Game Mechanics Revealed: Human BOFF Leadership

Welcome to the third installment of Game Mechanics Revealed.  Star Trek Online is filled with vagaries; the devs are not forthcoming with clarification; the forums are a source of confusing and contradictory knowledge; the chats are rife with conjecture and misinformation.  In this series, I will attempt to find the answers and dispel the myths that plague our game.

My partner in science is the ever patient and ever enthusiastic @JeanLPicard.

Game Mechanics Revealed: Human Bridge Officers and the Leadership Trait

Human Bridge Officers come with the Leadership trait.  This trait is supposed to give a passive bonus to hull repair and would thus be one of only two bridge officer traits that improve performance in space, along with Efficient.  However, on the forums it has been discussed that this trait is broken and does not in fact do anything.

Premise

Leadership trait improves hull repair, therefore the amount of time required to repair the ship from a certain hull hit points to fully healed would be shorter with human bridge officers.

Experiment

A cruiser with no human bridge officers on duty is attacked with energy weapons to avoid crew injury and death until its hull is taken down to 20% health.  The time taken to completely heal is recorded.  The test is repeated with 5 human bridge officers.

Results

	Time from 20% hull to full health (seconds)
Test	Control	5x Human Boff
1	48.0	46.0
2	47.0	46.5
3	49.0	48.0
average	48.0	46.8

Conclusion

This was a difficult test to perform with one big source of uncertainty: that 20% health starting point is very iffy to acquire.  The difference between the two averages was not statistically significant but with only 3 sample runs that isn’t entirely convincing that there isn’t some effect.  On the other hand, we’re only looking at a maximum bonus of 2.5% improvement in hull repair rate with a full 5 bridge officers, so it’s much more likely that the bridge officers are doing absolutely nothing and the difference is entirely due to variability of the starting hull damage in the tests.