I would LOVE the 4 boff Com. eng, lt.com tac, lt.com sci, lt. eng/universal. It would truly make the D'deridex the well rounded multi-role ship all cruisers should be... but that's probably exactly why we wouldn't get such a gem of a boff station layout. =(
Lt.cmd tac
Cmd.eng
Lt. eng
Lt.cmd sci
That's Galaxy material my friend :P
"Cryptic Studio’s Jack Emmert (2010): Microtransactions are the biggest bunch of nonsense. I like paying one fee and not worrying about it – like my cellphone. The world’s biggest MMO isn’t item based, even though the black market item GDP is bigger than Russia … microtransactions make me want to die.”
d'deridex turning wile cloaking. that looks like it deserve a 9 turn rate to me
you basically never see it turn other then here. same with the negvar, it pivots a little wile attacking DS9, yet it has a 9 turn. we see the galaxy turn better then both and its stuck at 6.
they chose to punish the d'deridex in game even though theres really no information ether way about mobility, except that clip there. for the sake of game play, it should move as well as a negvar. the galaxy too. all fed cruisers and carriers should get a +2 to their base turn rate to make them not such a chore to fly. their options are extreamly limited currently turning so poorly.
Well I think you may have just supported the dev's making it so the D'deridex can only really turn while cloaked, lol. If I am not mistaken, the turn boost takes effect the moment you activate the ability, no waiting 5 seconds or whatever, so turning quickly while disappearing is what the D'deridex can do now.
The main problem with the turning rate is the anemic combat distances we have and the tiny maps. We basically have to turn on a spot or run out of space or weapon range.
The main problem with the turning rate is the anemic combat distances we have and the tiny maps. We basically have to turn on a spot or run out of space or weapon range.
Indeed, it is often quite difficult to stay within 10km of an enemy while not getting too close to it (borg queen keeping you at 5-10km if you don't want instadeath) while also trying to keep team mates within range for support. Especially in slow to maneuver vessels, the escort type ships turn on a dime, flip in the opposite direction and are far out of range by the time a cruiser/carrier can come about. However, the changes to turn rate skill, rcs, and hopefully turn modifiers on engines seems to help mitigate this. I hopped in my recluse on tribble with two rcs and just the borg engine with 6 points in impulse thrusters and it was WAY more maneuverable than on holodeck. Also, rcs accelerators were actually useful on it, which was a refreshing change.
I'm also curious if turn rates/inertia are working quite the way they're supposed to, the ody is supposed to have a slightly better turn and inertia rating than the bortas, but with the same impulse thrusters and engine and rcs on the ody and bortas on holodeck, same engine power, the ody seems to mysteriously be less maneuverable despite better numbers. Of course I can't actually confirm this... the ody just "feels" less maneuverable. I suppose it could just be perception... but yeah.
I wonder how close the changes on tribble to Starship Impulse skill come to effectively doing this.
Has to help. I don't fly cruisers so i dont know.
helps a little, with a ton of turn consoles. with 5 turn consoles i can get a negvar to turn beter then 35 easy, even touch 40 turn rate with 5 turn consoles. i can barly get beter then 20 turn with a fleet galaxy, even seperated its just +10 more to about 30. the differecen between these ships is 3 turn rate. 3 turn rate, and the neg var can turn twice as well after its been buffed the same. the solution has to be adjusting the base, as long as the turn rate boosters buff by a %
Well I think you may have just supported the dev's making it so the D'deridex can only really turn while cloaked, lol. If I am not mistaken, the turn boost takes effect the moment you activate the ability, no waiting 5 seconds or whatever, so turning quickly while disappearing is what the D'deridex can do now.
so far, i haven't encountered anything that makes less sense then the flat +~15 or so turn from battle cloaking. that makes no sense at all. but it sure is nice to watch the ship handle like that, the d'deridex moves like my negvar wile its cloaked. thats how it should move all the time, if it can more like that under a certain condition.
also, it takes 3 seconds for that turn rate to kick in. those d'deridex hadn't got their turn rate buff wile they were visible :rolleyes:
I have found the warp core mechanics confusing rather going into more Depth of play. Whilst its conceivable that it would get users to transwarp more using EC, how would the Broader community see this?.
Already the game is very in depth in regard to content, much of the Existing ship components are not Explained enough to draw in New players for lack of in game component Explanations. I do have a suggestion that could at least help Explain each component and its basic Function to the overall ship.
Try Tooltip Balloons when hovering over each component and in that balloon give a Basic Explanation of each components then if the user wants to learn more about a particular Component allow for a link to the appropriate STO Wiki Article, or, Better integrate Wikis into Sto Itself. New users are going to be very confused with the warp core element of play and there not going to know about Abilities that target that particular Ship Component. I Really suggest research on New players in STO and look at the Dynamic picture of how users perceive the game from a Newbies point of View and really condense learning to basic levels like tool tips in game or better component in game Tutorials.
If i were you i probably would not focus New game Mechanics unless there was a way to Quickly Learn and go. The warp core Element is good for STO Veterans and amiture players, but may not be good for Newbies.
so far, i haven't encountered anything that makes less sense then the flat +~15 or so turn from battle cloaking. that makes no sense at all. but it sure is nice to watch the ship handle like that, the d'deridex moves like my negvar wile its cloaked. thats how it should move all the time, if it can more like that under a certain condition.
also, it takes 3 seconds for that turn rate to kick in. those d'deridex hadn't got their turn rate buff wile they were visible :rolleyes:
Well no, it doesn't really make sense that battle cloak is the one turn rate boost that gives a flat bonus like that, except emergency power to engines now does that too, but I digress. I share your cruiser/carrier turn rate frustrations, I just don't know how to 'fix' things without potentially throwing off the perceived balance of the game. If they were to increase the turn rate on cruisers, they'd probably feel the need to compensate by doubling the damage of dual heavy cannons or something. :rolleyes:
And poo, I was told the turn boost takes effect immediately, oh well...
the minus 10 power to each sububsystem is crippling the Warbirds in pvp. So plz increase the poerlvbl again. balance only matters much in pvp anyways so you don?t have to look at pve that much for terms of balance.
AS stated also, teh singularity powers are more or less useless, which matches with my impression of hte powers also.
And my personal experience as sci in a Warbird goes according to it. There is jsut not enough power to run the sci skills propperly without gimping the dmg output more then the skills impact would justify. (as far as you can speak of effective sci skills anyways).
I really would like to have a word with the devs that testing this stuff and i bet i am not the only one.
As i said before it seems to me that your testing methodes are not really giving useful results.
You guys should go and do some pvp matches with premades and pugs. Then you can see if changes work out or not.
Reynolds/Thokal
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class/R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit TheWiseGuys
Well no, it doesn't really make sense that battle cloak is the one turn rate boost that gives a flat bonus like that, except emergency power to engines now does that too, but I digress. I share your cruiser/carrier turn rate frustrations, I just don't know how to 'fix' things without potentially throwing off the perceived balance of the game. If they were to increase the turn rate on cruisers, they'd probably feel the need to compensate by doubling the damage of dual heavy cannons or something. :rolleyes:
And poo, I was told the turn boost takes effect immediately, oh well...
ships that turn poorly are so underpowered that even a massive buff would imbalance nothing. +1-3 more turn is hardly massive
Why is it that the Feds have been crying, begging even, for ages that cruisers need some help, any help, maybe a tiny turn rate buff of even 1 would make us happy, and the KDF would always come down on us like a ton of bricks, screaming that cruisers are fine, learn to play, (even though the KDF cruisers DON'T turn like whales and are just fine) but now that the D'Deridex is just as crappy as the Galaxy, everyone is up in arms over it's turn rate and the KDF actually supports them?
Why is it that the Feds have been crying, begging even, for ages that cruisers need some help, any help, maybe a tiny turn rate buff of even 1 would make us happy, and the KDF would always come down on us like a ton of bricks, screaming that cruisers are fine, learn to play, (even though the KDF cruisers DON'T turn like whales and are just fine) but now that the D'Deridex is just as crappy as the Galaxy, everyone is up in arms over it's turn rate and the KDF actually supports them?
if anyone has been the champion for fed cruiser turn rate buffs, its me, someone who has more kdf characters then fed. not only do i want the d'deridex to turn well, but i'd like the galaxy, my favorite ship, to turn well too. ive never seen any 'kdf player' come down on feds wanting better turn rates for their ships. the solution to the d'deridex turning better then it does now is for the turn rate floor to be raised from 5 to about 8. that would include all the fed ships too. +2 or +3 to all of them. they would still be slightly behind the kdf cruisers, but their turn rate wouldn't be a huge liability anymore.
I should mention that I am not part of the closed Beta, and haven't flown any of the ships or tried any of the mechanics discussed here. I have read the entire thread to this point, however, and have noticed a few issues that keep cropping up. I hope my input might, therefor, be useful.
Balancing the fact that all of the new Romulan ships have Battle Cloak -- somewhere in here is the current 'Rom ships are too survivable' issue.
Balancing the singularity core, tweaking the mechanics used, and accounting for the impact of the various singularity powers.
Giving Romulans a distinct new flavor; a in-game experience which feel distinctly different and uniquely Romulan.
The first two issues might be best addressed testing them sequentially -- ie, not at the same time. Hyouki will most assuredly object, but for testing purposes only a singularity core with no powers and no power penalty needs to be made available. This would allow the devs to get metrics on "Warbirds with just Battle Cloaks" vs all other ships, and get the balance of those ships right.
<opinion>
Don't reinvent the wheel here, and don't try to fix the problem by fixing stuff too far away from the source of the problem. If the Romulan BC is too much better than the KDF BC, then make the Rom BC less of an upgrade. If the new Traits give too big a boost to the cloak, reduce the effect of the trait. If a ship has too much shield or hull, reduce the shield and/or hull. By creating a big-buff problem in one spot and then trying to balance it by nerfing in other areas, an extremely difficult balancing act is created -- the problem spreads by affecting a dozen or more other unexpected areas. Each of those adjustments cascades over into yet more areas -- far simpler (and maybe better) to reduce the big-buff to a less-big-buff.
</opinion>
Step two, once the no-singularity-power Warbirds are sufficiently competitive and non-overpowered, then the singularity-power Warbirds can be balanced against them.
