Just to make things clear, I don't want things to be nerfed into utter uselessness. I'm just listing the current issues that Ground PvP has. I'm not saying "I want this kind of fix", "I want this fixed this way" by any means.
I really care about Ground and I want things to be balanced and fun at the same time, just like any other devoted PvPer.
Regarding the Jump Height of Caitians/Ferasans, it's an issue, you can escape almost all movement debuffs by just jumping, how fair is that?. You can easily access areas where other players cannot follow without using external methods like a Cover Shield, etc, how fair is that?.
Borticus said that it's an animation issue, but it's unlikely to see a fix before May.
Only 7 direct recommendations that an ability be nerfed. 9 recommendations for fixes that would result in an ability being less powerful than it is in its bugged or mis-designed state. 3 direct recommendations for buffs, and 7 recommendations for fixes that would make an ability more powerful, and 2 neutral fixes.
Exactly what is it that threads like this "generally" recommend, again?
Balance Design: damage mitigation Issue: Adding immunity to Suppressing Fire on Battle Strategies means that tacs will be doing full damage much more of the time (indefinitely, with 3 tacs chaining tac init at the right interval). The problem with this is that this provides a huge indirect buff to the already dominant "damage" side of the damage-control-tank triangle of ground pvp.
Suggestions: adjust the other proactive damage mitigation sources in the game to be more effective, to compensate for the lost damage mitigation from Suppressing Fire. Boost the quantity of damage reduction granted by Weapon Malfunction, and lower the cooldown of Dampening Field, so that it can be used as a targeted debuff against decloaking tacs going for a oneshot kill.
Notes: BatStrats should, indeed, clear Suppressing Fire, according to its tooltip (clears tactical debuffs). Furthermore, it doesn't seem right that tacs should be the primary source of both damage AND damage mitigation, in the game. So, in general, I think that the change mentioned on the Redshirt patchnotes is good. It does, however, have huge balance ramifications. For the past eight months or so, Suppressing Fire has been the main source of damage mitigation in STO ground pvp. This fix has major consequences and may require balance changes to compensate for them.
Ability: Weapons Malfunction / Polaron proc
Once an enemy is hit by it, after the weapon disable effect wears off by itself (or on usage of a power cell), it triggers an immunity effect that lasts for 60 seconds. This timer is not on par with other immunity procs (20 seconds). Additionally, if the ability is used again within that period of time, the timer is reset back to full 60s, making it difficult to use the skill to keep pressure or to more consistently reduce damage output from the affected target. A misleading effect of this is that while the target is immune to further effects of WM upon re-application, the target will show the orange lightning effect but their weapons will work as normal.
Suggestion: reduce the timer to 20s to match other immunity procs, or, if the 60s timer is intended for this case, upon reapplication of WM within that time, don't reset the timer.
[EDIT] this also applies to the Polaron proc, with the same timers. The proc already has a very short duration (about 2 seconds). A 60s immunity to further applications seems a bit too much.
Engineers with "Pet Summoning" Kits (Fabrication, Bunker, etc..)
Issue: When an Engineer Dies, some times their summoned objects remain allowing them to summon even more of those objects.
This recently came up as a topic of hot debate in the Boot Camp subforum, so I figured I might as well address it publicly...
It is not our intent that pets summoned via Kits should remain in the world once that Kit is removed from an active inventory slot.
In other words, if an Engineer summons a Phaser Turret, then swaps kits, that Phaser Turret should be removed from the world. This is not currently working as intended, and is a major boundary to a fair-and-balanced Ground PvP environment, that we intend to address in the near future.
If removing this multi-summon ability renders any associated ability undesirable as a result, we will examine their effectiveness of each ability in more detail only after the ability to stack them is fixed.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
This recently came up as a topic of hot debate in the Boot Camp subforum, so I figured I might as well address it publicly...
It is not our intent that pets summoned via Kits should remain in the world once that Kit is removed from an active inventory slot.
