test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Options
How To Make Crew Levels Worth It, Buff Cruisers and Slightly Nerf Escorts All At Once
icegavel
Member Posts: 991 Arc User
I expect there to be quite a bit of flame over what I'm about to propose (not at all my intent). So, before I even get on with this proposal, I will simply say this to those about to flame:
Now that THAT'S done and over with, let's get down to business. This proposal, technically speaking, is a rip-off of another game. But then, STO's combat system already seems a touch like a Starfleet Command rehash, that's not too terrible. The game I'm ripping off is the Star Trek: Armada games. What I'm ripping from them is how crew works... well, kinda. I'm not ripping all of it, that would be brutal.
The current state of the game is that the amount of crew on your ship, and the amount of that crew that is "active" (the ones in white) affect your passive hull repair. However, this bonus is minimal, and continues to exist even after everyone on your crew is dead (apparently, we've got enough Borg tech to autonomously regenerate our ships). This means that crew is literally useless in this game. In the game I'm ripping off, crew levels mattered. How they mattered is what I'm stealing. If the crew on a ship in Armada dropped below a certain point, its display changed color (green to yellow to red). Whenever it changed color, you lost a pretty big percentage of that ship's rate of fire, as well as its natural repair rate. In short, crew was important. You always wanted it to be green.
My proposal is a modification of that. For the purpose of the demonstration, I will be using the three "free" VA ships (if you have the 600-day Veteran reward) - The Exploration Cruiser Retrofit (Crew: 1,000), the Long-Range Science Vessel Retrofit (Crew: 200), and the Tactical Escort Retrofit (Crew: 50). What I propose is that the rate of fire on a ship be INCREASED by an amount equal to a combination of Max Crew and Able Crew (Able Crew, of course, would be by percent). Effectively, all weapon cooldowns in the game would be doubled (including torpedoes) as a BASE NUMBER (before Crew). Then crew would be applied like so:
All Team powers now have a debuff of -10 Able Crew for their durations, and cannot be activated if Able Crew is less than 10.
Photonic Officer: Alongside Cooldown reduction, this ability adds +75%/+150%/+225% Max Crew (and Able Crew, which cannot be disabled - extra crew becomes bottom) for the duration. Effectively, Photonic Officer would allow you to have more crew for a while, crew that would permanently be Able, but would still have a very long cooldown. The actual Crew bonus would be based on Aux power. I'm PRETTY sure that would make this power relevant again.
tl;dr: MORE CREW = MORE PEW PEW. Any questions?
DISCLAIMER wrote:The effect on Escorts that this proposal would have is MINIMAL. This is NOT an "OMG nerf Escorts" thread. The effect on Escorts is an afterthought at best.
Now that THAT'S done and over with, let's get down to business. This proposal, technically speaking, is a rip-off of another game. But then, STO's combat system already seems a touch like a Starfleet Command rehash, that's not too terrible. The game I'm ripping off is the Star Trek: Armada games. What I'm ripping from them is how crew works... well, kinda. I'm not ripping all of it, that would be brutal.
The current state of the game is that the amount of crew on your ship, and the amount of that crew that is "active" (the ones in white) affect your passive hull repair. However, this bonus is minimal, and continues to exist even after everyone on your crew is dead (apparently, we've got enough Borg tech to autonomously regenerate our ships). This means that crew is literally useless in this game. In the game I'm ripping off, crew levels mattered. How they mattered is what I'm stealing. If the crew on a ship in Armada dropped below a certain point, its display changed color (green to yellow to red). Whenever it changed color, you lost a pretty big percentage of that ship's rate of fire, as well as its natural repair rate. In short, crew was important. You always wanted it to be green.
