I wanted to take a minute to talk about Twilight T'Pol and tiering in general. This is not an important read so feel free to skip it, but since there's already a thread dedicated to the resource, why not? She was written up and slotted into tier 3 yesterday and out of the dozens of reactions to her I saw on forums, Discord, fleet chat, I would guess that very few people would place her that high.
First, the Big Book is primarily a resource for players who are newer and don't have the level of understanding to work out what makes certain crew worthwhile, or don't want to have that understanding because it's a mobile game and there are better uses of their time. As such, we'll assign plus value to attributes that are more impactful or harder to come by for those types of players.
My personal crew ranking would not match what we 'print'. There are several times where I think, 'I hate to rank a crew here. I wouldn't use them that much or I'd rather have this lower ranked crew, but I think the average player would get this level of use from them.'
[Tangent: There's this running joke in the BB chat - chicken or the egg? Are we predisposed to slotting a new crew into tier 3-ish, or is that the level of power that DB produces? Crew good enough to make players want them, but leaving wiggle room for must-haves or duds.]
So what are those plus attributes for newer players? An easy example would be Twilight T'Pol (3) vs Dr. 'Bones' McCoy (5). For a newer player, Bones may make some voyages pre-8 hours (beyond that, you're gimping yourself), but as your roster grows, he does exactly one thing. Shuttles are not the primary avenue for roster building. Their events only reward a 3/4 super rare and the value of daily shuttles is a whole other discussion.
In T'Pol you have a somewhat rare cocktail of attributes; MED voyager and gauntlet viability chiefly. Those are not common traits to acquire through the course of low-spending gameplay. Let's first take a look at voyagers (3-skill) and how the typical player has encountered them over the last 12 months:
In essence, only 5% of the voyagers your active, low-spending player can expect to encounter are MED primary and God help you if you missed a week or weren't able to rank high enough. Such exclusivity extends to Twilight T'Pol's skill set as well. There are only five other legendary crew who share it - Dr. Katherine Pulaski from a March 2019 event reward and four 6-pack crew.
It's a similar story in the gauntlet. Three of the top 25 MED rolls have been available over the last year without spending dilithium: Captain Bev (honor hall), Bartender Guinan (luck), and Twilight T'Pol. The only crew with better overall proficiency added in the last year are Fury Kes and Commander Ari bn Bem, both 6-pack only.
Ok, some of that is spreadsheet hero-ing. She's not going to slingshot a pebble between Defensive Phlox's eyes very often, but how often do you see total walls of him? The complete and absolute dearth of what she offers needs to be considered for players seeking the BB's advice. If your owning a Defensive Phlox crowds her out of most of your gauntlets or your three previous MED megas and handful of others you've gathered limit her to only improving one or two voyage combos, then you're big enough to read the intro page and ignore tiers if they recommend a crew you don't have a pressing need for.
Well, now hold on. Bones' is a singular crew and shares some of that MED exclusivity! That's true, and if I were writing an endgame Big Book, their tiers would be roughly swapped. At a certain point in the game, you start discounting versatility in favor of uniqueness or raw strength in a narrow area as your toolbox grows and you can use just the right crew for just the right job.
But the difference in these two crews' skill exclusivity is twofold. First, voyages are generally accepted as more beneficial for crew building than shuttles. We can have that (very long) discussion some other place, but that's the assumption that the BB operates under.
And second, shuttle seating is normalized for skill rarity while voyages are not. You'll get a roughly similar amount of featured voyage skills across the six (or ENG/MED every time ha ha ho ho hee hee), which isn't true for shuttles.
To finish up with Bones, he's good crew. He's ranked with the considerations of both his narrow use and tremendous power and depending on the roster, you could make a cogent argument to move him up or down three tiers. That's an enormous spread, but there's really only so much you can say with a single number. Like I said, we generally try to use tiers as an arrow to point players in a roster-building direction that can course correct for the imbalance (both skill set-wise and free/event vs 6-pack) that DB likes to throw at us.
Circling back around to Twlight T'Pol, I can't count the number of rosters I've looked at since I started playing. Breaking them down manually or using some IAP/IAmTosk print-outs, the one thing as constant as the northern star (shoutout to my boy Torpedo McCoy. this is what we call foreshadowing) was a lack of MED. Head over to tab 2 in the new Big Book and look at some of the skill charts. MED occurs in 9 of the 10 rarest skill sets. There are nearly four times as many DIP crew as MED crew.
And yet, I've never heard bad things about Scrooge McData on voyages. Despite DIP being ubiquitous (see above) and DIP/CMD/SCI the second most common skill set, he puts in work. Funny how fusion level can affect players' opinions of crew. Another common disconnect between the spreadsheet and the game; ranks. Ranks suggest a bigger gap in voyage efficacy than exists.
For a good example of both, Take Determined Janeway (#54). I bet she can't even get a breather on most rosters. Always busy doing something. Great mega crew, glad to have the free stars. Is anyone disappointed with her? She's 55 voyage ranks ahead of Twilight T'Pol (#109) - that's huge, right?! They are two percent apart in voyage score. Janeway's skill set is six times more common than T'Pol's and is seen eleven times in the top 100 while T'Pol's MED/SCI/SEC appears zero times.
