Is upgrading my bridge officer's ground gear important?

[Burba]

Do my bridge officers need level 15 ground gear or is it ok to leave it at 11 or 12?

[Xautos]

it's just as important as upgrading your ship. Bridge officers that aren't well armed are easy to kill and that leaves just you to carry the bag against a bunch of NPC targets. The more sturdy your boffs are the more likely you are to survive, additionally the better weapons your boffs have the more useful they become.

[VoodooMike]

Originally posted by Burba:

Do my bridge officers need level 15 ground gear or is it ok to leave it at 11 or 12?

Meh. For ground-use BOFFs most equipment is of very mild importance - they don't fire their weapons all that frequently compared to what you do, and their armor and shield won't stop them from being downed quickly if enemies focus on them.

Of more importance is their selection of BOFF abilities - those will significantly impact your ground performance and survivability far more than your selection of BOFF equipment, generally speaking.

[jonnin]

they should do just fine on the solo content with a mix of excess rewards (many of these reward nothing useful so grab an armor or weapon for one of your BO) and loot drops. If someone is too far behind, craft something or ask a buddy to do so if you haven't leveled a crafting toon.
My take on ground crew is 4 engineers and lots of mines & turrets.
There are a small # of missions with epic ground bosses that may give trouble with the 'no effort' approach, but they are rather rare. You will want the borg thingy and the atmo thingy (one lets you damage borg after they adapt, the other lets you breath in toxic areas) and give em a tribble so they can heal a bit. I think they may eventually need environmental suits for some content.

[Running-Target]

No you don't need to give your ground boffs Mk 15 epic gear. Just Mk 12 green to purple is fine.

[SotF]

You don't need it, but I've found it useful with their weapons at the least.

Mainly because I use them to store different weapons of types for endeavors when they pop up. It means that those still provide bonus' when I'm not working on those, and can swap them to my character for when I need to do that type of damage.

[NavFamG]

Bridge Officers as in those that fill the ships stations: Tac, Sci and Eng and DON'T belong to the Away Team? No you don't need to upgrade them. Same goes for any excess officers you might end up with (not on bridge stations or away team).

Away Team: Unlike what Voodoo said ..... Yes it doesn't hurt. I notice a difference and try to keep my away team guys geared up.

[markdb92]

I can say going from mk 12 gear on boffs to epic 15 is a game changer with the right powers to point I do not have baby sit them ie they kill the mobs before I have the chance. Making them elite helps too allowing them to have a kit which can get them buff their powers to allow them kill faster. If you want to ground boff content yes get them geared up but if your just want to do space content then gearing them up would be a wasted. The gear up does really help when they come out with more story missions so your not constantly dieing to kill npcs to get it done which saves time.

[Jivebot]

Mk 12 Purple gear, and good Skills has never given me trouble with any content

Everyone swears by "ALL Engineers with Turret Summons" and I don't see why, frankly.

I tend to prefer two SCI Boffs focused on healing, one ENG focused on Shield Heals with one or two Turret/Drone summons, and one TAC with various Grenades and Team Buffs. TAC Boffs are very generous with their use of grenades.

If you're giving them all MK12 Purple gear they'll be fine 99% opf the time. The two SCI's can keep your team healed, the ENG can throw out some turrets and additional buffs, and the TAC will help you kill faster.

Only rarely will someone die at all, and usually that'll be because stupid AI, one of your team got stuck and you didn't notice, or you were asleep at the wheel. And you'd have to be reeeeaaaally asleep at the wheel. For Kill endeavors I often park my team somewhere the enemies spawn heavily, make sure they'd commanded to stay in place, then I go do house hold chores or what not, and come back an hour or two later.

My team is standing strong, and surrounded by loot. Rarely do I return to find anyone on my team dead or wiped altogether. And even on those rare occasions I find my team wiped, they damn well finished the kill endeavor first.

That said, i do tend to kit my guys out in very good ground gear i've unlocked and can spawn infinitely from my account rewards like that Lorca armor and Electrical Shield, etc, etc.

And once I leveled my mains enough I started giving my Boffs goodies from the reputation stores, just to show off and flex a bit.

It's the skills that matter more and having two dedicated SCI Healers(With maybe one Debuff or AOE Damage skill each) has kept my team standing against damn near everything, allowing me the flexibility to use the other two BOFFs however I want. I suppose if you ever run into real trouble, an extra healer or two wouldn't hurt.

Oh and Combat Pet Summons. Your Boffs can and will use those.Those Hortas from the C-store. The Laser Dinosaur if you were lucky enough to earn him in-game, or rich enough to buy him from the C-Store. Those two Targs. That white hound thing only KDF players get. That Elachi mini walker.

