Adding significantly finite resources could potentially lead to a PVE-like dps race situation where pure firepower and focus fire win the day. No endless matches, but mindless strategies.
I think the core problem are self-applied heals/resists that are always-on and essentially cannot be removed. In earlier days, one could pressure certain targets, force heals onto them and then make a switch and go for a new target that can't be defended by the other team anymore because they spent all their heals and resists on the previous one. (Passive/always-on) Self-healing/resists that are available to everyone cannot be circumvented by target switching strategies, only by brute force (usually instakills or multi-snb).
Adding significantly finite resources could potentially lead to a PVE-like dps race situation where pure firepower and focus fire win the day. No endless matches, but mindless strategies..
In PVE, you resupply crew by taking a suicide. You cant do that in PVP, because your team just loses sooner.
Kind of an aside--One problem here is that there isnt a simple means of resupplying crew. Most games that use a resource (eg bandages) also provide means of resupplying in combat, and in open-map games you often have a runner who goes to resupply and comes back. That's not really compatible with the STO instanced model. Maybe in PVP you need to bring a hospital ship. Or if you have control of the map, you can use the starbase facilities to resupply your side's crew at a faster rate. Some interesting opportunities.
Adding significantly finite resources could potentially lead to a PVE-like dps race situation where pure firepower and focus fire win the day. No endless matches, but mindless strategies.
I think the core problem are self-applied heals/resists that are always-on and essentially cannot be removed. In earlier days, one could pressure certain targets, force heals onto them and then make a switch and go for a new target that can't be defended by the other team anymore because they spent all their heals and resists on the previous one. (Passive/always-on) Self-healing/resists that are available to everyone cannot be circumvented by target switching strategies, only by brute force (usually instakills or multi-snb).
It could lead to a DPS race situation if that is what the players desire. It could also become a 'outlast' race situation, a denial situation, and many other combinations depending upon team competition and the meta.
It could lead to a DPS race situation if that is what the players desire. It could also become a 'outlast' race situation, a denial situation, and many other combinations depending upon team competition and the meta.
It could lead to a DPS race situation if that is what the players desire. It could also become a 'outlast' race situation, a denial situation, and many other combinations depending upon team competition and the meta.
Yeah I just agree with mancom and husanak.
I don't like giant sacks of hitpoints.
Burst isn't evil, a lot of PvP games are designed around burst.
I really implore you to play some PvP at somepoint, maybe with the bootcamp folks or some PUGmade stuff.
You clearly have a good grasp of the math and mechanics, but I really think that proper organized team PvP in this game needs to be experience to be fully understood.
It's why sometimes the devs make decisions that sound easy in their head how players can adapt, because it is easy in PvE.
Nothing is that easy in PvP. Too many things are too intertwined and one change can bring about a domino effect on several others that no one saw coming.
We basically deal with metagame shifts on that level about once every 6 months.
Burst isn't evil, a lot of PvP games are designed around burst.
I really implore you to play some PvP at somepoint, maybe with the bootcamp folks or some PUGmade stuff.
You clearly have a good grasp of the math and mechanics, but I really think that proper organized team PvP in this game needs to be experience to be fully understood.
It's why sometimes the devs make decisions that sound easy in their head how players can adapt, because it is easy in PvE.
Nothing is that easy in PvP. Too many things are too intertwined and one change can bring about a domino effect on several others that no one saw coming.
We basically deal with metagame shifts on that level about once every 6 months.
PvP is always perfectly balanced as in everyone is playing by the same rules with the same stuff. Specific things may be under powered, or over powered, but beyond that and obviously broken cheese or an obviously pointless career, it is and always will be balanced.
Everything else is simply the meta, style, or what have you. My personal tastes and preferences make STO PvP undesirable to participate in beyond the Tyler Durden option which I do keep intending to partake in at some point. I unfortunately lack completely undisturbed chunks of time to devote to it at this current point in time and I will not make 9 other players suffer in a PvP match because I have to bail early.
But to that end I truly believe STO PvP in it's current meta state does not, and will not, appeal to the masses. Any suggestions I make are in an effort to broaden the appeal of it to more players, actually nearly all my suggestions for STO are to that end. Even if the suggestions are at odds with my own preferences.
