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Turn critical hits into injuries?

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  • asuran14asuran14 Member Posts: 2,335 Arc User
    In truth there is little reason to make a change like this, as it serves little purpose that would actually matter. Making that change would basically mean that unless they change up how injuries work we would see more players going into stfs, and battle-zones with long bars of injuries they have not repaired, might even make it that on ground you would see just as much a fact of this too, and so unless they implemented a system that blocked a player from queing or entering such content unless they had below a specific number of injuries it would hamper the overall game. As players that are on the lower end of the ability an experience might begin to cry out for nerfs to content an systems finding them even harder to them then they already were prior to that point.

    I would have preferred if instead of crit-hit making your weapons honestly deal more damage thru the critical damage bonus stat (crit-damage), that it would be how you procced your weapon/energy type's secondary/proc effect, like the plasma dot or the sub-system knock-off procs. That would actually improve other areas that feel quite lacking,a nd be to me a more fitting alteration. Yes the overall damage would drop, but it would also prop up the other weapon/energy types via making their procs more reliable to build around. The issue would be dealing with energy types like the antiproton type that has no true proc, but has a static semi-proc boost to critical damage, though even that could be altered to be a more like the other energy type's proc like effects in a form that boosts the critical damage of your weapon/s for a short duration after the proc that could be quite reliable even in this change such as this.
  • where2r1where2r1 Member Posts: 6,054 Arc User
    edited October 2018
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    While levelling my new Age of Discovery captain, a thought occurred to me that I'd like to share: Changing the critical hit mechanic from "adds more damage" to "gives the target ship injuries".

    I don't think that would make much difference. It is just opposite sides of the same coin.
    Certainly not a deterrent to continue to stack criticals for players.

    But I can see what you mean: there needs to be a penalty for pushing ship systems to going beyond its normal capacity. It shouldn't be something a ship can do almost continuously.

    Maybe it should be more like immunities, with lockout timers on the dang things.
    Even better....bigger the critical hit...the longer the timer.
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  • seaofsorrowsseaofsorrows Member Posts: 10,918 Arc User
    But, no one seems to want a more realistic, more interesting, more challenging game.

    Completely false.

    Your way is not the only way or the 'right way.' We simply don't share your vision of what would be 'more realistic,' 'more challenging' or even fun. This idea is none of that.
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  • asuran14asuran14 Member Posts: 2,335 Arc User
    If we want to talk about the idea of ship being able to push their capacity, than looking back the power system might be a better option. Expanding the power system levels to make it that flying a ship at high power levels gives more buffs than currently, as flying high aux or high weapon owe is largely the two primary concerns as the bonuses gained from the others two is abit less impactful comparatively, so expanding the buffs gained from having high power levels in your engines o shields should be just as of an impact as high weapon/aux power is truly. Though I do agree that flying a ship with these power levels above 100 for a long period of time continually without any ill effect is abit odd. I could also see flying a ship at high power levels like over 100 has a effect of incuring a chance on being critted to cause these power systems to overload giving you something like a system-offline effect as it is blown out, or unable to have more then 100 power polled into it for a duration after that point of being critted.

    I have always seen interplay between the usage of abilities as more of a interesting method of making a game more dynamic, challenging, and fun as a form of mechanic. Interplay between ability usages makes the player actually look at the abilities they (and their enemies use) use differently, and change their approach, Where as making crits debuff/injure as interesting as it sounds does not really have much interplay on the player's side. As a player I could stack more crit to inflict injuries on another player/ship though those injuries might have little to no effect on that player/target, though in some cases they could also be quite debilitating to the player/target too, but where is the counter-play/interplay in that for the opposing side outside of stacking crit themselves? You would almost need to implemented a stat that protects against injuries inflicted by being critted as a form of counter.
  • seaofsorrowsseaofsorrows Member Posts: 10,918 Arc User
    Not completely false. Clearly your impression of what is fun or realistic differs from mine. My point was that no one wants to change ANYTHING in any way to make it more realistic and challenging; whether it's what I suggested or something else. Everyone seems not merely content but insistent on maintaining an unrealistic system where more hit points and more damage is considered more challenge.

    It's a pity, however you slice it.

    Again, simply not true.

    Suggestions are made all the time, just because someone doesn't like one specific suggestion does not mean they are not open to change. There are plenty of things about this game that I and many others would like to see changed and improved just not this.

    Your assertion that anyone that disagrees with you is closed to change is not going to fly, sorry. Suggest something viable and we'll get on board.

