I don't get the devaluation of paid for 5/5 crew argument.
If you've got the best ENG card in the game and I haven't but then after a Mega that reward crew is now the best you still have the top 2 ENG crew- still a huge advantage in Voyages and shuttles compared to me having just the one, even if that is the best one.
Let me spell it out then. As I said earlier, I’m happy to get Ru’afo even though I had been concentrating on citing ENG crew. It’s not that you don’t have an advantage, just that the gap is seriously narrowed in certain circumstances.
Say I had my 1280 ENG 5/5 Romulan Data and all you have is an 880 4/4 Kazon Seska. If there were only one ENG slot on the event shuttles, my score is like 50% higher than yours. Now we both get 1500 ENG Ru’afo and now we’re even.
Now say there are two ENG slots. We’re still even on the first one and I still have a 50% advantage on the second. But assuming I had two 5/5 ENG crew and all you had were 4/4 pre-Ru’afo; I would have outgunned you 50% on both. I still have an advantage but it has been narrowed.
Add on that large cetaceans probably paid lots of money for their plethora of powerful 5/5; to see a sharp loss in relative advantage for “free” would kind of stink. Like I said before, I don’t mind but I can see where others would be ticked.
I don't get the devaluation of paid for 5/5 crew argument.
If you've got the best ENG card in the game and I haven't but then after a Mega that reward crew is now the best you still have the top 2 ENG crew- still a huge advantage in Voyages and shuttles compared to me having just the one, even if that is the best one.
The pay to win crowd is purchasing victory itself, not advantages.
I don't get the devaluation of paid for 5/5 crew argument.
If you've got the best ENG card in the game and I haven't but then after a Mega that reward crew is now the best you still have the top 2 ENG crew- still a huge advantage in Voyages and shuttles compared to me having just the one, even if that is the best one.
I mean...yes i totally agree...but id have liked at least 3 months before the power creep showed up...but like the borg, power creep is like a storm...it cant be stopped, or reasoned with.
Been playing for about 6 months. Minuet is now my top combined Dip at 3/5, and will be my top Dip base character at 5/5.
So the extra citation seemed worth it for me.
Been playing for about 6 months. Minuet is now my top combined Dip at 3/5, and will be my top Dip base character at 5/5.
So the extra citation seemed worth it for me.
Been playing for about 6 months. Minuet is now my top combined Dip at 3/5, and will be my top Dip base character at 5/5.
So the extra citation seemed worth it for me.
I understand that. She's also pretty solid at 4/5 for Voyages if you need the skills. T'Kuvma at 4/5 still goes out on many of my voyages and I've been playing for over a year. It totally depends on what you have in the way of skills as to whether she is useful or not, and while she's technically a very weak card, she'll be very strong for newer players for some time to come. And she's practically free.
Been playing for about 6 months. she's technically a very weak card, she'll be very strong for newer players for some time to come. And she's practically free.
She is weaker at 4/5 than a decent super rare crew at 4/4. All it takes are a few voyages and a galaxy event even for a new f2p. The super rare is also "free" , can be frozen to clear the crew slot when it's no longer useful and counts as immortalized in order to gain dilithium. All in all Minuet is a bad investment.
Been playing for about 6 months. she's technically a very weak card, she'll be very strong for newer players for some time to come. And she's practically free.
She is weaker at 4/5 than a decent super rare crew at 4/4. All it takes are a few voyages and a galaxy event even for a new f2p. The super rare is also "free" , can be frozen to clear the crew slot when it's no longer useful and counts as immortalized in order to gain dilithium. All in all Minuet is a bad investment.
Hmmm, not by my math, which bears checking as I've now got most of the 4's but not all. I'd count myself a "high/mid tier" player with a handful of FF 5's, a long list of 1-3/5's to choose between investing in, and still at the point where 4's are regularly used in my voyages. I've got no qualms with adding a "free-ish" Minuet to my deep bench, but I wouldn't cite her. A few months ago, that wouldn't have been the case.
