Clearly, there needs to be a maximum DPS and a minimum DPS. Hypothetically speaking, let's say 5000 DPS is the bottom of the scale and 50,000 DPS is the top of the scale. Then the ratio would incremented by 0.02 every 450 DPS until the ratio is capped at 1:1 for 50K DPS and up. Then 5K and lower would cap at 1:3. It's just a matter of math. So at a DPS of 27,500 (the halfway mark between 5K and 50K), the ratio would be at 1:1.5 (i.e. every 1.5 points of damage would transfer one shield point to the affected facing. The amount of damage would be calculated every second. If the DPS was at 50K at the first second, then on the next second, the ratio would be 1:1. If the shields are 10K per facing, then for the time span that it is taking 50K DPS, that facing would have the benefit of 30K extra shield points (40K total). Conversely, if the DPS is 5K or less, the ratio is set to 1:3 and that facing would have 3K shield points borrowed (13K total for that facing) from the other facings. If the DPS drops from 50K to 5K, for example, Tac Team would react by lowering the ratio from 1:1 to 1:3 after 1 second. So the change in transfer speed would have a 1 second lag.
So, if one were to launch an alpha strike that did 50K DPS, it would be a 50K loss to all four facings combined (i.e. the affected facing and the others depleted). If you take 5K DPS to that facing for two seconds, there would be 7K missing from the facing, leaving 3K on that facing and the other facings would be 1K short each. That means pressure damage would be more effective against Tac Team than burst damage. Then Tac Team would no longer be a way to turn four shields into one nearly invincible shield.
I like your ideas. I do have one thought though on certain stats of each ability. Make each ability scale with a particular power level. 10% of Aux applies to ST (i.e. power bonus and regen). 1.2% added per Engine power to TT (i.e. flight speed and crew resist). 2% of All power levels applies to ET (i.e. resists and repair duration).
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Well, trying to make the game figure out whether or not a bit of damage is spike or pressure (based on DPS) isn't feasible if not impossible as you'd have to take information from the future to have it work correctly.
A better idea is to take out the automatic distribution and turn it into a buff to normal distribution. IE, make it so you have to manually distribute your shields, but you get the same rate of distribution as with Tac Team. A good addition might be to lower the rate slightly (Say, 10% or so).
As it is now, regular distribution takes a while to kick in (Whereas Tac team happens about 3-4x as fast) and it simply cannot keep up with any major (or even minor) amount of damage. Regular distribution as it is now only serves to help not waste shield heals, not to directly counter damage to a particular shield facing.
Change the auto-distro to a distribution rate buff, and Tac Team maintains its usefulness while removing the problem of a Tactical ability doing something only a combination of Sci and Engineering heals should be able to do (IE, leaving a facing mostly intact after a Spike or even a fair amount of pressure damage).
What could also be done, building off of this change, is to rework the Team abilities to add in similar usefulness.
For instance, Tac Team can remain mostly the same (with the Distribution buff), Engineering team can also have the Distribution buff but at a higher rate, and Sci Team can also have the distribution buff (but at a very low rate) alongside a higher shield regen.
To make it more clear (though with mostly made up numbers just for the sake of example), I'll list out what I think the team abilities should be:
Tactical Team (1,2,3):
75-85-95% Shield Distribution Buff
100-125-150% Flight Speed strength.
Clear Boarding Parties and Tactical Debuffs.
125-150-175% Crew Death resistance.
Engineering Team (1,2,3):
95-115-125% Shield Distribution Buff
3-5-7% Damage Resistance
Hull heal (Keep it the same as it already is)
Repair Subsystems
Science Team (1,2,3):
60-70-80% Shield Distribution Buff.
13-17-19 Shield Regen
Clear Science debuffs
2-3-5 Power Levels (Direct Increase)
Design the team abilities that way and all 3 become equally useful (it would take testing to decide the most balanced numbers obviously, but the numbers I used give you the basic idea of what whatever team you use should do for your ship) instead of one being a must-have for absolutely everyone in the game while the other two are almost completely pointless outside of very specific situations.
Herm... I'm not sure how I feel about it being a "buff" to manual distribution, if that were the case, why not simply remove auto distribution and make manual distribution perform as quickly as tac team? Or tac team could keep auto distribution because people who don't want to use can better get by with manual distribution.