I'll cop to A. opportunity cost and B. voyage ranks mattering in the sense that crew ranked better can conceivably make those below 'useless' even if their value over replacement is tiny. My point is, there is more nuance to look at than one or two numbers to decide if a crew is "very mediocre", "lackluster", or "very disappointing" as some posters here called Twilight.
In our toolbox scenario, she's a way better voyager than "#109" gives her credit for and who wouldn't bring her to the SCI: Astrophysicist, Prodigy, Telepath gauntlet which sees her with four #2 and a #5 gauntlet pair. In a newer player scenario which has seen a total MED wasteland over the last year, she is water in the desert.
I'll throw another name out there to complete the loop - Torpedo Surgeon McCoy. Coincidentally two voyage ranks higher. His event thread saw him called "a tad underwhelming", "disappointingly low", "quite underwhelming", and "a bit disappointing". He actually has fewer events than Twilight and to be generous, I'll call lower base vs gauntlet potential a push.
Since his event, descriptions of Torpedo include:
I know many consider Torpcoy just a cheesecake light. Very similar, not quite as good.
My opinion is that Torpedo McCoy is worth citing unless you have like 3 cheesecakes.
I have Torpedo McCoy twice immortal, he's awesome
Torpedo McCoy is almost exactly like a cheesecake on voyages
Torpedo is good. His raw ranks do him a disservice, skill set wins out
To wrap things up; tiers are slanted toward the less experienced player, or at least what is my best estimation of a blend of useful now + good investment. Don't let the kneejerk reactions when a crew is released dictate how you approach them. See what parts of your own roster need shoring up. And keep an eye on DB. They love to give you what you don't need and make you pay for what you're missing.
2) Point of interest on the Torpedo Surgeon McCoy complaints: not all of them were about raw voyage power. The choice of SCI instead of SEC was a big part of it, and the art wasn’t maybe what we had all hoped for (though, given the challenges of that scene, I think it turned out far better than we could have expected).
And to your point above, if McCoy were MED/SEC/ENG or MED/ENG/SEC with the same stats his voyage utility would be even more impressive compared to his overall rank. Reason being: almost every 5* that has ENG and MED has SCI; TP Chakotay, Ba’ul, DF Paris, and Mountain Climber Mayweather are notable exceptions that have other (primary) skills. 4* crew with ENG and MED are actually skewed every so slightly more to SEC (Doc La Forge, Changeling Bashir) than SCI (Lewis Zimmerman) or anything else (Rianna Mayweather’s tertiary DIP).
This discussion leads me slightly off-track, wondering what characters we could get to fill some of these exceptionally rare voyage combos with both MED and ENG:
2) Point of interest on the Torpedo Surgeon McCoy complaints: not all of them were about raw voyage power. The choice of SCI instead of SEC was a big part of it, and the art wasn’t maybe what we had all hoped for (though, given the challenges of that scene, I think it turned out far better than we could have expected).
And to your point above, if McCoy were MED/SEC/ENG or MED/ENG/SEC with the same stats his voyage utility would be even more impressive.
Yea, my kneejerk was disappointment too since that skill set seemed A. so obvious B. more desirable and C. I wanted to back up the dil truck to dupe a big MED/ENG crew to wallpaper over a weak combo for months/years to come. I didn't mean it (all) as a prod at players, just that the first reaction is not always correct. Playing with a crew (especially with stars) and gobbling down as many different metrics as you can helps un-cloudy the water.
This discussion leads me slightly off-track, wondering what characters we could get to fill some of these exceptionally rare voyage combos with both MED and ENG:
I give that thought too from time to time. I think White Rabbit's crew note includes my top two candidates: Mine Defusing Ezri for MED/ENG/SEC or CMD and Galorndon Core Geordi for ENG/MED/SEC.
I wouldn't whine if they power creeped some ST:Picard crew and gave us a healthy eng/med combo there. Maybe a Romulan, since they're so under-represented in game.
Thanks for the great work on this, it's extremely valuable! One thought I had regarding the comment that the document is more geared towards newer players... why not have a tier number for versatility and a separate tier number for toolbox/specificity? Cater to both crowds in other words, since you're thinking about it anyway.
Thanks for the great work on this, it's extremely valuable! One thought I had regarding the comment that the document is more geared towards newer players... why not have a tier number for versatility and a separate tier number for toolbox/specificity? Cater to both crowds in other words, since you're thinking about it anyway.
Not enough info in there for ya? Trying to kill me?
The short answer is time. Anything new that's not automated has to be done 700+ times. And with tiering already being the majority of our discussion time, it's simply not viable.
I've long fantasized about grading each crew on a variety of attributes (base/event/voyage/gauntlet/arena/skill set/etc.) and then letting the user input how they value each of those - either on a number scale, or simply by order - and the sheet would output custom tier rankings. That may be the next step going forward, but there would still be a big element of subjectivity from our grading (how can you 'objectively' grade arena crew or account for future event potential?) and I imagine it would take a TON of fine tuning to avoid some really wonky results.