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  • jade1280jade1280 Member Posts: 868 Arc User
    How many critical hits can YOU do in one second? because i can do alot.
  • seaofsorrowsseaofsorrows Member Posts: 10,918 Arc User
    I'm saying that any effort to make suggestions along the lines described are usually met with rabid rejection from much of the playerbase, because it would interfere with their uberness or something. People are resistant to change at the best of times

    I can assure you that I understand what you're saying. Again, I just fundamentally disagree.

    It's obvious we're not going to change each others minds, so we'll just agree that we see things differently and call it a day. :smile:
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  • mustrumridcully0mustrumridcully0 Member Posts: 12,963 Arc User
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    [...] It doesn't create any new exciting build options, it doesn't make the character more powerful. [...]

    Well, if you have boff powers that allow to cleanse certain types of injuries, that means the engineering ship finally has a purpose. I would call that a new and exciting build option. Even with encouraging teamwork and all that.
    And suddenly people can't just randomly join any queue, they must ensure that there is at least one cruiser in it?

    OF course, lots of ships could carry up to a Lt.Cmdr level of Engineering power without being a Cruiser or otherwise being an Engineering focused ship, so nothing at all might change.
    And it's only a time until Cryptic releases the first universal consoles or traits that grant injury healing in another manner. IF they did release tons of healing powers before, so that you don't need a healer in your team now, why would that behavior not repeat itself?
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  • furyan#5289 furyan Member Posts: 48 Arc User
    This is a really good idea. I think it would be fun. I'm so bored in this game. We need something different.
  • peterconnorfirstpeterconnorfirst Member Posts: 6,225 Arc User
    edited October 2018
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    .
    LOL here we go again... :D
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    While levelling my new Age of Discovery captain, a thought occurred to me that I'd like to share:

    Learn to fight that impulse, save us all some time. None of the rest of this post is even worth the time it would take to address it.

    I would like to note that acording to the community moderator who posted in this very thread, this is apparently an acceptable mode of communication here on these forums.

    While it is certainly not the height of Sea’s and my posting history we are around long enough to have learned to post by the rules and regulations of these forums.

    This and your other “ideas” only aim at lowering the performance level of those players who play this game enthusiastically and did so for seasons. You on the other hand keep on requesting the rules of this game to be changed and even if your wishes get granted, like they did with S13, you and players like you do not embrace this change by bringing live to it. You rather take a break and abandon STO leaving those of us who do care about this title with a less enjoyable game to play.

    I won’t comment on moderating actions but there was certainly one good part about your thread.

    That was seeing that a moderator of these forums is not only good at his job here but is also enthusiastic about this game and has become a good player as result. Great post he made here. :)
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  • darkbladejkdarkbladejk Member Posts: 3,698 Community Moderator
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    If collecting actual damage in battle that reduces your abilities is not "real depth", then please, could you explain what "real depth" is, to you?

    We already have the ability to be damaged as we can lose health in our shields and hull. Anytime they are below 100% integrity is by definition having been damaged. I said what I did above about not adding depth to the game because this would result in little more than additional debuffs that were easily removed. If you want an example of adding some depth to a fight, look at World of Warcraft or SWTOR for some examples. They have a few of your classic tank and spank fights, but most of the fights they have, there are additional mechanics that you have to deal with. It could be removing a damage shield from a boss, killing adds to prevent them from buffing the boss, having to temporarily run out of the group to prevent an AoE attack from hitting everyone making the attack worse, instead of just hitting you for piddly damage, a mechanic requiring the tank to face the boss away from the group due to a cleave, etc. There are hundreds of different combinations that can happen in a fight that it would be impractical and probably impossible for me to list them all. Point being it's something different with each fight by and large that keeps folks on their toes. That is what I consider depth.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    So giving the NPC's another type of damage is not making them more threatening? I mean, one the one hand, you criticize how all they can do is large amounts of damage (duh, that's what anything and everyone in this game can do right now), and on the other hand, making that a bit more multidimensional is somehow making them LESS of a threat?

    See my examples in the first part of this post about different types of mechanics as it outlines what I consider adding depth to the fights. As I said above, adding what would amount to just extra cleansable debuffs is not my idea of fun. Additional mechanics similar to those named above is my idea of fun. Something that keeps folks on their toes like fights from WoW and SWTOR are good at doing. While adding additional debuffs would be factually an additional threat, if I can cleanse those debuffs easily and all but ignore them as was noted elsewhere in the post, then how much of a threat would those debuffs really be? Having to move out of your group due to an AoE attack that increases in damage with amount of people hit, or removing a damage buff from a boss so the tank doesn't get killed and the healer can keep him alive, are viable threats that you can't simply ignore.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    What would be examples of those "meaningful mechanics, if not damage that has actual impact on the ship's performance?