Equip those to your Boffs. Your Boffs Spam the hell out of them. On my KDF chars, that white hound thing gets spammed so hard I often end up with two of them simultaneously which I dont think I can even do if it were equipped to my actual Captain. But my Boff just be slamming that thing as soon as it cools down lol

[VoodooMike]

Originally posted by "Jivebot":

Mk 12 Purple gear, and good Skills has never given me trouble with any content

Same. The only upgraded gear any of my BOFFs have is weapons, and that's because I slap weapons I'm not using myself on them to hold.

Originally posted by "Jivebot":

Everyone swears by "ALL Engineers with Turret Summons" and I don't see why, frankly.

I use two engineers on mine, and am an engineer myself. Turrets, drones, mortars, defensive generators... they can lock down a battlefield easily and often pretty quickly. With very little investment in anything but easily purchased training manuals you can crush most ground combat with a lot of engineers.

Eventually, though, when your own equipment and abilities get good enough, you'll kill things fast enough that the whole fabrications setup is too slow to bother with.

Originally posted by "Jivebot":

Oh and Combat Pet Summons. Your Boffs can and will use those.Those Hortas from the C-store. The Laser Dinosaur if you were lucky enough to earn him in-game, or rich enough to buy him from the C-Store. Those two Targs. That white hound thing only KDF players get. That Elachi mini walker.

I forgot to mention this part, but yes - usable items that summon combat pets are an absolute powerhouse to equip on your away team BOFFs. The Shard of Possibilities item is also good to equip on at least one.

[Jaq]

The only way my bridge officers end up with Mk15 gear is if it's excess gear that I upgraded for myself. Upgrading ground gear specifically for a bridge officer would be the dead last thing I'd spend upgrade materials on. Mostly I just use my bridge officers as mannequins for all the reputation ground gear sets I bought but don't use. It's an easy way to keep the sets sorted together.

[cap-boulanger]

I generally run my away teams with one or two tac, one sci, and two or three engineers (counting the captain).

Only the tac *really* needs an upgraded weapon, the others you mostly want using their abilities.

Upgraded shields and armor are good ideas though, for survivability. I like to use the Lukari reputation 2pc on my scis for the set bonus to healing abilities.

[Azanimefan]

ground gear is a mixed bag. i'll be honest. most missions in the campaigns only really matter what your captain is geared at. however, there are some missions in some campaigns which are very very hard without a properly geared away team. some of the kabali ground missions... the hurk campaign... some of the stuff with the iconians... there definitely are some campaign missions which you make very hard on yourself if you don't get good equipment for your team.

[Jaq]

It's like with the endgame space combat difficulty bump. 98% of ground combat can be handled by setting your gun to autofire and standing out in the open in aim mode. Which, to be fair, is a pretty accurate representation of how gunfights were usually conducted on the old TV shows.

There are ways to play ground combat more skillfully, but you're very rarely put in a position to need to develop those skills, so it's always a shock the first time the brainless approach doesn't work. And you won't learn anything from playing ground TFOs because everyone nowadays just floods the screen with obnoxious magic spells from limited access items like it's Harry Potter Online.

The thing to keep in mind though is that the majority of these missions were created when Mk12 purple gear was the highest level you could get, and have not been re-balanced. You were not expected to solve every problem with gear upgrades, you were expected to play smarter with your Mk12 gear. Back then it was completely normal to fail and have to quit Borg ground TFOs if multiple players on your team didn't know what they were doing. If that happened today, you'd hear certain people crying that it's a paywall to force people to buy upgrades. But without the possibility of upgrades, people understood that they just needed to learn to play better.

But setting all that aside, here's the thing about Bridge Officer gear upgrades: You can only use Bridge Officers in single player missions or Battlezones, and in those modes it's completely meaningless if you die, you just click Respawn and continue as if nothing ever happened. Unless you are committed to playing single player episodes in Elite difficulty mode, where racking up injuries could become costly, it's just a waste of resources to upgrade anything specifically for your bridge officers to use. If you have all Mk15 gear on your main character, there already shouldn't be any challenge left in any content that bridge officers can appear in.

[AlienZeratul]

If you do random missions, i would just upgrade everything to basic MK15. If one ignores most of the ground-stuff, one doesn't even need any equipment.
It is up to you, if you need it or not. Mostly you can do all story missions without bigger problems without getting good ground-stuff.
However it is much easier and faster, if one has a bit equipment.