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Ship Design Redesign Proposal

bareelbareel Member Posts: 3 Arc User
This proposed redesign has a very simple goal. To create a 'different but equal' balance approach to the various ships in the game and to enable more options both in ship design and in space encounter design. The Holy Trinity is dead, Guild Wars 2 has shown what the different but equal approach can work in a mainstream MMO and should be embraced in a game that is already halfway there.

First off the design is modular and each ship should involve two halves that will be combined on a ship to ship basis with minor tweaks.

Weapons
Dual Heavy Cannons: These will remain as is for the most part. They will loose the crit severity bonus but gain Resistance Penetration(X). What will do is allow the ship to ignore a percentage of an enemies resistances on shield and possibly hull.

Heavy Beam Array: These will be a new addition and limited to specific ships mostly cruisers but also some science vessels. They will have an identical firing cycle to DHCs and also be forward mount only. They would deal the same amount of DPS as current beam arrays with the new firing cycle and would also deal 80% damage at maximum range as opposed to the 60% current beams deal. Finally they would gain Glancing Hit(X). This will deal a % of damage to the target even on a miss.

Existing Weapons: Current weapons should gain reduced versions of the above new traits.

Non Heavy Weapon Ships: All ships that cannot equip one of the heavy weapons should have an innate bonus. This can be a bonus to a weapon skill, higher power levels, an extra console, hanger, whatever would be appropriate. I do have a specific idea for Science Vessels I will get to later.

Hulls
Escort: The base hull has been shown to work well. The only thing it suffers from is the occasional one shot which I will cover later.

Cruisers: This base hull suffers from many penalties and few benefits. They should gain a Durable(X) trait that reduces damage by a set percent before any other resistances are taken into account. I would recommend between 5-15 percent depending on hull.

Science Vessel: Once again they are in a good place for the most part with sensor analysis and subsystem targeting. However I really do feel they would benefit from an advanced sensor analysis that increases critical chance and/or base weapon proc chance if possible.

Healing
We are suffering from an imbalance in the defensive department of the game. The ability to get really high resists and restoring large portions of your shields and hull are too high when compared to the base hit point amounts of the ships. This is a complex problem that needs to be approached from several angles.

1) Ships need an across the board increase in health. Hulls should be increased by around 10% across the board maybe even more for cruisers. Shields as well need increased by atleast that amount and while the fleet ships have done this they have not gone quite far enough.

2) Shield resists need reduced and/or harder to get. Two options for this is to remove the resistance bonus from shield power, or reduce the duration of the shield resistance bonus to five seconds from EpTS matching EptW

3) Base regeneration rates need adjusted. Remove the regeneration rate from being linked to shield multiplier to start. An overall target I would love to see would be escort regeneration being a tad lower than current and sci vessel being slightly higher than current. Hull regeneration needs to be divorced from crew and then adjusted to fit.

Boff Abilities
There is a disparity in the damage dealt directly compared to the ones that are buffs. This is due to the HP disparity between NPC ships and player ships. The best solution is to introduce a % mechanic to all direct damage abilities where they will either do the current flat amount, or a % whichever is higher.

Conclusion
The end result would be thus
- DHCs and other cannons would be ideal against high resistance targets and up close
- HBAs and other beams would be ideal against high defense targets and at range
- Specific ships could have specific benefits. Perhaps the Galaxy-R should get +10 power to all subsystems for example instead of heavy weapons.
- One shots would be reduced in frequency
- Ability to cross-buff and cross heal would become more important
- Gravity well would do more than 'tickle' an NPC ship

Thoughts?
Post edited by bareel on

Comments

  • kurtzroykurtzroy Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited January 2013
    Got mixed thoughts about this, at least its not another "reduce escorts in to garbage" thread.

    Few points DHC's should keep crit bonus (damage is what they do, after all they are a one trick pony)

    Heavy Beam Arrays should gain acc bonus the further a target is from them.The glancing blow sounds really cool. Heavy Beams should also have a higher threat generation trait built in too, as well as deal its damage in pulses maybe the beam stays on the target for a few seconds and deals damage each second.

    I always thought cruisers should get a passive hull damage reduction and shield resistance trait and a built in threat control trait, since they are the tanks Cruisers should generate more threat per shot then any other ship.

    my opinion.
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