The biggest issue is the decay of grades over time. Instead of looking at one number for each crew against the field, you're looking at 10 numbers and all shift and droop over time. There's also the fact that we don't have precise enough metrics for certain fields E.G. a voyage ranking that accounts for skill set.
Thanks for the great work on this, it's extremely valuable! One thought I had regarding the comment that the document is more geared towards newer players... why not have a tier number for versatility and a separate tier number for toolbox/specificity? Cater to both crowds in other words, since you're thinking about it anyway.
Not enough info in there for ya? Trying to kill me?
The short answer is time. Anything new that's not automated has to be done 700+ times. And with tiering already being the majority of our discussion time, it's simply not viable.
I've long fantasized about grading each crew on a variety of attributes (base/event/voyage/gauntlet/arena/skill set/etc.) and then letting the user input how they value each of those - either on a number scale, or simply by order - and the sheet would output custom tier rankings. That may be the next step going forward, but there would still be a big element of subjectivity from our grading (how can you 'objectively' grade arena crew or account for future event potential?) and I imagine it would take a TON of fine tuning to avoid some really wonky results.
The biggest issue is the decay of grades over time. Instead of looking at one number for each crew against the field, you're looking at 10 numbers and all shift and droop over time. There's also the fact that we don't have precise enough metrics for certain fields E.G. a voyage ranking that accounts for skill set.
Makes sense - thanks again to you and all the contributors!
I was going to write a post in the event thread on how I don't understand the negativity towards T'Pol and you've summed it up nicely here. MED is a primary skill.
In my example:
- I have both Dr. Pulaski and Defensive Phlox, at 1/5.
(won't go into detail of how I get the following numbers but ...)
- If I look at how T'Pol ranks against both, using my personal voyage ranking system, which incorporates skill combo and voyage-total numbers ... T'Pol comes out better over both: T'Pol (85,4), Pulaski (80,5) and Phlox (75,3) with a 5* crew average of 22,8.
- If I incorporate the BB's ranking system numbers, the three score: T'Pol (28,5), Phlox (25,1) and Pulaski (20,1) and a 5* crew average of 4,5.
The switch between Pulaski and Phlox is interesting and comes down to the fact that BB factors in gauntlet and events, for which Pulaski is both meh ... but here's hoping for a Caregiver mega!
- Almost all these numbers are between 1 and 2 standard deviations above the norm for my crew, this will only be higher if you don't own the likes of Pulaski or Phlox.
- For voyage numbers in general ... the SEC/MED and SCI/MED combos are #12 and #13 in strength with my crew ... and this cannot be much different for the average crew players own ... T'Pol would improve both ... and I've not yet hit 10 hrs with either combo.
I wrote the above this morning but didn't post it ...
As for most wanted skill combo for me (for voyages) ... ENG/MED/SEC in that exact order ... so that's another La Forge.
Of crew skill combos that exist and are rare for me ... SCI/SEC/MED - Bem and MED/ENG/SCI - Imprinted Archer.
Circling back around to Twlight T'Pol, I can't count the number of rosters I've looked at since I started playing. Breaking them down manually or using some IAP/IAmTosk print-outs, the one thing as constant as the northern star (shoutout to my boy Torpedo McCoy. this is what we call foreshadowing) was a lack of MED.
Always nice to know I'm not just the victim of bad RNG.
I've been playing for about 18 months, and prior to the 4th Anniversary I'd acquired 60 legendary characters. Only four had MED has primary or secondary, and only two of those were drops.
And then in the past few weeks I've had six begolds and gotten three excellent med primaries. I may not be able to predict the Great Material Continuum, but right now I'm enjoying the ride.
Six degrees in Inter-species Veterinary Medicine. Treating all manner of critters, from Tribbles to Humans.
Brilliant and much appreciated work, @Automaton_2000! I don't have enough of a grasp of stats to offer anything about the nuts and bolts of the Big Book, but I do have a minor request. In the Voyage Rank column, could I persuade you to either remove the "#" in front of the numbers or add leading zeroes? I ask because sorting presently returns:
Brilliant and much appreciated work, @Automaton_2000! I don't have enough of a grasp of stats to offer anything about the nuts and bolts of the Big Book, but I do have a minor request. In the Voyage Rank column, could I persuade you to either remove the "#" in front of the numbers or add leading zeroes? I ask because sorting presently returns:
#1
#10
#100
...
#109
#11
#110
I think we come to a few problems with how Sheets itself presents data and perhaps someone more experience with data handling and spreadsheet wizardry would handle this.
Removing the hash is an easy solution but would not solve the problem, as I have tested before the sorting still favors this relative form of sorting instead of doing it the obvious way.
Since this links from a few other sheets (using IMPORTRANGE and QUERY tags) to move data about some elements are lost in conversion (such as rich text data, something we spent a while trying to solve).