Lastly, making the Romulan look-and-feel distinct and enjoyable should be an important priority which is, nevertheless, less important than making certain that the game works. The first two points of balancing are long-term survival-of-the-game issues; look and feel is distinctly secondary. That being said, what I have seen of the new artwork, uniforms, hairstyles, etc is all excellent.
TL;DR: Get the ships right first, by testing with a special testing-only core.
<comment> Don't know why the list showed up in that weird font.
the minus 10 power to each sububsystem is crippling the Warbirds in pvp. So plz increase the poerlvbl again. balance only matters much in pvp anyways so you don?t have to look at pve that much for terms of balance.
AS stated also, teh singularity powers are more or less useless, which matches with my impression of hte powers also.
And my personal experience as sci in a Warbird goes according to it. There is jsut not enough power to run the sci skills propperly without gimping the dmg output more then the skills impact would justify. (as far as you can speak of effective sci skills anyways).
I really would like to have a word with the devs that testing this stuff and i bet i am not the only one.
As i said before it seems to me that your testing methodes are not really giving useful results.
You guys should go and do some pvp matches with premades and pugs. Then you can see if changes work out or not.
Their methods for testing? Yes...they shouldn't pick people who don't even bother trying to understand a system before declaring it useless. Now, go back to your ship and learn to use your Singularity properly, and you suddenly won't feel underpowered anymore, mmkay?
Now that I'm in the T5 Mogai, I'm just LOVING charging a group, hitting Charged Particle Burst, and dropping a Gravity Well followed by a Singularity Jump. Weakens shields, pins in place (they can't escape both the GW and the Singularity Jump unless they're at the edge of the GW when it's fired, and as long as they're trapped, they can't shoot accurately even if they can spot me in the first place due to the perception debuff), and I can spin around and start spraying them with plasma torps. Not as powerful as my science ship's Murderball combo, but I have a lot more tac skills to play with, at least.
What you need to accept is that you can't simply just try to build your normal ship and just use your singularity powers whenever you feel like it; you have to build and play to take advantage of your singularity powers. You need to select BOff powers to complement them. As long as you dismiss them, you will never get anywhere in a Warbird. And that's YOUR fault, not the devs.
So i have an idea for a solution to the whole mess. 6 actually.
-Power Levels at 50: This puts the romulan ships straight on par with other ships as far as power levels go.
-Cloak: cooldown of 40 seconds, each boff or your toon with operative drops it by 5 seconds but you can't make it go below 25 seconds.
-Singularity powers stay as they are right now, offensive ones might get 5% reduction.
-All ships get 5-15% hull reduction depending on ship and tier. They already have drastically higher hulls than Klingon and even federation escort, battleships and birds of prey.
-Power levels at 45: Puts us slightly below, but consoles and set pieces will bring most of us back up
-Cloak: cooldown of 30 seconds, each boff or your toon with operative drops it by 5 seconds but you can't make it go below 15 seconds.
-Singularity powers stay as they are now.
-All ships get 5-10% hull reduction depending on ship and tier.
Power levels at 40:
Cloak: cooldown of 20 seconds, boffs/toon reduce it by percentage. no minimum.
-Singularity powers all get 10-20% boost in damage or effectiveness to make up loss of power. Amount boost is dependent on power. Not all should get 20% boost.
-Singularity adds power to a max of 7.5 to all 4 systems at max singularity. an extra +2.5 can be added by cores with certain modifiers for a max of +10 to one system and +7.5 to all others.
-All ships get 5% hull reduction.
Other options.
Add Fleet Singularity cores that add +5 to all power levels instead of just one. max singuarity would give you an additional +5 to one system. Giving an always on power bonus would make this console decrease all singularity powers by 10% but you'd have an always-on +5 to all power levels.
Cloak Cooldown = less stealth. An idea i have to balance the cloak. The faster your cooldown, meaning the more boffs you put on it or the lower it is by default the less stealth you have while in cloak. So if the cloak is at 20 seconds and you drop it to 10 seconds it's only 50% effective compared to the full 20 second cooldown. Not sure if this could even be coded in, but i feel that it's very fair.
No Powers Core: This would be either an elite fleet item or cstore item, something not cheap to encourage use of the new power system.
-Singularity core that disables the use of all singularity powers. You still gain power level and that still effects your cloak, but all singularity abilities are disabled and can't be used.
-In return, this gives you +5 to all powers with an additional +5 to all powers based on charge of core. +1 per charge. There for in order to still be on par with our federation and klingon players you need a full charge. That full charge will drastically reduce your stealth in cloak, but will decrease it's cooldown maybe 2.5% per charge so at max charge you get a 12.5% decrease in cooldown to the cloak. Additionally this core lowers your hull by 10%
-if lowering hull is not possible than by simply adding this option into the game, decrease all ships hulls by 10%
So those are a few ideas i have, and in my opinion all are fair and balanced though I'd love some criticism on them.
Personally my feelings are that the singularity powers are a very cool concept, but they fail miserably in application. None of the offensive ones are really worth using. The shield heal one is great and adds a great free healing ability for tac toons on a ship without many eng/sci boffs. The cloak is great but having too long of a cooldown defeats the whole purpose of it of being able to be activated in battle.
With power levels at 45 it's really not that bad, it's a minor loss and can easily be offset with consoles and abilities, we'll still be lower than fed/kdf by 5 points to offset the other abilities, but at least we won't be so drastically below that we can't at least be on the same level.
40 power levels is just too low. Unless the singularity powers are very powerful and really worth using, which they're not, then 40 is just too much of a hit, especially for those of us who are just going to use the healing power since the other ones are really not worth it and vastly underpowered to our weapons. and add in the -10 to weapons power and we are now vastly inferior to any FED or KDF player. PVP is essentially ruined for Romulans since they'll never keep their DPS up with FED or KDF thanks to the -10 power. And even PVE will be difficult since as most of us have seen the singularity powers are not that effective even at max power against most normal enemies meaning that even at level 50 say doing elite stfs they'll be pretty useless and we'll all just be using the healing power
Romulans are getting penalties in exchange for benefits that aren't even benefits.
And that really sums it up. I don't want to just give Romulans +10 power without sacrificing anything, but lets be honest, these benefits are not that great right now, so either they need to get a lot better, which isn't really balanced, or you need to give us ways to be on par with Federation or Klingon characters.
To any dev that reads this, thank you for your time. I'm loving the expansion and everything that's coming with it and I've already bought my legacy pack and can't wait to play, but i do hope that you'll take my suggestions as well as those of hundreds of other people in this topic to heart and make the Romulans even more enjoyable for us.
So once again thanks for the game, thanks for Legacy of Romulus and hopefully thank you for your time in reading this.
I should mention that I am not part of the closed Beta, and haven't flown any of the ships or tried any of the mechanics discussed here. I have read the entire thread to this point, however, and have noticed a few issues that keep cropping up. I hope my input might, therefor, be useful.
Balancing the fact that all of the new Romulan ships have Battle Cloak -- somewhere in here is the current 'Rom ships are too survivable' issue.
Balancing the singularity core, tweaking the mechanics used, and accounting for the impact of the various singularity powers.
Giving Romulans a distinct new flavor; a in-game experience which feel distinctly different and uniquely Romulan.
The first two issues might be best addressed testing them sequentially -- ie, not at the same time. Hyouki will most assuredly object, but for testing purposes only a singularity core with no powers and no power penalty needs to be made available. This would allow the devs to get metrics on "Warbirds with just Battle Cloaks" vs all other ships, and get the balance of those ships right.
Yer dang right I'm going to object! You don't need to test Battle Cloaks separately; we have plenty of experience with Klingon cloaking ships to know how changing the balance of shields, hull, seating, etc. will interact with the Battle Cloak. What we DON'T know is how effective the three singularity skills that can be used to cover a transition into cloak will do their job...and taking those out of the testing makes it kind of pointless.
<opinion>
Don't reinvent the wheel here, and don't try to fix the problem by fixing stuff too far away from the source of the problem. If the Romulan BC is too much better than the KDF BC, then make the Rom BC less of an upgrade. If the new Traits give too big a boost to the cloak, reduce the effect of the trait. If a ship has too much shield or hull, reduce the shield and/or hull. By creating a big-buff problem in one spot and then trying to balance it by nerfing in other areas, an extremely difficult balancing act is created -- the problem spreads by affecting a dozen or more other unexpected areas. Each of those adjustments cascades over into yet more areas -- far simpler (and maybe better) to reduce the big-buff to a less-big-buff.
</opinion>
What this ends up becoming is, however, "don't do anything innovative; don't rock the boat; don't do anything that might interject new excitement into the game because we don't want to risk disturbing the stable-but-stale setup we have now". I agree that's a good attitude for regular updates (e.g. Season updates), but is ultimately fatal if an expansion can't be allowed to offer anything but "more of the same".
Step two, once the no-singularity-power Warbirds are sufficiently competitive and non-overpowered, then the singularity-power Warbirds can be balanced against them.
Again, the Singularity Powers are designed to work WITH the Battle Cloak; the power levels are designed to compensate for the combination of BOTH. If you balance the BC first, then adding the Singularity unbalances it again.
Lastly, making the Romulan look-and-feel distinct and enjoyable should be an important priority which is, nevertheless, less important than making certain that the game works. The first two points of balancing are long-term survival-of-the-game issues; look and feel is distinctly secondary. That being said, what I have seen of the new artwork, uniforms, hairstyles, etc is all excellent.
TL;DR: Get the ships right first, by testing with a special testing-only core.
<comment> Don't know why the list showed up in that weird font.
The look and feel is indeed great...although for some reason I can't shake the feeling that my captain is running around in a Romulan dinner-jacket rather than a uniform...
So i have an idea for a solution to the whole mess. 6 actually.
-Power Levels at 50: This puts the romulan ships straight on par with other ships as far as power levels go.
-Cloak: cooldown of 40 seconds, each boff or your toon with operative drops it by 5 seconds but you can't make it go below 25 seconds.
-Singularity powers stay as they are right now, offensive ones might get 5% reduction.
-All ships get 5-15% hull reduction depending on ship and tier. They already have drastically higher hulls than Klingon and even federation escort, battleships and birds of prey.
-Power levels at 45: Puts us slightly below, but consoles and set pieces will bring most of us back up
-Cloak: cooldown of 30 seconds, each boff or your toon with operative drops it by 5 seconds but you can't make it go below 15 seconds.
