Seeing a mine field and stepping on it with no regrets is never a good idea try to avoid it !
Ok, you go Ground PvP against a 5 man enemy neutralization engineer team in the Deserted Facility PvP map. I think that will give you a whole new perspective on the issue. Engineers may deploy 5 of them in a large area every 22 seconds. They are permitted to have 10 mines active at one time. With 5 engineers, that's 50 mines with a fairly large explosive radius. 1-2 mines shouldn't be able to kill a player, it should take 4-5. Either that, or the ability needs a longer cooldown, which would not be desirable for PvE content.
I underlined the problem, if the map layout allows players to barricade themselves using defensive abilities then its a map layout problem.
This is like the QQ over the Cat races jumping into places out of reach because someone screwed up with the map layout, fix the map and not nerf something because QQ PvP issues.
The cat ppl QQ a lot especially when I beat them without having to do anything shady lol.
Edit: Oh yeah thats one of the cornerstones of MMORPG's being able to customize instead of presets lol. One reason I didn't even think about purchasing guild wars 2 was because of the fact there is no customization. Sad thing with this game when it comes to ground if it was an only ground/away team game and there was a competitor star trek game I would have never come to sto for same reasons.
1: Bear in mind that whatever cooldown times a power has are cut by 70% by a strong tactical initiative. With the current cooldown time of tactical initiative, it is perfectly possible for a coordinated team to chain tactical initiative such that a team's long-cooldown, high-impact powers are always on their lowest possible cooldown when needed. (This is NOT a bad thing. It doesn't break PVE or PvP, and this kind of coordination takes build sacrifices, teamwork, planning, and skill, so the game should reward it.)
2: Changing cooldowns won't help. Changing activation times will.
The biggest issue I hear from people who are frustrated with ground combat isn't the cooldown timers or power effectiveness of kits, it's the activation times themselves.
My advice: chop the activation time of all kit and captain powers be chopped to some lower number (0.2 seconds would be nice) and allow new animations to cancel old animations unless old animations are left to run.
Champions Online appears to have functionality like this - for instance, the power Telekinetic Maelstrom will play an animation that lasts longer than the activation time of the power, but will be canceled if you trigger another power immediately after it. Since STO runs on the same (albeit heavily modified) engine this gives me hope that animation times and power activation times are not intrinsically linked.
I'm a huge ground player. I for one love it. I think in reading all these thoughtful post we have to stay focused on whats problematic, reasonable and unreasonable.
Problems. First and foremost the issue of kits goes farther than just the kits themselves. A lot of issues arise from UI lag. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking a power that doesn't fire. nothing more time consuming than having repeat rezing a teammate because for some reason it didn't work the first time.
Next problem is effectiveness. There is a reason why tac kits are perceived as most effective. It has a lot to do with where those skills fall on the skill tree. Tacs get a lot of mileage out of their tier 1-3 skills. Engineers out of tier 1-2 skills. Sci's in order to get effective CC and debuffs have to rank up tier 4-5 skills. ( cost prohibitive.)
Final problem: Boffs are not the answer. One of the repeated barriers of people playing ground combat is a dislike of boff system. It in fact makes us all handler classes on ground. to boot there are some powers you never want a boff to have, Cover shield and mines come to mind. The boff never lays those powers out effectively.
So the problems of the kits are tied to every aspec of the game itself. It's part in part of the UI, the skill tree, and the game engine.
What is unreasonable? I would suspect at this point STO doesn't want to overall it's entire game to accommodate kits in a better fashion? So what can be done? I think there are some tweaks to kits and powers that can be made utilizing minor repairs and current game systems.
Minor Repairs. Make the overwhelming majority of all classes kit powers tied to tier 1-3 ground skills. More specifically for Engineers make the turrets and mortars more durable. give them more hit points to make them more effective. The ground supply kit needs a total overhaul. but how? Lets look to one of the more effective Tac kits "Squad Leader" it's a kit centered around team buffs. All classes need a kit like this. If we look at each career and create kits that debuff, buff self, buff team, or dps.. then we can see 4 distinct roles per career. We can see now the most effective kits do this and thats why they are used. I would love to see Combat supply morphed into a team buff kit. Science. likewise I think the three most common kits my sci's run are Physician for melee, Geophysicist for dps and the Borg Medical kit. all three and well focused on their mission. Tac kits seem to work well because they focus on personal DPS "Fire Team, or Group buffs "Squad leader" the other kits all address a specific role.
What I'd like to see is each kit have 2 passive toggles (Just like cruiser commands) that all a player to chose two aura's that buff the team in some way some fashion. This makes diverse teams more appealing, makes diverse kits more appealing and does it all without having to click a button that may or may not fire.
Ultimately I think I'd love to gut this game's ground and rewrite it from ground up. The way it is now 90% of all players max space skills and run minimal ground points. But like I said that isn't likely to happen.
As we talk about this we are addressing how to make ground more appealing.. here is somethings I'd like to address. First, drops. The disparity between income from vending ground junk VS. space junk makes it unprofitable for people to want to play ground. Doubt me go run Romulan space daily vs New Romulas ground dailies and count up the ec earned. We could alleviate this by offering some worthy rare space drops on ground.. giving some incentive for Space pilots to actually beam down and run ground. Also it's time to divide ground and space skill tree.. This and not kits is the major problem with people playing ground.
That's a problem for all of the engineering fortifications. As you say, STFs frequently require the team to be mobile. A supply crate or a shield generator, will frequently be left behind as the team sprints to the next objective.
1: Bear in mind that whatever cooldown times a power has are cut by 70% by a strong tactical initiative. With the current cooldown time of tactical initiative, it is perfectly possible for a coordinated team to chain tactical initiative such that a team's long-cooldown, high-impact powers are always on their lowest possible cooldown when needed. (This is NOT a bad thing. It doesn't break PVE or PvP, and this kind of coordination takes build sacrifices, teamwork, planning, and skill, so the game should reward it.)
Very much so. The best STF runs I've done had a couple of tac officers who coordinated TI and other powers. It was almost like nobody had a cooldown on anything.
2: Changing cooldowns won't help. Changing activation times will.
The biggest issue I hear from people who are frustrated with ground combat isn't the cooldown timers or power effectiveness of kits, it's the activation times themselves.
My advice: chop the activation time of all kit and captain powers be chopped to some lower number (0.2 seconds would be nice) and allow new animations to cancel old animations unless old animations are left to run.
Champions Online appears to have functionality like this - for instance, the power Telekinetic Maelstrom will play an animation that lasts longer than the activation time of the power, but will be canceled if you trigger another power immediately after it. Since STO runs on the same (albeit heavily modified) engine this gives me hope that animation times and power activation times are not intrinsically linked.
It doesn't help that STO has so much input lag to begin with.
Problems. First and foremost the issue of kits goes farther than just the kits themselves. A lot of issues arise from UI lag. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking a power that doesn't fire. nothing more time consuming than having repeat rezing a teammate because for some reason it didn't work the first time.
While a lot of what you said was pretty good, this, and this alone, is a huge issue game wide. Not only in terms of kits, but in space combat, in crafting, in doff missions, this issue has caused so many issues that its safe to say it's almost broken.