For Voyages, FF, with my current skill bumps, she comes in at 2956 points, and my top 4's (Voq, Tsunkatse Seven, Irumodic Picard and Jannar) are in the range of 2663-2754 (and Jannar is a hard to get Voyage special). Even at 4/5, she's within that pack.
For Factions, using the wiki formula, and averaging over all combinations of primary/secondary/tertiary, I place her at 46% average chance at the highest difficulty, while my top 4's (Clown, Robin Hood, Irumodic Picard, and Shras) are in the 41-43% range, with the Clown again being a hard to get Voyage special.
For Gauntlet, the only comparable 4* I have is Lieutenant Valeris (taking into account trait bonus frequencies). Ambassador Spock would be next down.
So if "decent SR" means lucky enough to have gotten the top 1-2% of SR's, and "investment" means spend 50,000 honor to cite, I think it's a perfectly reasonable strategic choice for new/mid players to decide whether to invest that in a "solid today" all-arounder who will give them access to all the major game play modes, and help them incrementally in building up their deep bench, versus the opportunity cost of waiting much longer for a strong single-purpose 5*, or waiting much much longer for the next First Officer Burnham to appear and be a mega-special, and putting the honor to that use. If they aren't a meg special, that's 200,000 honor to sit on / wait for. It all depends on how you weight that opportunity cost against your enjoyment and progress in the game in those intervening months, I think.
I suspect new/mid players who do invest will get good use of her well into their late-mid tier experience, and then eventually retire her but be fondly nostalgic with few regrets.
Let's check the wiki . Tyler ( reward from event ) has a voyage score of 2350 without bonuses,dip is 1052. Minuet at 4/5 has a score of 2330, dip is 1331 and has only 2 skills. Torchbearer Voq is an even better super rare with the same skill set, also reward from event.
For a very new f2p it makes sense to keep her at 4/5 for a while until power creep comes along, because trainers and repli rations are easy to come by. The rest will gain 2200 honor by retiring her at once. For all players she takes a valuable crew slot and cost 50000 honor to FF, honor that can be used instead for the next Mirror Picard or Surak.
For a new player, she's going to hit plenty of voyages, probably the gauntlet, crit a whole bunch of nodes at command and dip real easy, and will likely be a top cmd/dip shuttle rider until they can build up their crew.
And that's at 4/5. I'd suggest newer players reserve their honor for now, but seriously I don't think she's a bad giveaway unless you've been playing for a while, and even then she's very pretty to look at. I can't stand looking at Voq yet he's a top scorer in my SR mainstay crew. And people have professed how much they dislike Celebratory Ash Tyler to look at too!
I dunno. I'll keep her around and see if she's useful or not. Probably not, but I got two Rufie's out of the last one so I'm happy enough for now.
Let's check the wiki . Tyler ( reward from event ) has a voyage score of 2350 without bonuses,dip is 1052. Minuet at 4/5 has a score of 2330, dip is 1331 and has only 2 skills. Torchbearer Voq is an even better super rare with the same skill set, also reward from event.
For a very new f2p it makes sense to keep her at 4/5 for a while until power creep comes along, because trainers and repli rations are easy to come by. The rest will gain 2200 honor by retiring her at once. For all players she takes a valuable crew slot and cost 50000 honor to FF, honor that can be used instead for the next Mirror Picard or Surak.
Um, yes, but that's 2 out of 221 in the wiki. So what's the chance that a newish player will get the top 1-2% of SRs to drop (and FF) for them...? :-) (Or I guess you're saying, top tier SRs show up regularly as event rewards, so wait/play for them "instead"). But if so, a "free power 4/4" or a "nearly equivalent free 4/5" are effectively the same except for the crew slot consumption, but there are a ton of lesser characters to freeze or airlock first to free up that slot. Then the question becomes griping because we got a weak mega reward (reasonable), which is a different question than "does it make sense for some to invest in her, given that we have her".
I take your point about her hogging a crew slot for all players, fair point. The good of the many and all that. (That said, I don't know the histogram of new vs mid vs elite players ... which end are the "many" on???)
Been playing for about 6 months. Minuet is now my top combined Dip at 3/5, and will be my top Dip base character at 5/5.