So one obvious solution would be to change all values on the source sheet to 001, 002, 003 etc. Fantastic, problem solved! No...1) There is a metric shitload of data to convert, of which converting can cause numerous issues across a number of sheets. 2) changing the data from 1 to 001 didn't always work, cell formats for numeric values isn't always consistent and changing it across something like hundreds of thousands of cells as said would cause untold issues in other areas.
Using sheets to link other sheets is a fickle thing, one wrong cell entry can derail the entire sheet however the benefits are that the end product, a tiered list of crew people can rate is a quicker product for those who use it.
For voyage ranks and metrics like that I would recommend using Paladin's L100 Sheet with all crew data in it and has an ordered voyage ranking, and if you want to see it with your own personal crew feel free to use my Datacore Analysis Sheet.
TL:DR - Sheets is a great online spreadsheet tool, but it's not as flexible as it's desktop counterparts.
Our good friend and Big Book contributor @[ISA] Big McLargeHuge is retiring from the game. He's been with the resource for nearly a year and even maintained it solo for a time. I will miss reading your clever crew notes and your absence will be felt in Discord. Godspeed taking care of the more important things in life and, selfishly, I hope to see you back some day.
Thank you for your efforts and contribution @[ISA] Big McLargeHuge . This is both an extremely useful, as well as entertaining resource, in large part due to your contribution.
Good luck out out there, @[ISA] Big McLargeHuge . I'll miss seeing you around the forum. Hope you stop in from time to time if you're in the thread about Star Trek Picard.
As Idol noted, a changelog for tiers has been added to tab 1. As always, feel free to ask here or message me here or on Reddit/Discord if you'd like elaboration.
---
Going forward, tiers will place less emphasis on voyage ability for Super Rares.
For newer or low-spending players, fusion level generally beats out voyage score. Those 3/4 and 4/4 event crew are going to be more effective voyagers than a 'superior' 1-2/4 from beholds (while also having the perk of being freezable). In addition, the discrepancy in power levels between your average in-portal crew and a new event crew is growing.
While separate in the Book, super rares have to compete with 1/5 legendary crew from beholds or events. E.G. #40 legendary voyager Kahless at 1/5 has a ~100 point lead over #40 super rare Alan-a-Dale at 4/4. Voyages draw from your entire roster at all times, while Faction events limit the pool of choices, allowing super rares better seating opportunity without as many other crew to compete against.
We also have to consider that as the resource is foremost applicable to behold choices, players will often be looking at new or low-fusion options in their beholds. With a pool of several hundred super rare crew, voyage efficacy for crew of that rarity may not be as relevant to a roster by the time that specific crew is fused as would be collections or event help.
To that end, we have (and will) adjusted the tiers of several crew who are stronger for 'daily use' (voyages), but lack longer term perks like collections, events, gauntlet, etc.
To that end, we have (and will) adjusted the tiers of several crew who are stronger for 'daily use' (voyages), but lack longer term perks like collections, events, gauntlet, etc...
If I am getting the full grasp of your above comment I really like the changes you are proposing. A wider view of possible uses for a crew card is always a plus in my book. Also a change log is an A+ idea!
Hopefully these changes will bring about more relevance to using the BBoBA as a resource to new/mid-game players, like me, vs a more established player who has 300-500 immortalized crew and chases after every new (and often bizarre) 5* crew that gets squirted out of the feeding chute. (I always thought it was a bit 'top heavy' to be of use to me ... but that's just me and heresy)
Remember: it's just a game, not a matter of life and death!
Big thanks for reviving this project. My only criticism is that I'm not in love with the new look. It could use some formatting work. To start, perhaps split the Tiers with a whitespace like before. It's a minor complaint, though
With everything else said here, I won't get too much into it because I simply don't have the time. Theorycrafting used to be my bread and butter. It was why I played games like this. So much number crunching and model building. These days, I find that I've grown more weary with it and leave the heavy lifting to others. But that doesn't mean I blindly follow tier lists. Never have and never will. In fact, I mostly check out the blurbs written about each new crew as the source of most of my decision making over anything else in the entire document. Comparisons to existing crew and comments about the efficacy of the particular skill set they posses are more important to me. I'm at the point you mentioned where versatility is not something I'm looking for. My crew is expansive and covers pretty much everything that can be thrown at them. Now I'm looking to push the limits of what I've got and keep punching upward. Certain goals like achieving 10-hour voyages for all skill pairs are what I'm looking towards. With that said, most Tier 3 and better are still automatic pickups for me (at least if they're event crew, to hell with the 6-packs) because I've got plenty of empty roster space at the moment. 30 free slots give me some freedom to be liberal with my acquisitions.
tl;dr: Anybody even moderately knowledgeable with a game's systems and has a functioning critical-thinking center in their brain knows that tier lists are never the final authority nor are they the end all be all on how good particular cards are. They're simply another tool in the box.
Used your 'change log' today (to adjust my info sheets which everybody obviously think are goofy nonsense) ... I really appreciated it!!!! Toss a column in for changes in the Portal status for cards and I would buy you dinner and all the hooch ya can swill!!!
Remember: it's just a game, not a matter of life and death!