I assume that current manual distribution has a set transfer x points from other facings into selected facing over the course of 6 seconds, for example. I think it needs to be changed so that distributes are toggles that are active until you click/press them again (constant mashing is ridiculous) and could have a 10 second on 5 second off or 5 second on 5 second off type mechanic where, as long as they are active, they distribute shields at tac team speed with that 5 second "computer reaction time" or whatever we want to call it where the shields are vulnerable to punch through.
Though, actually, I think shield distribution as it stands would have been fine if our ships didn't put out such epic, overwhelming damage. If our damage to shield and hull ratios was more in line with how it was in star trek: bridge commander, it would take some time to whittle down a shield facing, it wouldn't be blown through in two seconds, and the only way to reduce a shield facing quickly would be to send a volley of 5 torps at it (torps worked more like they did in trek, and more like how the omega torpedo launcher works, they charged up 1 every few seconds to a max of 5 you could fire in a row, and torps were the spike damage, as it should be.) Of course, the ships didn't have massive heals so there was no yo-yo of epic damage knocking you down, then uber heals pulling you back up.
That said, I would like to see a massive reduction in energy damage so that it becomes our "pressure damage" and have torps be the spike damage, the way it should be.
And I would also like to see cannons have their damage reduced against shields and high against hull so that instead of being the "blows through your shields and your hull" they currently are, they would be quite effective against shields, but really shine when brought to bear on bare hull.
In such a mechanic, we would also have to reduce/remove spike heals and make them all heal over time or "repair rate buffs" as it were. and they would have to be more subtle, and probably some of them geared more toward a buff than a heal. Like auxiliary to structural should make you take less damage based off of auxiliary power, not be some magical hull heal, especially not one you can use on someone else's ship. Pray tell, how does one transfer their auxiliary power to the structural integrity field of a ship 10km away?... uhuh.
And if our native repair and defense rates were actually our highest and then our skills were mild "edges" given in one way or another, abilities wouldn't be such ridiculous stack upon stack of super ridiculous yo-yo extremes. Basically... look at how the game plays without skills. If there were no skills used, the base damage of our ships and current manual shield distribution would probably work just fine.
So actually, it looks like what we really need is a massive nerf to everything.
Doing it my way makes 5 virtually useless powers and 3 mostly useless powers entirely useful.
Doing it my way also allows the latter 3 to be interchangeable depending on build and intent, allowing greater build diversity.
And while I would agree with the idea of nerfing damage across the board, the problem is the most ultimate factor: players. Nerf damage across the board, and people will still gravitate towards whatever happens to still kill faster than anything else. Nerfing damage will help as a start to balancing PVP (and even PVE for that matter, where the chasm between rofl-stomp and "oh my god how is this thing not dead yet" is even greater) but without changing what people gravitate towards we will eventually see a return to where we were. Just that now instead of people gloating about 100k+ crits, they're talking about their uber 10k crits.
And this is a problem that pretty much everyone knows is in the room but seldom decide to acknowledge as the root of all other problems. DPS is far too important in all facets of this game, to the point where its the only important thing aside from its one counter (HPS). This shouldn't be, and other avenues of the almighty win should be fleshed out.
Objective based PVP (where killing isn't always the point) is a way towards this.
Herm... I'm not sure how I feel about it being a "buff" to manual distribution, if that were the case, why not simply remove auto distribution and make manual distribution perform as quickly as tac team? Or tac team could keep auto distribution because people who don't want to use can better get by with manual distribution.
I assume that current manual distribution has a set transfer x points from other facings into selected facing over the course of 6 seconds, for example. I think it needs to be changed so that distributes are toggles that are active until you click/press them again (constant mashing is ridiculous) and could have a 10 second on 5 second off or 5 second on 5 second off type mechanic where, as long as they are active, they distribute shields at tac team speed with that 5 second "computer reaction time" or whatever we want to call it where the shields are vulnerable to punch through.
Though, actually, I think shield distribution as it stands would have been fine if our ships didn't put out such epic, overwhelming damage. If our damage to shield and hull ratios was more in line with how it was in star trek: bridge commander, it would take some time to whittle down a shield facing, it wouldn't be blown through in two seconds, and the only way to reduce a shield facing quickly would be to send a volley of 5 torps at it (torps worked more like they did in trek, and more like how the omega torpedo launcher works, they charged up 1 every few seconds to a max of 5 you could fire in a row, and torps were the spike damage, as it should be.) Of course, the ships didn't have massive heals so there was no yo-yo of epic damage knocking you down, then uber heals pulling you back up.
That said, I would like to see a massive reduction in energy damage so that it becomes our "pressure damage" and have torps be the spike damage, the way it should be.