-Singularity powers stay as they are now.
-All ships get 5-10% hull reduction depending on ship and tier.
Power levels at 40:
Cloak: cooldown of 20 seconds, boffs/toon reduce it by percentage. no minimum.
-Singularity powers all get 10-20% boost in damage or effectiveness to make up loss of power. Amount boost is dependent on power. Not all should get 20% boost.
-Singularity adds power to a max of 7.5 to all 4 systems at max singularity. an extra +2.5 can be added by cores with certain modifiers for a max of +10 to one system and +7.5 to all others.
-All ships get 5% hull reduction.
Other options.
Add Fleet Singularity cores that add +5 to all power levels instead of just one. max singuarity would give you an additional +5 to one system. Giving an always on power bonus would make this console decrease all singularity powers by 10% but you'd have an always-on +5 to all power levels.
Cloak Cooldown = less stealth. An idea i have to balance the cloak. The faster your cooldown, meaning the more boffs you put on it or the lower it is by default the less stealth you have while in cloak. So if the cloak is at 20 seconds and you drop it to 10 seconds it's only 50% effective compared to the full 20 second cooldown. Not sure if this could even be coded in, but i feel that it's very fair.
No Powers Core: This would be either an elite fleet item or cstore item, something not cheap to encourage use of the new power system.
-Singularity core that disables the use of all singularity powers. You still gain power level and that still effects your cloak, but all singularity abilities are disabled and can't be used.
-In return, this gives you +5 to all powers with an additional +5 to all powers based on charge of core. +1 per charge. There for in order to still be on par with our federation and klingon players you need a full charge. That full charge will drastically reduce your stealth in cloak, but will decrease it's cooldown maybe 2.5% per charge so at max charge you get a 12.5% decrease in cooldown to the cloak. Additionally this core lowers your hull by 10%
-if lowering hull is not possible than by simply adding this option into the game, decrease all ships hulls by 10%
So those are a few ideas i have, and in my opinion all are fair and balanced though I'd love some criticism on them.
Personally my feelings are that the singularity powers are a very cool concept, but they fail miserably in application. None of the offensive ones are really worth using. The shield heal one is great and adds a great free healing ability for tac toons on a ship without many eng/sci boffs. The cloak is great but having too long of a cooldown defeats the whole purpose of it of being able to be activated in battle.
With power levels at 45 it's really not that bad, it's a minor loss and can easily be offset with consoles and abilities, we'll still be lower than fed/kdf by 5 points to offset the other abilities, but at least we won't be so drastically below that we can't at least be on the same level.
40 power levels is just too low. Unless the singularity powers are very powerful and really worth using, which they're not, then 40 is just too much of a hit, especially for those of us who are just going to use the healing power since the other ones are really not worth it and vastly underpowered to our weapons. and add in the -10 to weapons power and we are now vastly inferior to any FED or KDF player. PVP is essentially ruined for Romulans since they'll never keep their DPS up with FED or KDF thanks to the -10 power. And even PVE will be difficult since as most of us have seen the singularity powers are not that effective even at max power against most normal enemies meaning that even at level 50 say doing elite stfs they'll be pretty useless and we'll all just be using the healing power
As i just saw in another topic:
And that really sums it up. I don't want to just give Romulans +10 power without sacrificing anything, but lets be honest, these benefits are not that great right now, so either they need to get a lot better, which isn't really balanced, or you need to give us ways to be on par with Federation or Klingon characters.
To any dev that reads this, thank you for your time. I'm loving the expansion and everything that's coming with it and I've already bought my legacy pack and can't wait to play, but i do hope that you'll take my suggestions as well as those of hundreds of other people in this topic to heart and make the Romulans even more enjoyable for us.
So once again thanks for the game, thanks for Legacy of Romulus and hopefully thank you for your time in reading this.
SAID BEFORE, WILL PROBABLY SAY MANY, MANY MORE TIMES.
-10 power is too much of a drain...if you're playing your Warbird like a Federation or Klingon ship with an extra BOff (one that you don't like, either). If you are playing to take advantage of your Singularity powers and your cloak properly, then the power change isn't a problem. Quit trying to "fix" a system you haven't even fully understood yet.
Heck, we haven't even seen most of the Legacy consoles in action yet, and have no idea what their set bonuses will be. We haven't seen what DOffs will be introduced to enhance the Singularity system. In short, we ain't seen nothin' yet. Give it a chance, and see what you can do with what you're given.
Their methods for testing? Yes...they shouldn't pick people who don't even bother trying to understand a system before declaring it useless. Now, go back to your ship and learn to use your Singularity properly, and you suddenly won't feel underpowered anymore, mmkay?
Now that I'm in the T5 Mogai, I'm just LOVING charging a group, hitting Charged Particle Burst, and dropping a Gravity Well followed by a Singularity Jump. Weakens shields, pins in place (they can't escape both the GW and the Singularity Jump unless they're at the edge of the GW when it's fired, and as long as they're trapped, they can't shoot accurately even if they can spot me in the first place due to the perception debuff), and I can spin around and start spraying them with plasma torps. Not as powerful as my science ship's Murderball combo, but I have a lot more tac skills to play with, at least.
What you need to accept is that you can't simply just try to build your normal ship and just use your singularity powers whenever you feel like it; you have to build and play to take advantage of your singularity powers. You need to select BOff powers to complement them. As long as you dismiss them, you will never get anywhere in a Warbird. And that's YOUR fault, not the devs.
I am not talking about pve issues. PvE content is so easy that you can faceroll to do it in most cases, except elite stfs. I can handle the standard pve pretty easy in my Warbird. Still some situational abilities are not worth a permanent -10 to every subsystems. They should bring the cloak back to 40 sec generall cd and raise the power lvls again to -5 for each subsystem.
It is more a matter of what you have to pay for the things you get, and atm the price is way to high.
I woud be happy if could get a singularity core without any of those abilities and only -5 Power to each subsystem.
And besides that i would still like to know how they are testing changes, just to understand on which base they made thier decissions. Especially since the last sci nerf.
And if you have to use doffs to compensate things you won`t have the slots open for other doffs, which give ships that don`t have to compensate an advantage over you again.
And i doubt that using cpb have a significant effect of the time you need to kill a bunch of npcs. Most of them die in one pass anyways, at least with an Escort/Warbird.
Reynolds/Thokal
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class/R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit TheWiseGuys
SAID BEFORE, WILL PROBABLY SAY MANY, MANY MORE TIMES.
-10 power is too much of a drain...if you're playing your Warbird like a Federation or Klingon ship with an extra BOff (one that you don't like, either). If you are playing to take advantage of your Singularity powers and your cloak properly, then the power change isn't a problem. Quit trying to "fix" a system you haven't even fully understood yet.
Heck, we haven't even seen most of the Legacy consoles in action yet, and have no idea what their set bonuses will be. We haven't seen what DOffs will be introduced to enhance the Singularity system. In short, we ain't seen nothin' yet. Give it a chance, and see what you can do with what you're given.
Don't think you actually read my post. I didn't write that whole thing out to complain, just to give my opinions on it. I have played as a romulan and it's been my experience that the singularity powers are not powerful enough to justify the power loss. at least not -10. And if you would of read my post you would of seen that i gave 6 different opinions and options on balancing the changes.
I plan on taking advantage of the singularity powers, but i also don't want to fly a crippled ship and right now the -10 does seem crippled to me. I even gave a solution for keeping the powers at -10 that if implemented i would be very happy with. as would many others, it would allow those who don't want to use the powers to have power levels still less than FED/KDF but at least close, and those of us who want to use the powers still get a nice bonus until we do.
I will gladly admit that your right, we haven't seen everything. But we've seen the basics, and the basics are troubling.
Again if you read you would of seen that i already bought a legacy pack. I also already bought weapons and consoles to outfit my romulan at level 50, so i'm very invested and i'll play no matter what. And there is nothing wrong to posting my opinions and possible balancing options.
Also, i have no idea what your talking about for the extra boff. warbirds have the same max boffs as any other ship as far as i can tell on tribble.
You don't need to test Battle Cloaks separately; we have plenty of experience with Klingon cloaking ships to know how changing the balance of shields, hull, seating, etc. will interact with the Battle Cloak.
Except we don't. The Romulan BC is better than the KDF BC in ways the devs won't tell us; it is numerically 'cloak-ier' which leads to better Defense, etc. And in your very next point, you object to using lessons learned about balancing the KDF cloak as 'just more of the same' and roundly condemn it. If the Rom BC is going to be different from the KDF BC, then you can't claim that it is the same as the KDF BC, and therefore 'needs no separate testing'.
What we DON'T know is how effective the three singularity skills that can be used to cover a transition into cloak will do their job...and taking those out of the testing makes it kind of pointless.
Not at all; I in no way advocated stopping testing at that point. The point was just to allow the issues with the Rom BC to be isolated for testing purposes only from the issues that may need to be addressed with the Singularity power & powers. And my point was also that smaller problems are easier to fix than big problems, and that it may be better to fix the actual cause of the problem rather than trying to create an endless series of work-arounds.
What this ends up becoming is, however, "don't do anything innovative; don't rock the boat; don't do anything that might interject new excitement into the game because we don't want to risk disturbing the stable-but-stale setup we have now". I agree that's a good attitude for regular updates (e.g. Season updates), but is ultimately fatal if an expansion can't be allowed to offer anything but "more of the same".
This is exactly why the Rom BC needs to be tested on it's own; if you don't want to balance it in exactly the same way as the KDF BC, then it needs to be balanced in some new way. That new balance needs to be shaken out in testing, hopefully in an environment where the just-BC issues can be isolated.
Again, the Singularity Powers are designed to work WITH the Battle Cloak; the power levels are designed to compensate for the combination of BOTH. If you balance the BC first, then adding the Singularity unbalances it again.
Will Singularity powers + Rom BC Warbirds be better than just-Rom BC Warbirds? I don't really know, and neither do you. Such a test is utterly impossible at the moment. What I do know is that some folks who fly the Warbirds say the powers are too situational to be worth the penalties being paid for them. I would hope that the singularity powers do turn out to be an increase in power -- but that is exactly what the second round of testing would determine.