My proposal is a modification of that. For the purpose of the demonstration, I will be using the three "free" VA ships (if you have the 600-day Veteran reward) - The Exploration Cruiser Retrofit (Crew: 1,000), the Long-Range Science Vessel Retrofit (Crew: 200), and the Tactical Escort Retrofit (Crew: 50). What I propose is that the rate of fire on a ship be INCREASED by an amount equal to a combination of Max Crew and Able Crew (Able Crew, of course, would be by percent). Effectively, all weapon cooldowns in the game would be doubled (including torpedoes) as a BASE NUMBER (before Crew). Then crew would be applied like so:
Allow me to demonstrate this formula at work with the Galaxy Retrofit at full crew:formula wrote:Percent of Max Crew Able {B} [expressed as a decimal] * (Max Crew {A}/10) = Rate of Fire Bonus {F}
B * (A/10) = F
So, you get +100% Rae of Fire if you have full crew on the Galaxy. Now, let's say they have 50% crew:Galaxy Full Crew wrote:1.00 * (1000/10) = F
1.00* 100 = F
100 = F
Your bonus comes down because you lost crew. Now, let's try these same two on the Intrepid Retrofit:Galaxy Half Crew wrote:0.5 * (1000/10) = F
0.5 * 100 = F
50 = F
Intrepid Full Crew wrote:1.00 * (200/10) = F
1.00 * 20 = F
20 = F
So, the Intrepid fires more slowly. Now, let's see how the Defiant ranks:Intrepid Half Crew wrote:0.50 * (200/10) = F
0.50 * 20 = F
10 = F
Defiant Full Crew wrote:1.00 * (50/10) = F
1.00 * 5 = F
5 = F
The bonus has diminished quite a bit, now that the total crew has diminished. This is only really NOTICEABLE in torpedoes, it'll add an extra few seconds to each cooldown. It'll only put an extra second, maybe, between Cannon volleys. Also, most larger vessels will now be able to fire faster, while most Escorts will have to wait an extra half a second or so before firing the next shot. This may also have an effect on some Bridge Officer abilities, namely the Teams and the ever-forgotten Photonic Officer power. I see these as such:Defiant Half Crew wrote:0.50 * (50/10) = F
0.50 * 5 = F
2.5 = F
All Team powers now have a debuff of -10 Able Crew for their durations, and cannot be activated if Able Crew is less than 10.
Photonic Officer: Alongside Cooldown reduction, this ability adds +75%/+150%/+225% Max Crew (and Able Crew, which cannot be disabled - extra crew becomes bottom) for the duration. Effectively, Photonic Officer would allow you to have more crew for a while, crew that would permanently be Able, but would still have a very long cooldown. The actual Crew bonus would be based on Aux power. I'm PRETTY sure that would make this power relevant again.
tl;dr: MORE CREW = MORE PEW PEW. Any questions?
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
See, I don't think you've really considered this suggestion as carefully as you should have, are aware of the issues associated with the crew system, or some of the problems that make Federation cruisers ever-so-much the last place option.
I came up with this idea a week ago. I've thought about it plenty, and I FLY a cruiser on 1 of my characters. One of my others is in a CARRIER. I know what their problems are. This won't solve them, but it's not supposed to. Not really. It's a minor buff, meant to fix the problem of crew being useless. The rest of it is just a bonus.
Do you fly a Kar'Fi or a Dreadnought Carrier?
Vo'quv, specced for disabling. I use all my Sci slots for power drain and stuff, my weapons are Phased Polaron, whilemy fighters do all the real talkin'.
Honestly, just removing crew from the game would be better in some ways, and ships based on a flat rate depending on the ship.
I think you have failed to grasp what I meant.
If your suggestion were to be implemented, Kar'Fis and Dreadnought Carriers would receive a firing rate bonus of 300% and 350%, respectively. Now put APO 3 and CRF2 on top of that, and perhaps a dual-proc energy type for good measure. Do I need to draw you a diagram, or give you some numbers?
Furthermore, I do not believe you are aware of how weapon firing rates work, or how this ties into weapon energy drain.
I know how ALL of that works, dude. I fly everything. I saw that 350% coming. On energy weapons, that will barely reduce anything because the base number is so small. Plus, you WOULD have to contend with power drain. I've spent hours thinking about this. The added power drain offsets the added firing rate enough that it's not terribly OP. And mind you, canon cruisers WERE built a bit as torpedo boats.
Said things do not work properly. Emergency Force Fields do not have a visible impact on gameplay, while a Biofunction Monitor keeps your crew from actually dying (it'll still let 'em get injured, though).
No, I don't believe you have actually considered everything.
I'm also not quite sure what you're hoping to accomplish here, either. Problems with Federation cruisers aren't solely related to DPS, and this suggestion won't address such issues.
I've simulated dozens of scenarios in my head, envisioned fleet actions, tactics, BOff power uses. I'm a scientist by nature, and I am as thorough as one.