Used your 'change log' today (to adjust my info sheets which everybody obviously think are goofy nonsense) ... I really appreciated it!!!! Toss a column in for changes in the Portal status for cards and I would buy you dinner and all the hooch ya can swill!!!
When a Portal update happens we'll make a note of it.
Big thanks for reviving this project. My only criticism is that I'm not in love with the new look. It could use some formatting work. To start, perhaps split the Tiers with a whitespace like before. It's a minor complaint, though.
Using spreadsheets as a medium has it's positives and negatives. One of the main negatives is a lack of decent formatting options. We explored many ways to try and get modifiable options inbetween cells and animated gifs and such. I even went down the route of looking through scripts to try and bring about some of the features that don't translate over from Docs.
However the main focus for me coming onto the project and moving over to Sheets was to automate the statistics/data entry/event counts and such so that Auto and the team didn't have the arduous task of updating 800+ crew members numbers every few months.
So plus, the numbers you see on the page are up to date and change automatically when new crew is added. Minus, we lose some formatting options.
In regards to white space I could possibly add a dummy crew in between each tier, will look into it.
Sad to say my time has come. I believe Stars, Idol, and others involved will continue this resource - they've put in fantastic work so far and it's meant the world to me to make these close friends and be able to work and game with them.
Thank you to everyone who's reached out with criticism or praise over the years. It's been very rewarding to try and help others and to hear their feedback. Hope my advice didn't muck up your rosters too badly LLAP 🖖
Goodbyes are always bittersweet but I wish you well on your future endeavors.
I have now first hand witnessed the effort and skill that you put into rating crew and it's been a fantastic asset to the community and to my own understanding of how the game works. You will be missed and we (Stars, Big, Garak) will try our best to keep the book running up to your amazing standards!
Sad to say my time has come. I believe Stars, Idol, and others involved will continue this resource - they've put in fantastic work so far and it's meant the world to me to make these close friends and be able to work and game with them.
Thank you to everyone who's reached out with criticism or praise over the years. It's been very rewarding to try and help others and to hear their feedback. Hope my advice didn't muck up your rosters too badly LLAP 🖖
thanks again Automaton for your hard work and wonderfully helpful resource.
Sad to say my time has come. I believe Stars, Idol, and others involved will continue this resource - they've put in fantastic work so far and it's meant the world to me to make these close friends and be able to work and game with them.
Thank you to everyone who's reached out with criticism or praise over the years. It's been very rewarding to try and help others and to hear their feedback. Hope my advice didn't muck up your rosters too badly LLAP 🖖
Sad to say my time has come. I believe Stars, Idol, and others involved will continue this resource - they've put in fantastic work so far and it's meant the world to me to make these close friends and be able to work and game with them.
Thank you to everyone who's reached out with criticism or praise over the years. It's been very rewarding to try and help others and to hear their feedback. Hope my advice didn't muck up your rosters too badly LLAP 🖖
Thanks for all your hard work and sage advice. Its sad to see you go but I wish you well in your future endeavours.
Ok, so I haven’t been to this thread in a while so I’ve missed some things obviously and there’s just SO much material to read through and I’m busy like every other human being, so I was hoping someone could summarize for me what’s happened?
I know the format and people doing the Big Book have changed but that’s it. Who is it now? Why is it in this annoying spreadsheet format now? (No offense to spreadsheet lovers) Is the BBoBA still being updated with new crew and revisions of older crew? I’m asking because this is a resource I’ve come to rely on and rather like. Any help?
Weirdly enough, I’m also Vulcan Housewife. Also, RNGesus hates me, like really, REALLY hates me.
Comments
First, the Big Book is primarily a resource for players who are newer and don't have the level of understanding to work out what makes certain crew worthwhile, or don't want to have that understanding because it's a mobile game and there are better uses of their time. As such, we'll assign plus value to attributes that are more impactful or harder to come by for those types of players.
My personal crew ranking would not match what we 'print'. There are several times where I think, 'I hate to rank a crew here. I wouldn't use them that much or I'd rather have this lower ranked crew, but I think the average player would get this level of use from them.'
[Tangent: There's this running joke in the BB chat - chicken or the egg? Are we predisposed to slotting a new crew into tier 3-ish, or is that the level of power that DB produces? Crew good enough to make players want them, but leaving wiggle room for must-haves or duds.]
So what are those plus attributes for newer players? An easy example would be Twilight T'Pol (3) vs Dr. 'Bones' McCoy (5). For a newer player, Bones may make some voyages pre-8 hours (beyond that, you're gimping yourself), but as your roster grows, he does exactly one thing. Shuttles are not the primary avenue for roster building. Their events only reward a 3/4 super rare and the value of daily shuttles is a whole other discussion.
In T'Pol you have a somewhat rare cocktail of attributes; MED voyager and gauntlet viability chiefly. Those are not common traits to acquire through the course of low-spending gameplay. Let's first take a look at voyagers (3-skill) and how the typical player has encountered them over the last 12 months:
In essence, only 5% of the voyagers your active, low-spending player can expect to encounter are MED primary and God help you if you missed a week or weren't able to rank high enough. Such exclusivity extends to Twilight T'Pol's skill set as well. There are only five other legendary crew who share it - Dr. Katherine Pulaski from a March 2019 event reward and four 6-pack crew.