<opinion>
I must say that although you and some others do say that the powers are ok as is, or over-powered, you constantly invoke using combinations of BOff abilities alongside the singularity powers. And if a Romulan captain chooses not to slot those BOff powers? This sounds like a reduction in versatility to me; it seems like the Singularity powers have to be 'compensated for' by a particular, predictable build. Is your response to the 'rather have something other than Eject Warp Plasma in that slot' captains that they should go play some other faction? Perhaps the powers are not unblemished masterpieces yet; perhaps they need to be tested against opponents who are exactly-like-the-same-ship-except-with-no-powers.
<opinion>
And again, I didn't advocate stopping testing; the Powers+BC Warbirds would be competed against the just-BC Warbirds and the Powers+BC Warbirds would be tweaked until they were no longer over-powered. This is what testing is intended to accomplish, N'est-ce pas?
The look and feel is indeed great...although for some reason I can't shake the feeling that my captain is running around in a Romulan dinner-jacket rather than a uniform...
It's pretty much a non-starter to suggest nerfing the battle cloak in any way, shape, or form. If the battle cloak takes any longer than 20 seconds to cool, it might as well not even be there considering how fast paced combat is in this game. The romulans are known for their cloak and dagger and in and out of cloak tactics, romulans are all about cloak. Reducing the effectiveness of the cloak by up to 50 percent is ridiculous and also defeats the purpose of it. A D'deridex and Ha'apax are massive and slow, so they are already going to be easy enough to stay on top of once they battle cloak, let alone with a 50% less effective battle cloak, so all around, nerfing romulan battle cloak is a no go.
I agree that balancing the battle cloak first and then balancing the singularity powers makes sense, and, as I've said before, we've seen from the peghqu and the chimera that a battle cloak apparently only warrants an 8% drop in shield modifier, as these two ships are identical, except the peghqu has 8% lower shields and a battle cloak. So lets not reinvent the wheel on this one, give the romulan ships 8% lower shields or take it out of their hull, but lets not go crazy.
And let us keep in mind that the "increased surviveability" a battle cloak provides comes at a cost. With battle cloak, you might escape destruction, but you can't do damage while cloaked, you can't actively heal while cloaked, and shields don't regenerate while cloaked, which means you have to run off and decloak to heal and come back, or spend a great deal of time while cloaked to let your hull passively repair, but you won't get any shields back. And keep in mind that all this time, the enemy has a chance to actively heal, so the enemy's surviveability also goes up. Plus there's the very real chance that attempting to battle cloak is exactly the opening the enemy needs to blast you out of the sky.
That leaves balancing the singularity powers... which is admittedly difficult. They are essentially one power, because you can only use one of them when you get a charge, but they do provide the versatility of being able to choose which power you use. However, they are not reliably available. The singularity does not constantly charge, it only charges while in combat and loses charge out of combat and stops charging while cloaked. Which is why I don't see the point in high singularity charge reducing the effectiveness of your cloak... the two of them already rub each other the wrong way because the cloak stops singularity charging.
Unfortunately, I'm not even sure what to suggest for balancing this because it is so complicated a thing.
lets have an honest evaluation of the warbirds from a pve point of view. depending on your presets, at low character levels you can have engine power so low you crawl, or shield power so low it doesn't regenerate, wile you try to maximize weapons power. really... that never was much of a problem actually, i dont even need to run EPtS in any of the pve. the pve is so easy that you can have 2 hands tied behind your back and still do fine.
wile running through the pi cantis sorties 100 times to level on elite dificulty, the healing singularity power with the temperarry hitpoints has saved me several times, and so has the phantom ship ability, drawing agro away from those fed escorts with the point defense console that has like 20,000 DPS for some insane reason.
the plasma shockwave does basically nothing, no npc lives long enough for some DOT to mater, and the initial damage has no noticeable effect on enemy shields no mater the singularity level. npcs are hitpoint sponges after all, but i cant even see this as being worth much in pvp. maybe as a spam object clearer but thats it. then you lose out on useing a skill that actually does something for a good wile. compared to a stranded plasma torp fireing every 8 seconds, applying a dot, and even compared to that the shock wave with its rate of fire is doing nothing. this being on the same system cooldowns as the other singularity skills is kinda laughable. this should proboly be a new BOFF ability that can be used as often as PSW. and in their infinite fun hateing wisdom, they castrated all DOT builds by taking away plasma infuser's ability to buff all forms of plasma damage. so buffing this skill any significant amount aint going to happen. im still far from level cap with a filled out skill try though, so i suppose all particle buffed it might do something, but im doubting.
the singularity + jump the d'deridex has looks like the perfect weapon against siphon drones or interceptors, maybe runabouts too. any swarm of spam thats pinning you down will be delt with by that, plus you can jump and face your target. not terribly useful in pve, but im gonna like this in pvp.
cant comment on the ha'apax overcharge yet
the romulans will get by the power disadvantage just fine by end game. so why even have the power disadvantage? well, for pvp it will make a difference, and is an important balancing measure. battle cloak has almost no use in pve, it can be sorta fun to use, but changes little. in pvp it will be very powerful. so in the end the warbirds have a few gimicks that are sorta fun for pve, but are hardly game changing, and like always every little thing can make a big difference in pvp. im glad they are trying to balance for pvp here, once again. but not all is perfect...
frankly, the hitpoins on all the romulan ships are too high for having the battle cloak. ether that, or the bird of preys need a significant balance pass. i think both proboly. the lower power isn't to critical, and balances out the singularity powers. but the warbirds have federation ship hitpoints with battle cloak. maybe the warbirds need to be given the same treatment that fleet ships get, but instead of +10% to everything, -10% instead.
as far as KDF bops go, universal station setups? big deal, theres an escort that has every one of a bop's good station setups, plus an extra ENS station, more hitpoints, and enough turn so its not at any disadvantage. the one big deal thing the bops have is the turn rate that allows them to keep their weapons to bare the most. but thats becomes less and less important since they dont have the hitpoints to hang out in combat for longer then their battle cloak cooldown. the best strategy for them is to go for insta kills, which you dont need turn rate to even do, even a galaxy X can sorta do that. the greatest insult to injury to the raiders by the warbirds, is that the T'Varo is better then the defiant in EVERY way, and not only has a battle cloak, but an ENHANCED battlecloak, something the brel practically sells its soul for.that ship ether needs to look a lot more like the brel stat wise, or lose the enhanced battle cloak. i say lose the enhanced.
i think the best way to balance the romulan ships is to do a balance pass on everything else, is this a major expansion or isnt it? start here, with a turn rate floor rebalance-http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=9301751&postcount=33. then big kdf bops a universal ENS and like 15% more hitpoints and beter shield mod, but take away 1 turn rate. could say that the kdf upgraded them and made them more durable, but at a minor maneuverability expense. i suppose thats enough for now
40 power levels is just too low. Unless the singularity powers are very powerful and really worth using, which they're not, then 40 is just too much of a hit, especially for those of us who are just going to use the healing power since the other ones are really not worth it and vastly underpowered to our weapons. and add in the -10 to weapons power and we are now vastly inferior to any FED or KDF player. PVP is essentially ruined for Romulans since they'll never keep their DPS up with FED or KDF thanks to the -10 power. And even PVE will be difficult since as most of us have seen the singularity powers are not that effective even at max power against most normal enemies meaning that even at level 50 say doing elite stfs they'll be pretty useless and we'll all just be using the healing power
This is the point I'm addressing, and everything else you said follows from this point: -10 to each subsystem is too much, and the singularity is effectively useless. If this argument is invalid, then the rest of your post (suggested fixes) is unnecessary.
My counterargument has, and will likely continue to be, people are continually doing the following:
1.) trying to fly their Warbird as if it was their regular ship with an extra "virtual" BOff (the singularity powers) and a cloak, and
2.) underestimating, misunderstanding, or disregarding the singularity power, considering them as "useless" or "a gimmick".
For issue 1, people need to start realizing that they're completely missing the point. Their argument comes off like saying "iPods are terrible! I tried to drive a nail with it and it broke on the first one!" It's understandable that you want to use your hard-earned expertise with existing systems to try to make a new one work, but when it fails (like it's failing for everyone relying on their standard builds which rely on standard power levels) the proper response is "how can I make good use of the tools I've got"...not to demand Apple redesign the iPod to be turned into some variant of the hammer you've already got.
Which brings us to point 2. The singularity powers are potent, but as many have pointed out they're rather situational. Again, the proper response here is NOT "I don't face those situations, therefore they're useless, therefore the system has to be changed," but rather "how can I CREATE those situations where they're most devastating?" I've been talking tactics a lot here, power combos, setting up situations, building around strengths...and nobody's listening. One of the latest posts got the reply "well what if I don't want to use those powers?" I dunno, come up with your own combos then? I'm not your dang mother. If you don't want a group of enemies trapped in your Gravity Well + Singularity Jump combo, getting chewed up by the GW, blinded by the SJ, and well within radius of one another to soak up all the splash damage from all those Torp Spread 3 volleys coming in, then fine, come up with something else. But if your "something else" isn't enhancing or taking advantage of one of your core powers, you're probably going to be in for a bad time of it. Ignoring them, or pretending Quantum Absorption is the only one with any value, is a recipe for disaster.
Finally, you can start building your ship to mitigate some of those weaknesses. The iconic TOS T'liss demonstrated how effective warbirds can be with torpedos...which neither need nor drain weapon power. Nor do mines. With plasma, even if your energy weapons aren't up to draining shields quickly, your plasma fire will bypass and start eating into the hull. Engineers will probably have a field day in warbirds, as they have access to that lovely new trait that boosts all their power levels whenever they use any battery or EPtX skill, and since Warbirds always have at least three battery slots, that's a fair number of batteries they can bring to bear on their power issues. And so on, and so on. Also as I've said, we haven't even seen everything that's planned. The more we see, the more we'll realize that we've got all the tools we need to make killer warbirds...as long as we're willing to use them.
It's pretty much a non-starter to suggest nerfing the battle cloak in any way, shape, or form. If the battle cloak takes any longer than 20 seconds to cool, it might as well not even be there considering how fast paced combat is in this game. The romulans are known for their cloak and dagger and in and out of cloak tactics, romulans are all about cloak. Reducing the effectiveness of the cloak by up to 50 percent is ridiculous and also defeats the purpose of it. A D'deridex and Ha'apax are massive and slow, so they are already going to be easy enough to stay on top of once they battle cloak, let alone with a 50% less effective battle cloak, so all around, nerfing romulan battle cloak is a no go.
