Lessons Unlearned - Passive Powercreep Part 2

battykoda0

We had stacks of passives from the reputation system. We had to choose 1 of 2 possible for each tier on the first 4 tiers, the 5th tier being an active. Had that continued unchanged, right now you would have 48 possible of which you had to choose 24. But that didn't continue unchanged because it was OP and now you get to choose 8 (4 ground and 4 space) out of 48. Another way to look at it is 75% was taken away because it was OP.

Now, part two. Specializations. We will soon have 90, 45 of which can be active at the same time - a primary with 30 and a secondary with 15. You have nearly doubled what existed before you took them away as being OP with reputation and this is all within 1 season!

I'm not going to go so far as to ask for my reputation unlocks back but I will go so far as to ask when will we be told to choose 4 primary out of 60 (so far) and 4 secondary out of 30 (so far) because there are too many stacked passives?

lianthelia

Yeah it does seem odd...knowing Cryptic they could of just made the changes in the rep traits for the upcoming specialization system.

ereiid

I think you neglect key differences in degree, leaving you with false equivalence in your argument.

Traits > Specializations, speaking generally, on a per ability basis.

Why? I'd argue because more Traits provide broad additions to core stats - Crit Hit, Crit Severity, Accuracy and Defense being high among them.

In contrast, a broad selection of Specializations thus far are proc-based or situational.

battykoda0

ereiid wrote: »

I think you neglect key differences in degree, leaving you with false equivalence in your argument.

Traits > Specializations, speaking generally, on a per ability basis.

Why? I'd argue because more Traits provide broad additions to core stats - Crit Hit, Crit Severity, Accuracy and Defense being high among them.

In contrast, a broad selection of Specializations thus far are proc-based or situational.

I would call the Attack Pattern buff pretty powerful, more powerful than any of the traits. Every single time I use it, I get an incoming damage sponge. I get uninterruptable actions because of damage coming in being sponged. There's no percent chance of it happening every X seconds/minutes. It happens every single time. It does time out if not used up, however.

That is just one of them. Some of these are more powerful than combined traits working together all on their own.

ereiid

battykoda0 wrote: »

I would call the Attack Pattern buff pretty powerful, more powerful than any of the traits. Every single time I use it, I get an incoming damage sponge. I get uninterruptable actions because of damage coming in being sponged. There's no percent chance of it happening every X seconds/minutes. It happens every single time. It does time out if not used up, however.

That is just one of them. Some of these are more powerful than combined traits working together all on their own.

Which is gated on having a build heavy on Attack Patterns. If you're in an escort, a Tac, or one of the Tac-oriented ships - bully for you. But in a Sci ship, or one of the tanker cruisers? Not as useful.

And that's my point, by attaching to core stats, I can think of at least half a dozen Traits that will benefit anybody, irrespective of build. Contrast those with the current Specialization trees - which have some outliers, sure. But they're generally tuned to be more build, spec, and situationally-dependent.

praxi5

Remember when +7 power Engineering consoles were nerfed because they provided "too much power" and "you shouldn't be able to have high power in every system"? And then the -40 power that Warbirds come with was considered a huge negative?

Now we've got Leech giving twice that amount to everything, not just a single subsystem. And it seems like every non-generic console and gear item gives some amount of +Power in addition to whatever their other stats out.

Lesson to be learned: There isn't really a long-term plan as far as abilities, skills, and items go. It's more of a "Hm, how can we make more money now?"

In the case of specs, it's to get people to grind out more in order to pad the vaunted metrics and/or realize that in order to grind faster, you can spend Dil/Zen/money on upgrading your gear and ships.

sunfrancks

I am sure the powers at be have a patch ready and waiting to "cull" our progress again.

They do seem to love taking away what we earned...

ereiid

praxi5 wrote: »

In the case of specs, it's to get people to grind out more in order to pad the vaunted metrics and/or realize that in order to grind faster, you can spend Dil/Zen/money on upgrading your gear and ships.

Not bad points, but I think the key difference being that the gear system is so much broader, it's easier for the item that slips through the cracks - be it Plasmonic Leech or Red Matter Capacitor or whatever - to break the system. It becomes.

Generally, I've found this game to be much more nerf-reticent than Cryptic's previous efforts, or most any other MMO.

