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Power Management Guide


Drakkolich

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Power management is one of the defining features of GSF, but many players still haven’t mastered or even know how to use it effectively. This guide is to inform what exactly those power settings do when you use them and to capitalize the most on their use.

 

For the rest of the post I’m going to refer to the power settings as follows:

Power to weapons: F1

Power to shields: F2

Power to engines: F3

Balanced power: F4

 

 

Each power setting changes a multiple of your ships stats, let’s go over those now.

 

F1:

 

Scouts, Gunships and Bombers gain 10% primary weapon damage, while losing 10% speed and 10% shield capacity.

 

Strike Fighters gain 25% primary weapon damage, while losing 15% speed and 15% shield capacity

 

All ships also gain +50% weapon power regeneration, while losing 25% engine power regeneration and 25% shield regeneration.

 

 

F2:

 

Scouts, Gunships and Bombers gain 20% shield capacity, while losing 5% primary weapon damage and 10% speed.

 

Strike Fighters gain 30% shield capacity, while losing 10% primary weapon damage and 15% speed.

 

All ships also gain +50% shield power regeneration, while losing 25% weapon power regeneration and 25% engine power regeneration.

 

 

F3:

 

Gunships and Bombers gain 20% speed, while losing 5% primary weapon damage and 10% shield capacity.

 

Scouts gain 30% speed, while losing 5% primary weapon damage and 10% shield capacity.

 

Strike Fighters gain 30% speed, while losing 10% primary weapon damage and 15% shield capacity.

 

All ships also gain +50% engine power regeneration, while losing 25% weapon power regeneration and 25% shield regeneration.

 

 

Next I’d like to focus on the regenerations and the power pools specifically, these 3 power pools actually all regenerate differently.

Weapon power:

 

Gunships and Scouts have a base weapon power pool of 100, Bombers have 90 and Strike Fighters have 110.

 

Gunships, Scouts and Bombers all regenerate 10 weapon power per second, Strike Fighters regenerate 10.5.

 

When you fire a laser or begin charging a railgun you put your regeneration into the recently consumed category. This means for a short time you will regenerate much slower than your regular amount of regeneration.

 

For all ships this duration of time is 1.5 seconds. The recently consumed regeneration rate for all ships is 4 weapon power per second.

 

This means that if you really need to regenerate some weapon power you want to stop shooting and let them get out of the recently consumed category which only takes 1.5 seconds, then you’ll be getting the full regeneration for them. If you fired a shot every 1.5 seconds though, you’d stay in that low regeneration forever.

 

Now these values are modified both by some ship components and by your power settings, keep in mind the power settings multiply the components as well.

 

The base values are as follows for each power settings:

F1: Gunships, Scouts and Bombers regeneration is 15 and Strike Fighters have 15.75. They all have a recently consumed regeneration of 6.

 

F2: Gunships, Scouts and Bombers regeneration is 7.5 and Strike Fighters have 7.875. They all have a recently consumed regeneration of 3.

 

F3: Gunships, Scouts and Bombers regeneration is 7.5 and Strike Fighters have 7.875. They all have a recently consumed regeneration of 3.

 

Shield power:

 

Each ship chassis actually has different shield values.

 

Strike Fighter:

2125 base

99 regen per arc

 

Gunship:

1700 base

85 regen per arc

 

Bomber:

1500 Base

75 regen per arc

 

Scout:

1300 base

65 regen per arc

 

All of them have a recently consumed category, it gets triggered when one of your shield arcs takes damage. That shield arc will get put into the recently consumed category for 6 seconds. Now all ships have 0 recently consumed regeneration on shields. There are some components and crew that affect this though. There is however something very odd with how they affect this.

 

When you gain +% Shield power regen rate (when recently consumed) it doesn’t give you a percentage of your normal regeneration rate like you’d expect. Instead it treats all ships as having a 50 base regen rate per arc and gives you a percentage of that while you’re in the recently consumed mode.

 

Just a quick example here, let’s say you had a Strike fighter with +100% Shield power regen rate (when in recently consumed). You’d expect it to give you 99 regen when you’re in recently consumed but it doesn’t it gives you 50. If you had +50% Shield power regen rate (when in recently consumed) it would give you 25 shield power per second.

 

This “50” base for recently consumed shield regen is on all ships as well, it doesn’t matter if you’re on a Scout or Strike Fighter recently consumed shield regen is always based on this “50” base number.

 

 

Now these values are modified both by some ship components and by your power settings, keep in mind the power settings multiply the components as well.

