Leader mains

Hey there! So leader mains, right? Why won’t those damn things reach 150 in the class they specialize in? It is seriously a downer that some races which even have natural 4’s in a given class won’t make the 150 as a leader main.

Would it be possible to bump the leader main level boost in a given class to +40? This would cover a lot of the tier-4 races that always just barely don’t scrape it and still make it so a 150 leader main for a given class is rare while making them at least achieveable.

I think it sounds reasonable and would help make for leader mains other than leader/science mains. What do you all think?

I could get behind races with natural 4’s reaching 150 but not some race with a 3 or less just getting jumped up to max when specializing in it.

I agree.

I do agree that leadership mains are a wonderful mechanic that are cripplingly underused at the moment, except to teach sciences. You don’t see them really because the only other viable leadership main is leader-combats on an 8,000 or 10,000 point race, which the majority of players are unwilling to invest in because they want to be forcers that will hide from conflict or die in a week.

The problem with leadership mains reaching 150 in their subclass too easily is that it would lower the value of choosing just that subclass alone. If it was that easy to achieve, then everyone would just roll leadership mains because why not? I actually enjoy leadership mains even when I can’t get my subclass to 150. There are quite a few perks to leadership and it can create some really potent hybrid builds.

More than levels I think the actual leadership bonuses could benefit from a looksy. Maybe a buff of some kind or make them .. actually work! I was pretty disappointed at the fact that leadership smugglers can’t actually help their group members sneak like you would think from reading the bonus under “help leadership”. I’m not sure if it just doesn’t work at all or if your group members have to have the skill sneak, in which case the bonus is absolutely worthless in the first place! I tested this pretty thoroughly with Vega.

Bonuses like the leader/combat adding extra damage to the group is a little harder to track. It would be cool if bonuses like this were visible to the user. The same thing goes for things like toughness. If toughness actually gave the user some kind of feedback that it worked, like iron wall does, people might appreciate it a lot more as a feat. It is more satisfying for a player to get some kind of output that these types of bonuses are, in fact, actually doing something.

At the end of every combat round it should have a tally of the total damage reduced by toughness. “Due to your uncanny tenacity and toughness you took X less damage!”

“Your exceptional skill at leading allowed your group to do X more damage!”

These are just random outputs I drafted up in 30 second, but you get the idea. Bonuses, feats, and perks should not be invisible. They should also actually work. The smuggling leadership bonus, for a start, needs to be looked at because I don’t think it even works in the first place.

Handling user outputs for perks and bonuses is one of the easiest things you can do in terms of coding, because it doesn’t require creating any new logic. All you are doing is documenting the logic by displaying it to the user. At most some of these require a new variable to use as a counter.

The +10 level suggestion made wouldn’t bump those 3’s up, just help the nat 4’s reach 150. Rescoping leadership to make sure all its intended goodies work is a different issue, but maybe one that would get more attention to it if there were more folks actually able to use leader/class combos!

Specially disheartening is when you select a leader engi combo that both list as 5s and come up short of the last engi feat. . .

I see a new change went through and noticed my recently leveled character doesn’t get the benifits. *le sigh* Time to cide and start from scratch so I can do what I had initially planned. Missing a feat by two levels with every applicable stat maxed out kinda sucks since it’s the one you need AS a Engineering Leader.