    Examples have been given above already of some meaningful mechanics. Point being with those mechanics they don't allow folks to just park and sparkle as we might say in STO. Not obeying those mechanics can very easily get you and your entire group killed if not careful enough.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    The last five words of that are hyperbole. Even "drastically" is a bit of a stretch. I am sure you see why without me writing a novel about it.

    If I may ask, have you ever actually sat down and opened up any of the files in a game, old or new and just looked at the coding? Have you ever sat down and looked at the file structure and just how many files and lines of code it takes sometimes to make a game function? As I explained previously, most computers read every single line of a code even if they don't actually use all of those lines of code. The more you add to the code the more the computer has to read. Also the more complex the calculations in said code, the more can go wrong. Less is more with computer coding and what you're proposing would add far more calculations per second to the mix. Did player get hit with a critical? If so then apply debuff A and reduce damage output by X. Player ability 2 has called for removal of debuff A, boost damage output percentage back to norm. Sometimes the players (myself included) underestimate the amount of calculations this game actually does in a second, especially in an active mission environment like ISA, HSE, UAA, or one's preferred choice of queue. What we see as pretty numbers on the screen takes alot of backend number crunching to produce. To give an example, let's assume there is a standard 5 man team of folks with 8 weapons each on their ship all firing on a target. Assuming standard firing rate and no firing cycle haste, that's 1 shot per second per weapon and 40 shots per second, just from the players the game has to account for and calculate damage for. Now start adding in damage buffs, cycle haste, and similar effects and the calculations get much more extreme.

    This is why the Kemocite issue was such a big deal is it required far too many calculations too quickly which led to so much of the lag. Now let's assume for sake of thought experiment that each of those 40 shots was a critical hit and now the game is having to apply 40 separate debuffs to the enemy target, that's 40 debuffs each with a potentially different effect in a single second. The odds of all 8 weapons on all 5 players critting at once is extremely low, but is a possibility that would have to be accounted for as by sheer law of probability alone it will happen sooner or later.

    I give you these examples not to berate you but to show that there is much much more calculations going on behind the scenes than what most folks realize.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    Ah. So what really bothers you is that you'd have to actually apply some tactics, instead of just DPSing through everything? ;)

    Ok, jokes aside, the way some scary enemies have become the galaxy's laughing stock that can't last 3 minutes against certain captains is sad, and yes, it is no secret that it bothers me to witness such TFO's.

    Making some pretty bold assumptions there with that first statement there.

    As I pointed out above several times, I don't mind mechanics and have given you examples of what types of mechanics work well in other games that I would like to see here. I simply disagree with your suggested idea and it's implementation. What you're proposing would simply add a passive mechanic that could very easily be powered through or outright ignored. By adding active mechanics such as removing a damage shield from a boss by dragging them through a fire, or in the STO case a plasma fire, you add an active mechanic that can't simply be ignored and that folks from the low to high end of the damage spectrum will want to take advantage of. In other words give an active in fight reason for things to be there.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    Let me just say that this argument again reads like "keep me my DPS". Don't worry, even with critical hits doing injuries instead of hitpoint damage, there will still be overperformers who do much more damage than others.

    While this is certainly an important issue, it is not what motivated me to proposing this idea. This isn't mostly a balancing attempt, but a proposal of how to make the game more interesting in itself. The balancing might actually not happen at all, because while you couldn't measure battle performance as easy as before any more, certain players would still have the most impact on the result: An enemy who cannot do any more projectile damage, and who has -500% damage resistance rating, is easily defeated, but getting him there will still be mainly the achievement of the guys who score the most critical hits - even if the game mechanics somehow put a cap on that.

    Actually it's got nothing to do with "keep me my DPS" and more so me saying, if I'm only going to be allowed to deal 45k of my 85k dps to the enemy, give me a valid in fight reason for it instead of just a passive debuff. Give him a damage shield that I have to purge from him by dragging him through a fire or a gravity well type of thing. Let an add spawn in that drops a consumable device I have to pick up and smack him with to remove the shield. Point being give me an active reason as to why I'm not allowed to smack him with my full power instead of just saying, oh you have this debuff here. Simply using passive debuffs does nothing but place an artificial damage cap on the player and simply slows down the fight for the sake of slowing it down. Adding in the consumable device dropped by an add gives an active mechanic that folks can partake in. If the group keeps his shield down then they can get done faster. If they don't it will take longer. The same result is achieved and it makes folks feel like they've actually accomplished something vs having to play around a static passive debuff.