The base values are as follows for each power settings:

F1:

Strike Fighter:

1806.25 base

75.25 regen per arc

 

Gunship:

1530 base

63.75 regen per arc

 

Bomber:

1350 Base

56.25 regen per arc

 

Scout:

1170 base

48.75 regen per arc

 

F2:

Strike Fighter:

2792.5 base

148.5 regen per arc

 

Gunship:

2040 base

127.5 regen per arc

 

Bomber:

1800 Base

112.5 regen per arc

 

Scout:

1560 base

97.5 regen per arc

 

F3:

Strike Fighter:

1806.25 base

75.25 regen per arc

 

Gunship:

1530 base

63.75 regen per arc

 

Bomber:

1350 Base

56.25 regen per arc

 

Scout:

1170 base

48.75 regen per arc

 

Engine power:

 

All the ships have the same regeneration rates, however they have different speeds and Scouts actually use less engine power to activate and maintain their engines.

 

Strikes, Gunships and Bombers use 6 engine power to activate their engines and 12 engine power per second to maintain them. Scouts only use 5 engine power to activate them and only 10 per second to maintain them.

 

All the ship types regenerate 5 engine power per second. They also regenerate 2 engine power per second while in their recently consumed mode. The delay on engine power is triggered every time you activate and/or maintain your engines, the delay on them is 3 seconds long.

 

 

Now these values are modified both by some ship components and by your power settings, keep in mind the power settings multiply the components as well.

 

The base values are as follows for each power settings:

F1: Engine power regeneration is 3.75. Recently consumed regeneration is 1.5.

 

F2: Engine power regeneration is 3.75. Recently consumed regeneration is 1.5.

 

F3: Engine power regeneration is 7.5. Recently consumed regeneration is 3.

 

 

One thing that also affects your engine power consumption is the speed of your ship and each ship has a different speed.

 

Scout: 845m per second

 

Strike Fighter: 806m per second

 

Gunship: 696m per second

 

Bomber: 636m per second

 

I find it hard to see the differences in speeds in this format so I’m going to show it as a percentage of a balanced power Bomber. This means that 100% is equal to 636m per second.

 

Scout: 132.8%

 

Strike Fighter: 126.7%

 

Gunship: 109.4%

 

Bomber: 100%

 

Now these are affected by power settings so I’m going to add those too. (Keep in mind 100% is still a Bomber in balanced power.)

(I’ll also throw in the new speed totals in meters per second just for extra info)

 

F1:

 

Scout: 119.5% (760.5m per second)

 

Strike Fighter: 107.7% (685.1m per second)

 

Gunship: 98.4% (626.4m per second)

 

Bomber: 90% (572.4m per second)

 

F2:

 

Scout: 119.5% (760.5m per second)

 

Strike Fighter: 107.7% (685.1m per second)

 

Gunship: 98.4% (626.4m per second)

 

Bomber: 90% (572.4m per second)

 

F3:

 

Scout: 172.7% (1098.5m per second)

 

Strike Fighter: 164.7% (1047.8m per second)

 

Gunship: 131.3% (835.2m per second)

 

Bomber: 120% (763.2m per second)

 

 

 

Onto the guide portion!

 

One of the most important parts of Power management in GSF is respecting the recently consumed delay. If you take one thing away from this thread it’s that.

 

 

Weapon power management:

 

 

Let’s go over some examples of how respecting the weapon power delay can help deal more damage.

 

Let’s say you’re firing with your lasers and you actually run out of weapon power, if you continue to just hold down the firing button you’re going to regenerate enough weapon power to fire just about as your delay kicks off, meaning you’ll never actually get out of that recently consumed mode. What you want to do is stop firing for however long you need to get back just enough weapon power to finish your opponent off. By respecting the delay here, we gain 1.5x more regeneration and minimize our downtime of firing.

 

 

Weapon power regeneration isn’t as cumbersome to deal with because it has such a high innate regeneration. There is one case though where respecting the delay will net you huge dividends, that case is Railguns.

 

Dealing damage with Railguns is about burst, the Railguns themselves actually deal very little damage per second compared to primary lasers. Often what you’re doing with a Railgun is opening on a target with a huge burst of damage to either completely drain or deal a huge dent in one of their shield arcs and then quickly lining up a second shot on them to finish them off or deal tremendous hull damage since they have very little shields from the first shot.

 

That strategy is very easy to do when you have a full bar of weapon power, but once you get low having to wait in between those two first shots for longer just to regenerate your weapon power is devastating.

 

The best way to stop that from happening is to once again respect the delay, let’s say you just finished a target off, you swap targets and he’s within range but you only have enough weapon power for one shot. This is the situation we’re really trying to avoid, you want to not take that shot, sit in F1 and don’t start charging again until you’re back to full. This will let you chain shots on your target once you fire your first shot. Many players don’t realize a Gunship is targeting them until after they get fired upon, make sure you have the weapon power for the follow up shots ready before you even begin the attack.