And I would also like to see cannons have their damage reduced against shields and high against hull so that instead of being the "blows through your shields and your hull" they currently are, they would be quite effective against shields, but really shine when brought to bear on bare hull.
In such a mechanic, we would also have to reduce/remove spike heals and make them all heal over time or "repair rate buffs" as it were. and they would have to be more subtle, and probably some of them geared more toward a buff than a heal. Like auxiliary to structural should make you take less damage based off of auxiliary power, not be some magical hull heal, especially not one you can use on someone else's ship. Pray tell, how does one transfer their auxiliary power to the structural integrity field of a ship 10km away?... uhuh.
And if our native repair and defense rates were actually our highest and then our skills were mild "edges" given in one way or another, abilities wouldn't be such ridiculous stack upon stack of super ridiculous yo-yo extremes. Basically... look at how the game plays without skills. If there were no skills used, the base damage of our ships and current manual shield distribution would probably work just fine.
So actually, it looks like what we really need is a massive nerf to everything.
I'm now insanely curious to see how it would play out if abilities were not allowed in PvP. I think it would become much more strategic and less about DPS. It would be a fun experiment.
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Doing it my way makes 5 virtually useless powers and 3 mostly useless powers entirely useful.
Doing it my way also allows the latter 3 to be interchangeable depending on build and intent, allowing greater build diversity.
And while I would agree with the idea of nerfing damage across the board, the problem is the most ultimate factor: players. Nerf damage across the board, and people will still gravitate towards whatever happens to still kill faster than anything else. Nerfing damage will help as a start to balancing PVP (and even PVE for that matter, where the chasm between rofl-stomp and "oh my god how is this thing not dead yet" is even greater) but without changing what people gravitate towards we will eventually see a return to where we were. Just that now instead of people gloating about 100k+ crits, they're talking about their uber 10k crits.
And this is a problem that pretty much everyone knows is in the room but seldom decide to acknowledge as the root of all other problems. DPS is far too important in all facets of this game, to the point where its the only important thing aside from its one counter (HPS). This shouldn't be, and other avenues of the almighty win should be fleshed out.
Objective based PVP (where killing isn't always the point) is a way towards this.
One should not have to pop a team ability to be able to distribute their shields in a timely manner, that like how eng team has +hull heal skill attached to it, so once you pop eng team (a heal) if you quickly heal with another hull heal immediately after, that heal will be boosted, having to pop a heal to make another heal more effective is silly.
Yes, people will still gravitate toward whatever does the most damage, the point is to reduce the contrast between weapons so that dual heavy cannons aren't obviously far and away the superior weapon when compared to a beam array, if they both did comparable damage against shields, but more focused weapons like dual heavy cannons had an advantage on hull, the would still be advantageous, but people might not super stack dual heavy cannons any more in favor of a more mixed build, or they might still stack them because they have the maneuverability to effectively use them to take out shields and then have super hull damage one through.
This game is basically a combat game, it will never REALLY be about exploring and whatnot, to delude ourselves otherwise is just imprudent. What we should do instead of "lets find ways to make these lame ships actually have something to do" is make them all comparable on damage and give them a different secondary. Technically, cruisers should have the highest damage and the highest shields and hull but TRIBBLE maneuverability and no evasion stat. Escorts should have slightly less damage than cruisers, but super maneuverability and evasion with medium shields and hull, science ships should do less damage than escorts (made up for by science damage/control) and have a mix of defense with medium evasion, good shields, and low hull, and good maneuverability.
If the ships were balanced thusly, they would all be equally good in combat but with different play styles. Cruisers being lumbering heavy hitters that can take a beating, because they have to, escorts that don't hit quite as hard but have the maneuverability and speed to zip around and take advantage of a weak shield facing or stay out of an enemy's best damage arcs coupled will good evasion. Science ships do respectable damage with their standard weapons, they have decent speed and maneuverability that gives them a leg up, but most importantly they have a whole host of debuffs and exotic damage abilities to compensate for their reduced armament.
So people could pick and choose, do they want to draw attention with high damage and hold the line in a cruiser, do they want to be strategic and hit the enemy where it hurts in an escort, or do they want to debuff and crowd control in a science ship.
All ships should be reasonably decent at healing themselves, but none of this yo-yo TRIBBLE, and cross healing should be waaay reduced, if not eliminated. Star trek ships very infrequently "healed" each other except out of battle where one ship could support another. So perhaps there could be an out of combat mechanic for one ship to speed repairs on another by lending them repair teams. And extending shields was risky business for, while it helped protect another ship, it reduced the efficacy of your own shields, so I would rework that power so that "extend shields" basically made your shield bubble significantly larger and allowed your allies to take refuge inside it, but it would have reduced capacity/regeneration for the duration.