It's a similar story in the gauntlet. Three of the top 25 MED rolls have been available over the last year without spending dilithium: Captain Bev (honor hall), Bartender Guinan (luck), and Twilight T'Pol. The only crew with better overall proficiency added in the last year are Fury Kes and Commander Ari bn Bem, both 6-pack only.
Ok, some of that is spreadsheet hero-ing. She's not going to slingshot a pebble between Defensive Phlox's eyes very often, but how often do you see total walls of him? The complete and absolute dearth of what she offers needs to be considered for players seeking the BB's advice. If your owning a Defensive Phlox crowds her out of most of your gauntlets or your three previous MED megas and handful of others you've gathered limit her to only improving one or two voyage combos, then you're big enough to read the intro page and ignore tiers if they recommend a crew you don't have a pressing need for.
Well, now hold on. Bones' is a singular crew and shares some of that MED exclusivity! That's true, and if I were writing an endgame Big Book, their tiers would be roughly swapped. At a certain point in the game, you start discounting versatility in favor of uniqueness or raw strength in a narrow area as your toolbox grows and you can use just the right crew for just the right job.
But the difference in these two crews' skill exclusivity is twofold. First, voyages are generally accepted as more beneficial for crew building than shuttles. We can have that (very long) discussion some other place, but that's the assumption that the BB operates under.
And second, shuttle seating is normalized for skill rarity while voyages are not. You'll get a roughly similar amount of featured voyage skills across the six (or ENG/MED every time ha ha ho ho hee hee), which isn't true for shuttles.
A reasonable sample size from last year had MED under 10% of shuttle seating (including 5-seaters) and a more recent, small sample size excluding 5-seaters (cause you shouldn't be running them) had MED seating at closer to 5%. Both under the assumed 16.7% for voyage appearance.
To finish up with Bones, he's good crew. He's ranked with the considerations of both his narrow use and tremendous power and depending on the roster, you could make a cogent argument to move him up or down three tiers. That's an enormous spread, but there's really only so much you can say with a single number. Like I said, we generally try to use tiers as an arrow to point players in a roster-building direction that can course correct for the imbalance (both skill set-wise and free/event vs 6-pack) that DB likes to throw at us.
And yet, I've never heard bad things about Scrooge McData on voyages. Despite DIP being ubiquitous (see above) and DIP/CMD/SCI the second most common skill set, he puts in work. Funny how fusion level can affect players' opinions of crew. Another common disconnect between the spreadsheet and the game; ranks. Ranks suggest a bigger gap in voyage efficacy than exists.
For a good example of both, Take Determined Janeway (#54). I bet she can't even get a breather on most rosters. Always busy doing something. Great mega crew, glad to have the free stars. Is anyone disappointed with her? She's 55 voyage ranks ahead of Twilight T'Pol (#109) - that's huge, right?! They are two percent apart in voyage score. Janeway's skill set is six times more common than T'Pol's and is seen eleven times in the top 100 while T'Pol's MED/SCI/SEC appears zero times.
I'll cop to A. opportunity cost and B. voyage ranks mattering in the sense that crew ranked better can conceivably make those below 'useless' even if their value over replacement is tiny. My point is, there is more nuance to look at than one or two numbers to decide if a crew is "very mediocre", "lackluster", or "very disappointing" as some posters here called Twilight.
In our toolbox scenario, she's a way better voyager than "#109" gives her credit for and who wouldn't bring her to the SCI: Astrophysicist, Prodigy, Telepath gauntlet which sees her with four #2 and a #5 gauntlet pair. In a newer player scenario which has seen a total MED wasteland over the last year, she is water in the desert.
I'll throw another name out there to complete the loop - Torpedo Surgeon McCoy. Coincidentally two voyage ranks higher. His event thread saw him called "a tad underwhelming", "disappointingly low", "quite underwhelming", and "a bit disappointing". He actually has fewer events than Twilight and to be generous, I'll call lower base vs gauntlet potential a push.
Since his event, descriptions of Torpedo include:
To wrap things up; tiers are slanted toward the less experienced player, or at least what is my best estimation of a blend of useful now + good investment. Don't let the kneejerk reactions when a crew is released dictate how you approach them. See what parts of your own roster need shoring up. And keep an eye on DB. They love to give you what you don't need and make you pay for what you're missing.
2) Point of interest on the Torpedo Surgeon McCoy complaints: not all of them were about raw voyage power. The choice of SCI instead of SEC was a big part of it, and the art wasn’t maybe what we had all hoped for (though, given the challenges of that scene, I think it turned out far better than we could have expected).