I agree that balancing the battle cloak first and then balancing the singularity powers makes sense, and, as I've said before, we've seen from the peghqu and the chimera that a battle cloak apparently only warrants an 8% drop in shield modifier, as these two ships are identical, except the peghqu has 8% lower shields and a battle cloak. So lets not reinvent the wheel on this one, give the romulan ships 8% lower shields or take it out of their hull, but lets not go crazy.
And let us keep in mind that the "increased surviveability" a battle cloak provides comes at a cost. With battle cloak, you might escape destruction, but you can't do damage while cloaked, you can't actively heal while cloaked, and shields don't regenerate while cloaked, which means you have to run off and decloak to heal and come back, or spend a great deal of time while cloaked to let your hull passively repair, but you won't get any shields back. And keep in mind that all this time, the enemy has a chance to actively heal, so the enemy's surviveability also goes up. Plus there's the very real chance that attempting to battle cloak is exactly the opening the enemy needs to blast you out of the sky.
That leaves balancing the singularity powers... which is admittedly difficult. They are essentially one power, because you can only use one of them when you get a charge, but they do provide the versatility of being able to choose which power you use. However, they are not reliably available. The singularity does not constantly charge, it only charges while in combat and loses charge out of combat and stops charging while cloaked. Which is why I don't see the point in high singularity charge reducing the effectiveness of your cloak... the two of them already rub each other the wrong way because the cloak stops singularity charging.
Unfortunately, I'm not even sure what to suggest for balancing this because it is so complicated a thing.
Really can't disagree with anything.
And speaking of the 'increased survivability' that cryptic keeps talking about, nerf the hull. That's really the solution to everything. boost the power levels, and nerf the hull
The B'rel retrofit has 21000 hull.
The Dhelan retrofit is very similar, though it has an extra boff, 3rd rear weapon, less turn, about 5 times the crew, extra device slot, and 31500 hull.
So were looking at a ship that easily puts the b'rel to shame. 10.5k extra hull, extra weapon, more crew, extra device, AND the singularity powers. Now compared to a fed escort it actually has less hull, but still more crew, extra device, and singularity.
I'd gladly take a 25% hit in hull if it meant boosting the powers back up. And honestly, if you want to balance the ships and reduce the survivability, hull is what needs to change as evident just in comparing the b'rel and dhelan.
Let me say up front, I'm NOT touching PvP applications on this; I will say freely, my ISP sucks so I don't bother trying PvP, I'll have to rely on your own expertise to consider the PvP applications for this info.
Just tossing some numbers out from lvl 50, science officer. 102 points total in particle gen. Damage listed as [blast]/[DoT], rank 5 (rank 1 is about half that)
Plain: 1528 / 4586
With decloak bonus: 1910 / 5732
With Conservation of Energy: 1987 / 5962
With CoE AND decloak: 2369 / 7108
Even if you assume stripped shields, that's still not going to take out, say, a Danube, but it'll certainly help, and hit up to 10 of the little buggers. Not a perfect spam solution, admittedly. Probably more useful vs large torps. Can be enhanced to have a 10% chance to disable one subsystem, but that's too little chance to bother with.
Given that it's the only one that's affected by exotic damage boosts, I think it's primarily there to give science officers more oomph to their arsenal, but it really does not age well or scale well with level.
Dangit, I forgot to check if that's including the bonus from the Romulan Energy Harness for plasma damage. Actual numbers might be lower.
the singularity + jump the d'deridex has looks like the perfect weapon against siphon drones or interceptors, maybe runabouts too. any swarm of spam thats pinning you down will be delt with by that, plus you can jump and face your target. not terribly useful in pve, but im gonna like this in pvp.
The real power of the Singularity Jump is in the Accuracy and Perception debuff; if you've got a good cluster of enemies (preferably ones slowed in some fashion already, such as by warp plasma) you can keep them blind til they move away from it. And if you can arrange a Gravity Well (yours or someone else's) where you drop the Singularity Jump, I don't know if they CAN get away from it. PVE enemies generally don't unless they were at the edge of the effect already. But yeah, will give you enough time to cloak, spin, and decloak without having to worry about attacks from those in the SJ effect.
Since I haven't been relying on energy weapons so much, and certainly not the HCs and DHCs favored by escorts, I'm rather underwhelmed by the Overcharge, but I think those wanting the Raider/Escort playstyle will like it. It looks like it overwrites FAW, so it probably replaces Cannon Rapid Fire and Cannon Spray with its buff. It jacks up damage AND seems to remove weapon fire drain for the duration. For someone on a heavy energy weapon build, they'll probably find plenty of use for it; for myself, not so much. The description says it HAS to be used from cloak, but it appears to be lying, as it seems to work regardless of cloakedness.
frankly, the hitpoins on all the romulan ships are too high for having the battle cloak. ether that, or the bird of preys need a significant balance pass. i think both proboly. the lower power isn't to critical, and balances out the singularity powers. but the warbirds have federation ship hitpoints with battle cloak. maybe the warbirds need to be given the same treatment that fleet ships get, but instead of +10% to everything, -10% instead.
Warbirds have federation strength hulls because they have federation (actually worse) turn rates. The thicker your hull, the lower your turn rate, it has nothing to do with the battle cloak. As I have said before, the peghqu and the chimera are carbon copies of one another on fed and kdf side, the one difference is that the peghqu has a battle cloak, and apparently the compensation for that is -8% shield modifier. The devs have apparently chosen to compensate for both the battle cloak and the singularity powers by giving warbirds lower power levels. That means lower damage, lower shields, lower turn/speed and lower heals/sci skills. Warbirds don't need their hulls and shield modifiers nerfed on top of that.
Bops have such weak hulls because they have such high turn rates. I presume the slightly lower shield modifier when compared to a raptor is payment for the battle cloak, and one less aft weapon and loss of an ensign boff to compensate for all universal seating. Yes, there are escorts/raptors out there with good boff setups, but the bop is versatile without needing to switch from one ship or another to change tactics, so don't underestimate the value of that.
And speaking of the 'increased survivability' that cryptic keeps talking about, nerf the hull. That's really the solution to everything. boost the power levels, and nerf the hull
The B'rel retrofit has 21000 hull.
The Dhelan retrofit is very similar, though it has an extra boff, 3rd rear weapon, less turn, about 5 times the crew, extra device slot, and 31500 hull.
So were looking at a ship that easily puts the b'rel to shame. 10.5k extra hull, extra weapon, more crew, extra device, AND the singularity powers. Now compared to a fed escort it actually has less hull, but still more crew, extra device, and singularity.
I'd gladly take a 25% hit in hull if it meant boosting the powers back up. And honestly, if you want to balance the ships and reduce the survivability, hull is what needs to change as evident just in comparing the b'rel and dhelan.
I think that the increased surviveability translates literally into seeing the respawn timer less, but what we have to look at is: what is the cost of this surviveability? Do people not die as much, but still take more time to complete the mission because they had to run off and heal before coming back, which also gives the enemy time to heal? If so, that increase in surviveability is compensated for by the healing the enemy does and taking more time in the mission. That kind of survivability does not need to be 'balanced" or corrected. There's nothing wrong with that.
A 25% reduction in hull on a D'deridex would give one the hull of an escort and the turn of a carrier... that's an absolute no go, lol. I think the reduced power levels will ultimately be manageable. A few things they could do to make them more palatable though would be to remove the "shields don't regenerate below 25 power" since warbirds will drop below that. I really wish they would also remove the power drain from weapons, that way one does not have to pour 145 power into weapons just to consistently get 125 ish. They may have to rebalance weapon damage to compensate, but I think it would be preferable. They could also stand to buff engineering power enhancing consoles, it would be better for all factions, but in particular, a warbird could pop on a energy enhancer to whichever system they feel most needs the compensation. Once the power consoles are buffed, they could add a new console that gives bonus power across the board. So, for example, one could put +12 to one system, or with the new console, +3 to all power levels. (I use those more conservative numbers as I doubt they would go for +20 to a subsystem and +5 to all consoles... but that would be appreciated. )
Given current crew mechanics, I would not call the Dhelan having a larger crew an "advantage" lol. All those extra crew will die/get a paper cut and go on strike just as quickly if not more so than a bop's crew and will take a year longer to get back to work than a bop's small crew.
I think the reasons why the devs are fine giving such a powerful escort type vessel an enhanced battle cloak because, if I"m not mistaken, it has very few science and engineering abilities available to it. So unlike a brel that has universals for high science and eng powers while also spamming torps and mines, this ship just has high tactical abilities for torps and mines only. Of course, the brel can go tac heavy too, the universals give it that versatility, but the Dhelan is stuck in tactical mode. So in theory I don't think it will be that big of a deal, or steal any, or at least not too much, of the brel's thunder, but we shall have to see.
I don't think the Dhelan will be able to use singularity powers while enhanced battle cloaked, battle cloak prevents the singularity from charging... so those would only be available should it choose to stay in the fight and not use enhanced battle cloak... so I don't really find that OP either.
Comments
Lt.cmd tac
Cmd.eng
Lt. eng
Lt.cmd sci
That's Galaxy material my friend :P
Well I think you may have just supported the dev's making it so the D'deridex can only really turn while cloaked, lol. If I am not mistaken, the turn boost takes effect the moment you activate the ability, no waiting 5 seconds or whatever, so turning quickly while disappearing is what the D'deridex can do now.
Indeed, like I said, it is more the "multi-role" functionality that ALL cruisers should have, including the galaxy.
Indeed, it is often quite difficult to stay within 10km of an enemy while not getting too close to it (borg queen keeping you at 5-10km if you don't want instadeath) while also trying to keep team mates within range for support. Especially in slow to maneuver vessels, the escort type ships turn on a dime, flip in the opposite direction and are far out of range by the time a cruiser/carrier can come about. However, the changes to turn rate skill, rcs, and hopefully turn modifiers on engines seems to help mitigate this. I hopped in my recluse on tribble with two rcs and just the borg engine with 6 points in impulse thrusters and it was WAY more maneuverable than on holodeck. Also, rcs accelerators were actually useful on it, which was a refreshing change.