For me personally, my main is built as a Vulcan Augment, so he's stronger, faster, and needs a kit that would showcase this. For that reason, i've been using the Close combat kit, and all too often, it feels way too sluggish (like most of the game), the Grenade is kind of useless since it either doesn't work or doesn't work properly for me any way, the leg sweeps are okay but feel way too slow, and while i like the Drop kick, its buggy at times.
I would love to see the grenade replaced, possibly with a judo style throw of sorts. It would also be nice if you could throw in more martial arts style moves to make it feel like i was actually trained to fight hand to hand. One of the biggest issues is movement. With most enemies, they are constantly moving, or at least do so when you get close. It would be fantastic if Melee didn't root you in one spot as it makes it feel way to clumsy and clunky. During 'Defend Ri'ihha Station' it becomes more prominent against the Elachi, so it should be made more fluid in terms of motion. I'm not asking to be Neo from the Matrix or Spider-Man here, but it would be nice not to have it feel so choppy when i'm needing to reposition myself for another attack. Closing the distance is too hard at times when dealing with groups, so when Lunge is on cool down, some other ability to close the gap would be nice. Aside from that, the balance seems to be okay with legsweep being AOE, and unarmed for single strikes, but over all the melee kit needs to feel better suited for melee combat.
While i know it's "Close Combat" and not melee specific, it would still be nice to have it more melee friendly, if not just flat out give us a better Melee kit in general. Maybe as part of the next fleet holding since Close Combat has been left out so far? Melee is the ability set i use the most, so it would be nice to get a kit that better reflects that in my character, in terms of both powers and animations.
The Bunker kits i love, but i wouldn't mind seeing more difference between the two drones. As it is, they look and function too similarly, so i wouldn't mind one actually being more support and the other more attack. As stated by others though, the drops DO seem way too fragile, especially in endgame, with my character spec'ed into bunker bunker kit. Usually one generator will blow before i can quick fix it (because targeting it makes it not quick at all) it explodes, knocking me back and often destroying other things. Maybe switch Quick Fix to a smaller AOE heal rather than trying to cycle to the right target which is gone before i can hit the button. I would love to see more variation on the theme as well, like the romulan turret, but with other factions as well. it would be interesting to see how other factions would bunker down if they could. As it stands though, more so on elite, The medical and shield generator are more of a decoy than anything useful. It would be nice if these were buffed to compensate for the power creep and heavy DPS focus. Shield generator could possibly Harden shields or be a shield (damage negation) as well as giving the (currently poor) regen boost, while the medical generator could give a better boost, or at least work on anything in the radius rather than just organics up to a 5 count (i.e. keep the other drops from exploding as easily). On elite, and against newer elites like the Voth or hive, they literally just become decoys because of how useless they are in a fight.
At end game, my rom usually just uses the standard med kit. Nothing fancy here, but it tends to feel a little too bland. The heals are nice when they actually work right, *Glares at the nanites*, but the animations are boring, and some times it's to easy to just heal my self and neglect the rest of the team, so maybe a little attention could be made there to encourage being the team medic instead of the unstoppable A-Hole.
to the OP....you are about the best dev on the forums....that said.....alot of the kit powers for all classes just stink....never work...or so underpowered....about useless...some sci kits fall into this...some engie kits...most tac kits are ok....just my two coppers
"If everyone used Macs, we'd be working on how to get to Alpha Centauri rather than how to get to Mars."
Ok, you go Ground PvP against a 5 man enemy neutralization engineer team in the Deserted Facility PvP map. I think that will give you a whole new perspective on the issue. Engineers may deploy 5 of them in a large area every 22 seconds. They are permitted to have 10 mines active at one time. With 5 engineers, that's 50 mines with a fairly large explosive radius. 1-2 mines shouldn't be able to kill a player, it should take 4-5. Either that, or the ability needs a longer cooldown, which would not be desirable for PvE content.
Yep! The enemy neutralization kit is for close combat, and on a small map it can be very deathly.
The transphasic bomb can be destroyed by shooting on it. But that is not the case for the chroniton mines, and that makes them annoying. Maybe that should be changed so that you can take them out from far out ! Anyway usage of sniper and other wide range wep in that situation is wise. You cant just like that jump on a engineer with his mines, and you with your pulsewave and expect to get lucky!
I think the most important thing to do is to be sure that the devs that make any modifications actually PLAY the game. I would suggest you spend a couple of days playing stfs (and some PvP perhaps) and force yourself to use all the kits and see how they manage in real-world conditions.
I think the most important thing to do is to be sure that the devs that make any modifications actually PLAY the game. I would suggest you spend a couple of days playing stfs (and some PvP perhaps) and force yourself to use all the kits and see how they manage in real-world conditions.
Quoting to make sure one of the team sees this.
The rest of you should as well. Don't want this valuable suggestion to be buried under all these pages.
as a side note, when it comes to doffs that enhance ground abilities, could we get a pass on those as well? My bunker kit is fully enhanced by doffs, yet i seem to be hardly getting any of the procs i should be. Most are 20% but one even says 100%, neither really seem to be firing as often as they say.
I've noticed that with some of the Sci kit abilities, while the animations are cool looking, they don't really seem to make sense when fighting in doors or on a ship. Would it be possible to change the animation slightly so you're forming small anomalies or tossing out a device to produce the debuff rather than just having the ground rupture and all that?
I know this isn't a power either, but a lot of them are way too bulky/clunky, has there been any word on what they're doing about that?
Still though, i'm getting really excited about the possible improvements to the ground kits, specifically close combat and the Bunker kits.
For my tac officers I tend to use the Mk XII fire team kit from the embassy but its rare I use the motion accelerator power on it. What I think would be a good idea would be a blank kit with various slots and we slot various powers on it as a character levels up much like the character traits. I intend to purchase one of the new engineering kits that will become available from the tier 3 spire that contains the chroniton mine barrier and the quantum mortar as for me this is the perfect engineering kit for my play style and saves me having to constantly swap kits. I know when I enquired about this during the last live stream that Brandon did I was told the it had been redacted. So it'll be interesting to see what develops as as result of this.
On a personal note I would like to see the motion accelerator on the embassy fire team kit swapped out for something like rally cry or overwatch. Som
I agree with what's being said about the activation times being a problem and I would like it reduced. But with those that are complaining about the cool down being to short I disagree. Yes having a 5 man engineering team kitted out with the enemy neutralization is a nightmare in PvP but how is it any different from a 5 man tac team trained in long range sniping and camping a choke point on a map. Or someone trained in melee pinning a target in a corner using the knock back and placate ability?
I think the most important thing to do is to be sure that the devs that make any modifications actually PLAY the game. I would suggest you spend a couple of days playing stfs (and some PvP perhaps) and force yourself to use all the kits and see how they manage in real-world conditions.
That would be lovely, had the DEV team spent more time outside of Escorts and Tac officers :-), things might be a tad different right now.
Inertia just means you can do Powerslides in you carrier!