And to your point above, if McCoy were MED/SEC/ENG or MED/ENG/SEC with the same stats his voyage utility would be even more impressive compared to his overall rank. Reason being: almost every 5* that has ENG and MED has SCI; TP Chakotay, Ba’ul, DF Paris, and Mountain Climber Mayweather are notable exceptions that have other (primary) skills. 4* crew with ENG and MED are actually skewed every so slightly more to SEC (Doc La Forge, Changeling Bashir) than SCI (Lewis Zimmerman) or anything else (Rianna Mayweather’s tertiary DIP).
This discussion leads me slightly off-track, wondering what characters we could get to fill some of these exceptionally rare voyage combos with both MED and ENG:
-SEC: Stranded Reno, Gallatin
-DIP: Metaphasic Shielding Crusher
-COM: ???
Yea, my kneejerk was disappointment too since that skill set seemed A. so obvious B. more desirable and C. I wanted to back up the dil truck to dupe a big MED/ENG crew to wallpaper over a weak combo for months/years to come. I didn't mean it (all) as a prod at players, just that the first reaction is not always correct. Playing with a crew (especially with stars) and gobbling down as many different metrics as you can helps un-cloudy the water.
I give that thought too from time to time. I think White Rabbit's crew note includes my top two candidates: Mine Defusing Ezri for MED/ENG/SEC or CMD and Galorndon Core Geordi for ENG/MED/SEC.
I wouldn't whine if they power creeped some ST:Picard crew and gave us a healthy eng/med combo there. Maybe a Romulan, since they're so under-represented in game.
Yea, there are a handful of rarer ones nowadays:
and SCI + MED/ENG individually are already more common pairings than CMD, DIP, or SEC + ENG or MED.
Not enough info in there for ya? Trying to kill me?
The short answer is time. Anything new that's not automated has to be done 700+ times. And with tiering already being the majority of our discussion time, it's simply not viable.
I've long fantasized about grading each crew on a variety of attributes (base/event/voyage/gauntlet/arena/skill set/etc.) and then letting the user input how they value each of those - either on a number scale, or simply by order - and the sheet would output custom tier rankings. That may be the next step going forward, but there would still be a big element of subjectivity from our grading (how can you 'objectively' grade arena crew or account for future event potential?) and I imagine it would take a TON of fine tuning to avoid some really wonky results.
The biggest issue is the decay of grades over time. Instead of looking at one number for each crew against the field, you're looking at 10 numbers and all shift and droop over time. There's also the fact that we don't have precise enough metrics for certain fields E.G. a voyage ranking that accounts for skill set.
Makes sense - thanks again to you and all the contributors!
Nice work as always ...
I was going to write a post in the event thread on how I don't understand the negativity towards T'Pol and you've summed it up nicely here. MED is a primary skill.
In my example:
- I have both Dr. Pulaski and Defensive Phlox, at 1/5.
(won't go into detail of how I get the following numbers but ...)
- If I look at how T'Pol ranks against both, using my personal voyage ranking system, which incorporates skill combo and voyage-total numbers ... T'Pol comes out better over both: T'Pol (85,4), Pulaski (80,5) and Phlox (75,3) with a 5* crew average of 22,8.
- If I incorporate the BB's ranking system numbers, the three score: T'Pol (28,5), Phlox (25,1) and Pulaski (20,1) and a 5* crew average of 4,5.
The switch between Pulaski and Phlox is interesting and comes down to the fact that BB factors in gauntlet and events, for which Pulaski is both meh ... but here's hoping for a Caregiver mega!
- Almost all these numbers are between 1 and 2 standard deviations above the norm for my crew, this will only be higher if you don't own the likes of Pulaski or Phlox.
- For voyage numbers in general ... the SEC/MED and SCI/MED combos are #12 and #13 in strength with my crew ... and this cannot be much different for the average crew players own ... T'Pol would improve both ... and I've not yet hit 10 hrs with either combo.
I wrote the above this morning but didn't post it ...
As for most wanted skill combo for me (for voyages) ... ENG/MED/SEC in that exact order ... so that's another La Forge.
Of crew skill combos that exist and are rare for me ... SCI/SEC/MED - Bem and MED/ENG/SCI - Imprinted Archer.
I've been playing for about 18 months, and prior to the 4th Anniversary I'd acquired 60 legendary characters. Only four had MED has primary or secondary, and only two of those were drops.
And then in the past few weeks I've had six begolds and gotten three excellent med primaries. I may not be able to predict the Great Material Continuum, but right now I'm enjoying the ride.
Starport
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#109
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I think we come to a few problems with how Sheets itself presents data and perhaps someone more experience with data handling and spreadsheet wizardry would handle this.
Removing the hash is an easy solution but would not solve the problem, as I have tested before the sorting still favors this relative form of sorting instead of doing it the obvious way.
Since this links from a few other sheets (using IMPORTRANGE and QUERY tags) to move data about some elements are lost in conversion (such as rich text data, something we spent a while trying to solve).
So one obvious solution would be to change all values on the source sheet to 001, 002, 003 etc. Fantastic, problem solved! No...1) There is a metric shitload of data to convert, of which converting can cause numerous issues across a number of sheets. 2) changing the data from 1 to 001 didn't always work, cell formats for numeric values isn't always consistent and changing it across something like hundreds of thousands of cells as said would cause untold issues in other areas.