I have to politely disagree with the pvp honchos here. Yes you should not ever die in one to four seconds, nor should you ever be able to heal to full (*snortchortle* my apologies, I also play SWTOR) in the same amount of time. These changes suggested by the OP go some way towards it.
I would also add the caveat that you SHOULD die to focused fire from 2-3 players in that same amount of time, and be saved by focused healing from the same number of players too. This gives room for some burst to exist.
Adjust the numbers and we may have a better compromise.
The thing about STO is that it needs a systems approach. Nerfing heals, reducing res and adding more HP needs to come with other things like:
1) Concurrently, remove doff, console and abilities stacking on a target/targeter where appropriate, while improving the way abilities are at baseline and with scaling.
2) Equalizing beam array power drain with cannons.
Trying to fix the game piecemeal will end up with cries of reverse change polarity, and if the change is reverse, we get nowhere fast!
"Last Engage! Magical Girl Origami-san" is in print! Now with three times more rainbows.
I think high hull hit points must be done to help close the gap between long time PVPer and new PVPer.
But with the higher hull hit points, let?s say 5 times, hull healing needs to take a hit, at least half of what it is now.
Healing in this game is too strong to the point that you can live through everything or you are dead in 2 seconds.
I fly a Sci Oddy on my Eng and I can die in 3 to 4 seconds or keep all of the team alive. My ship has about 63k in hit points and anywhere from 46% resis to 64%. I was just in a match where I died in 4 or 5 seconds with full shield. In 4 to 5 seconds I can heal about 48k hull hit points and be at that 64%. That means they did 170k in damage in 5 seconds or less. Maybe I am not remembering right but the spike damage of higher end players is way too high.
Now you can?t nerf the heck out of damage without pissing most people off. But if you raise hull hit points you can make a better buffer. Then you nerf hull healing(which is used a lot less in PVE then damage is).
I think shields should have a lower cap on their resis, but keep them yo-yo.
What you will end up with is spike damage to get through shields and hurt the hull and pressure damage to (bleed through) to counter hull heals.
Or
Hull counters Spike
Shield counters pressure.
I don?t know but I would think they could make the hull points/heals changes only in PVP. That why the PVE game play is unchanged.
I would like to add that this would make cloaks less OP because right now you decloak and kill your target in one pass. while they respawn you have time to heal. if it took 4 or 5 runs the pressure damage could get to the weaker hull of the cloak ship before the killing run.
I like this idea. Curtail hull heals and beef up everyone's total hull values. Pressure damage adds to the battle other than to create a cycle in the tgts buffs for the cloaked teamate to pounce on. Does it even do that?
Anyways, escorts can't stack armor consoles in the same way that cruisers can. Just imagine if escorts can't shrug off the pressure damage of cruisers. Wasn't that the original idea that escorts do high damage but die faster? The higher end escorts aren't dying that easily nowadays. Only CC from Sci or other escorts can kill them. Cruisers are hopelessly undergunned to get through escorts defenses. AuxtB is about the only way to do real damage in a cruiser and that makes them pretty weak defensively. Star Trek always revolved around cruisers, make them more viable for the love of god.
I like this idea. Curtail hull heals and beef up everyone's total hull values. Pressure damage adds to the battle other than to create a cycle in the tgts buffs for the cloaked teamate to pounce on. Does it even do that?
Really?
Elite STFs are right now, able to be completed in 3 minutes or lower by the best teams.
When was the last time you gave the initial spheres & cube a second though in ISE?
Those spheres have over 100k hull, the cube probably has half a million to a million.
There is probably about a total of 6 to 9 million hull to cut through on any given STF, and even though they don't protect their shields enough, the targets that do have shields have a lot more than players do.
If we took Bareel's proposal, and we increased player hull by 5, and estimate each ship at a generous base of 50k, now increased to 250k a single team would only have 1 million hull.
If everyone stacked hull res to 50% against everything, which is not the case, we can give that an approximate value of about 2 million hull.
The last thing this game needs is for everything to be completely overhauled, the devs are afraid to even nerf specific DOFFs or powers - does anyone, for even a moment, think they will take a wrecking ball to their entire combat system and redesign it while the game is making money?