 

Now I know some players are going to come in and say things like but what if he’s about to get behind line of sight, or maybe I need to get that one shot to put pressure on them to peel for a teammate or maybe they have a really low hull count and the shield piercing from Slug would simply finish them off in one shot. These are all great points, but what we’re trying to create is good muscle memory. You want to get in the habit of conserving this weapon power in most cases and when you see one of those opportunities then you take that shot. This way you’ll gain the most shots per match you can on all your targets and once you start being able to identifying when not regenerating is correct you’ll have all the tools you need to really excel.

 

Shield power management:

 

 

Shield power management is very component specific because for the most part you’re going to have a huge regeneration delay so you can’t really do a lot of tricks to get your shields to regenerate in combat. Most of the time you’re just regenerating your shields naturally after a fight and quicker regeneration doesn’t count for too much.

 

There are exceptions though, for example when using Quick charge shield and Turbo Reactor and a crew passive for faster regeneration. You can lower your recently consumed delay way down to 0.6 seconds. This means only 0.6 seconds after taking damage your shields will start using their full regeneration again, with this setup you want to use F2 a lot since that’s what you build it for. To take a little damage and immediately regenerate it as if nothing had happened. If you’re using this strategy you want to avoid being in areas where finding cover will be difficult as you’ll want to prolong engagements so that you can take advantage of practically having no delay on your shield regeneration while your opponent has a lengthy delay if you hit them every few seconds you’ll be regenerating and he won’t so eventually after many rounds of this you’ll still have all your shields or at least a high percentage and they’ll have run out.

 

Another fun trick is with Directional Shields, since each shield arc is independent of each other if your front shields take damage they won’t start regenerating until the delay is over, however your rear shields don’t have that restriction so if you get out of your opponents line of sight using an object or even just by using an engine maneuver you can “cycle” your shields by putting them full back, then full front then balanced again using Directional Shields. What this does is put half the damage you took on your front shields on your rear shields, and since your rear shields don’t have the delay they just begin regenerating immediately. You can even keep doing this every time you take damage to get some constant in combat regeneration going, just make sure to never do it while they’re firing at you as you don’t ever want to put all your shields in the opposite direction of the incoming damage, that leads to some very red hulls.

 

 

Engine power management:

 

 

Engine power is one of if not the most important resource in GSF, learning how to use it and gain it back well is everything.

 

Once again the most important part of managing engine power is you guessed it the recently consumed delay. Learning to have some patience and let your engines recharge to full is very important.

 

After you’ve gotten a kill or really anytime you get a little breathing room is time to let your ship take a break. Just being in F3 isn’t enough for engine power you have to let the delay kickoff and do it’s regeneration thing for many seconds, learning to find places to do this is really important too.

 

For example let’s say you’re at A in Denon Exosphere and you want to get to C. Most ships can’t make that trip in one go, but just going into F3 and holding space bar to boost until you’re out of engine power is a really bad idea it’s going to leave you in between B and C with no line of sight blocking or engine power to evade any attack. Instead once you get to B stop do a few circles and let your engine power go back all the way to the top, this way not only will you have plenty of engine power on the way to C to avoid attacks but once you get there you’ll have a bunch to actually do some fighting.

 

This is the type of strategy you want to add to your muscle memory, finding places to “gas up”. In a team deathmatch friendly nests or just good line of sight spots like pillars or rocks are great areas for this. You finish your engagement and then find a spot to quickly top up your engines. By keeping your engines topped up as much as possible, if you do hit a long engagement you always have all that extra engine power banked, or if you get hit by an engine draining ability you still have some engines left to disengage and regenerate it back.

 

When playing a Strike Fighter this is even more important as they start with huge engine power tanks and it’s easy to forget that they regenerate the same as everything else but you can boost much more because of all that extra starting energy. If you do actually run out of engine power with a Strike Fighter it’s going to take even longer than other ships to regenerate the whole tank.

 

One trick you can use to get some extra distance and still be mindful of the recently consumed delay is by using Power Dive. Power dive once upgraded doesn’t use any engine power, because of this when you use it unlike other engine maneuvers it doesn’t trigger your recently consumed mode. This means if you were waiting for some much needed engine power and gave it a few seconds and your delay finally kicked off but you find yourself really needing to move, maybe to get to line of sight or just get a little distance from an enemy you can use Power Dive to do this and still be regenerating at max speed. This ability is what makes Power Dive so powerful, many people think it’s because of its lower cooldown but it’s the fact that it doesn’t use any engine power at all. When you’re playing with Power Dive you’re all about mobility, diving in and out of line of sight because even though Power Dive has a shorter cooldown then the other engine maneuvers it has the shortest missile immunity duration of all of them.

 

 

Now you might be saying, this means I’m spending so much time basically doing nothing, but this is a good time to ingrain another great technique into your muscle memory, map awareness. These small gaps where you’re taking some time to just refuel and recharge your ship are the perfect moments to analyze the minimap and where everything is happening. In domination you can check where most of your team is or is going and maybe where the enemy team is preparing to attack. In team deathmatch you can check for enemies trying to sneak around and/or analyze the map for Damage Overcharge spawn points. Turning some much needed refueling time into a strategic move.

