsic_parity]

I sometimes take elite helmsmanship purely for the small top speed increase on my flagship because it's just one story point for the player, but I think the zero flux speed bonus aspect is not a very good, and I think this elite skill is almost never worth the opportunity cost on an officer.

Personally, I almost never use elite damage control or combat endurance because I always pilot fast high tech ships where taking hull damage can and should be avoided, but I think it's fine as a more niche option for high hull/armor ships. I feel like there are usually better options for limited AI elite skills as well, unless I have gone for cybernetic augmentation, which I think is way too much of a story point sink to be worthwhile 90% of the time.

I think elite impact mitigation is in a great spot because it fits perfectly with the sorts of ships that want the skill, but isn't so strong as to be an auto-pick.

For elite field modulation, I feel like the hard flux aspect is pretty bad. AFAIK it only kicks in if you have no soft flux built up, but if you are even modestly overfluxed, that will not happen until you are out of combat, at which point you can just drop shields or vent (and you can often drop shields in combat if you have good armor). Same issues as elite helmsmanship IMO. Maybe it is ok with fortress shield, and slightly better for the AI that is not always optimal about dropping shields, but I have a hard time imagining how it is really worth the opportunity cost of elite skill on a non-phase officer. The phase aspect is good but fairly niche. I guess it being a niche phase elite skill is fine overall, but I wish the hard flux aspect was more meaningful (and also for the s-mod that gives that). If it gave a small amount of hard flux dissipation on top of base dissipation at all times (like 5% or something), that would be way better, maybe too good though.

I feel like the PD skill in general is in a weird place. I only really take it if I want the elite effect, but now that I need to s-mod IPDAI to get the combo, the skill feels very niche in general, although the elite aspect is pretty good.

Elite target analysis is fine for the player, although not usually my first pick for limited officer elite skills. Overall boring but not bad.

In terms of elite ballistic mastery, I actually found it VERY noticeable when playing against it in a fast high tech ship. It makes it much much harder to dodge shots and generally terrorizes small fast ships and fighters. Still not necessarily a top priority for me though, but something I would take for the player or on an AI core somewhat frequently.

Elite system expertise definitely feels random and not really a first choice for any ship IMO. I've only every picked it for a bit of extra PPT on frigates if I have nothing better to take.

Elite missile spec is very good, maybe too good given how prominent missiles spam is becoming.

I think elite gunnery implants is a bit underpowered for the player but not fundamentally bad, because the player tends to have to go for bigger ships due to limited officers. However, I have used it to decent effect before. If you are doing officered frigate stuff with wolfpack tactics, it can be good, and I think the best use case is if you spam cheap gamma AI frigates (I usually do this alongside a beta radiant). In that case you can pretty easily dominate EW from just elite gunnery implants, and in combo with the EW skill, you can compete with remnant fleets EW. Elite gunnery implants is also frequently where enemies are getting a lot of their EW from, so changing that would substantially alter EW balance in general, making it trickier to balance.

I think elite energy weapon mastery is very good, and I almost always take it if I have the skill. EWM in general is quite good on fast brawler high tech ships, but less so with large energy weapons. I wish the range restriction was relaxed a little, but that is another topic.

Elite ordinance expertise is solid IMO, although a bit boring. I think it's especially valuable for shield reliant ships that don't have the hull/armor to survive otherwise.

Elite polarized armor is one I value less, because I tend to pilot fast high tech ships that can easily and safely vent (and have high base dissipation), but I can see how it would be more valuable for other ships. 

[Vanshilar]

• 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.
  

I think Missile Spec (elite) is the single most overpowered skill and the most in need of a nerf. The +50% fire rate and the +10% damage means slightly more than +65% damage rate for that weapon type (more damage per shot also means more hit strength), far greater than the skill bonuses for the other weapon types. It's what singlehandedly makes the Gryphon overpowered. The increased ammo usage doesn't matter much since the base skill already doubles the ammo, and the faster kills means less back-and-forth means less total ammo gets used per kill.