I like the idea of making the hulls higher in value and reducing the 'magic' heals
Making them more Damage control than heals
-one thing i have seen in a seperate thread on PvP Ideas
is the idea of a warp core power resource that regenerates slowly over time ( faster out of combat) and using heals, weapons etc will skim some off the top of your power reserves
the idea is that you have to think about the consequences of hitting that heal button, as you are committing some kind of depletable resource to it , same as Attack pattern Alpha , as this would carry a power penalty, in order to spike, you will have to sacrifice your power, making you a softer target for counter attacks
You would never run out of power completely , but the idea would be that your attacks and heals become less effective when you have no reserve power left, causing you to either die by attrition from a player that has kept some power in reserve, or break from combat to recover
it also provides cruisers with some limited advantage, having far larger warp cores, and anit matter matter supply storage, they will have more power on tap, or a faster recharge rate than smaller escorts
this is by no means a perfect idea, but i think it has some merrit to it
i also think persistant system damage, or systems damaged by crits INSTEAD of bonus crit damage is a great idea
Another idea i like is the idea of seperated PVP PvE ship dolls, where pvp ships are restricted from using certain items ( much like certain FPS games have modes in which you all use the same weapons and loadouts to make the playing field even)
These are the Voyages on the STO forum, the final frontier. Our continuing mission: to explore Pretentious Posts, to seek out new Overreactions and Misinformation , to boldly experience Cynicism like no man has before.......
So it's ok for NPCs to one shot you into oblivion with a poorly designed mechanic and a poorly thought out damage scalar - but when players can do it to other players...well we better get the nerf bat out.
Is it spike or just very-high sustained damage? We're talking about things like scims with 12-20k builds, using 5x forward rom weaps + pets + stacked tactical abilities, right? I should pay closer attention to those builds
So it's ok for NPCs to one shot you into oblivion with a poorly designed mechanic and a poorly thought out damage scalar
Is it spike or just very-high sustained damage? We're talking about things like scims with 12-20k builds, using 5x forward rom weaps + pets + stacked tactical abilities, right? I should pay closer attention to those builds
no
Sorry when you said they are doing too much damage, I thought you meant the NPCs.
Which is why I went to the spike conversation.
I think I actually made a post at one point detailing exactly why NPCs should be given much higher sustained damage to overcome player passive mitigation instead of giving NPCs one-shot kills that just out right ignore it all.
It's pretty funny, but the yo-yo mechanic actually plagues their PvE game as well.
Either NPCs do not do enough damage of anykind, or they only do mega-spikes that make healers and tanks and any role that is not damage completely irrelevant.
So what is an unfun mechanic, players being killed in one second, after 45 to 90s of jockeying around for position and timing is apparently different from 1-shot torpedoes from NPCs or lance weapons that can hit you for 5x your hull strength.
A quick note on why NPCs take so much damage compared to players.
1st) They lack high shield resist, regen, and distribution capability typically.
2nd) Their hull resist is typically negative some stupid high (or low heh) number.
Take a 10k DPS build. Fire at players and your lucky to deal 5k, fire at NPCs and you should be doing over 20k. Slight difference but thank goodness TT clears APB so it wouldn't be a significant problem. Although Sensor Scan at full AUX will still retain a high amount of power.
Anyways, escorts can't stack armor consoles in the same way that cruisers can.
Jem'hadar Attack Ship. Jem'hadar Heavy Escort Carrier. Fleet Patrol Escort. Fleet Qin Heavy Raptor Refit. Fleet Mogai Heavy Warbird.
4 Escorts and a destroyer that can stack armor consoles in the same way a cruiser can. And don't lose ANY damage for doing so (debatable with the Mogai, but we aren't going to go into that).
It should also be noted the plethora of warbirds and escorts and raptors that have 3 engi consoles. They have only at most 10% less resistance capability than a ship with 4. Which puts them right up there with cruisers in armor ability. Sorry, that particular point is null.
It is said the best weapon is one that is never fired. I disagree. The best weapon is one you only have to fire... once.
Comments
I think the core problem are self-applied heals/resists that are always-on and essentially cannot be removed. In earlier days, one could pressure certain targets, force heals onto them and then make a switch and go for a new target that can't be defended by the other team anymore because they spent all their heals and resists on the previous one. (Passive/always-on) Self-healing/resists that are available to everyone cannot be circumvented by target switching strategies, only by brute force (usually instakills or multi-snb).