 

 

There’s something I see many players doing that you really want to avoid. It’s chain spamming boost, when you activate your engines it is not only activating your recently consumed delay but using a lot more energy because activating your boost uses way more energy than simply continuing to boost because of the activation cost. I often see players that have run out of engine power keep trying to spam their boost to get that little bit further to where they’re going. Patience is important here, just give it a few seconds after the delay kicks off and you’ll have plenty of energy to get where you need to go.

 

 

I know once again some players are going to say sometimes you need to get to an objective now and don’t have time to wait for your engines to come back, or a teammate is in trouble and you really need to get over there. You might even be being shot at by an enemy player and need to do a quick tap just to get just out of range from them so that you can then regen again to get to line of sight a little further away. My point once again isn’t to never do these things, those are great play but building the muscle memory to have the most engine power you can all game because of just how important it is going to help you so much more. Afterwards you can identify those scenarios to “go off script” to gain an advantage. You’re also going to notice if you start giving your engines time to recharge more often you’re going to run into a lot less spots where you don’t have enough engine power to do what you want.

 

 

The last thing I want to talk about for Engine power is Quick Charge Shields. You might be wondering why I’d talk about a shield component in the engine section. Well Quick Charge Shields have a very powerful boost to your engine power regeneration, they give you +55% to your engine power regeneration when in recently consumed. This means that if you’re a player that doesn’t respect the recently consumed delay of your engines you’re going to feel like this shield is borderline overpowered. This by no means is a get out of jail free card though, even with Quick Charge Shields you still need to respect the delay, it’s just that your “fuel up” moments are definitely going to be further in between each other.

 

 

 

I hope this helped a lot of players understand just how important power management is in GSF. As usual if you have any questions please post them and I’ll get to them as fast as I can.

 

 

Here are the sources for the power settings values in case you wanted to know where I got them. (A quick note the first link is from long before 5.5 came along and they changed some of the power settings values, so you have to start with those values and then adjust them with the second links patch notes.)

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=729779&highlight=numbers&page=2

 

http://www.swtor.com/patchnotes/10102017/game-update-5.5-united-forces-preparation

Edited by Drakkolich
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Excellent guide, as ever.

 

Remember also, that you can rebind the keys to something more user-friendly.

 

If you're using WASD then it's a stretch for the left hand to make 1,2,3,4 and f1,f2,f3, and f4, while keeping forward thrust, and rolling left or right, using Tab and E for selecting enemies etc.

 

of course use whatever feels natural to you. Personally all my power settings are all on my mouse. Wheel press for shields, forward thumb button for weapons, rear thumb button for engines. Wheel back for balanced. ( assuming a mouse with more than the regular 3 buttons ofc)

 

- But find what works for you. - If you're migrating to some other keybinds, you can have the same ability tied to 2 different key-presses. - so if you forget ( or miss-key) the new one, you can still press the old one.

 

I use my left hand in strange-ish ways for gaming and keying CDs - severing tendons is never good for gaming :)

 

GL. & Safe flying!

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I did notice the other day that the purple engine pool indicator on the right side of the targeting UI will flash red a little bit in the middle of the bar in the "empty" portion of the bar when the engine power pool is in the "recently consumed" state, and then stop flashing when its moved out of that state. I haven't paid attention to the yellow weapon pool on the left, but I'm pretty sure there isn't any visual indication of being in "recently consumed" for the shields.

 

Thanks for your contributions Drak, and if I'm correct maybe you can add this UI indication to your guide?

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I did notice the other day that the purple engine pool indicator on the right side of the targeting UI will flash red a little bit in the middle of the bar in the "empty" portion of the bar when the engine power pool is in the "recently consumed" state, and then stop flashing when its moved out of that state. I haven't paid attention to the yellow weapon pool on the left, but I'm pretty sure there isn't any visual indication of being in "recently consumed" for the shields.

 

Thanks for your contributions Drak, and if I'm correct maybe you can add this UI indication to your guide?

 

I've actually never noticed that so I'll check it out tonight while playing.

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Looks like it only does the flashing if you are below 50% of the maximum pool, regardless of whether you are in recently consumed state. Maybe we should suggest to Bret to see if he can change it to blink red when in recently consumed, instead of current functionality. Thanks for clarifying that.
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  • 2 months later...

I've been doing some more video reviews lately and I've noticed the Power Management of many players has been getting a lot better.

 

I honestly didn't realize how many players didn't know a lot of this information, it does kind of suck how much the game doesn't tell you directly sometimes.

 

Really glad this was able to help a bunch of players though! :)

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  • 2 years later...
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