So the extra citation seemed worth it for me.
Dip is the most common skill.
Perhaps, but of my 5*'s I have almost no dip primaries, and none more than 1/5.
I'm just saying that for me, right now, she is useful enough at 5/5 for me to think the citation was worth it.
If Minuet was the exact same only her two skills were medicine and engineering/science, would this conversation be different?
I have read this entire thread and can definitely see both sides of the Minuet coin; for me it all comes down to the fact that she only has 2 skills and they just happen to be the two most common skills. She is useful to me and I am thankful to have her, but I am also not excited by her being command and diplomacy.
But if she had two strong skills and they were medicine and either engineering or science she would still be useful to me (more so actually) and would probably have been more exciting for people.
OR (just thought of this) if she had the exact same command and diplomacy stats but had a nominal (say 100 or so) medicine score so people could cheat in a lot of command/diplomacy into a medicine slot on voyages, her value to the community would be a lot higher.
Sorry this post in unfocused, just sort of winging it
More than half of the event month involved no crew sharing so Minuet is of limited use. In this galaxy I only use her on one build and she is only two percentage points on that higher than my 1/5 Gloria Guinan.
If Minuet was the exact same only her two skills were medicine and engineering/science, would this conversation be different?
I have read this entire thread and can definitely see both sides of the Minuet coin; for me it all comes down to the fact that she only has 2 skills and they just happen to be the two most common skills. She is useful to me and I am thankful to have her, but I am also not excited by her being command and diplomacy.
But if she had two strong skills and they were medicine and either engineering or science she would still be useful to me (more so actually) and would probably have been more exciting for people.
OR (just thought of this) if she had the exact same command and diplomacy stats but had a nominal (say 100 or so) medicine score so people could cheat in a lot of command/diplomacy into a medicine slot on voyages, her value to the community would be a lot higher.
Sorry this post in unfocused, just sort of winging it
These were my thoughts exactly, she did need a third unusual stat to make the card worthwhile. Her base stats are really underwhelming, but the fact that they're the two most common (and to be blunt, useless) stats is the nail in the coffin. Right now a lot of super rare cards have better total stats, which makes this mega event endeavor a sad joke.
I added the extra star with honor. She'll do a lot of shuttles for me. She'll be useful in the upcoming Skirmish so I don't have to repair my ship. She may go in the freezer after a while, but she's good for the mega and maybe a little afterward. As @belle'anna mentioned, she's a good looking card. I'm overall happy. And who knows... She may see some Arena time with her high evasion on top of shield repair.
If Minuet was the exact same only her two skills were medicine and engineering/science, would this conversation be different?
I have read this entire thread and can definitely see both sides of the Minuet coin; for me it all comes down to the fact that she only has 2 skills and they just happen to be the two most common skills. She is useful to me and I am thankful to have her, but I am also not excited by her being command and diplomacy.
But if she had two strong skills and they were medicine and either engineering or science she would still be useful to me (more so actually) and would probably have been more exciting for people.
OR (just thought of this) if she had the exact same command and diplomacy stats but had a nominal (say 100 or so) medicine score so people could cheat in a lot of command/diplomacy into a medicine slot on voyages, her value to the community would be a lot higher.
Sorry this post in unfocused, just sort of winging it
ENG/MED I think would have been highly acceptable with her current stats. At a 951 base and 292-766 proficiency (w/o starbase or collection bonuses) she would be my #5 base and #1 voyage in ENG; with 911+(162-353) MED she would be 5th base and 7th voyage. More importantly, she would be far better even than my 3/5* Caretaker for the MED/ENG voyage combo and would in fact beat an immortal Caretaker as well.
That would be something for us to get excited over, especially those who have been shut out from getting any Caretakers in the gauntlet. Instead, here we are with Minuet only being valuable to someone who has played less than 6 months or has been exceedingly unlucky with events or portal pulls.
It's the skill level and the that they're common skills. ENG/MED is in shorter supply and has lower skills overall, so she would have a use on peoples crew. CMD/DIP is more common with higher stats so she's more likely to be to weak to be used. Both Gloria and Nog released for this mega have better DIP stats that Minuet. Cornwell has a better DIP as a secondary than Minuet has as primary.