Kind of an aside--One problem here is that there isnt a simple means of resupplying crew. Most games that use a resource (eg bandages) also provide means of resupplying in combat, and in open-map games you often have a runner who goes to resupply and comes back. That's not really compatible with the STO instanced model. Maybe in PVP you need to bring a hospital ship. Or if you have control of the map, you can use the starbase facilities to resupply your side's crew at a faster rate. Some interesting opportunities.
It could lead to a DPS race situation if that is what the players desire. It could also become a 'outlast' race situation, a denial situation, and many other combinations depending upon team competition and the meta.
Your making this idea sound more and more boring.
Yeah I just agree with mancom and husanak.
I don't like giant sacks of hitpoints.
Burst isn't evil, a lot of PvP games are designed around burst.
I really implore you to play some PvP at somepoint, maybe with the bootcamp folks or some PUGmade stuff.
You clearly have a good grasp of the math and mechanics, but I really think that proper organized team PvP in this game needs to be experience to be fully understood.
It's why sometimes the devs make decisions that sound easy in their head how players can adapt, because it is easy in PvE.
Nothing is that easy in PvP. Too many things are too intertwined and one change can bring about a domino effect on several others that no one saw coming.
We basically deal with metagame shifts on that level about once every 6 months.
PvP is always perfectly balanced as in everyone is playing by the same rules with the same stuff. Specific things may be under powered, or over powered, but beyond that and obviously broken cheese or an obviously pointless career, it is and always will be balanced.
Everything else is simply the meta, style, or what have you. My personal tastes and preferences make STO PvP undesirable to participate in beyond the Tyler Durden option which I do keep intending to partake in at some point. I unfortunately lack completely undisturbed chunks of time to devote to it at this current point in time and I will not make 9 other players suffer in a PvP match because I have to bail early.
But to that end I truly believe STO PvP in it's current meta state does not, and will not, appeal to the masses. Any suggestions I make are in an effort to broaden the appeal of it to more players, actually nearly all my suggestions for STO are to that end. Even if the suggestions are at odds with my own preferences.
I would also add the caveat that you SHOULD die to focused fire from 2-3 players in that same amount of time, and be saved by focused healing from the same number of players too. This gives room for some burst to exist.
Adjust the numbers and we may have a better compromise.
The thing about STO is that it needs a systems approach. Nerfing heals, reducing res and adding more HP needs to come with other things like:
1) Concurrently, remove doff, console and abilities stacking on a target/targeter where appropriate, while improving the way abilities are at baseline and with scaling.
2) Equalizing beam array power drain with cannons.
Trying to fix the game piecemeal will end up with cries of reverse change polarity, and if the change is reverse, we get nowhere fast!
"Last Engage! Magical Girl Origami-san" is in print! Now with three times more rainbows.
Support the "Armored Unicorn" vehicle initiative today!
Thanks for Harajuku. Now let's get a real "Magical Girl" costume!
But with the higher hull hit points, let?s say 5 times, hull healing needs to take a hit, at least half of what it is now.
Healing in this game is too strong to the point that you can live through everything or you are dead in 2 seconds.
I fly a Sci Oddy on my Eng and I can die in 3 to 4 seconds or keep all of the team alive. My ship has about 63k in hit points and anywhere from 46% resis to 64%. I was just in a match where I died in 4 or 5 seconds with full shield. In 4 to 5 seconds I can heal about 48k hull hit points and be at that 64%. That means they did 170k in damage in 5 seconds or less. Maybe I am not remembering right but the spike damage of higher end players is way too high.
Now you can?t nerf the heck out of damage without pissing most people off. But if you raise hull hit points you can make a better buffer. Then you nerf hull healing(which is used a lot less in PVE then damage is).
I think shields should have a lower cap on their resis, but keep them yo-yo.
What you will end up with is spike damage to get through shields and hurt the hull and pressure damage to (bleed through) to counter hull heals.
Or
Hull counters Spike
Shield counters pressure.
I don?t know but I would think they could make the hull points/heals changes only in PVP. That why the PVE game play is unchanged.
I would like to add that this would make cloaks less OP because right now you decloak and kill your target in one pass. while they respawn you have time to heal. if it took 4 or 5 runs the pressure damage could get to the weaker hull of the cloak ship before the killing run.