In other words, if an Engineer summons a Phaser Turret, then swaps kits, that Phaser Turret should be removed from the world. This is not currently working as intended, and is a major boundary to a fair-and-balanced Ground PvP environment, that we intend to address in the near future.
If removing this multi-summon ability renders any associated ability undesirable as a result, we will examine their effectiveness of each ability in more detail only after the ability to stack them is fixed.
I think he means when a ENG using a kit that can spawn mortars dies.. the mortars will stay when a new group of mortals is spawned.
I think he means when a ENG using a kit that can spawn mortars dies.. the mortars will stay when a new group of mortals is spawned.
We're focusing on kit swapping in this fix, but intend to adjust how death interacts with these summoned turrets, as well.
The intended behavior that we're aiming for, is for turrets to be allowed to linger after the Engineer's death, but get replaced if s/he summons a new one after respawning.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
The intended behavior that we're aiming for, is for turrets to be allowed to linger after the Engineer's death, but get replaced if s/he summons a new one after respawning.
As it should be. It's already a pain in the backside, having to summon multiple turrets/generators. Meanwhile, while standing there summoning them, you leave yourself exposed to enemy weapons fire.
Summoned turrets/generators should remain if the Engineer dies, but be replaced if the Engineer summons new, and removed entirely if Engineer changes kit.
Looking forward to these fixes. Might one inquire as to adding a new "Summon all" ability to kits with multiple turrets/generators?
We're focusing on kit swapping in this fix, but intend to adjust how death interacts with these summoned turrets, as well.
The intended behavior that we're aiming for, is for turrets to be allowed to linger after the Engineer's death, but get replaced if s/he summons a new one after respawning.
If I were you I would also focus on the sci kit swap that would allow a person to gain nanite health monitor from med kit and carry that into combat with physics kit on etc....
Also the support tech and equip tech kit swap with 3 doffs that allow you to gain double the equip diag firepower procs and thus major firepower and orbital strike that can reach almost 2000 base dmg.
A simple fix would be to have equip diag power put the player on red alert.
Also see if it is possible to have doff swapping disabled during red alert. An engy using equip tech kit can swap those equip diag doffs for shield recharge ones after he gets his proc during red alert.
As it should be. It's already a pain in the backside, having to summon multiple turrets/generators. Meanwhile, while standing there summoning them, you leave yourself exposed to enemy weapons fire.
Summoned turrets/generators should remain if the Engineer dies, but be replaced if the Engineer summons new, and removed entirely if Engineer changes kit.
Looking forward to these fixes. Might one inquire as to adding a new "Summon all" ability to kits with multiple turrets/generators?
Sure go ahead and summon all in one area so my ghostbuster gun can wipe them all away in one shot :P
I was thinking mostly for PVE usage. "Borg" don't have ghostbuster guns :P
I had better stop you right there before before you give bort here any ideas. Changing things in relation to PVE balance is half the reason why pvp is so effed up in the first place.
Besides do you want your support drone and cover shield to drop at the same time as well? This summon all would actually hurt you more than help you in pve and pvp.
If I were you I would also focus on the sci kit swap that would allow a person to gain nanite health monitor from med kit and carry that into combat with physics kit on etc....
All kit powers will be included in this review pass.
Also see if it is possible to have doff swapping disabled during red alert. An engy using equip tech kit can swap those equip diag doffs for shield recharge ones after he gets his proc during red alert.
We've just checked in a fix that prevents Doff swapping during combat. This was never intended functionality.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
All kit powers will be included in this review pass.
We've just checked in a fix that prevents Doff swapping during combat. This was never intended functionality.
That's very good work there. That will solve lots of problems across ground and space by itself.
And to antrenos yeah the animation lock on bunker kit is a pain to deal with but a simpler fix would be reduce the animation lock time on fabbing these kit powers. I would also lower the transphasic bomb fab time by one second if they do adjust fabbing times of these kit powers. In the end if you are with the proper team I have found using a kit with fab powers does nothing but slow you down since the groups can be wiped before your "bunker" is fully created.