I'm also curious if turn rates/inertia are working quite the way they're supposed to, the ody is supposed to have a slightly better turn and inertia rating than the bortas, but with the same impulse thrusters and engine and rcs on the ody and bortas on holodeck, same engine power, the ody seems to mysteriously be less maneuverable despite better numbers. Of course I can't actually confirm this... the ody just "feels" less maneuverable. I suppose it could just be perception... but yeah.
helps a little, with a ton of turn consoles. with 5 turn consoles i can get a negvar to turn beter then 35 easy, even touch 40 turn rate with 5 turn consoles. i can barly get beter then 20 turn with a fleet galaxy, even seperated its just +10 more to about 30. the differecen between these ships is 3 turn rate. 3 turn rate, and the neg var can turn twice as well after its been buffed the same. the solution has to be adjusting the base, as long as the turn rate boosters buff by a %
so far, i haven't encountered anything that makes less sense then the flat +~15 or so turn from battle cloaking. that makes no sense at all. but it sure is nice to watch the ship handle like that, the d'deridex moves like my negvar wile its cloaked. thats how it should move all the time, if it can more like that under a certain condition.
also, it takes 3 seconds for that turn rate to kick in. those d'deridex hadn't got their turn rate buff wile they were visible :rolleyes:
Already the game is very in depth in regard to content, much of the Existing ship components are not Explained enough to draw in New players for lack of in game component Explanations. I do have a suggestion that could at least help Explain each component and its basic Function to the overall ship.
Try Tooltip Balloons when hovering over each component and in that balloon give a Basic Explanation of each components then if the user wants to learn more about a particular Component allow for a link to the appropriate STO Wiki Article, or, Better integrate Wikis into Sto Itself. New users are going to be very confused with the warp core element of play and there not going to know about Abilities that target that particular Ship Component. I Really suggest research on New players in STO and look at the Dynamic picture of how users perceive the game from a Newbies point of View and really condense learning to basic levels like tool tips in game or better component in game Tutorials.
If i were you i probably would not focus New game Mechanics unless there was a way to Quickly Learn and go. The warp core Element is good for STO Veterans and amiture players, but may not be good for Newbies.
Well no, it doesn't really make sense that battle cloak is the one turn rate boost that gives a flat bonus like that, except emergency power to engines now does that too, but I digress. I share your cruiser/carrier turn rate frustrations, I just don't know how to 'fix' things without potentially throwing off the perceived balance of the game. If they were to increase the turn rate on cruisers, they'd probably feel the need to compensate by doubling the damage of dual heavy cannons or something. :rolleyes:
And poo, I was told the turn boost takes effect immediately, oh well...
Yes. Join KDF and equip Plasmonic Leech
the minus 10 power to each sububsystem is crippling the Warbirds in pvp. So plz increase the poerlvbl again. balance only matters much in pvp anyways so you don?t have to look at pve that much for terms of balance.
AS stated also, teh singularity powers are more or less useless, which matches with my impression of hte powers also.
And my personal experience as sci in a Warbird goes according to it. There is jsut not enough power to run the sci skills propperly without gimping the dmg output more then the skills impact would justify. (as far as you can speak of effective sci skills anyways).
I really would like to have a word with the devs that testing this stuff and i bet i am not the only one.
As i said before it seems to me that your testing methodes are not really giving useful results.
You guys should go and do some pvp matches with premades and pugs. Then you can see if changes work out or not.
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class / R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer
U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit
TheWiseGuys
ships that turn poorly are so underpowered that even a massive buff would imbalance nothing. +1-3 more turn is hardly massive
if anyone has been the champion for fed cruiser turn rate buffs, its me, someone who has more kdf characters then fed. not only do i want the d'deridex to turn well, but i'd like the galaxy, my favorite ship, to turn well too. ive never seen any 'kdf player' come down on feds wanting better turn rates for their ships. the solution to the d'deridex turning better then it does now is for the turn rate floor to be raised from 5 to about 8. that would include all the fed ships too. +2 or +3 to all of them. they would still be slightly behind the kdf cruisers, but their turn rate wouldn't be a huge liability anymore.
Let's just leave it at that.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
The first two issues might be best addressed testing them sequentially -- ie, not at the same time. Hyouki will most assuredly object, but for testing purposes only a singularity core with no powers and no power penalty needs to be made available. This would allow the devs to get metrics on "Warbirds with just Battle Cloaks" vs all other ships, and get the balance of those ships right.
<opinion>
Don't reinvent the wheel here, and don't try to fix the problem by fixing stuff too far away from the source of the problem. If the Romulan BC is too much better than the KDF BC, then make the Rom BC less of an upgrade. If the new Traits give too big a boost to the cloak, reduce the effect of the trait. If a ship has too much shield or hull, reduce the shield and/or hull. By creating a big-buff problem in one spot and then trying to balance it by nerfing in other areas, an extremely difficult balancing act is created -- the problem spreads by affecting a dozen or more other unexpected areas. Each of those adjustments cascades over into yet more areas -- far simpler (and maybe better) to reduce the big-buff to a less-big-buff.
</opinion>
Step two, once the no-singularity-power Warbirds are sufficiently competitive and non-overpowered, then the singularity-power Warbirds can be balanced against them.
Lastly, making the Romulan look-and-feel distinct and enjoyable should be an important priority which is, nevertheless, less important than making certain that the game works. The first two points of balancing are long-term survival-of-the-game issues; look and feel is distinctly secondary. That being said, what I have seen of the new artwork, uniforms, hairstyles, etc is all excellent.
TL;DR: Get the ships right first, by testing with a special testing-only core.
<comment> Don't know why the list showed up in that weird font.
Their methods for testing? Yes...they shouldn't pick people who don't even bother trying to understand a system before declaring it useless. Now, go back to your ship and learn to use your Singularity properly, and you suddenly won't feel underpowered anymore, mmkay?
Now that I'm in the T5 Mogai, I'm just LOVING charging a group, hitting Charged Particle Burst, and dropping a Gravity Well followed by a Singularity Jump. Weakens shields, pins in place (they can't escape both the GW and the Singularity Jump unless they're at the edge of the GW when it's fired, and as long as they're trapped, they can't shoot accurately even if they can spot me in the first place due to the perception debuff), and I can spin around and start spraying them with plasma torps. Not as powerful as my science ship's Murderball combo, but I have a lot more tac skills to play with, at least.
What you need to accept is that you can't simply just try to build your normal ship and just use your singularity powers whenever you feel like it; you have to build and play to take advantage of your singularity powers. You need to select BOff powers to complement them. As long as you dismiss them, you will never get anywhere in a Warbird. And that's YOUR fault, not the devs.
-Power Levels at 50: This puts the romulan ships straight on par with other ships as far as power levels go.
-Cloak: cooldown of 40 seconds, each boff or your toon with operative drops it by 5 seconds but you can't make it go below 25 seconds.
-Singularity powers stay as they are right now, offensive ones might get 5% reduction.
-All ships get 5-15% hull reduction depending on ship and tier. They already have drastically higher hulls than Klingon and even federation escort, battleships and birds of prey.
-Power levels at 45: Puts us slightly below, but consoles and set pieces will bring most of us back up
-Cloak: cooldown of 30 seconds, each boff or your toon with operative drops it by 5 seconds but you can't make it go below 15 seconds.
-Singularity powers stay as they are now.
-All ships get 5-10% hull reduction depending on ship and tier.
Power levels at 40:
Cloak: cooldown of 20 seconds, boffs/toon reduce it by percentage. no minimum.
-Singularity powers all get 10-20% boost in damage or effectiveness to make up loss of power. Amount boost is dependent on power. Not all should get 20% boost.
-Singularity adds power to a max of 7.5 to all 4 systems at max singularity. an extra +2.5 can be added by cores with certain modifiers for a max of +10 to one system and +7.5 to all others.
-All ships get 5% hull reduction.
Other options.
Add Fleet Singularity cores that add +5 to all power levels instead of just one. max singuarity would give you an additional +5 to one system. Giving an always on power bonus would make this console decrease all singularity powers by 10% but you'd have an always-on +5 to all power levels.
Cloak Cooldown = less stealth. An idea i have to balance the cloak. The faster your cooldown, meaning the more boffs you put on it or the lower it is by default the less stealth you have while in cloak. So if the cloak is at 20 seconds and you drop it to 10 seconds it's only 50% effective compared to the full 20 second cooldown. Not sure if this could even be coded in, but i feel that it's very fair.
No Powers Core: This would be either an elite fleet item or cstore item, something not cheap to encourage use of the new power system.
-Singularity core that disables the use of all singularity powers. You still gain power level and that still effects your cloak, but all singularity abilities are disabled and can't be used.
-In return, this gives you +5 to all powers with an additional +5 to all powers based on charge of core. +1 per charge. There for in order to still be on par with our federation and klingon players you need a full charge. That full charge will drastically reduce your stealth in cloak, but will decrease it's cooldown maybe 2.5% per charge so at max charge you get a 12.5% decrease in cooldown to the cloak. Additionally this core lowers your hull by 10%
-if lowering hull is not possible than by simply adding this option into the game, decrease all ships hulls by 10%
So those are a few ideas i have, and in my opinion all are fair and balanced though I'd love some criticism on them.
Personally my feelings are that the singularity powers are a very cool concept, but they fail miserably in application. None of the offensive ones are really worth using. The shield heal one is great and adds a great free healing ability for tac toons on a ship without many eng/sci boffs. The cloak is great but having too long of a cooldown defeats the whole purpose of it of being able to be activated in battle.
With power levels at 45 it's really not that bad, it's a minor loss and can easily be offset with consoles and abilities, we'll still be lower than fed/kdf by 5 points to offset the other abilities, but at least we won't be so drastically below that we can't at least be on the same level.
40 power levels is just too low. Unless the singularity powers are very powerful and really worth using, which they're not, then 40 is just too much of a hit, especially for those of us who are just going to use the healing power since the other ones are really not worth it and vastly underpowered to our weapons. and add in the -10 to weapons power and we are now vastly inferior to any FED or KDF player. PVP is essentially ruined for Romulans since they'll never keep their DPS up with FED or KDF thanks to the -10 power. And even PVE will be difficult since as most of us have seen the singularity powers are not that effective even at max power against most normal enemies meaning that even at level 50 say doing elite stfs they'll be pretty useless and we'll all just be using the healing power
As i just saw in another topic:
And that really sums it up. I don't want to just give Romulans +10 power without sacrificing anything, but lets be honest, these benefits are not that great right now, so either they need to get a lot better, which isn't really balanced, or you need to give us ways to be on par with Federation or Klingon characters.