I am Il Shadow and i approve these Shennanigans!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I'm currently taking a look at a number of Kit Powers that are largely ignored, and coming up with tweaks to them to make them more usable and more interesting. In some rare cases, powers are so unused that we can pretty much totally change their functionality completely *cough*CombatSupply*cough* - but in most cases, I'm taking care to retain the essence of any given power while making it more usable and more competitive with other Kit Powers.
So, why am I here on the forums, telling you all this? For one, I'm curious how you all feel about kits. Are they fun pieces of equipment? Do you enjoy switching them up to change playstyles from time to time? What Kit Powers do you find especially fulfilling and fun, and what Kit Powers do you really want to like but just aren't there yet?
Secondly, a number of the changes we're thinking about making involve increasing the cooldown of some Kit Powers, but boosting their effects to be worthy of the longer recharge. The reason for this is twofold - primarily, most of a player's actions on ground are Weapon activations, and the longer activation and root times of kit powers lend themselves less well to frequent use than do the short times of weapon powers. Second, having longer cooldown times on kit powers lets us make them really impactful when they do go off, so you only have to spend 1-2 seconds of animation to do something really cool.
How would you feel about, say, Weapons Malfunction being a 60 second cooldown instead of 30 seconds - but being a much bigger deal when it goes off? Are there any Kit Powers that you really like being able to use every 15 seconds?
Please feel free to provide general feedback on any Kit Powers you feel strongly about in any regard in this thread as well. Thanks!
Since I see so many people have already responded I'm sure what I have to say has been addressed. Call me lazy I can't sit and sift through all of these especially since I would counter every other post on the first page alone. For the sake of thoroughness I will add my comments.
1st you need to look at outside influences on kit powers, PvP vs PvE, build, skills, traits and DOffs.
Builds in how the kit is arranged for its effectiveness.
There are four classifications of Kit Abilities, Offensive, Support/Control, Heals and Buffs. Generally when we think of the classes in STO we see Tactical = DPS, Engineer = Tank and Science = Support and Heals. This is not necessarily the case however. Each class can Control/Support, DPS and Heal and generally the best Tank in game will be a healer!
Skills are setup based on the class that we play, Tactical=DPS, Engineering=Support and Science~=Heals. If you are taking a look at Kits you also need to take a look at Skills. Unlike most MMOs STO characters are all encompassing yet we can specialize to meet our playstyle goals. I would suggest revamping the ground skills to fall more in line with the space skills. That is, General, Security, Operations, and Scientific. On the Ground we each have access to Weapon Proficiency, PS Generator, Threat Control, Willpower and Combat Armor. IMO, I would list these skills as General.
I would establish General: is what all currently have access to, Security: as what Tacs currently have access to, Operations: as what Engs currently have access to and Scientific: as what Sci currently have access to.
So your Ground skill tree would look like
Operations: Demolitions, Repairs, Generators, Turrets and Drones, Modification Specialist
Security: Grenades, Combat Specialist, Special Forces, Squad Command, Advanced Tactics
Scientific: Medic, Physiology, Scientist, Probability Logistics, Particle Physics
General: Weapon Proficiency, Personal Shield Generator, Threat Control, Willpower, Combat Armor
This can be viewed as assisting your away teams as much as yourself on the ground. Just like with space skills you could have a skill outside the ?normal? spectrum of the character that can give them training access to other skills.
Since there are 4 characteristics of kits abilities why not make each kit carry at least 2 characteristic skills and then you could have specialized kits like Grenade Satchel or Fabrication Kit. There are a lot of skills that are not properly being utilized on kits.
My view of kit skills popularity. Tactical Ability use
Lunge (Offensive) = Gap Closer, Melee specialty [Popular]
Sweeping Strikes (Offensive) = Multi Target Melee skill [Relatively Unused]
Plasma Grenade (Offensive) = AOE+DOT [Popular]
Photon Grenade (Offensive) = AOE [Popular]
Rally Cry (Heal) = the only heal a Tac can have (Not available on BOffs) [Unkown? I use it often]
Draw Fire (Support/Control) = Aggro Pull [Not used often]
Smoke Grenade (Support/Control) = AOE Debuff [Ineffective in PvP]
Currently the following are a list of abilities frequencies on kits. Tactical Ability use
Lunge 2x
Sweeping Strikes 1x
Plasma Grenade 2x
Photon Grenade 2x
Rally Cry 1x
Draw Fire 1x
Smoke Grenade 2x
Stun Grenade x3
Ambush 2x
Battle Strategies 2x
Motion Accelerator 1x
Overwatch 2x
Stealth Module 1x
Suppressing Fire 2x
Engineering Ability Use
Chroniton Mine Barrier 1x
Combat Supply 2x
Equipment Diagnostics 2x
Force Field Dome 1x
Fuse Armor 2x
Medical Generator Fabrication 2x
Quantum Mortar Fabrication 2x
Quick Fix 1x
Seeker Drone Fabrication 2x
Shield Generator Fabrication 2x
Shield Recharge 2x
Transphasic Bomb 1x
Turret Fabrication 2x
Weapons Malfunction 2x
Science Ability Use
Anesthizine Gas 2x
Biofilter Sweep 2x
Electro-Gravitic Field 1x
Exothermic Induction Field 1x
Hyperonic Radiation 2x
Hypospray Dylovene 1x
Hypospray Melorazine 1x
Medical Tricorder 2x
Nanite Health Monitor 2x
Sonic Pulse 2x
Stasis Field 2x
Tachyon Harmonic 2x
Triage 2x
Vascular Regeneration 2x
There is also the Borg Medical Analyzer Kit that I did not account for as it is a very rare drop.
A few traits have impact on Kits namely Creative.
Lastly is the Doff impact. I think there are a very few ground Doffs utilized based on the common and popular skills used between kits and BOffs. We look at ourselves and say I can?t use Fabrications why should I slot that Doff. I think Doff influence should be a bit more broad or with multiple effects. i.e. If I have a tac Captain using an Armory Doff could impact the number of grenades thrown towards a target area widening the impact area. While this Doff might impact my Eng BOff using a turret it could also impact my captain using something else.
Hopefully you look at all these items and the impact on kits as you look to revamp the kits. I trust good things will come.
*snip* Long list of abilities that no one uses...*snip*
You know how I know you don't play the game?
You listed ALL these powers that are absolutely rarely used. You didnt even list Target Optics or Fire on My Mark ffs - two of the strongest and most important buffs to the Tac field. Sweeping Stirkes? Rarely used except by the poor saps that attempt melee builds. Rally cry? Not often used really. Combat supply? Not popular nor used. Equipment diagnostics? Not popular OR common. Quick fix? lolwut?
Dude, seriously - what game are you playing? I play ground combat almost exclusively and I don't know where you got that mess of information. No disrespect.
You listed ALL these powers that are absolutely rarely used. You didnt even list Target Optics or Fire on My Mark ffs - two of the strongest and most important buffs to the Tac field. Sweeping Stirkes? Rarely used except by the poor saps that attempt melee builds. Rally cry? Not often used really. Combat supply? Not popular nor used. Equipment diagnostics? Not popular OR common. Quick fix? lolwut?
Dude, seriously - what game are you playing? I play ground combat almost exclusively and I don't know where you got that mess of information. No disrespect.