Thew other issues with Cruisers is that, compared to the damage output of the Escort, they're not tough enough. I've seen a VERY few builds that can actually stand up to a good beating, but they do exist. It's just harder to do than getting an Escort geared up and vaporizing everything. I know all this because the original spark for the idea was a discussion with a friend of mine when we were discussing Geko's Armor post. He wanted Carriers to have 2 Heavy Armor slots, but have a penalty for the second (if they chose to use 2 Heavy Armor). I said nay, since carriers move too slowly anyway, and suggested crew. His reply was that crew was useless, so I thought up a way to make them useful. Here it is, a week later and far more refined.
I do this kind of postulating all the time.For every post I make, 30 concepts are born and killed in my mind for lack of detail. I know what I'm talking about. I've played this game for well over 2 years, though not since launch.
..and not by profession?
Time is one thing; manpower and expertise is another. That being said, it's unlikely they'll touch it.
If anything is to be done with crew, it shouldn't be put towards trying to make larger vessels match the DPS of smaller ones. Instead, it ought to be put towards making crew size a distinct advantage: something that cannot simply be overcome by the right mods and is inherent to the vessel itself. I believe that your suggestion in fact, would make cruisers less desirable to use, because they're going to suffer even more from being compared to carriers.
Science as a profession only pays well for one out of a hundred people. The jobs aren't there.
Only on the Klink side, since Carriers are more readily-available there. But then, no one flies Klink cruisers, anyway. Starfleet doesn't have any carriers that they have easy access to. Hundreds of dollars, hundreds of thousands of Di, or hundreds of millions of EC. Either way, it's all lockbocks, Lobi, and C-Store. I'm amazed at how many people pay as much as that for those. But, there's a distinct advantage Cruisers have that you're missing:
Commander Engineering BOffs. If you haven't heard, there's this nifty little most-over-powered-heal-in-the-game called Aux to SIF III that can do 7k hull every 15 seconds, with a DOff that has a chance to give it's damage resist buff a HoT. And if you don't want that, there's always the ever-excessive shield healing of Reverse Shield Polarity III. Trust me...Cruisers have more going for them than you think, if you build them right.
Scis are truely ovepowered.
(So... I am dead serious.)
Commander Engineering is just about the only advantage that Federation cruisers have, and even then they lose out to the Recluse where that's concerned. Either way, you're still stuck flying a brick whose performance characteristics are comparable, or worse than that of carriers.
Also, relying so much on RSP for tanking is just asking for you to get hit with a Subnucleonic beam.
Take the 10% dead, and 20% injured proc on all torps and such we have, and instead change it to: 1% or 1 dead, and 2% or 2 injured. (whichever is larger)
Because nearly a third of your crew getting injured and killed from a SINGLE torpedo from the weakest, wimpiest, mostly-dead level 1 Miranda on your 1,000 or more cruiser which didn't even flinch from the impact...is quite honestly a bit ridiculous.
Yes, you can do things to adjust and slow it down:
Adapted MACO/Honor Guard set
Aux to Dampeners
BFI
Emergency Force Fields
Biofunction Monitors
Nurse DOFFs
Probably other stuff I forgot.
However, even with doing all of that, you still can lose copious amounts of crew, and they simply won't come back fast enough. At least, not without giving up a LOT of sci console slots and equipping 3 or more Biofunction monitors, even that isn't perfect though.
In my experience, only Biofunction Monitors work at keeping crew from dying: one console is capable of stopping your crew from ever dying, but it won't keep them from becoming incapacitated. I think the problem goes further than the massacre-by-torpedo issue and probably has to do with the complicated mess that it actually is.
Anyhow, Emergency Force Fields should be scrapped or changed to help with things other than crew. Nurse DOffs should just straight up boost recovery rates. Before we get to talking about how the system could be made useful, we should probably take out the whole dying-in-droves-to-anything issue, at least until something workable gets put into place.
If the devs would nerf every s*** people on the forums say it needs nerf ,we'd have the game reduced to pong.I take these "lets nerf X " threads as "this guy was killed by X in pvp and now is having a rage moment" :cool:
RnD and upgrade needs less RNG. Less lottery. Something has to change.
Is that a problem?
Both of these. The crew system has sucked and been a worthless mechanic ever since the game first launched I'm afraid.
Also, in Hive Space (especially on Elite), SNB is a real LIFE-SAVER against the Queen. Trust me, I ran it with fleeties on Elite and got all the optionals. Saved 3 guys from Death-by-Torp-Spread with my SNB.
The only thing I rely on for tanking is my hull heals and the occasional ST. RSP is moreof an "oh sh*t" button, and only ever hits me after everyone's SPENT their SNBs. 'Cause I'm careful like that.