I think the biggest problem most people have with this game is that it's too "typical mmo" and not enough trek mmo.
I'm now insanely curious to see how it would play out if abilities were not allowed in PvP. I think it would become much more strategic and less about DPS. It would be a fun experiment.
time to start some rounds of pvp with no bridge officers allowed, just straight ship to ship combat and see what happens, lol.
I think it would still be about dps, but concepts like "turn to present a healthy shield facing" and "manually distribute shields" would actually have a chance at being effective tactics. They aren't currently because manual distribution can no where near make up for the insane damage, and when someone can blow through your shield facing in two seconds, turning to present another only buys you 2 seconds.
I want to point out some other abilities that need changing and how I think they could be improved for balance.
Transfer Shield Strength: Make it do what its name implies. Transfer shield regeneration to the weakest shield facing. It would do this once per activation. So, that one facing would have 3x times the regeneration rate for 6,12,18 seconds and the others would have none for 18,12,6 seconds. A fair trade, I think. Make the shield resist aux level dependent. Lose the instant heal.
Viral Matrix: Double the global cool down so it can't be chained.
Torpedo Spread: change the number of torpedoes to 2,3,4 per volley and only one extra target per volley. Reduce the CD to 20 secs so it can be used more often. It's just too powerful as it is. With it's 100% chance to hit, and using quantum torpedoes, it can lay down 40K damage or more.
Reverse Shield Polarity: Keep it as it is, but add a reduced resistance to kinetic damage as a tradeoff.
Extend Shields: Add a severe loss of shield regen and resistance to the ship using the ability.
For captain abilities.
Attack Pattern Alpha: Replace the damage boost with a reduction to power drain from weapons using the same percentages (i.e. The maximum reduction would be 60% at commander level and 9 points in attack patterns.).
Tactical Fleet: Same as APA. No team benefit.
Subnucleonic Beam: Only offensive buffs are removed and put into cool down, multiplied by their current listed percentages. Example: Attack Pattern Alpha hit with a captain level SNB would be put in a cooldown of 51 seconds.
Science Fleet: Make it AoE with a range of 3K.
Miracle Worker: Replace the shield heal with a global boost to power levels.
Engineering Fleet: Replace everything with a bonus to Starship Hull Plating and Starship Armor Reinforcement. 5K AoE.
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I want to point out some other abilities that need changing and how I think they could be improved for balance.
Transfer Shield Strength: Make it do what its name implies. Transfer shield regeneration to the weakest shield facing. It would do this once per activation. So, that one facing would have 3x times the regeneration rate for 6,12,18 seconds and the others would have none for 18,12,6 seconds. A fair trade, I think. Make the shield resist aux level dependent. Lose the instant heal.
This would be too micromanaging, one would have to activate the ability and tell it which shield facing you want your "shield strength" transferred to, it would additionally eliminate it as a support ability. I say transfer shield strength should be literal, it doesn't work on yourself, it is support only and it transfers X amount of points from your shield into your target's shields.
Torpedo Spread: change the number of torpedoes to 2,3,4 per volley and only one extra target per volley. Reduce the CD to 20 secs so it can be used more often. It's just too powerful as it is. With it's 100% chance to hit, and using quantum torpedoes, it can lay down 40K damage or more.
You mean 40k damage total when hitting multiple targets, right? Cause it doesn't do anywhere near that much on single targets/few targets. And because kinetic does such little damage to shields and almost everything is shielded, I don't think this ability is too powerful, what's silly is that high yield isn't significantly more powerful even though it's a single target attack.
Extend Shields: Add a severe loss of shield regen and resistance to the ship using the ability.
I agree with this one except that the ships that use it tend to be sitting ducks for escorts already, without a significant buff to cruiser innate survival ability, compromising their defense further might make extend completely unusable.
Attack Pattern Alpha: Replace the damage boost with a reduction to power drain from weapons using the same percentages (i.e. The maximum reduction would be 60% at commander level and 9 points in attack patterns.).
This would kind of be turning attack pattern alpha into the engineer's nadeon inversion.
Subnucleonic Beam: Only offensive buffs are removed and put into cool down, multiplied by their current listed percentages. Example: Attack Pattern Alpha hit with a captain level SNB would be put in a cooldown of 51 seconds.