We're focusing on kit swapping in this fix, but intend to adjust how death interacts with these summoned turrets, as well.
The intended behavior that we're aiming for, is for turrets to be allowed to linger after the Engineer's death, but get replaced if s/he summons a new one after respawning.
While additional pets are a real problem of engineer, the one thats related to kit switching currently is in the list as #9 btw:
09. Doff: Diagnostic Engineer: Chance to increase ranged damage with Equipment Diagnostics
Issue: The equipment diagnostic doff dmg proc can be stacked, equipping 3 DE doffs while switching through multiple Equipment Technician kits rebuffing equipment diagnostic allows to continuously increase ranged damage (this includes gunfire and orbital strike damage). This allows engineers with enough kits to swap to increase dmg to get close/surpass even tac dmg and for more then one shot even.
What this means is, an engineer would just cast equipment diagnostic while switching through enough KITS to get a guarateed dmg enhancing proc.. or even multiple of those procs (they stack).
Kit switching resets the cooldown on equipment diagnostic, while equipment diagnostic itself won't stack the doff proc from the diagnostic engineers do stack and increase dmg, weapon dmg and orbital strike dmg.
While additional pets are a real problem of engineer, the one thats related to kit switching currently is in the list as #9 btw:
What this means is, an engineer would just cast equipment diagnostic while switching through enough KITS to get a guarateed dmg enhancing proc.. or even multiple of those procs (they stack).
Kit switching resets the cooldown on equipment diagnostic, while equipment diagnostic itself won't stack the doff proc from the diagnostic engineers do stack and increase dmg, weapon dmg and orbital strike dmg.
Yep mentioned that a few posts ago and yes easiest fix would be putting the equip diag power to place the player on red alert. Bt the time red alert is over the player will have lost over half is firepower buff time. In any case the process would be so much slower and he would be hurting his team by doing little fighting.
All kit powers will be included in this review pass.
Will this review pass also address the ultra-rare Romulan kits? I'm not going to buy a Mk XII kit until the Plasma Grenade IV has better stats than my current Plasma Grenade III:
Yep mentioned that a few posts ago and yes easiest fix would be putting the equip diag power to place the player on red alert. Bt the time red alert is over the player will have lost over half is firepower buff time. In any case the process would be so much slower and he would be hurting his team by doing little fighting.
Not sure how much of a solution that really is tho.. if you activate target optics it puts you in red alert.. that red alert however is only 3 seconds long, the one you want to happen would have to be a real red-alert at least.
That still wouldn't be much of a solution to science player's buffing nanite health monitors from different kits tho.
In space when you buff someone with a healing ability and switch the boff after it the healing ability is canceled i wonder if the same could be done for ground.
Maybe switching a kit should generally put all the abilities from the kit on a full cooldown in the beginning, but even that would still present some benefits (like doing nhm then switching physicist), so canceling buffs is something that may be still needed in some way.
I know that it's easy to assume things out, but with in mind the Traits Revamp on Tribble, Covert is not getting touched, on the contrary is getting Buffed, and I quote.
Covert
- In addition to its previous effects, this trait now increases the bonus flanking damage your character deals.
So we can assume that Perfect Cloak it's an intended feature or are we going to have a Perception buff somehow?
Also, Scis are getting tankier, in the Engy way:
Ground -Medical Vanguard:
- All powers you use on allies give them perfect shields for 4 seconds, along with a moderate Shield Heal.
Why the Science Class -a HP tank- is now getting Shield tanking?. I thought that this was only ground for Engineers. Why not make Medical Vaguard a perfect HP for 4 seconds? That would be too much?
Covert
- In addition to its previous effects, this trait now increases the bonus flanking damage your character deals.
I did some very quick testing (and I stress very):
Flank on Tribble with Covert
Your Compression Bolt Setting dealt 365 (604) shield damage to Tactical Drone.