Even given that, at least for this game, Cryptic's always seemed to me to be far less willing to take the nerd at to gear, in comparison to core character build.

battykoda0

ereiid wrote: »

Which is gated on having a build heavy on Attack Patterns. If you're in an escort, a Tac, or one of the Tac-oriented ships - bully for you. But in a Sci ship, or one of the tanker cruisers? Not as useful.

And that's my point, by attaching to core stats, I can think of at least half a dozen Traits that will benefit anybody, irrespective of build. Contrast those with the current Specialization trees - which have some outliers, sure. But they're generally tuned to be more build, spec, and situationally-dependent.

I have a science captain in a science carrier. I have TS3, 2x APB1, 2x BFAW1. Why? Because due to that particular power I mentioned, I can afford to make the Lt Universal seat a tactical seat and gain 1 more attack instead of an engineer because I don't need ET1 and Aux2Sif1 any more. I can get by with the engineering seat built into it and a single HE3. I can also spread the debuff around for those that can do the damage. Running Aux2Bat on a science ship is silliness so I just use Photonic Officer and some doffs. It's not as fast as Aux2Bat but it has drastically increased my science ship's ability. Put the captain you mention in there...

meimeitoo

I'd say, let's just undo 'The Desolation of Hawk,' and give us all our Rep Passives back (or, at least, increase cap to 6 or 8). The whole argument that, boo-hoo, new players wouldn't be able to keep up, that ship has sailed with DR, permanently. Heck, even my alt can't keep up any more!

warpangel

The issue with rep passives was (supposedly) that they would increase without limit as new reps were added. That's not an issue with specializations, since you will always have 1 primary and 1 secondary no matter how many are added.

Which means, of course, that specializations will also be reduced to "options" just like rep passives were. Once you've got one set maxed out, getting more will be mostly a matter of curiosity, collection drive, or playstyle. Perhaps even more so than for reps, because if you've got one spec maxed out, you probably wouldn't switch it until you've maxed out the new one too.

And despite all of this, I still want my rep passives back, or extra slots for each completed rep. Because that would make completing reps feel more like progress instead of just checking things off a todo list. EDIT: This too is not an issue with specializations, because you don't have to do anything but play the game to get XP.

tarastheslayer

Thing is though was that, during testing, it was made quite clear that the 'nerf' achieved pretty much nothing. Some of the passives that had been causing issues anyway got nerfed, while some passives were never that good anyway and so left you with a handful that were of any genuine use, which got buffed. Hell some of them are still woefully under-par.

Don't get me wrong powercreep has a taken a rocket assisted leap in the wrong direction, but pointing at rep passives and crying about them is distracting from the real causes. Geko's frankly uncalled for buffing of Mk XIII and XIV space weapons, not to mention terrible methodology in making content more challenging to account for the new systems like the starship masteries and spec systems that already have built-in limitations.

So while we have taken a big leap in powercreep, I don't see the rep powers really being at all a contributing factor, and it isn't something that matters when we have a balance issue that needs solving first, only if that's done can we really say if a system relating to our combat effectiveness is working well or not.

battykoda0

tarastheslayer wrote: »

Thing is though was that, during testing, it was made quite clear that the 'nerf' achieved pretty much nothing. Some of the passives that had been causing issues anyway got nerfed, while some passives were never that good anyway and so left you with a handful that were of any genuine use, which got buffed. Hell some of them are still woefully under-par.

Don't get me wrong powercreep has a taken a rocket assisted leap in the wrong direction, but pointing at rep passives and crying about them is distracting from the real causes. Geko's frankly uncalled for buffing of Mk XIII and XIV space weapons, not to mention terrible methodology in making content more challenging to account for the new systems like the starship masteries and spec systems that already have built-in limitations.

So while we have taken a big leap in powercreep, I don't see the rep powers really being at all a contributing factor, and it isn't something that matters when we have a balance issue that needs solving first, only if that's done can we really say if a system relating to our combat effectiveness is working well or not.

(This is NOT directed at you, Tarastheslayer!)

But this cannot be right, surely. A regular player has no need for anything beyond Mk XII if I follow the posts in the forums here correctly. They have no need to grind advanced or elite to get the materials to upgrade anything nor to get the special parts for reputation gear because they have absolutely no need for anything other than Mk XII (I assume fleet gear?). That Mk XIV is +110% stronger than Mk XII is no reason to want to join the better content to get the means to acquire them.