You know I don't play the game cause talking about Kit powers I didn't list Tac Captain skills? Hmm well I guess I should have addressed Orbital Strike and Nanoprobe Infestation?
Honestly I don't know if your agreeing with my viewpoint or what cause you haven't addressed it in any other way. I made an effort to demonstrate the frequency of abilities used to support what the Devs goals are in looking at Kit Powers to make these abilities more popular.
Your classic T post is a waste of space here, no disrespect.
Ambush, Battle Strategies, Stealth Module, and Smoke Grenade work fine in the Tactical department. Ambush is one of the most powerful Tactical officer buffs in the game, tied with Rally Cry and Target Optics. Battle Strategies is a debuff cleanse and minor damage buff, it fits it's role well, though a shorter cooldown of 45 seconds would be nice. Stealth Module is a toggle, similar to Battle Cloak in Space combat. When used in the correct instance, the ability is very effective. Smoke Grenade does work well in PvP, I've used it before without a problem.
On the Science side, Biofilter Sweep is very redundant to Vascular Regenerator. Vascular Regenerator is also superior in every way. You are also underplaying Tachyon Harmonics, it's the most powerful offensive Science ability in the game. Exothermic Induction Field is a very close second. Hyperonic Radiation could be better, but all it really needs is a slight buff in gained damage based on invested skill points. Sonic Pulse is also a Science officer's best repel and knockback ability.
The reason Rally Cry is not used is because of the limited usefulness of the Squad Leader Mk X kit. Rally Cry will make a comeback with the Mk XII version of Squad Leader. Suppression Fire II will bring the kit to a competitive level. The Rally Cry ability provides a small heal, +12% Critical Chance, +70% Critical Severity, and a small resistance/damage bonus. The 15 second uptime will work fine with the 45 second downtime, especially when the AoE nature is considered.
Ambush, Battle Strategies, Stealth Module, and Smoke Grenade work fine in the Tactical department. Ambush is one of the most powerful Tactical officer buffs in the game, tied with Rally Cry and Target Optics. Battle Strategies is a debuff cleanse and minor damage buff, it fits it's role well, though a shorter cooldown of 45 seconds would be nice. Stealth Module is a toggle, similar to Battle Cloak in Space combat. When used in the correct instance, the ability is very effective. Smoke Grenade does work well in PvP, I've used it before without a problem.
On the Science side, Biofilter Sweep is very redundant to Vascular Regenerator. Vascular Regenerator is also superior in every way. You are also underplaying Tachyon Harmonics, it's the most powerful offensive Science ability in the game. Exothermic Induction Field is a very close second. Hyperonic Radiation could be better, but all it really needs is a slight buff in gained damage based on invested skill points. Sonic Pulse is also a Science officer's best repel and knockback ability.
The reason Rally Cry is not used is because of the limited usefulness of the Squad Leader Mk X kit. Rally Cry will make a comeback with the Mk XII version of Squad Leader. Suppression Fire II will bring the kit to a competitive level. The Rally Cry ability provides a small heal, +12% Critical Chance, +70% Critical Severity, and a small resistance/damage bonus. The 15 second uptime will work fine with the 45 second downtime, especially when the AoE nature is considered.
Yes Ambush is very powerful especially when used with stealth module. The problem with stealth module is that even when I'm attacked it doesn't break unlike Battle or any Cloak. So I can sit in stealth mode and be killed by someone close enough to see through it.
Smoke grenade is ineffective in PvP because players have the awareness to move out of it where NPCs won't. It is an obscuring grenade that does nothing but debuff enemy perceptions and buff allied stealth. Its not completely ineffective however it's not as useful as it could be.
Vascular regeneration is by far the best heal ability in game imo. But how science kits are pieced together limits how abilities are utilized not taking away from the effectiveness just player utilization.
I like the idea of keeping kits with pre-determined abilities. I think it makes people have to stick to a certain set of abilities.
Putting aside 'can it be put into the game or not' for a moment, letting people have their own choices freely I feel would be worse. Because through eventual min-maxing, people would figure out the best choices and options, and most likely ignore most other abilities.
Combat Supply is a good example. How many things positive things have been said about that ability in this thread? Presuming this system was put in with the abilities as they stand now, I doubt most people would ever use it.
Anyways, said my peace on that. I do prefer kits as they stand, in terms of being preset in their abilities. BUT every ability should also be worth using, and have synergy with the rest of the kit. Which I feel is very important, synergy. I'll give a couple examples (but ignore fleet kits for a moment)
Great synergy:
Medic - All heals, all the abilities from the kit are easily specced into for virtually no cost, and is a fairly common mainstay of many science toons on the ground.
Good synergy:
Fire Team - A highly effective kit, but all 4 of it's abilities are spread out over 4 different skills (Grenades, Special Forces, Squad Command, Advanced Tactics). It obviously works quite well for those who use it, reason why it tends to be fairly popular. But it doesn't change how spread out the abilities are to spec into.
Bad synergy:
Breach Engineer - To start it has Combat Supply. Then it has Quantum Mortar and Seeker Drones on it, which could potentially make it a kind of 'DPS kit', if it worked well. But the Seeker and Mortars either die so fast it matters little, or the enemies die quickly it doesn't matter, or the enemies are never ever really hit by the Mortar so it's basically pointless. It also has Shield Charge, which is always a nice ability, but really doesn't fit in very well with the 'Breach' aspect.
However, good or bad synergy doesn't necessarily make a kit good or bad. For example:
Grenade Satchel - Yes, technically the kit has good synergy since all the abilities are specced from the same skill, and all the stuff that affects Grenades can be used on all abilities on this. However it's rarely considered useful by many people (at least the ones I know), particularly due to the shared CDs between them. It's essentially the ground equivalent of a 'torp boat', but far less potentially useful.
There can also be a kit with a weird or poor synergy, that could also potentially work out well in the future:
Support Technician - To start, this also has Combat Supply on it. Which as it stands isn't that good of course, but it also has a great combo in the form of Quick Fix and Equipment Technician, which can be given to others. The weird part comes in with the rather random feeling Shield Generator on it as well. But it could work depending on how things change in the future.
On a similar note:
Equipment Technician - It has two of the engineering buff abilities, and both of the debuff abilities in the form of Fuse Armor, Weapons Malfunction, and Equipment Diagnostics, all of which are specced off of the (rather expensive) Modification Specialist skill. The oddball being the Shield Recharge, but it's still useful even if you don't spec much into it. If you were to add Quick Fix to a future version of this kit in the form of some kind of fleet kit, that'd go perfect with both the theme of the kit and go extremely well with the synergy.
Now, again I'd just like to say that again, some skills feel a bit lackluster because the amount of skills we have to spec into are quite limited, and the effects aren't as strongly felt as they are in space.
In space you can super-charge something like a Gravity Well by loading up a ton of Particle Gen consoles and pushing your Aux power higher, etc. On the ground, you don't have those kinds of systems and such to do so. You're more limited in that regard, and if an ability doesn't feel like it matters whether you spec into it or not, people will simply not bother wasting points on it, and possibly avoid using those kits at all, and also tell people they aren't worth it, etc etc.