Your Compression Bolt Setting deals 809 (855) Plasma Damage to Tactical Drone.
Nonflank on Tribble with Covert
Your Compression Bolt Setting dealt 365 (512) shield damage to Tactical Drone.
Your Compression Bolt Setting deals 619 (807) Plasma Damage to Tactical Drone.
Flank on live server (same exact character)
Your Compression Bolt Setting dealt 365 (604) shield damage to Tactical Drone.
Your Compression Bolt Setting deals 654 (761) Plasma Damage to Tactical Drone.
Nonflank on live server
Your Compression Bolt Setting dealt 365 (512) shield damage to Tactical Drone.
Your Compression Bolt Setting deals 602 (795) Plasma Damage to Tactical Drone.
I'm not good at math, but this looks like a 25%-30% increase in flank damage. Granted, it's not a great test as I've only shot once for each test. But it's enough to see the increase.
On the bright side, Acute Senses provides a 25% resistance to flank damage. I'm just worried that not every race has access to it, while it seems every race has access to Covert on Tribble.
Joined: January 2010
Fanfiction! ZOMG! Read it now!
kate-wintersbite.deviantart.com/art/0x01-Treachery-293641403
Ground -Medical Vanguard:
- All powers you use on allies give them perfect shields for 4 seconds, along with a moderate Shield Heal.
Why the Science Class -a HP tank- is now getting Shield tanking?. I thought that this was only ground for Engineers. Why not make Medical Vaguard a perfect HP for 4 seconds? That would be too much?
The way I'm reading it, is that the perfect shield effect only applies to allies, not to yourself, which encourages team healing and not self tanking.
Currently on tribble the sci can cast medical vanguard on themself from any heal including hypos. Whether it will stay that way, who knows. At the moment medical vanguard stays active for the full duration of NHM so, obviously a work in progress. The effect does not stack however, the 4 sec timer gets reset from each heal used. As much as I hate the thought of sci's getting even tankier, the effect from it was noticable in testing but not game breakingly OP, tho that was just a very quick test of the ability. Now where's my engie health heal/Dot cure ability. May as well give engie some innate health heal ability as long as scis will be able to heal shields too. :P
And meh to the covert buff. I guess Operative tacs didn't have enough flank dmg...
With suppressive fire being of diminished usefulness in the near future, combined with the buff to the covert trait..it appears cryptic wants all the tactical officers ingame to be dirty gankers
Comments
I really care about Ground and I want things to be balanced and fun at the same time, just like any other devoted PvPer.
Regarding the Jump Height of Caitians/Ferasans, it's an issue, you can escape almost all movement debuffs by just jumping, how fair is that?. You can easily access areas where other players cannot follow without using external methods like a Cover Shield, etc, how fair is that?.
Borticus said that it's an animation issue, but it's unlikely to see a fix before May.
www.divisionhispana.com
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=600771
And my lovely Ground is getting fixed!
www.divisionhispana.com
Let's count up the things on the first post of this thread:
1Nerf
2Nerf
3Nerf
4Buff
5Fix/Nerf
6Fix/Buff
7Nerf
8Fix/Nerf
9Fix/Nerf
10Fix/Nerf
11Fix/Nerf
12Buff
13Buff
14Nerf
15Nerf
16Fix/Nerf
17Fix/Nerf
18Fix/Nerf
19Fix/Nerf
20Fix/Buff
21Fix/Buff
22Fix/Buff
23Fix/Buff
24Fix/Buff
25Fix/Buff
26Nerf
Only 7 direct recommendations that an ability be nerfed. 9 recommendations for fixes that would result in an ability being less powerful than it is in its bugged or mis-designed state. 3 direct recommendations for buffs, and 7 recommendations for fixes that would make an ability more powerful, and 2 neutral fixes.
Exactly what is it that threads like this "generally" recommend, again?