Cornwell has a better DIP as a secondary than Minuet has as primary.
That's my current sticking point - I have Cornwall at 4/5 from her mega and I feel it would be better to finish her than Minuet. But, if I finish Minuet I can freeze her... But she has my highest dip proficiency so has been useful in Gauntlet! Plus, I had Darth Bashir at 5/5 and he's better than Cornwall...
It is such a shame that a card which looks like a primate and that is Prisoner Cornwall has better stats than a card which has a beautiful art (Minuet)
Sorry to necro this thread, but now that we've all had 4 months to digest Minuet, and since I'm in the process of cleaning out some crew to send to the freezer in preparation of the party, I happened upon my Minuet and upon reflecting on how often I use her, I have now formed a pretty solid position that she is bad.
In Gauntlet, she regularly loses to cards like Kahless the Unforgettable and Surak in a Dip/Com round, and they both have really useful third skills. Minuet's Command proficiency is laughable given her lack of a third skill, and even when she gets the 25% crit bonus she is still not runnable unless you literally have no other option.
I have my Minuet at 5/5 and I cannot begin to tell you how often a shuttle seat comes up with Dip + Com and she is the THIRD or worst in line, behind several 1/5s and even a 4/4! I mean seriously, when everything comes up Minuet and she is still FOURTH, she is a bad card.
The same goes for voyages. Occasionally I'll slot her into a spot because of the Hologram trait, but even when I do that there is usually at least 2 other crew that are arguably better.
I've come to the conclusion after 4 months that when the day comes, she is going in the freezer, and I will not even feel a little bad about it, and that is unbelievably sad given that she was a BLEEPing "mega" event crew card! There is absolutely nothing mega about Minuet, other than possibly my regret in buying the legendary citation to get her immortalized, although I guess had I not done that I wouldn't be able to freeze her.
Not sure if this is possible, but is it possible for DB to go back and reassess this card and possibly buff her scores a bit? Like maybe add 0-75 to both her proficiencies and add another 100 to both her base scores? At least at that point she would be useful.
Sorry to necro this thread, but now that we've all had 4 months to digest Minuet, and since I'm in the process of cleaning out some crew to send to the freezer in preparation of the party, I happened upon my Minuet and upon reflecting on how often I use her, I have now formed a pretty solid position that she is bad.
Excellent analysis Bylo. I never got her to 5/5. I don't have the strongest crew but even at 4/5 I've only used her in Voyages where her stats are the primary/secondary and I'm at sub 2700 antimatter and there's a hologram spot.
I had to cut off your quote for space purposes and well because my post will be within a few posts of yours, possibly the one right after it. I don't know how to hide quoted stuff maybe with hide/hide commands? IDK
My 2nd account uses her for shurttles.
However, when trying to lower my difficulty on the shuttles I run, I really do not need good crew for shuttles.
I now always run four shuttles to same faction. Two of those shuttles are sent at 14% success rate. I am always trying to lower the difficulty now.
I still have Borg at 30 seconds on both my accounts. Everyday I send 10 Borg shuttles with 6 successes and 4 failures. I may need to run more failures to keep at 30 seconds.
Minuet having bad stats fits with her character on TNG. She is programmed by the Bynars to distract Riker so the Bynars can steal the Enterprise but she fails to do so. Then Riker finds out why the Bynars stole the Enterprise and decides to help them but they have locked out the computer. But the Bynars have fallen unconscious so Riker goes to Minuet and asks for her help in unlocking the computer since she was programmed by the Bynars. But Minuet is absolutely zero help as she does not know how to unlock the computer and help complete the Bynars' task. She fails to distract Riker, she fails to help finish the Bynars' task and she just stands around in the Holodeck while Riker and Picard save the day.
So that I never regret being unable to put ideal crew on voyages, I only use 2-stat crew on daily shuttles (saving the 3-stats for voyages). So my 4/5 Minuet is, theoretically, a shuttle option for me. She is my 10th best 2-stat DIP card. In other words, I had totally forgotten I had her until you bumped this thread back up.