    Then there's the debuffs on the enemy side of things. If crits give ship injuries to players and enemies alike, then this will reduce enemy effectiveness as well. Thus putting you right back where you started in terms of how threatening the enemies are. In the extreme worst case scenario you would have players not capable of functioning and enemy npcs that can't function and it would be a stalemate in which nothing gets done.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    Hm. I have 8 weapons, a deflector, an impulse drive, a warp core, a shield and mre than a dozen consoles on most of my ships... Maybe you're on to something here. Maybe each of these components could be diminished in function in a new injury system?

    This gets into what I've said already, if it's something that removes functionality from a player for the entire run it will never sit well with players. in SWTOR there are medical droids or portable droids at different points during missions where people can repair their gear for a cost in credits. If heaven forbid the group wiped and someone's piece of gear broke they can easily repair. The penalty for failing is the repair bill. Too many repair bills and folks will cease the attempt either from frustration or running out of cash. With the repair bills in SWTOR it at least serves to remove some excess currency from the game without being too extreme. In STO the injuries are easily repaired on the fly or at a shipyard and cost next to nothing to fix, so aren't even effective at removing excess EC.

    Again adding an active reason, such as a boss temporarily knocking out one of your weapons for 30 seconds one thing, a passive debuff not allowing it to be used at all is something else. As to reduced effectiveness in game of the various parts, it would need to be done in a way that the player could still function. Disabling a piece of gear or reducing output too much would easily render any ship in game at a severe disadvantage if not outright cripple them, which is no fun for anyone. Yes games should have their own challenge, but they should be fun as well, and I simply don't see the fun factor in what you're proposing for a game like STO.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    You may have noticed that the thought of new bridge officer abilities that heal injuries (instead of healing hitpoints) has entered the discussion in the meantime, to get rid of unjuries in the midst of a battle. This would give engineering-heavy ships a purpose in the game.

    At that point you're adding an entirely new class of ability at that point to deal with only one specific thing and I don't see most folks wanting to incorporate yet another type of ability into their toolkit and potentially send their builds back to the drawing board yet again. Most of the issues with this have been dealt with already above and I see no need to repeat them again.

    I do however have to address the big elephant in the room with your last statement, since when have engineering heavy ships never had a purpose? That's news to me and quite a few other people. Currently my 3 strongest ships are engineering heavy ships. I have the Jem'hadar Vanguard Dreadnought cruiser, which has a Commander Engineering seat, along with a Lt Commander Engineering/Command seat and a Ensign Uni. That means potentially 8 of my powers are engineering based, though only 7 the way I have it setup. Yet despite that fact it's the ship I pulled 85k with as a tank. Then there's my Tucker Tactical miracle worker cruiser which has a Commander Engineer/Miracle Worker seat, Ensign Engineer seat, and Lt Commander Universal, which I pulled 81k using tetryons with and is just barely behind my Jem'hadar dread. Again a ship with 8 potential engineering based powers, 5 at the absolute least. Then finally my Cardassian Keldon which has a Commander Engineering, Lt Engineering/Intel, and Lt Commander Universal/Intel seat. Potentially 9 engineering powers, and that ship clocked 60k last time I parsed it.

    Virtually any t5u or t6 ship can be made to do great damage and more than enough damage to clear 99% of the content in game. In fact I have yet to see a t5u or t6 ship I can't make into some sort of tank. Not all ships are going to play nicely with all types of builds. For me more engineering heavy ships are what is best, where as for one of the other guys in here that focuses more on DPS a more tac heavy ship may be best. Simply because it may not lend alot of tools to certain build types doesn't mean the ship has no purpose in game, it simply means the build type you're trying to use it for is not the purpose it was made for. I say all of that not to be arrogant as to my ability, but to make the point, gear is important yes, but in this game it's about 20% gear, skills, setup etc, and the other 80% is the pilot.

    Overall I simply do not see this idea adding anything of value into the game as it would amount to just a passive debuff. Give folks meaningful mechanics and you will see more interaction with NPCs and so on, and fights will be more meaningful. I understood what you were saying overall, I simply do not agree with it.
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  • kyle223catkyle223cat Member Posts: 584 Arc User
    edited October 2018
    Discussion of moderation redacted in favor of gratuitous tribble.

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  • danaleedanalee Member Posts: 73 Arc User
    Swapping the critical hit system for the player death penalty system is a major re-balance of the game mechanics, especially with the rate at which critical hits happen.

    I see what the OP is thinking and give him credit for trying to mix it up. But I am not too keen on completely upending the system without massive research and testing beforehand.
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