To any dev that reads this, thank you for your time. I'm loving the expansion and everything that's coming with it and I've already bought my legacy pack and can't wait to play, but i do hope that you'll take my suggestions as well as those of hundreds of other people in this topic to heart and make the Romulans even more enjoyable for us.
So once again thanks for the game, thanks for Legacy of Romulus and hopefully thank you for your time in reading this.
Yer dang right I'm going to object! You don't need to test Battle Cloaks separately; we have plenty of experience with Klingon cloaking ships to know how changing the balance of shields, hull, seating, etc. will interact with the Battle Cloak. What we DON'T know is how effective the three singularity skills that can be used to cover a transition into cloak will do their job...and taking those out of the testing makes it kind of pointless.
What this ends up becoming is, however, "don't do anything innovative; don't rock the boat; don't do anything that might interject new excitement into the game because we don't want to risk disturbing the stable-but-stale setup we have now". I agree that's a good attitude for regular updates (e.g. Season updates), but is ultimately fatal if an expansion can't be allowed to offer anything but "more of the same".
Again, the Singularity Powers are designed to work WITH the Battle Cloak; the power levels are designed to compensate for the combination of BOTH. If you balance the BC first, then adding the Singularity unbalances it again.
The look and feel is indeed great...although for some reason I can't shake the feeling that my captain is running around in a Romulan dinner-jacket rather than a uniform...
SAID BEFORE, WILL PROBABLY SAY MANY, MANY MORE TIMES.
-10 power is too much of a drain...if you're playing your Warbird like a Federation or Klingon ship with an extra BOff (one that you don't like, either). If you are playing to take advantage of your Singularity powers and your cloak properly, then the power change isn't a problem. Quit trying to "fix" a system you haven't even fully understood yet.
Heck, we haven't even seen most of the Legacy consoles in action yet, and have no idea what their set bonuses will be. We haven't seen what DOffs will be introduced to enhance the Singularity system. In short, we ain't seen nothin' yet. Give it a chance, and see what you can do with what you're given.
I am not talking about pve issues. PvE content is so easy that you can faceroll to do it in most cases, except elite stfs. I can handle the standard pve pretty easy in my Warbird. Still some situational abilities are not worth a permanent -10 to every subsystems. They should bring the cloak back to 40 sec generall cd and raise the power lvls again to -5 for each subsystem.
It is more a matter of what you have to pay for the things you get, and atm the price is way to high.
I woud be happy if could get a singularity core without any of those abilities and only -5 Power to each subsystem.
And besides that i would still like to know how they are testing changes, just to understand on which base they made thier decissions. Especially since the last sci nerf.
And if you have to use doffs to compensate things you won`t have the slots open for other doffs, which give ships that don`t have to compensate an advantage over you again.
And i doubt that using cpb have a significant effect of the time you need to kill a bunch of npcs. Most of them die in one pass anyways, at least with an Escort/Warbird.
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class / R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer
U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit
TheWiseGuys
Don't think you actually read my post. I didn't write that whole thing out to complain, just to give my opinions on it. I have played as a romulan and it's been my experience that the singularity powers are not powerful enough to justify the power loss. at least not -10. And if you would of read my post you would of seen that i gave 6 different opinions and options on balancing the changes.
I plan on taking advantage of the singularity powers, but i also don't want to fly a crippled ship and right now the -10 does seem crippled to me. I even gave a solution for keeping the powers at -10 that if implemented i would be very happy with. as would many others, it would allow those who don't want to use the powers to have power levels still less than FED/KDF but at least close, and those of us who want to use the powers still get a nice bonus until we do.
I will gladly admit that your right, we haven't seen everything. But we've seen the basics, and the basics are troubling.
Again if you read you would of seen that i already bought a legacy pack. I also already bought weapons and consoles to outfit my romulan at level 50, so i'm very invested and i'll play no matter what. And there is nothing wrong to posting my opinions and possible balancing options.
Also, i have no idea what your talking about for the extra boff. warbirds have the same max boffs as any other ship as far as i can tell on tribble.
Except we don't. The Romulan BC is better than the KDF BC in ways the devs won't tell us; it is numerically 'cloak-ier' which leads to better Defense, etc. And in your very next point, you object to using lessons learned about balancing the KDF cloak as 'just more of the same' and roundly condemn it. If the Rom BC is going to be different from the KDF BC, then you can't claim that it is the same as the KDF BC, and therefore 'needs no separate testing'.
Not at all; I in no way advocated stopping testing at that point. The point was just to allow the issues with the Rom BC to be isolated for testing purposes only from the issues that may need to be addressed with the Singularity power & powers. And my point was also that smaller problems are easier to fix than big problems, and that it may be better to fix the actual cause of the problem rather than trying to create an endless series of work-arounds.
This is exactly why the Rom BC needs to be tested on it's own; if you don't want to balance it in exactly the same way as the KDF BC, then it needs to be balanced in some new way. That new balance needs to be shaken out in testing, hopefully in an environment where the just-BC issues can be isolated.
Will Singularity powers + Rom BC Warbirds be better than just-Rom BC Warbirds? I don't really know, and neither do you. Such a test is utterly impossible at the moment. What I do know is that some folks who fly the Warbirds say the powers are too situational to be worth the penalties being paid for them. I would hope that the singularity powers do turn out to be an increase in power -- but that is exactly what the second round of testing would determine.
<opinion>
I must say that although you and some others do say that the powers are ok as is, or over-powered, you constantly invoke using combinations of BOff abilities alongside the singularity powers. And if a Romulan captain chooses not to slot those BOff powers? This sounds like a reduction in versatility to me; it seems like the Singularity powers have to be 'compensated for' by a particular, predictable build. Is your response to the 'rather have something other than Eject Warp Plasma in that slot' captains that they should go play some other faction? Perhaps the powers are not unblemished masterpieces yet; perhaps they need to be tested against opponents who are exactly-like-the-same-ship-except-with-no-powers.
<opinion>
And again, I didn't advocate stopping testing; the Powers+BC Warbirds would be competed against the just-BC Warbirds and the Powers+BC Warbirds would be tweaked until they were no longer over-powered. This is what testing is intended to accomplish, N'est-ce pas?
Heh -- I can see it now B'ond, J'mes B'ond
It's pretty much a non-starter to suggest nerfing the battle cloak in any way, shape, or form. If the battle cloak takes any longer than 20 seconds to cool, it might as well not even be there considering how fast paced combat is in this game. The romulans are known for their cloak and dagger and in and out of cloak tactics, romulans are all about cloak. Reducing the effectiveness of the cloak by up to 50 percent is ridiculous and also defeats the purpose of it. A D'deridex and Ha'apax are massive and slow, so they are already going to be easy enough to stay on top of once they battle cloak, let alone with a 50% less effective battle cloak, so all around, nerfing romulan battle cloak is a no go.
I agree that balancing the battle cloak first and then balancing the singularity powers makes sense, and, as I've said before, we've seen from the peghqu and the chimera that a battle cloak apparently only warrants an 8% drop in shield modifier, as these two ships are identical, except the peghqu has 8% lower shields and a battle cloak. So lets not reinvent the wheel on this one, give the romulan ships 8% lower shields or take it out of their hull, but lets not go crazy.
And let us keep in mind that the "increased surviveability" a battle cloak provides comes at a cost. With battle cloak, you might escape destruction, but you can't do damage while cloaked, you can't actively heal while cloaked, and shields don't regenerate while cloaked, which means you have to run off and decloak to heal and come back, or spend a great deal of time while cloaked to let your hull passively repair, but you won't get any shields back. And keep in mind that all this time, the enemy has a chance to actively heal, so the enemy's surviveability also goes up. Plus there's the very real chance that attempting to battle cloak is exactly the opening the enemy needs to blast you out of the sky.
That leaves balancing the singularity powers... which is admittedly difficult. They are essentially one power, because you can only use one of them when you get a charge, but they do provide the versatility of being able to choose which power you use. However, they are not reliably available. The singularity does not constantly charge, it only charges while in combat and loses charge out of combat and stops charging while cloaked. Which is why I don't see the point in high singularity charge reducing the effectiveness of your cloak... the two of them already rub each other the wrong way because the cloak stops singularity charging.
Unfortunately, I'm not even sure what to suggest for balancing this because it is so complicated a thing.
wile running through the pi cantis sorties 100 times to level on elite dificulty, the healing singularity power with the temperarry hitpoints has saved me several times, and so has the phantom ship ability, drawing agro away from those fed escorts with the point defense console that has like 20,000 DPS for some insane reason.
the plasma shockwave does basically nothing, no npc lives long enough for some DOT to mater, and the initial damage has no noticeable effect on enemy shields no mater the singularity level. npcs are hitpoint sponges after all, but i cant even see this as being worth much in pvp. maybe as a spam object clearer but thats it. then you lose out on useing a skill that actually does something for a good wile. compared to a stranded plasma torp fireing every 8 seconds, applying a dot, and even compared to that the shock wave with its rate of fire is doing nothing. this being on the same system cooldowns as the other singularity skills is kinda laughable. this should proboly be a new BOFF ability that can be used as often as PSW. and in their infinite fun hateing wisdom, they castrated all DOT builds by taking away plasma infuser's ability to buff all forms of plasma damage. so buffing this skill any significant amount aint going to happen. im still far from level cap with a filled out skill try though, so i suppose all particle buffed it might do something, but im doubting.
the singularity + jump the d'deridex has looks like the perfect weapon against siphon drones or interceptors, maybe runabouts too. any swarm of spam thats pinning you down will be delt with by that, plus you can jump and face your target. not terribly useful in pve, but im gonna like this in pvp.
cant comment on the ha'apax overcharge yet
the romulans will get by the power disadvantage just fine by end game. so why even have the power disadvantage? well, for pvp it will make a difference, and is an important balancing measure. battle cloak has almost no use in pve, it can be sorta fun to use, but changes little. in pvp it will be very powerful. so in the end the warbirds have a few gimicks that are sorta fun for pve, but are hardly game changing, and like always every little thing can make a big difference in pvp. im glad they are trying to balance for pvp here, once again. but not all is perfect...