Minuet is my 4th (6th when I get 2 non-event 1/5ths leveled up) best Diplomacy crew at 4/5*. She's my best Diplomacy Proficiency crew. I use her on shuttles often and sometimes voyages. I've used her in every Gauntlet since I got her fully equipped. I've only been playing for about 8? months now. She seems pretty useful from my standpoint.
I have her at 5/5 and her DIP is about 1000 and her COM is a little lower. I have her on shuttles every day and occasionally on voyages / Guantlet. It saves my good crew for the voyages and events and I plug her in with equivalent stats to run shuttles. She isn't the best and she isn't the worst. It all depends on your crew. If you don't use her, cryo her. She is useful to me so I keep her. There aren't a large number of 4/4s or 1/5s that have better DIP than she does for shuttles so it is unlikely that a lot of players are heavy on crew better than her card at 5/5 for DIP/COM. Just my thoughts.
Comments
Let me spell it out then. As I said earlier, I’m happy to get Ru’afo even though I had been concentrating on citing ENG crew. It’s not that you don’t have an advantage, just that the gap is seriously narrowed in certain circumstances.
Say I had my 1280 ENG 5/5 Romulan Data and all you have is an 880 4/4 Kazon Seska. If there were only one ENG slot on the event shuttles, my score is like 50% higher than yours. Now we both get 1500 ENG Ru’afo and now we’re even.
Now say there are two ENG slots. We’re still even on the first one and I still have a 50% advantage on the second. But assuming I had two 5/5 ENG crew and all you had were 4/4 pre-Ru’afo; I would have outgunned you 50% on both. I still have an advantage but it has been narrowed.
Add on that large cetaceans probably paid lots of money for their plethora of powerful 5/5; to see a sharp loss in relative advantage for “free” would kind of stink. Like I said before, I don’t mind but I can see where others would be ticked.
Oh. We didn't realise...
The pay to win crowd is purchasing victory itself, not advantages.
Power creep is a business decision.
So the extra citation seemed worth it for me.
Dip is the most common skill.
I understand that. She's also pretty solid at 4/5 for Voyages if you need the skills. T'Kuvma at 4/5 still goes out on many of my voyages and I've been playing for over a year. It totally depends on what you have in the way of skills as to whether she is useful or not, and while she's technically a very weak card, she'll be very strong for newer players for some time to come. And she's practically free.
Check out our website to find out more:
https://wiki.tenforwardloungers.com/
For a very new f2p it makes sense to keep her at 4/5 for a while until power creep comes along, because trainers and repli rations are easy to come by. The rest will gain 2200 honor by retiring her at once. For all players she takes a valuable crew slot and cost 50000 honor to FF, honor that can be used instead for the next Mirror Picard or Surak.
And that's at 4/5. I'd suggest newer players reserve their honor for now, but seriously I don't think she's a bad giveaway unless you've been playing for a while, and even then she's very pretty to look at. I can't stand looking at Voq yet he's a top scorer in my SR mainstay crew. And people have professed how much they dislike Celebratory Ash Tyler to look at too!
I dunno. I'll keep her around and see if she's useful or not. Probably not, but I got two Rufie's out of the last one so I'm happy enough for now.
Check out our website to find out more:
https://wiki.tenforwardloungers.com/
Um, yes, but that's 2 out of 221 in the wiki. So what's the chance that a newish player will get the top 1-2% of SRs to drop (and FF) for them...? :-) (Or I guess you're saying, top tier SRs show up regularly as event rewards, so wait/play for them "instead"). But if so, a "free power 4/4" or a "nearly equivalent free 4/5" are effectively the same except for the crew slot consumption, but there are a ton of lesser characters to freeze or airlock first to free up that slot. Then the question becomes griping because we got a weak mega reward (reasonable), which is a different question than "does it make sense for some to invest in her, given that we have her".
I take your point about her hogging a crew slot for all players, fair point. The good of the many and all that. (That said, I don't know the histogram of new vs mid vs elite players ... which end are the "many" on???)