Anyways, escorts can't stack armor consoles in the same way that cruisers can. Just imagine if escorts can't shrug off the pressure damage of cruisers. Wasn't that the original idea that escorts do high damage but die faster? The higher end escorts aren't dying that easily nowadays. Only CC from Sci or other escorts can kill them. Cruisers are hopelessly undergunned to get through escorts defenses. AuxtB is about the only way to do real damage in a cruiser and that makes them pretty weak defensively. Star Trek always revolved around cruisers, make them more viable for the love of god.
Really?
Elite STFs are right now, able to be completed in 3 minutes or lower by the best teams.
When was the last time you gave the initial spheres & cube a second though in ISE?
Those spheres have over 100k hull, the cube probably has half a million to a million.
There is probably about a total of 6 to 9 million hull to cut through on any given STF, and even though they don't protect their shields enough, the targets that do have shields have a lot more than players do.
If we took Bareel's proposal, and we increased player hull by 5, and estimate each ship at a generous base of 50k, now increased to 250k a single team would only have 1 million hull.
If everyone stacked hull res to 50% against everything, which is not the case, we can give that an approximate value of about 2 million hull.
The last thing this game needs is for everything to be completely overhauled, the devs are afraid to even nerf specific DOFFs or powers - does anyone, for even a moment, think they will take a wrecking ball to their entire combat system and redesign it while the game is making money?
Making them more Damage control than heals
-one thing i have seen in a seperate thread on PvP Ideas
is the idea of a warp core power resource that regenerates slowly over time ( faster out of combat) and using heals, weapons etc will skim some off the top of your power reserves
the idea is that you have to think about the consequences of hitting that heal button, as you are committing some kind of depletable resource to it , same as Attack pattern Alpha , as this would carry a power penalty, in order to spike, you will have to sacrifice your power, making you a softer target for counter attacks
You would never run out of power completely , but the idea would be that your attacks and heals become less effective when you have no reserve power left, causing you to either die by attrition from a player that has kept some power in reserve, or break from combat to recover
it also provides cruisers with some limited advantage, having far larger warp cores, and anit matter matter supply storage, they will have more power on tap, or a faster recharge rate than smaller escorts
this is by no means a perfect idea, but i think it has some merrit to it
i also think persistant system damage, or systems damaged by crits INSTEAD of bonus crit damage is a great idea
Another idea i like is the idea of seperated PVP PvE ship dolls, where pvp ships are restricted from using certain items ( much like certain FPS games have modes in which you all use the same weapons and loadouts to make the playing field even)
This change would not work in isolation
Well, specifically, they do too much spike.
Which is rather interesting isn't it?
So it's ok for NPCs to one shot you into oblivion with a poorly designed mechanic and a poorly thought out damage scalar - but when players can do it to other players...well we better get the nerf bat out.
no
Sorry when you said they are doing too much damage, I thought you meant the NPCs.
Which is why I went to the spike conversation.
I think I actually made a post at one point detailing exactly why NPCs should be given much higher sustained damage to overcome player passive mitigation instead of giving NPCs one-shot kills that just out right ignore it all.
It's pretty funny, but the yo-yo mechanic actually plagues their PvE game as well.
Either NPCs do not do enough damage of anykind, or they only do mega-spikes that make healers and tanks and any role that is not damage completely irrelevant.
So what is an unfun mechanic, players being killed in one second, after 45 to 90s of jockeying around for position and timing is apparently different from 1-shot torpedoes from NPCs or lance weapons that can hit you for 5x your hull strength.
1st) They lack high shield resist, regen, and distribution capability typically.
2nd) Their hull resist is typically negative some stupid high (or low heh) number.
Take a 10k DPS build. Fire at players and your lucky to deal 5k, fire at NPCs and you should be doing over 20k. Slight difference but thank goodness TT clears APB so it wouldn't be a significant problem. Although Sensor Scan at full AUX will still retain a high amount of power.
Jem'hadar Attack Ship. Jem'hadar Heavy Escort Carrier. Fleet Patrol Escort. Fleet Qin Heavy Raptor Refit. Fleet Mogai Heavy Warbird.
4 Escorts and a destroyer that can stack armor consoles in the same way a cruiser can. And don't lose ANY damage for doing so (debatable with the Mogai, but we aren't going to go into that).
It should also be noted the plethora of warbirds and escorts and raptors that have 3 engi consoles. They have only at most 10% less resistance capability than a ship with 4. Which puts them right up there with cruisers in armor ability. Sorry, that particular point is null.