frankly, the hitpoins on all the romulan ships are too high for having the battle cloak. ether that, or the bird of preys need a significant balance pass. i think both proboly. the lower power isn't to critical, and balances out the singularity powers. but the warbirds have federation ship hitpoints with battle cloak. maybe the warbirds need to be given the same treatment that fleet ships get, but instead of +10% to everything, -10% instead.
as far as KDF bops go, universal station setups? big deal, theres an escort that has every one of a bop's good station setups, plus an extra ENS station, more hitpoints, and enough turn so its not at any disadvantage. the one big deal thing the bops have is the turn rate that allows them to keep their weapons to bare the most. but thats becomes less and less important since they dont have the hitpoints to hang out in combat for longer then their battle cloak cooldown. the best strategy for them is to go for insta kills, which you dont need turn rate to even do, even a galaxy X can sorta do that. the greatest insult to injury to the raiders by the warbirds, is that the T'Varo is better then the defiant in EVERY way, and not only has a battle cloak, but an ENHANCED battlecloak, something the brel practically sells its soul for.that ship ether needs to look a lot more like the brel stat wise, or lose the enhanced battle cloak. i say lose the enhanced.
i think the best way to balance the romulan ships is to do a balance pass on everything else, is this a major expansion or isnt it? start here, with a turn rate floor rebalance-http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=9301751&postcount=33. then big kdf bops a universal ENS and like 15% more hitpoints and beter shield mod, but take away 1 turn rate. could say that the kdf upgraded them and made them more durable, but at a minor maneuverability expense. i suppose thats enough for now
And what was the core of the thesis? The central point of the post?
This is the point I'm addressing, and everything else you said follows from this point: -10 to each subsystem is too much, and the singularity is effectively useless. If this argument is invalid, then the rest of your post (suggested fixes) is unnecessary.
My counterargument has, and will likely continue to be, people are continually doing the following:
1.) trying to fly their Warbird as if it was their regular ship with an extra "virtual" BOff (the singularity powers) and a cloak, and
2.) underestimating, misunderstanding, or disregarding the singularity power, considering them as "useless" or "a gimmick".
For issue 1, people need to start realizing that they're completely missing the point. Their argument comes off like saying "iPods are terrible! I tried to drive a nail with it and it broke on the first one!" It's understandable that you want to use your hard-earned expertise with existing systems to try to make a new one work, but when it fails (like it's failing for everyone relying on their standard builds which rely on standard power levels) the proper response is "how can I make good use of the tools I've got"...not to demand Apple redesign the iPod to be turned into some variant of the hammer you've already got.
Which brings us to point 2. The singularity powers are potent, but as many have pointed out they're rather situational. Again, the proper response here is NOT "I don't face those situations, therefore they're useless, therefore the system has to be changed," but rather "how can I CREATE those situations where they're most devastating?" I've been talking tactics a lot here, power combos, setting up situations, building around strengths...and nobody's listening. One of the latest posts got the reply "well what if I don't want to use those powers?" I dunno, come up with your own combos then? I'm not your dang mother. If you don't want a group of enemies trapped in your Gravity Well + Singularity Jump combo, getting chewed up by the GW, blinded by the SJ, and well within radius of one another to soak up all the splash damage from all those Torp Spread 3 volleys coming in, then fine, come up with something else. But if your "something else" isn't enhancing or taking advantage of one of your core powers, you're probably going to be in for a bad time of it. Ignoring them, or pretending Quantum Absorption is the only one with any value, is a recipe for disaster.
Finally, you can start building your ship to mitigate some of those weaknesses. The iconic TOS T'liss demonstrated how effective warbirds can be with torpedos...which neither need nor drain weapon power. Nor do mines. With plasma, even if your energy weapons aren't up to draining shields quickly, your plasma fire will bypass and start eating into the hull. Engineers will probably have a field day in warbirds, as they have access to that lovely new trait that boosts all their power levels whenever they use any battery or EPtX skill, and since Warbirds always have at least three battery slots, that's a fair number of batteries they can bring to bear on their power issues. And so on, and so on. Also as I've said, we haven't even seen everything that's planned. The more we see, the more we'll realize that we've got all the tools we need to make killer warbirds...as long as we're willing to use them.
Really can't disagree with anything.
And speaking of the 'increased survivability' that cryptic keeps talking about, nerf the hull. That's really the solution to everything. boost the power levels, and nerf the hull
The B'rel retrofit has 21000 hull.
The Dhelan retrofit is very similar, though it has an extra boff, 3rd rear weapon, less turn, about 5 times the crew, extra device slot, and 31500 hull.
So were looking at a ship that easily puts the b'rel to shame. 10.5k extra hull, extra weapon, more crew, extra device, AND the singularity powers. Now compared to a fed escort it actually has less hull, but still more crew, extra device, and singularity.
I'd gladly take a 25% hit in hull if it meant boosting the powers back up. And honestly, if you want to balance the ships and reduce the survivability, hull is what needs to change as evident just in comparing the b'rel and dhelan.
Just tossing some numbers out from lvl 50, science officer. 102 points total in particle gen. Damage listed as [blast]/[DoT], rank 5 (rank 1 is about half that)
Plain: 1528 / 4586
With decloak bonus: 1910 / 5732
With Conservation of Energy: 1987 / 5962
With CoE AND decloak: 2369 / 7108
Even if you assume stripped shields, that's still not going to take out, say, a Danube, but it'll certainly help, and hit up to 10 of the little buggers. Not a perfect spam solution, admittedly. Probably more useful vs large torps. Can be enhanced to have a 10% chance to disable one subsystem, but that's too little chance to bother with.
Given that it's the only one that's affected by exotic damage boosts, I think it's primarily there to give science officers more oomph to their arsenal, but it really does not age well or scale well with level.
Dangit, I forgot to check if that's including the bonus from the Romulan Energy Harness for plasma damage. Actual numbers might be lower.
The real power of the Singularity Jump is in the Accuracy and Perception debuff; if you've got a good cluster of enemies (preferably ones slowed in some fashion already, such as by warp plasma) you can keep them blind til they move away from it. And if you can arrange a Gravity Well (yours or someone else's) where you drop the Singularity Jump, I don't know if they CAN get away from it. PVE enemies generally don't unless they were at the edge of the effect already. But yeah, will give you enough time to cloak, spin, and decloak without having to worry about attacks from those in the SJ effect.
Since I haven't been relying on energy weapons so much, and certainly not the HCs and DHCs favored by escorts, I'm rather underwhelmed by the Overcharge, but I think those wanting the Raider/Escort playstyle will like it. It looks like it overwrites FAW, so it probably replaces Cannon Rapid Fire and Cannon Spray with its buff. It jacks up damage AND seems to remove weapon fire drain for the duration. For someone on a heavy energy weapon build, they'll probably find plenty of use for it; for myself, not so much. The description says it HAS to be used from cloak, but it appears to be lying, as it seems to work regardless of cloakedness.
Warbirds have federation strength hulls because they have federation (actually worse) turn rates. The thicker your hull, the lower your turn rate, it has nothing to do with the battle cloak. As I have said before, the peghqu and the chimera are carbon copies of one another on fed and kdf side, the one difference is that the peghqu has a battle cloak, and apparently the compensation for that is -8% shield modifier. The devs have apparently chosen to compensate for both the battle cloak and the singularity powers by giving warbirds lower power levels. That means lower damage, lower shields, lower turn/speed and lower heals/sci skills. Warbirds don't need their hulls and shield modifiers nerfed on top of that.
Bops have such weak hulls because they have such high turn rates. I presume the slightly lower shield modifier when compared to a raptor is payment for the battle cloak, and one less aft weapon and loss of an ensign boff to compensate for all universal seating. Yes, there are escorts/raptors out there with good boff setups, but the bop is versatile without needing to switch from one ship or another to change tactics, so don't underestimate the value of that.
I think that the increased surviveability translates literally into seeing the respawn timer less, but what we have to look at is: what is the cost of this surviveability? Do people not die as much, but still take more time to complete the mission because they had to run off and heal before coming back, which also gives the enemy time to heal? If so, that increase in surviveability is compensated for by the healing the enemy does and taking more time in the mission. That kind of survivability does not need to be 'balanced" or corrected. There's nothing wrong with that.
A 25% reduction in hull on a D'deridex would give one the hull of an escort and the turn of a carrier... that's an absolute no go, lol. I think the reduced power levels will ultimately be manageable. A few things they could do to make them more palatable though would be to remove the "shields don't regenerate below 25 power" since warbirds will drop below that. I really wish they would also remove the power drain from weapons, that way one does not have to pour 145 power into weapons just to consistently get 125 ish. They may have to rebalance weapon damage to compensate, but I think it would be preferable. They could also stand to buff engineering power enhancing consoles, it would be better for all factions, but in particular, a warbird could pop on a energy enhancer to whichever system they feel most needs the compensation. Once the power consoles are buffed, they could add a new console that gives bonus power across the board. So, for example, one could put +12 to one system, or with the new console, +3 to all power levels. (I use those more conservative numbers as I doubt they would go for +20 to a subsystem and +5 to all consoles... but that would be appreciated.
Given current crew mechanics, I would not call the Dhelan having a larger crew an "advantage" lol. All those extra crew will die/get a paper cut and go on strike just as quickly if not more so than a bop's crew and will take a year longer to get back to work than a bop's small crew.
I think the reasons why the devs are fine giving such a powerful escort type vessel an enhanced battle cloak because, if I"m not mistaken, it has very few science and engineering abilities available to it. So unlike a brel that has universals for high science and eng powers while also spamming torps and mines, this ship just has high tactical abilities for torps and mines only. Of course, the brel can go tac heavy too, the universals give it that versatility, but the Dhelan is stuck in tactical mode. So in theory I don't think it will be that big of a deal, or steal any, or at least not too much, of the brel's thunder, but we shall have to see.
I don't think the Dhelan will be able to use singularity powers while enhanced battle cloaked, battle cloak prevents the singularity from charging... so those would only be available should it choose to stay in the fight and not use enhanced battle cloak... so I don't really find that OP either.