I agree with this a bit. Even how worthless crew is now, they die WAY too easily. This would be a bit needed.
Well, if we're going to FIX the "massacre-by-torpedo" mess, one way to do it would be to fix EFF and all the rest so it WORKS RIGHT. You're basically saying "if it's broke, replace it." Where I come from, if it's broke, you fix it. They can - and SHOULD - fix it.
Exactly the same as before, except your cannons need an extra second to recharge. You only really lose on torpedoes. But, from what I've seen, I'm the only guy in an Escort in the game that uses Torpedoes anyway. If you want a better rate of fire, fly a bigger ship. Simple as that. Now you have a choice to make: Fire a little less in your escort and NOT be overpowered, or fly a different ship and NOT be DPS. Oh look, other viable options.
That's the point of this idea: To change that and make it worthwhile.
R.I.P
No questions, a comment.
Cruisers are about Tanking (PvE) and Healing (PvE/PvP).
Crew benefiting offense has nothing to do with what Cruisers were designed to do, and everything to do with Cruiser players wanting Tank/Healers to do more damage.
I will disagree with what you have said with this premise, larger crews should be able to keep the ships and its subsystems running better than smaller crews. Debuffs and other events that take systems online, as well as healing bonus should be better handled with larger crew sizes.
Would be nice if they did those two things particularly well, but they don't.
And if they were designed to be "tankers" and "healers", what of the eight weapon slots, or tactically-oriented cruisers like the Regent?
If you have no special bonuses, the UI reports that your crew recovery rate is 50%/min in combat and 5%/min out of combat. However, as far as I can tell, the numbers reported by the UI are wrong. They apply to neither able crew nor alive crew. My rough estimates for the actual crew recovery rates are as follows:
Able Crew (in combat): ~60 crew/min
Able Crew (out of combat): ~500 crew/min
Alive Crew (in combat): never recovers during combat
Alive Crew (out of combat): ~100%/min
Hull regeneration rate depends on the percentage of able crew, but in combat, able crew regenerates at a fixed number of crewmen per minute. This implies that ships with smaller crew have the advantage when it comes to crew regeneration. However, this is not as much of an advantage as you would think, because the "normal" hull regeneration rate is divided by 6 when you enter red alert. By "normal" hull regeneration rate, I mean that part which comes from the base hull regeneration rate of your ship class and your skill in "Starship Hull Repair". The hull regeneration bonus from leadership doesn't follow the normal rules: it not divided by 6 when you enter red alert and is not affected by crew. That's what makes the leadership trait so strong.
Granted, some work would need to be redone to change some existing items and powers that affect crew but taking out this unfinished, clunky, and frankly unnecessary stat would help streamline things.
Hull repair is only meant to be part of the story; if more abilities, particularly engineering ones, were scaled by the amount of crew you have then this could give cruisers more of a niche, done with diminishing returns so that small crew ships can still benefit from the abilities, just not as much as say a cruiser with 1000 active crew which would have the full benefit (any extra crew is mostly just allowing you to keep that effectiveness for a lot longer).
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
I agree, what they might want to use instead is to assign a "ship repair rate" per each vessel that can take into account how many crew members would be in a ship. Big cruisers would have the highest bonus-rates and smallest ships like the Defiant and BOP would have the lowest.
Have some Star Trek spirit, and never give up.
Your first point, about adjusting crew damage, has been addressed numerous times in this thread. I refer you to the last 3 pages of discussion.
Having Engineering powers scale to crew is an interesting idea. Combine that with my idea, and we might just be on to something.
Yea? And when's the last time they were able to do that well enough to fight Escorts? Been a LONG time. Besides, even for a TANK role, their damage is low. That renders their tanking moot, because they can't get aggro. Hell, even with maxed Threat Control and an Attack Patter Delta (with a DOff that makes AP:D double my threat generation), my Eng Ody can't get much aggro. I have to be alone or on a team with no Escorts, because their DPS gets all the aggro, anyway. The lack of damage on a Cruiser is LITERALLY interfering with its ability to tank.
So, we're all flying Borg ships now? Starfleet/Klingon/Romulan ships don't repair themselves, the crew repairs them. Take away the crew, take away ALL healing capacity. EVERYONE is a glass cannon, and there's no longer a reason to be anything other than an Escort. I say nay. Bad idea.