(This was my point in the OP)

I ground out those traits. I had to go on the galactic shopping spree day in and day out on two characters to get them. I was doing fine without the reputation system, just missing one drop on ground and space from having the full Mk XII sets. The reputation system removed my grind and gave it to someone else. Then I grind it out again as reputation. They remove my grind because they didn't like the system they created with the grind. To do what? Make a new grind with a ton of specializations (traits!) that do exactly what they took away before.

It's a repeating circle of add a grind with lots of shinies and then remove the shinies to make room for a new grind with the same shinies that will be removed again for the next grind. That's my entire point to the OP.

EDIT: I'm not the one said they were too powerful. If I recall, they were curbed because of "powercreep."

tarastheslayer

battykoda0 wrote: »

(This is NOT directed at you, Tarastheslayer!)

But this cannot be right, surely. A regular player has no need for anything beyond Mk XII if I follow the posts in the forums here correctly. They have no need to grind advanced or elite to get the materials to upgrade anything nor to get the special parts for reputation gear because they have absolutely no need for anything other than Mk XII (I assume fleet gear?). That Mk XIV is +110% stronger than Mk XII is no reason to want to join the better content to get the means to acquire them.

(This was my point in the OP)

I ground out those traits. I had to go on the galactic shopping spree day in and day out on two characters to get them. I was doing fine without the reputation system, just missing one drop on ground and space from having the full Mk XII sets. The reputation system removed my grind and gave it to someone else. Then I grind it out again as reputation. They remove my grind because they didn't like the system they created with the grind. To do what? Make a new grind with a ton of specializations (traits!) that do exactly what they took away before.

It's a repeating circle of add a grind with lots of shinies and then remove the shinies to make room for a new grind with the same shinies that will be removed again for the next grind. That's my entire point to the OP.

EDIT: I'm not the one said they were too powerful. If I recall, they were curbed because of "powercreep."

You certainly don't need it, I probably should have clarified that it was an exacerbating a problem, in this case that DPS is by far the almost expected way to progress through content that doesn't encourage use of other build types. While you don't need more than Mk XII you do need stuff from advanced queues to get gear from the reps, which I think is the stumbling block for a lot of people as advanced is hard without gear for a lot of players. What I mean by that is that you are right, the means to get them isn't justified all that well.

To your original point, I get what you're saying, which in short is that you put time and effort in to what now amounts to quite a lot of work to get the passives just to get them all removed? I can appreciate that is annoying and I was in the same boat (was here for the old system before rep). Which actually goes back to what I said and you've mentioned in the last line of the post I've quoted here, which is that most the powers weren't good enough to cause powercreep to begin with, or cause much of a gap between new and old 50's so why bother removing them?

I think we are on the same wavelength more or less.

erei1

The powercreep is everywhere in this game.
Spec trees, upgrading embassy console (hello free 15K + DPS !), new ships (hello scimitard), new powers (hello surgical strike), upgrind system (mk xiv epic, lol), BOFF traits (SRO, pirate)...
Except for ground, which is still left behind with the powercreep race, I don't think there is a single thing left untouched.

But yeah, rep trait are probably what made a scimitard so powerful. Just FYI, I do the same dps after than before rep trait nerf on my scimi. I totally felt the powercreep nerf.

People are arming themselves with military grade weapon, and the police is forbidding kitchen knives. While selling the weapons.

battykoda0

LOL we need +1 buttons. I agree 100% with both those posts.

I didn't see much gains out of the traits like you said. But I have seen a huge boost from the specializations. Maybe the issue I perceive would be alleviated with trait slots like loadout slots? I dunno. Which ties hand in hand with your space vs ground. I have a tougher time in space on the missions and many missions are mixture of space and ground. I would like to see it remember space traits in space and ground traits on the ground like it remembers your power tray (hopefully anyway LOL) when you change. That observation is totally off topic but it would be nice.

Another thing I would really like is the secondary tree to know when you are in each. Having a ground secondary set (commando) while in space is useless and quite the same the other way around. All of this trait swapping constantly is enough to drive a person insane.

So... for my totally off topic post, I am going to try to do something on Tribble since my DR characters finally copied and I am not there with LoR testing ones. LOL

coupaholic

Unlearned, or intentionally ignored? My money is on the latter. It is the Cryptic way, creep = progress. They lack the imagination for alternative means, or just as bad is that the majority of players don't want the challenge.

The irony is of course these days endgame content means the odd run in a normal queue, or going to a battlezone and joining a mass armada to steamroll everything.

So really we don't need traits. Or upgraded weapons. Or T5U+ ships. Or any sort of reputation gear at all.