Issue: Adding immunity to Suppressing Fire on Battle Strategies means that tacs will be doing full damage much more of the time (indefinitely, with 3 tacs chaining tac init at the right interval). The problem with this is that this provides a huge indirect buff to the already dominant "damage" side of the damage-control-tank triangle of ground pvp.
Suggestions: adjust the other proactive damage mitigation sources in the game to be more effective, to compensate for the lost damage mitigation from Suppressing Fire. Boost the quantity of damage reduction granted by Weapon Malfunction, and lower the cooldown of Dampening Field, so that it can be used as a targeted debuff against decloaking tacs going for a oneshot kill.
Notes: BatStrats should, indeed, clear Suppressing Fire, according to its tooltip (clears tactical debuffs). Furthermore, it doesn't seem right that tacs should be the primary source of both damage AND damage mitigation, in the game. So, in general, I think that the change mentioned on the Redshirt patchnotes is good. It does, however, have huge balance ramifications. For the past eight months or so, Suppressing Fire has been the main source of damage mitigation in STO ground pvp. This fix has major consequences and may require balance changes to compensate for them.
Lets hope for more fixes, ground PVP needs them.
Division Hispana
www.divisionhispana.com
Once an enemy is hit by it, after the weapon disable effect wears off by itself (or on usage of a power cell), it triggers an immunity effect that lasts for 60 seconds. This timer is not on par with other immunity procs (20 seconds). Additionally, if the ability is used again within that period of time, the timer is reset back to full 60s, making it difficult to use the skill to keep pressure or to more consistently reduce damage output from the affected target. A misleading effect of this is that while the target is immune to further effects of WM upon re-application, the target will show the orange lightning effect but their weapons will work as normal.
Suggestion: reduce the timer to 20s to match other immunity procs, or, if the 60s timer is intended for this case, upon reapplication of WM within that time, don't reset the timer.
[EDIT] this also applies to the Polaron proc, with the same timers. The proc already has a very short duration (about 2 seconds). A 60s immunity to further applications seems a bit too much.
STO Screenshot Archive
This recently came up as a topic of hot debate in the Boot Camp subforum, so I figured I might as well address it publicly...
It is not our intent that pets summoned via Kits should remain in the world once that Kit is removed from an active inventory slot.
In other words, if an Engineer summons a Phaser Turret, then swaps kits, that Phaser Turret should be removed from the world. This is not currently working as intended, and is a major boundary to a fair-and-balanced Ground PvP environment, that we intend to address in the near future.
If removing this multi-summon ability renders any associated ability undesirable as a result, we will examine their effectiveness of each ability in more detail only after the ability to stack them is fixed.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
I think he means when a ENG using a kit that can spawn mortars dies.. the mortars will stay when a new group of mortals is spawned.
We're focusing on kit swapping in this fix, but intend to adjust how death interacts with these summoned turrets, as well.
The intended behavior that we're aiming for, is for turrets to be allowed to linger after the Engineer's death, but get replaced if s/he summons a new one after respawning.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
As it should be. It's already a pain in the backside, having to summon multiple turrets/generators. Meanwhile, while standing there summoning them, you leave yourself exposed to enemy weapons fire.
Summoned turrets/generators should remain if the Engineer dies, but be replaced if the Engineer summons new, and removed entirely if Engineer changes kit.
Looking forward to these fixes. Might one inquire as to adding a new "Summon all" ability to kits with multiple turrets/generators?
If I were you I would also focus on the sci kit swap that would allow a person to gain nanite health monitor from med kit and carry that into combat with physics kit on etc....
Also the support tech and equip tech kit swap with 3 doffs that allow you to gain double the equip diag firepower procs and thus major firepower and orbital strike that can reach almost 2000 base dmg.
A simple fix would be to have equip diag power put the player on red alert.
Also see if it is possible to have doff swapping disabled during red alert. An engy using equip tech kit can swap those equip diag doffs for shield recharge ones after he gets his proc during red alert.