Hyperonic radiation is a good example of that one. It's a decent skill, but it's also an expensive one to spec into, and really feels like it changes very little if you do so. I know it's an AoE and you don't want people to go overboard or anything, but it should also be worthwhile to actually WANT to spec into it. Don't misunderstand, the Physicist kit is a great sci kit, just feels like the damage itself is a smidge lackluster sometimes if you aren't getting much out of it.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
Hyperonic radiation is a good example of that one. It's a decent skill, but it's also an expensive one to spec into, and really feels like it changes very little if you do so. I know it's an AoE and you don't want people to go overboard or anything, but it should also be worthwhile to actually WANT to spec into it. Don't misunderstand, the Physicist kit is a great sci kit, just feels like the damage itself is a smidge lackluster sometimes if you aren't getting much out of it.
Hyperonic radiation for sure needs more damage per tick when skill points are invested into the skill. However, I'd like to see that stack limit of 3 imposed upon the Biochemist duty officer before anything happens. Right now, the duty officer has no stack limit, which means it's very easy to rack up 30+ proc stacks for -300 All Damage Resistance Rating before the Science Officer even adds in Tricorder Scan or Nanite Infestation. The Biochemist is more powerful than any other damage resistance debuff in the game, it's why some teams are running 5 Science officers.
There's also the matter of Defiance, the Tier V Dyson ability unlock, receiving cooldown reduction from Tactical Initiative. That bug has become "justification" for using the Biochemist duty officer. Tactical Officers are capable of obtaining a 33-50% uptime with Defiance instead of the intended 6.7% uptime. It's come to the point where you need Biochemist stacks to counter the high uptime of Defiance and you need Defiance to counter the insane damage resistance reduction from Biochemist.
Hi, adjudicatorhawk. I'll try to give you my thoughts on the subject.
First, the kit system in general feels very limited and confining when compared to, say, the trait system, or the way boff abilities work. In either case, we can pick and choose abilities alacarte off a menu, mix and match them at will, retrain them as desired. So I guess removing kits entirely and giving us 4-5 active ground power slots is definitely on my STO wish list. However, it doesn't look like that is under consideration. In part, that desire is driven by the fact that every kit has 1-2 abilities I either ignore or just plain forget about.
When I began playing in 2010, and for along time, I mostly ignored kit powers. I just mashed the 1-2 keys like an idiot. It took me a year or longer to realize that I could even rearrange the order of abilities in the tray, which probably didn't help. (this was my first MMO, stop laughing at me)
I been reading this thread and a lot of the responces are simular to this guy, insted of being able to prepare yourself for a situation you would rather be limited by having 1 set of kit (or as in the way this guy puts it, traits......)So say for examples, your in a stf and you have 3 engineers the other 2 are on mine kit and you have no medic, so the way the system is set up now, one of the engineers can swich to a bunker kit that has a medical generator and a shield generator that will help somewhat, but the way you want the system to be is that once your in a event (stf, mission, whatever) your stuck with the same abilities and are bacelly sol (S*** outta Luck), I for one DO NOT want that type of system, I like being able to change on the fly to better help out the team
Hyperonic radiation for sure needs more damage per tick when skill points are invested into the skill. However, I'd like to see that stack limit of 3 imposed upon the Biochemist duty officer before anything happens. Right now, the duty officer has no stack limit, which means it's very easy to rack up 30+ proc stacks for -300 All Damage Resistance Rating before the Science Officer even adds in Tricorder Scan or Nanite Infestation. The Biochemist is more powerful than any other damage resistance debuff in the game, it's why some teams are running 5 Science officers.
There's also the matter of Defiance, the Tier V Dyson ability unlock, receiving cooldown reduction from Tactical Initiative. That bug has become "justification" for using the Biochemist duty officer. Tactical Officers are capable of obtaining a 33-50% uptime with Defiance instead of the intended 6.7% uptime. It's come to the point where you need Biochemist stacks to counter the high uptime of Defiance and you need Defiance to counter the insane damage resistance reduction from Biochemist.
Oh I'm not denying that. The Biochemist DOFF is the ground equal to APB stacking in space. It's insane on both sides of the coin.
Defiance shouldn't be doing that, I understand that as well. That is certainly and undeniably a bug.
But those are different issues IMO. Let's stick to kit stuff. Biochemist DOFF fix needs to happen, but putting aside that issue, let's just keep in mind how the ability is acting right now.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
Yes Ambush is very powerful especially when used with stealth module. The problem with stealth module is that even when I'm attacked it doesn't break unlike Battle or any Cloak. So I can sit in stealth mode and be killed by someone close enough to see through it.
Smoke grenade is ineffective in PvP because players have the awareness to move out of it where NPCs won't. It is an obscuring grenade that does nothing but debuff enemy perceptions and buff allied stealth. Its not completely ineffective however it's not as useful as it could be.
Vascular regeneration is by far the best heal ability in game imo. But how science kits are pieced together limits how abilities are utilized not taking away from the effectiveness just player utilization.
Ambush works very well when paired with any high damage secondary attack (compression pistol, sniper rifle, pulsewave assault, split beam rifle). Stealth Module is a toggle, the player must deactivate the cloak, this is true for space as well. Smoke Grenades are quite useful in PvP, all it requires is good timing on the player's part. This is true for any ability in PvP, it's great when used correctly, but terrible when used incorrectly. There are underperforming abilities (Stasis Field, Combat Supply, Draw Fire, etc), but most abilities work well.
But those are different issues IMO. Let's stick to kit stuff. Biochemist DOFF fix needs to happen, but putting aside that issue, let's just keep in mind how the ability is acting right now.
Very well, then I stand by my previous comment, Hyperonic Radiation could use a small buff to the amount of damage gained via skill points. Investing from 0 ranks to 6 ranks in Particle Physics will increase Hyperonic Radiation's damage from 15/second to 21.3/second. 18,000 skill points is granting the player a potential 94.5 extra damage over the 15 second duration. The damage needs an increase. While I'm thinking of it, Hyperonic Radiation also cannot be removed via Vascular Regenerator, yet Vascular Regenerator clears all other DoTs.
If we can slot the powers that we want instead of being forced to choose a 'kit' a lot more would get used, it is as simple as that.
As for the powers that are just too poor to use, well I'm sure you could improve on them, but ground is meant to be fast paced, don't increase cooldowns or it'll break the feeling of a fast paced shooting (or bashing, if you're a melee person).
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I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
Very well, then I stand by my previous comment, Hyperonic Radiation could use a small buff to the amount of damage gained via skill points. Investing from 0 ranks to 6 ranks in Particle Physics will increase Hyperonic Radiation's damage from 15/second to 21.3/second. 18,000 skill points is granting the player a potential 94.5 extra damage over the 15 second duration. The damage needs an increase. While I'm thinking of it, Hyperonic Radiation also cannot be removed via Vascular Regenerator, yet Vascular Regenerator clears all other DoTs.
Alright. I do agree with you that HR does feel a bit lackluster. But Vascular doesn't clear it? Didn't know that. Does anything clear it, besides waiting or dying?