Perhaps, but of my 5*'s I have almost no dip primaries, and none more than 1/5.
I'm just saying that for me, right now, she is useful enough at 5/5 for me to think the citation was worth it.
I have read this entire thread and can definitely see both sides of the Minuet coin; for me it all comes down to the fact that she only has 2 skills and they just happen to be the two most common skills. She is useful to me and I am thankful to have her, but I am also not excited by her being command and diplomacy.
But if she had two strong skills and they were medicine and either engineering or science she would still be useful to me (more so actually) and would probably have been more exciting for people.
OR (just thought of this) if she had the exact same command and diplomacy stats but had a nominal (say 100 or so) medicine score so people could cheat in a lot of command/diplomacy into a medicine slot on voyages, her value to the community would be a lot higher.
Sorry this post in unfocused, just sort of winging it
These were my thoughts exactly, she did need a third unusual stat to make the card worthwhile. Her base stats are really underwhelming, but the fact that they're the two most common (and to be blunt, useless) stats is the nail in the coffin. Right now a lot of super rare cards have better total stats, which makes this mega event endeavor a sad joke.
ENG/MED I think would have been highly acceptable with her current stats. At a 951 base and 292-766 proficiency (w/o starbase or collection bonuses) she would be my #5 base and #1 voyage in ENG; with 911+(162-353) MED she would be 5th base and 7th voyage. More importantly, she would be far better even than my 3/5* Caretaker for the MED/ENG voyage combo and would in fact beat an immortal Caretaker as well.
That would be something for us to get excited over, especially those who have been shut out from getting any Caretakers in the gauntlet. Instead, here we are with Minuet only being valuable to someone who has played less than 6 months or has been exceedingly unlucky with events or portal pulls.
That's my current sticking point - I have Cornwall at 4/5 from her mega and I feel it would be better to finish her than Minuet. But, if I finish Minuet I can freeze her... But she has my highest dip proficiency so has been useful in Gauntlet! Plus, I had Darth Bashir at 5/5 and he's better than Cornwall...
In Gauntlet, she regularly loses to cards like Kahless the Unforgettable and Surak in a Dip/Com round, and they both have really useful third skills. Minuet's Command proficiency is laughable given her lack of a third skill, and even when she gets the 25% crit bonus she is still not runnable unless you literally have no other option.
I have my Minuet at 5/5 and I cannot begin to tell you how often a shuttle seat comes up with Dip + Com and she is the THIRD or worst in line, behind several 1/5s and even a 4/4! I mean seriously, when everything comes up Minuet and she is still FOURTH, she is a bad card.
The same goes for voyages. Occasionally I'll slot her into a spot because of the Hologram trait, but even when I do that there is usually at least 2 other crew that are arguably better.
I've come to the conclusion after 4 months that when the day comes, she is going in the freezer, and I will not even feel a little bad about it, and that is unbelievably sad given that she was a BLEEPing "mega" event crew card! There is absolutely nothing mega about Minuet, other than possibly my regret in buying the legendary citation to get her immortalized, although I guess had I not done that I wouldn't be able to freeze her.
Not sure if this is possible, but is it possible for DB to go back and reassess this card and possibly buff her scores a bit? Like maybe add 0-75 to both her proficiencies and add another 100 to both her base scores? At least at that point she would be useful.
Excellent analysis Bylo. I never got her to 5/5. I don't have the strongest crew but even at 4/5 I've only used her in Voyages where her stats are the primary/secondary and I'm at sub 2700 antimatter and there's a hologram spot.
I had to cut off your quote for space purposes and well because my post will be within a few posts of yours, possibly the one right after it. I don't know how to hide quoted stuff maybe with hide/hide commands? IDK
My 2nd account uses her for shurttles.
However, when trying to lower my difficulty on the shuttles I run, I really do not need good crew for shuttles.
I now always run four shuttles to same faction. Two of those shuttles are sent at 14% success rate. I am always trying to lower the difficulty now.
I still have Borg at 30 seconds on both my accounts. Everyday I send 10 Borg shuttles with 6 successes and 4 failures. I may need to run more failures to keep at 30 seconds.