• 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.)
  

More flux capacity is very good (although base effect is much better, of course). The more I look at AI behavior, the more it looks like it prioritizes percentage of flux bar in deciding whether or not to fire its weapons, so more flux capacity means it fires more means more of its flux goes toward driving up enemy flux instead of absorbing enemy attacks. Having said that, the problem with getting it for the AI is that there are usually other stuff I'd like to make elite. But it's actually pretty useful to get.

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.

Yes, that sounds like a good idea, especially against Ordos when the enemy fleet is running around with ~+50 ECM so there's really no point to take ECM most of the time. That 10 might need to be 20 or something instead so that it's not too "easy" to decrease the enemy's weapon range, but that can be determined in playtesting.

[Megas]

With Combat Endurance on NPC ships, I get elite either on Automated Ships who get it for free, or through Neural Link where Combat Endurance is auto-pick for my flagship (for more CR and PPT) if I want Combat skills.  For officers with only one elite, I usually pick Point Defense or Missile Specialization, although I would consider Field Modulation if I plan to keep the officer in a phase ship permanently.

I feel like the PD skill in general is in a weird place. I only really take it if I want the elite effect, but now that I need to s-mod IPDAI to get the combo, the skill feels very niche in general, although the elite aspect is pretty good.

I have selected this on Automated Ships without sIPDAI to buff LR PD range and hit power.  If I use a long-range or beam build, I do not want the "fearless" ships to get any closer than they need to because of their PD weapons, and use LR PD instead of burst PD if the other weapons have longer range.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

Helmsmanship: extremely situational effect(that the AI doesn't know how to use) that only helps you when you screw up and a negligible speed bonus. To be honest the entire Helmsmanship skill is only good for the +50% maneouverability if you can't get elite Impact Mitigation for some reason.
Combat Endurance: due to how armor works, when your ship is below 50% hull it's likely already about to be quickly destroyed. Should work at any level of hull, or affect armor(!) and not hull.
Damage Control: again extremely situational effect that's only useful when you screw up and that doesn't even work on some high powered anti-armor stuff like Tachyon Lances.
Ballistic Mastery: I actually love this elite because it makes ballistics look amazing. Since faster projectiles let you hit ships you'd otherwise miss, it's very hard to judge just how useful it actually is. I suspect it actually benefits Vulcans the most.
Systems Expertise: +30 PPT is nothing and it's the third skill that "rewards" screwing up. These kinds of skills are almost univerally bad - win more instead of losing less! Also I want to point out that Systems Expertise as a whole is extremely ship-dependent. There are ship systems that gain nothing from it. This can be rather annoying since it's a capstone and so you'll always see it on a skill list for officers from level 4 onwards.
Gunnery Implants: I'm actually perfectly fine with the bonus, and with how it scales with ship size. But as people pointed out ECM is a weird thing, you either ignore it completely(because almost no one else uses it) or try to stack the bejeezus out of it(because the Remnants do); there is no middle ground really.
Polarized Armor: tiny bonus and Resistant Flux Conduits is a "mandatory" mod for any armor tanking anyway so it's not like they have venting issues in the first place. To be honest this would be a much better place for hull regen found on Combat Endurance.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Polarized Armor: tiny bonus and Resistant Flux Conduits is a "mandatory" mod for any armor tanking anyway so it's not like they have venting issues in the first place. To be honest this would be a much better place for hull regen found on Combat Endurance.

The polarized armor elite effect feels like it would be right at home on systems expertise instead.

[SCC]

The polarized armor elite effect feels like it would be right at home on systems expertise instead.

This would be quite nice, since it would mean I could get faster vent speed without Polarised Armour. I'm not going to miss 30s of PPT, shorter overload and whatsitagain.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

The polarized armor elite effect feels like it would be right at home on systems expertise instead.

And the Systems Expertise effect would fit Combat Endurance more...