Sure go ahead and summon all in one area so my ghostbuster gun can wipe them all away in one shot :P
I was thinking mostly for PVE usage. "Borg" don't have ghostbuster guns :P
I had better stop you right there before before you give bort here any ideas. Changing things in relation to PVE balance is half the reason why pvp is so effed up in the first place.
Besides do you want your support drone and cover shield to drop at the same time as well? This summon all would actually hurt you more than help you in pve and pvp.
All kit powers will be included in this review pass.
We've just checked in a fix that prevents Doff swapping during combat. This was never intended functionality.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
That's very good work there. That will solve lots of problems across ground and space by itself.
And to antrenos yeah the animation lock on bunker kit is a pain to deal with but a simpler fix would be reduce the animation lock time on fabbing these kit powers. I would also lower the transphasic bomb fab time by one second if they do adjust fabbing times of these kit powers. In the end if you are with the proper team I have found using a kit with fab powers does nothing but slow you down since the groups can be wiped before your "bunker" is fully created.
While additional pets are a real problem of engineer, the one thats related to kit switching currently is in the list as #9 btw:
What this means is, an engineer would just cast equipment diagnostic while switching through enough KITS to get a guarateed dmg enhancing proc.. or even multiple of those procs (they stack).
Kit switching resets the cooldown on equipment diagnostic, while equipment diagnostic itself won't stack the doff proc from the diagnostic engineers do stack and increase dmg, weapon dmg and orbital strike dmg.
Yep mentioned that a few posts ago and yes easiest fix would be putting the equip diag power to place the player on red alert. Bt the time red alert is over the player will have lost over half is firepower buff time. In any case the process would be so much slower and he would be hurting his team by doing little fighting.
Will this review pass also address the ultra-rare Romulan kits? I'm not going to buy a Mk XII kit until the Plasma Grenade IV has better stats than my current Plasma Grenade III:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=536091
Keep the goodwork guys.
www.divisionhispana.com
Not sure how much of a solution that really is tho.. if you activate target optics it puts you in red alert.. that red alert however is only 3 seconds long, the one you want to happen would have to be a real red-alert at least.
That still wouldn't be much of a solution to science player's buffing nanite health monitors from different kits tho.
In space when you buff someone with a healing ability and switch the boff after it the healing ability is canceled i wonder if the same could be done for ground.
Maybe switching a kit should generally put all the abilities from the kit on a full cooldown in the beginning, but even that would still present some benefits (like doing nhm then switching physicist), so canceling buffs is something that may be still needed in some way.
www.divisionhispana.com
Covert
- In addition to its previous effects, this trait now increases the bonus flanking damage your character deals.
So we can assume that Perfect Cloak it's an intended feature or are we going to have a Perception buff somehow?
Also, Scis are getting tankier, in the Engy way:
Ground -Medical Vanguard:
- All powers you use on allies give them perfect shields for 4 seconds, along with a moderate Shield Heal.
Why the Science Class -a HP tank- is now getting Shield tanking?. I thought that this was only ground for Engineers. Why not make Medical Vaguard a perfect HP for 4 seconds? That would be too much?
www.divisionhispana.com
I did some very quick testing (and I stress very):
I'm not good at math, but this looks like a 25%-30% increase in flank damage. Granted, it's not a great test as I've only shot once for each test. But it's enough to see the increase.
On the bright side, Acute Senses provides a 25% resistance to flank damage. I'm just worried that not every race has access to it, while it seems every race has access to Covert on Tribble.
Fanfiction! ZOMG! Read it now!
kate-wintersbite.deviantart.com/art/0x01-Treachery-293641403
The way I'm reading it, is that the perfect shield effect only applies to allies, not to yourself, which encourages team healing and not self tanking.
STO Screenshot Archive
And meh to the covert buff. I guess Operative tacs didn't have enough flank dmg...
Vanilla Ground PvP information