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
Alright. I do agree with you that HR does feel a bit lackluster. But Vascular doesn't clear it? Didn't know that. Does anything clear it, besides waiting or dying?
I will need to test, but I am pretty sure the Dominion Advisor - Removes all negative effects from self and up to 3 teammates upon activation of Overwatch - clears Hyperonic Radiation.
Comments
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
The cat ppl QQ a lot especially when I beat them without having to do anything shady lol.
Edit: Oh yeah thats one of the cornerstones of MMORPG's being able to customize instead of presets lol. One reason I didn't even think about purchasing guild wars 2 was because of the fact there is no customization. Sad thing with this game when it comes to ground if it was an only ground/away team game and there was a competitor star trek game I would have never come to sto for same reasons.
2: Changing cooldowns won't help. Changing activation times will.
The biggest issue I hear from people who are frustrated with ground combat isn't the cooldown timers or power effectiveness of kits, it's the activation times themselves.
My advice: chop the activation time of all kit and captain powers be chopped to some lower number (0.2 seconds would be nice) and allow new animations to cancel old animations unless old animations are left to run.
Champions Online appears to have functionality like this - for instance, the power Telekinetic Maelstrom will play an animation that lasts longer than the activation time of the power, but will be canceled if you trigger another power immediately after it. Since STO runs on the same (albeit heavily modified) engine this gives me hope that animation times and power activation times are not intrinsically linked.
Problems. First and foremost the issue of kits goes farther than just the kits themselves. A lot of issues arise from UI lag. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking a power that doesn't fire. nothing more time consuming than having repeat rezing a teammate because for some reason it didn't work the first time.
Next problem is effectiveness. There is a reason why tac kits are perceived as most effective. It has a lot to do with where those skills fall on the skill tree. Tacs get a lot of mileage out of their tier 1-3 skills. Engineers out of tier 1-2 skills. Sci's in order to get effective CC and debuffs have to rank up tier 4-5 skills. ( cost prohibitive.)
Final problem: Boffs are not the answer. One of the repeated barriers of people playing ground combat is a dislike of boff system. It in fact makes us all handler classes on ground. to boot there are some powers you never want a boff to have, Cover shield and mines come to mind. The boff never lays those powers out effectively.
So the problems of the kits are tied to every aspec of the game itself. It's part in part of the UI, the skill tree, and the game engine.
What is unreasonable? I would suspect at this point STO doesn't want to overall it's entire game to accommodate kits in a better fashion? So what can be done? I think there are some tweaks to kits and powers that can be made utilizing minor repairs and current game systems.
Minor Repairs. Make the overwhelming majority of all classes kit powers tied to tier 1-3 ground skills. More specifically for
Engineers make the turrets and mortars more durable. give them more hit points to make them more effective. The ground supply kit needs a total overhaul. but how? Lets look to one of the more effective Tac kits "Squad Leader" it's a kit centered around team buffs. All classes need a kit like this. If we look at each career and create kits that debuff, buff self, buff team, or dps.. then we can see 4 distinct roles per career. We can see now the most effective kits do this and thats why they are used. I would love to see Combat supply morphed into a team buff kit.
Science. likewise I think the three most common kits my sci's run are Physician for melee, Geophysicist for dps and the Borg Medical kit. all three and well focused on their mission.
Tac kits seem to work well because they focus on personal DPS "Fire Team, or Group buffs "Squad leader" the other kits all address a specific role.
What I'd like to see is each kit have 2 passive toggles (Just like cruiser commands) that all a player to chose two aura's that buff the team in some way some fashion. This makes diverse teams more appealing, makes diverse kits more appealing and does it all without having to click a button that may or may not fire.
Ultimately I think I'd love to gut this game's ground and rewrite it from ground up. The way it is now 90% of all players max space skills and run minimal ground points. But like I said that isn't likely to happen.
As we talk about this we are addressing how to make ground more appealing.. here is somethings I'd like to address. First, drops. The disparity between income from vending ground junk VS. space junk makes it unprofitable for people to want to play ground. Doubt me go run Romulan space daily vs New Romulas ground dailies and count up the ec earned. We could alleviate this by offering some worthy rare space drops on ground.. giving some incentive for Space pilots to actually beam down and run ground. Also it's time to divide ground and space skill tree.. This and not kits is the major problem with people playing ground.
That's a problem for all of the engineering fortifications. As you say, STFs frequently require the team to be mobile. A supply crate or a shield generator, will frequently be left behind as the team sprints to the next objective.
Very much so. The best STF runs I've done had a couple of tac officers who coordinated TI and other powers. It was almost like nobody had a cooldown on anything.
It doesn't help that STO has so much input lag to begin with.
While a lot of what you said was pretty good, this, and this alone, is a huge issue game wide. Not only in terms of kits, but in space combat, in crafting, in doff missions, this issue has caused so many issues that its safe to say it's almost broken.
For me personally, my main is built as a Vulcan Augment, so he's stronger, faster, and needs a kit that would showcase this. For that reason, i've been using the Close combat kit, and all too often, it feels way too sluggish (like most of the game), the Grenade is kind of useless since it either doesn't work or doesn't work properly for me any way, the leg sweeps are okay but feel way too slow, and while i like the Drop kick, its buggy at times.
I would love to see the grenade replaced, possibly with a judo style throw of sorts. It would also be nice if you could throw in more martial arts style moves to make it feel like i was actually trained to fight hand to hand. One of the biggest issues is movement. With most enemies, they are constantly moving, or at least do so when you get close. It would be fantastic if Melee didn't root you in one spot as it makes it feel way to clumsy and clunky. During 'Defend Ri'ihha Station' it becomes more prominent against the Elachi, so it should be made more fluid in terms of motion. I'm not asking to be Neo from the Matrix or Spider-Man here, but it would be nice not to have it feel so choppy when i'm needing to reposition myself for another attack. Closing the distance is too hard at times when dealing with groups, so when Lunge is on cool down, some other ability to close the gap would be nice. Aside from that, the balance seems to be okay with legsweep being AOE, and unarmed for single strikes, but over all the melee kit needs to feel better suited for melee combat.
While i know it's "Close Combat" and not melee specific, it would still be nice to have it more melee friendly, if not just flat out give us a better Melee kit in general. Maybe as part of the next fleet holding since Close Combat has been left out so far? Melee is the ability set i use the most, so it would be nice to get a kit that better reflects that in my character, in terms of both powers and animations.
The Bunker kits i love, but i wouldn't mind seeing more difference between the two drones. As it is, they look and function too similarly, so i wouldn't mind one actually being more support and the other more attack. As stated by others though, the drops DO seem way too fragile, especially in endgame, with my character spec'ed into bunker bunker kit. Usually one generator will blow before i can quick fix it (because targeting it makes it not quick at all) it explodes, knocking me back and often destroying other things. Maybe switch Quick Fix to a smaller AOE heal rather than trying to cycle to the right target which is gone before i can hit the button. I would love to see more variation on the theme as well, like the romulan turret, but with other factions as well. it would be interesting to see how other factions would bunker down if they could. As it stands though, more so on elite, The medical and shield generator are more of a decoy than anything useful. It would be nice if these were buffed to compensate for the power creep and heavy DPS focus. Shield generator could possibly Harden shields or be a shield (damage negation) as well as giving the (currently poor) regen boost, while the medical generator could give a better boost, or at least work on anything in the radius rather than just organics up to a 5 count (i.e. keep the other drops from exploding as easily). On elite, and against newer elites like the Voth or hive, they literally just become decoys because of how useless they are in a fight.
