Back in the day, the cruiser with 2xET3 and AtoSIF3 useed to rock the healing...
The shield heals took over...
But now... with shield healing taking a hit, and hull resistance getting a great boost... combined with everyone and his uncle running Tac Team, reducing the value of hull resist debuffs a lot... Is there a chance hull tanking/healing can regain some of it's past glory?
(please refrain from raging about the patch notes in
this thread. I'm trying to look forward here

)
Comments
hull? well crank resistance on it past 40%, before using abilities, and your build is pretty compromised, at least your eng consoles are. and torps just love dealing full damage to it
but hey, now you can have 2 copies of AtS and have full resistance up time, AtS1 is like having an extra blue mkXI nutronium wile its on.cryptic is attempting to lessen shield tanking and buff hull tanking by doing this, and the PH, HE at the same time change.
but all they did was make RSP basically unusable, and make you carry 2 extends or else you cant have full EPtS up time. its a disastrous change, and it shows the system team doesn't know the game well enough to attempt any balance passes, they are unqualified.
Math wise hull tanking can tank more than shields but in game hull tanking seems to be less effective over shields. For years I hull tanked without shields but not any more
i don't have any math to back it up really, but its as plain as day what works. having exposed hull is pretty much a death sentence if anyone is really trying to kill you. maybe you didn't factor in regeneration?
I did factor in regen and hull tanks regen as well even though it drops to 30% ish in combat. If you factor in resistance + regen hull tanks should tank more DPS and back last year hull tanks did tank better, but no more.
Probably. Regenrative [Reg]x3 running on full shield power with shield buffs and some minimal healing can outregenerate the escort standard damage (counting all 4 facings) and repair damage from alphas pretty fast. With TT running this means that shields will stay on forever unless some escort crit you pretty high or is alpha striking you.
Other shields are not that good at regeneration, but still untill you use those shields from last Guardian of Time mission they will still regenerate far faster then hull.
With a little cross-healing shield resists can easily be boosted to the cap of 75%. Getting hull resists to similar levels is much more difficult. High resists also magnify the value of heals. And hull resists can be debuffed, shield resists cannot.
And most importantly: you need to take into account that ever since TT, attackers have had to go through essentially all four shield facings to hit hull instead of only one.
So the Fleet quin heavy raptor, quin heavy raptor, mvav and all other ships with only 1 engineer now can not shield tank any-more. Nice spend money on a fleet ship and MVAV and again you nerv something i spend money on. When do I learn, don't spend money on this game.
Not necessarily bad, as long as it's not too much faster.
If shields are, like some people claim, almost useless now, people will have to rely on a both shield and hull heals now, to survive a little bit longer, so the enemy dies before them.
Increased importance of hull healing. I sort of like this.
So the massive hull healer, using doffs to make one ET3 count as two copies, in combo with AtoSIF3, that lands 20k+ hull +resistance every 15 seconds may be useful again?
well duh! theyve been slowly changing the game to be like that since season 3 or so.
anyone remember before they did a general increase in shields? or before they started releaseing "super" shields with huge caps even before you equip it?
or back when people used to be able to fly shieldless in a match just for fun and NOT get killed just by being looked at?
now they did a complete 180 with this single patch. what the hell are they trying to do here? really? for about a year and half "its all about the shields staying up to keep you alive" to "bah shields are too strong"
Didn't you hear? The autumn collection was just released in Milan! Shields are soooo last year! Now it's all retro-hull!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
1. Resistances have sharp and very harsh dim9nishing returns. This means before you factor in weapons damage modifers you will be taking between 2 and 3 times the damage per shot from anything against your hull.
2. Resistances AFAIK are applied on top of damage multipliers. Torps have far and away the worst modifers so torps do even less to sheilds than most things. Against hulls however their full damage, high burst and the lack of resistances takes their damage to even crazier heights than it does cannons, (beams get a damage reduction vs. hulls so probably only get a slight increase, whilst cannons are equally good against both so get equal damage vs hull and sheilds, and so see a damage differance in line with resistance differance).
3. Thanks to tac team and how sheild heals are applied a sheild heal heals about 4 times as much as the listed amount unless it overheals.
The problem here is that the game's current content has been balanced around the drastic increase in healing sheilds heals have and the drastic damage reduction they have. Without the those factors sheild helaing is simply insufficent to keep up with damage intake. Now in terms of personal tanking ability this is a very small change. It's not going to scratch any of my tanking builds on a personel level.
But several peices of PVE content, (espcially the new fleet stuff), ask you to heal somthing else, (a freighter, the starbase, e.t.c.), at the same time as absorbing massive amounts of punishment yourself. You can't avoid having to heal somone else and take large amounts of damage yourself. And even if you could, in blockade and especially NWS it would be a moronic thing to do becuase your making an allready difficult situation even worse becuase an entire ship just effectivlly dropped out the fight. 15 man starbase defence isn't s bad, (14+ other players), but it's still far from great.
PVP wise it's probably not that bad, but it's horrifficlly destructive to PVE play.
Hull Healing was never Boss in STO. Never. Shield tanking has always been king. The difference is, there was alot less people in the know about that back then. It's always been Extend, EPTS2 or 3, ASIF3.
Last I checked w/the Weaver and KHG MKXII I could get over 20k per facing that's over 80k shields @ higher resists. Even on the lower end of 8k per facing that's still 32k which is still higher than my b'rel's hull. Comparing hull and shield "tanking" potential gets tricky fast.
To repair hulls you have HE, Aux2sif, ET and borg proc.
To repair shields you have Shield Regen Modifier, Shield Distro Doffs, RSP, EPTS, TSS, Sci Team, ES and borg proc.
To resist hulls you have APD, HE, Aux2Sif, Hazzard Doffs, PH, and borg proc. (leaving out capt abilities and P2W consoles and ship abilities)
To resist shields you have ETPS, ES, TSS, APD. (leaving out P2W consoles, ship abilities, and capt abilities)
On the face of it there are more basic abilities to repair shields and more basic abilities to resist hull damage. But, the abilities have different cooldowns. Also, there are Doff abilities which can greatly reduce cooldowns.
Take Tech doffs for a zombie boat. They can basically give you 2xEPTS and 2xRSP w/only 1 copy of each assuming you have a boat w/2x Lt Eng boff slots. Depending on your layout they could be high level as well. My memory of TSS cooldown is fuzzy, but assuming 45 sec cooldown w/30 sec shared, you'd only need 1 slot of TSS as well since the 70% is so close to 66.6%.
So for a "selfish" zombie shield repair cruiser build you could have EPTS3, RSP, Aux2batt, TSS2, ES3, PH1, ET1 (to clear subsystem debuff), TT1, APD, HE1. In theory, you'd save the EPTS2, RSP, PH1, HE1, TSS2, APD, and Team abilities to see how the other team responds to your ES3 and than you respond accordingly by rolling repairs/resists as needed. Back to the main point, the longer cooldown shields abilities are now up to twice as effective from the Tech doffs w/aux2batt (which btw would spike 3 of 4 systems' powers). Remember there's also more of them to begin with.
Random Quote from Kerrat
"Sumlobus@****: your mums eat Iced Targ Poo"
C&H Fed banter
Cant have your cake and eat it too.
Bottom line is that some people hate change. Change can be good or bad. Without knowing whats in the pipeline kinda hard to rage about this. I for one am glad the vet cruisers will take a hit. Anyway, 12 more days.