Using sheets to link other sheets is a fickle thing, one wrong cell entry can derail the entire sheet however the benefits are that the end product, a tiered list of crew people can rate is a quicker product for those who use it.
For voyage ranks and metrics like that I would recommend using Paladin's L100 Sheet with all crew data in it and has an ordered voyage ranking, and if you want to see it with your own personal crew feel free to use my Datacore Analysis Sheet.
TL:DR - Sheets is a great online spreadsheet tool, but it's not as flexible as it's desktop counterparts.
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Going forward, tiers will place less emphasis on voyage ability for Super Rares.
For newer or low-spending players, fusion level generally beats out voyage score. Those 3/4 and 4/4 event crew are going to be more effective voyagers than a 'superior' 1-2/4 from beholds (while also having the perk of being freezable). In addition, the discrepancy in power levels between your average in-portal crew and a new event crew is growing.
While separate in the Book, super rares have to compete with 1/5 legendary crew from beholds or events. E.G. #40 legendary voyager Kahless at 1/5 has a ~100 point lead over #40 super rare Alan-a-Dale at 4/4. Voyages draw from your entire roster at all times, while Faction events limit the pool of choices, allowing super rares better seating opportunity without as many other crew to compete against.
We also have to consider that as the resource is foremost applicable to behold choices, players will often be looking at new or low-fusion options in their beholds. With a pool of several hundred super rare crew, voyage efficacy for crew of that rarity may not be as relevant to a roster by the time that specific crew is fused as would be collections or event help.
To that end, we have (and will) adjusted the tiers of several crew who are stronger for 'daily use' (voyages), but lack longer term perks like collections, events, gauntlet, etc.
If I am getting the full grasp of your above comment I really like the changes you are proposing. A wider view of possible uses for a crew card is always a plus in my book. Also a change log is an A+ idea!
Hopefully these changes will bring about more relevance to using the BBoBA as a resource to new/mid-game players, like me, vs a more established player who has 300-500 immortalized crew and chases after every new (and often bizarre) 5* crew that gets squirted out of the feeding chute. (I always thought it was a bit 'top heavy' to be of use to me ... but that's just me and heresy)
My Captain Idol's
My DataCore page
My Spreadsheet
With everything else said here, I won't get too much into it because I simply don't have the time. Theorycrafting used to be my bread and butter. It was why I played games like this. So much number crunching and model building. These days, I find that I've grown more weary with it and leave the heavy lifting to others. But that doesn't mean I blindly follow tier lists. Never have and never will. In fact, I mostly check out the blurbs written about each new crew as the source of most of my decision making over anything else in the entire document. Comparisons to existing crew and comments about the efficacy of the particular skill set they posses are more important to me. I'm at the point you mentioned where versatility is not something I'm looking for. My crew is expansive and covers pretty much everything that can be thrown at them. Now I'm looking to push the limits of what I've got and keep punching upward. Certain goals like achieving 10-hour voyages for all skill pairs are what I'm looking towards. With that said, most Tier 3 and better are still automatic pickups for me (at least if they're event crew, to hell with the 6-packs) because I've got plenty of empty roster space at the moment. 30 free slots give me some freedom to be liberal with my acquisitions.
tl;dr: Anybody even moderately knowledgeable with a game's systems and has a functioning critical-thinking center in their brain knows that tier lists are never the final authority nor are they the end all be all on how good particular cards are. They're simply another tool in the box.
My Captain Idol's
My DataCore page
My Spreadsheet
When a Portal update happens we'll make a note of it.
Using spreadsheets as a medium has it's positives and negatives. One of the main negatives is a lack of decent formatting options. We explored many ways to try and get modifiable options inbetween cells and animated gifs and such. I even went down the route of looking through scripts to try and bring about some of the features that don't translate over from Docs.
However the main focus for me coming onto the project and moving over to Sheets was to automate the statistics/data entry/event counts and such so that Auto and the team didn't have the arduous task of updating 800+ crew members numbers every few months.
So plus, the numbers you see on the page are up to date and change automatically when new crew is added. Minus, we lose some formatting options.
In regards to white space I could possibly add a dummy crew in between each tier, will look into it.
Thank you to everyone who's reached out with criticism or praise over the years. It's been very rewarding to try and help others and to hear their feedback. Hope my advice didn't muck up your rosters too badly
I have now first hand witnessed the effort and skill that you put into rating crew and it's been a fantastic asset to the community and to my own understanding of how the game works. You will be missed and we (Stars, Big, Garak) will try our best to keep the book running up to your amazing standards!
thanks again Automaton for your hard work and wonderfully helpful resource.
thanks for all your work
Thanks for all your hard work and sage advice. Its sad to see you go but I wish you well in your future endeavours.
I know the format and people doing the Big Book have changed but that’s it. Who is it now? Why is it in this annoying spreadsheet format now? (No offense to spreadsheet lovers) Is the BBoBA still being updated with new crew and revisions of older crew? I’m asking because this is a resource I’ve come to rely on and rather like. Any help?