At end game, my rom usually just uses the standard med kit. Nothing fancy here, but it tends to feel a little too bland. The heals are nice when they actually work right, *Glares at the nanites*, but the animations are boring, and some times it's to easy to just heal my self and neglect the rest of the team, so maybe a little attention could be made there to encourage being the team medic instead of the unstoppable A-Hole.
Yep! The enemy neutralization kit is for close combat, and on a small map it can be very deathly.
The transphasic bomb can be destroyed by shooting on it. But that is not the case for the chroniton mines, and that makes them annoying. Maybe that should be changed so that you can take them out from far out ! Anyway usage of sniper and other wide range wep in that situation is wise. You cant just like that jump on a engineer with his mines, and you with your pulsewave and expect to get lucky!
Input lag is a myth. If you are interested, I wrote up an explanation in a different thread, so as to avoid derailing this one.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=14226981#post14226981
The rest of you should as well. Don't want this valuable suggestion to be buried under all these pages.
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I've noticed that with some of the Sci kit abilities, while the animations are cool looking, they don't really seem to make sense when fighting in doors or on a ship. Would it be possible to change the animation slightly so you're forming small anomalies or tossing out a device to produce the debuff rather than just having the ground rupture and all that?
I know this isn't a power either, but a lot of them are way too bulky/clunky, has there been any word on what they're doing about that?
Still though, i'm getting really excited about the possible improvements to the ground kits, specifically close combat and the Bunker kits.
On a personal note I would like to see the motion accelerator on the embassy fire team kit swapped out for something like rally cry or overwatch. Som
That would be lovely, had the DEV team spent more time outside of Escorts and Tac officers :-), things might be a tad different right now.
I am Il Shadow and i approve these Shennanigans!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Since I see so many people have already responded I'm sure what I have to say has been addressed. Call me lazy I can't sit and sift through all of these especially since I would counter every other post on the first page alone. For the sake of thoroughness I will add my comments.
1st you need to look at outside influences on kit powers, PvP vs PvE, build, skills, traits and DOffs.
Builds in how the kit is arranged for its effectiveness.
There are four classifications of Kit Abilities, Offensive, Support/Control, Heals and Buffs. Generally when we think of the classes in STO we see Tactical = DPS, Engineer = Tank and Science = Support and Heals. This is not necessarily the case however. Each class can Control/Support, DPS and Heal and generally the best Tank in game will be a healer!
Skills are setup based on the class that we play, Tactical=DPS, Engineering=Support and Science~=Heals. If you are taking a look at Kits you also need to take a look at Skills. Unlike most MMOs STO characters are all encompassing yet we can specialize to meet our playstyle goals. I would suggest revamping the ground skills to fall more in line with the space skills. That is, General, Security, Operations, and Scientific. On the Ground we each have access to Weapon Proficiency, PS Generator, Threat Control, Willpower and Combat Armor. IMO, I would list these skills as General.
I would establish General: is what all currently have access to, Security: as what Tacs currently have access to, Operations: as what Engs currently have access to and Scientific: as what Sci currently have access to.
So your Ground skill tree would look like
Operations: Demolitions, Repairs, Generators, Turrets and Drones, Modification Specialist
Security: Grenades, Combat Specialist, Special Forces, Squad Command, Advanced Tactics
Scientific: Medic, Physiology, Scientist, Probability Logistics, Particle Physics
General: Weapon Proficiency, Personal Shield Generator, Threat Control, Willpower, Combat Armor
This can be viewed as assisting your away teams as much as yourself on the ground. Just like with space skills you could have a skill outside the ?normal? spectrum of the character that can give them training access to other skills.
Since there are 4 characteristics of kits abilities why not make each kit carry at least 2 characteristic skills and then you could have specialized kits like Grenade Satchel or Fabrication Kit. There are a lot of skills that are not properly being utilized on kits.
My view of kit skills popularity.
Tactical Ability use
Engineering Ability Use
Science Ability Use
Currently the following are a list of abilities frequencies on kits.
Tactical Ability use
Engineering Ability Use
Science Ability Use
There is also the Borg Medical Analyzer Kit that I did not account for as it is a very rare drop.
A few traits have impact on Kits namely Creative.
Lastly is the Doff impact. I think there are a very few ground Doffs utilized based on the common and popular skills used between kits and BOffs. We look at ourselves and say I can?t use Fabrications why should I slot that Doff. I think Doff influence should be a bit more broad or with multiple effects. i.e. If I have a tac Captain using an Armory Doff could impact the number of grenades thrown towards a target area widening the impact area. While this Doff might impact my Eng BOff using a turret it could also impact my captain using something else.
Hopefully you look at all these items and the impact on kits as you look to revamp the kits. I trust good things will come.
You know how I know you don't play the game?
You listed ALL these powers that are absolutely rarely used. You didnt even list Target Optics or Fire on My Mark ffs - two of the strongest and most important buffs to the Tac field. Sweeping Stirkes? Rarely used except by the poor saps that attempt melee builds. Rally cry? Not often used really. Combat supply? Not popular nor used. Equipment diagnostics? Not popular OR common. Quick fix? lolwut?
Dude, seriously - what game are you playing? I play ground combat almost exclusively and I don't know where you got that mess of information. No disrespect.
You know I don't play the game cause talking about Kit powers I didn't list Tac Captain skills? Hmm well I guess I should have addressed Orbital Strike and Nanoprobe Infestation?
Honestly I don't know if your agreeing with my viewpoint or what cause you haven't addressed it in any other way. I made an effort to demonstrate the frequency of abilities used to support what the Devs goals are in looking at Kit Powers to make these abilities more popular.
Your classic T post is a waste of space here, no disrespect.
On the Science side, Biofilter Sweep is very redundant to Vascular Regenerator. Vascular Regenerator is also superior in every way. You are also underplaying Tachyon Harmonics, it's the most powerful offensive Science ability in the game. Exothermic Induction Field is a very close second. Hyperonic Radiation could be better, but all it really needs is a slight buff in gained damage based on invested skill points. Sonic Pulse is also a Science officer's best repel and knockback ability.
The reason Rally Cry is not used is because of the limited usefulness of the Squad Leader Mk X kit. Rally Cry will make a comeback with the Mk XII version of Squad Leader. Suppression Fire II will bring the kit to a competitive level. The Rally Cry ability provides a small heal, +12% Critical Chance, +70% Critical Severity, and a small resistance/damage bonus. The 15 second uptime will work fine with the 45 second downtime, especially when the AoE nature is considered.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
Yes Ambush is very powerful especially when used with stealth module. The problem with stealth module is that even when I'm attacked it doesn't break unlike Battle or any Cloak. So I can sit in stealth mode and be killed by someone close enough to see through it.
Smoke grenade is ineffective in PvP because players have the awareness to move out of it where NPCs won't. It is an obscuring grenade that does nothing but debuff enemy perceptions and buff allied stealth. Its not completely ineffective however it's not as useful as it could be.
Vascular regeneration is by far the best heal ability in game imo. But how science kits are pieced together limits how abilities are utilized not taking away from the effectiveness just player utilization.
I like the idea of keeping kits with pre-determined abilities. I think it makes people have to stick to a certain set of abilities.
Putting aside 'can it be put into the game or not' for a moment, letting people have their own choices freely I feel would be worse. Because through eventual min-maxing, people would figure out the best choices and options, and most likely ignore most other abilities.
Combat Supply is a good example. How many things positive things have been said about that ability in this thread? Presuming this system was put in with the abilities as they stand now, I doubt most people would ever use it.
Anyways, said my peace on that. I do prefer kits as they stand, in terms of being preset in their abilities. BUT every ability should also be worth using, and have synergy with the rest of the kit. Which I feel is very important, synergy. I'll give a couple examples (but ignore fleet kits for a moment)
Great synergy:
Medic - All heals, all the abilities from the kit are easily specced into for virtually no cost, and is a fairly common mainstay of many science toons on the ground.
Good synergy:
Fire Team - A highly effective kit, but all 4 of it's abilities are spread out over 4 different skills (Grenades, Special Forces, Squad Command, Advanced Tactics). It obviously works quite well for those who use it, reason why it tends to be fairly popular. But it doesn't change how spread out the abilities are to spec into.
Bad synergy:
Breach Engineer - To start it has Combat Supply. Then it has Quantum Mortar and Seeker Drones on it, which could potentially make it a kind of 'DPS kit', if it worked well. But the Seeker and Mortars either die so fast it matters little, or the enemies die quickly it doesn't matter, or the enemies are never ever really hit by the Mortar so it's basically pointless. It also has Shield Charge, which is always a nice ability, but really doesn't fit in very well with the 'Breach' aspect.
However, good or bad synergy doesn't necessarily make a kit good or bad. For example:
Grenade Satchel - Yes, technically the kit has good synergy since all the abilities are specced from the same skill, and all the stuff that affects Grenades can be used on all abilities on this. However it's rarely considered useful by many people (at least the ones I know), particularly due to the shared CDs between them. It's essentially the ground equivalent of a 'torp boat', but far less potentially useful.
There can also be a kit with a weird or poor synergy, that could also potentially work out well in the future:
Support Technician - To start, this also has Combat Supply on it. Which as it stands isn't that good of course, but it also has a great combo in the form of Quick Fix and Equipment Technician, which can be given to others. The weird part comes in with the rather random feeling Shield Generator on it as well. But it could work depending on how things change in the future.
On a similar note:
Equipment Technician - It has two of the engineering buff abilities, and both of the debuff abilities in the form of Fuse Armor, Weapons Malfunction, and Equipment Diagnostics, all of which are specced off of the (rather expensive) Modification Specialist skill. The oddball being the Shield Recharge, but it's still useful even if you don't spec much into it. If you were to add Quick Fix to a future version of this kit in the form of some kind of fleet kit, that'd go perfect with both the theme of the kit and go extremely well with the synergy.
Now, again I'd just like to say that again, some skills feel a bit lackluster because the amount of skills we have to spec into are quite limited, and the effects aren't as strongly felt as they are in space.
In space you can super-charge something like a Gravity Well by loading up a ton of Particle Gen consoles and pushing your Aux power higher, etc. On the ground, you don't have those kinds of systems and such to do so. You're more limited in that regard, and if an ability doesn't feel like it matters whether you spec into it or not, people will simply not bother wasting points on it, and possibly avoid using those kits at all, and also tell people they aren't worth it, etc etc.
Hyperonic radiation is a good example of that one. It's a decent skill, but it's also an expensive one to spec into, and really feels like it changes very little if you do so. I know it's an AoE and you don't want people to go overboard or anything, but it should also be worthwhile to actually WANT to spec into it. Don't misunderstand, the Physicist kit is a great sci kit, just feels like the damage itself is a smidge lackluster sometimes if you aren't getting much out of it.
Hyperonic radiation for sure needs more damage per tick when skill points are invested into the skill. However, I'd like to see that stack limit of 3 imposed upon the Biochemist duty officer before anything happens. Right now, the duty officer has no stack limit, which means it's very easy to rack up 30+ proc stacks for -300 All Damage Resistance Rating before the Science Officer even adds in Tricorder Scan or Nanite Infestation. The Biochemist is more powerful than any other damage resistance debuff in the game, it's why some teams are running 5 Science officers.
There's also the matter of Defiance, the Tier V Dyson ability unlock, receiving cooldown reduction from Tactical Initiative. That bug has become "justification" for using the Biochemist duty officer. Tactical Officers are capable of obtaining a 33-50% uptime with Defiance instead of the intended 6.7% uptime. It's come to the point where you need Biochemist stacks to counter the high uptime of Defiance and you need Defiance to counter the insane damage resistance reduction from Biochemist.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
I been reading this thread and a lot of the responces are simular to this guy, insted of being able to prepare yourself for a situation you would rather be limited by having 1 set of kit (or as in the way this guy puts it, traits......)So say for examples, your in a stf and you have 3 engineers the other 2 are on mine kit and you have no medic, so the way the system is set up now, one of the engineers can swich to a bunker kit that has a medical generator and a shield generator that will help somewhat, but the way you want the system to be is that once your in a event (stf, mission, whatever) your stuck with the same abilities and are bacelly sol (S*** outta Luck), I for one DO NOT want that type of system, I like being able to change on the fly to better help out the team
Oh I'm not denying that. The Biochemist DOFF is the ground equal to APB stacking in space. It's insane on both sides of the coin.
Defiance shouldn't be doing that, I understand that as well. That is certainly and undeniably a bug.
But those are different issues IMO. Let's stick to kit stuff. Biochemist DOFF fix needs to happen, but putting aside that issue, let's just keep in mind how the ability is acting right now.
Very well, then I stand by my previous comment, Hyperonic Radiation could use a small buff to the amount of damage gained via skill points. Investing from 0 ranks to 6 ranks in Particle Physics will increase Hyperonic Radiation's damage from 15/second to 21.3/second. 18,000 skill points is granting the player a potential 94.5 extra damage over the 15 second duration. The damage needs an increase. While I'm thinking of it, Hyperonic Radiation also cannot be removed via Vascular Regenerator, yet Vascular Regenerator clears all other DoTs.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
As for the powers that are just too poor to use, well I'm sure you could improve on them, but ground is meant to be fast paced, don't increase cooldowns or it'll break the feeling of a fast paced shooting (or bashing, if you're a melee person).
Alright. I do agree with you that HR does feel a bit lackluster. But Vascular doesn't clear it? Didn't know that. Does anything clear it, besides waiting or dying?
I will need to test, but I am pretty sure the Dominion Advisor - Removes all negative effects from self and up to 3 teammates upon activation of Overwatch - clears Hyperonic Radiation.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)