Let's just remove captain abilities... but otherwise, just put everything on ridiculous cool down but don't strip active buffs, having both is overkill.
There is a thread titled 'cruiser commands aoe is too small' and comm powers have a range of 5km, 3km wouldn't help anyone but the captain using it, again, neglecting the 'fleet' of it.
Miracle Worker: Replace the shield heal with a global boost to power levels.
This would be a repeat of engineer captain's eps power transfer skill just with added hull heal, and it's shields that really keep you alive, hull tanking is a joke, so the miracle you need is usually more shields than hull.
Engineering Fleet: Replace everything with a bonus to Starship Hull Plating and Starship Armor Reinforcement. 5K AoE.
Taking the fleet abilities and making them tac-not fleet, sci-no where near big enough to be fleet, eng, still no where near big enough to be fleet, and largely nerfing them into the ground? Yes... i still think simply removing them would be best.
This would be too micromanaging, one would have to activate the ability and tell it which shield facing you want your "shield strength" transferred to, it would additionally eliminate it as a support ability. I say transfer shield strength should be literal, it doesn't work on yourself, it is support only and it transfers X amount of points from your shield into your target's shields.
Actually, the transfer would be automated and would favor the weakest facing. What I'm trying to say with these changes is that healing abilities are silly because they only exist because this game should really be called "DPS Online". Personally, I think all healing should be wiped from the game and leave it to passive regeneration. This would obviously require a significant curtailing of damage buffs.
Here's what I'd truly like to see: No more healing nor APA type damage buffs. Ships would deal with damage mitigation through strategic control of power systems, shield balancing, and maneuvering. You want more damage? Equip DHC's and cycle your weapons to max power. You want more shield regen? Cycle your shield power to max and start hitting your shield balance keys to refill weak facings or turn that face away from the attacker. You want speed? Cycle to engines and hit evasive (it's available to every captain and isn't OP, so why not?).
Additionally, the weapons need a few changes as well. High DPS energy weapons need to have differing effective ranges. As an example, DC's and DHC's should have a minimum effective range of 5K because they're cannons and they're powerful. Anything that uses a DHC should have to be a high risk, high reward play style and anything beyond 5K should make them unable to fire. Beams should be the long range weapon of choice, but a narrower arc. They should have a minimum effective range of 10K. Turrets and cannons should be somewhere in between (i.e. 7.5K); being a middle of the road choice. Therefore single cannons would have similar damage than a beam, but a wider arc (basically, cannons and beams would swap arcs, but DBB would stay as it is), and turrets have the 360? arc, so they should remain the same damage-wise.
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Actually, the transfer would be automated and would favor the weakest facing. What I'm trying to say with these changes is that healing abilities are silly because they only exist because this game should really be called "DPS Online". Personally, I think all healing should be wiped from the game and leave it to passive regeneration. This would obviously require a significant curtailing of damage buffs.
Here's what I'd truly like to see: No more healing nor APA type damage buffs. Ships would deal with damage mitigation through strategic control of power systems, shield balancing, and maneuvering. You want more damage? Equip DHC's and cycle your weapons to max power. You want more shield regen? Cycle your shield power to max and start hitting your shield balance keys to refill weak facings or turn that face away from the attacker. You want speed? Cycle to engines and hit evasive (it's available to every captain and isn't OP, so why not?).
Additionally, the weapons need a few changes as well. High DPS energy weapons need to have differing effective ranges. As an example, DC's and DHC's should have a minimum effective range of 5K because they're cannons and they're powerful. Anything that uses a DHC should have to be a high risk, high reward play style and anything beyond 5K should make them unable to fire. Beams should be the long range weapon of choice, but a narrower arc. They should have a minimum effective range of 10K. Turrets and cannons should be somewhere in between (i.e. 7.5K); being a middle of the road choice. Therefore single cannons would have similar damage than a beam, but a wider arc (basically, cannons and beams would swap arcs, but DBB would stay as it is), and turrets have the 360? arc, so they should remain the same damage-wise.
I wouldn't mind healing being removed from the game either, and yes, damage would need to be brought waaaaay down for that to happen. One may not want transfer shield strength to transfer all regeneration to their weakest shield facing, they may want it all in their strongest shield facing to keep it strong against incoming damage... so yeah...
Beam arrays have large arcs in the show, so it wouldn't make sense for them to trade places with cannons by giving them narrow arcs and whatnot. Something I proposed was that narrow arch weapons like dual heavy cannons/dual cannons/dual beam banks would have bonus damage to hull but against shields would do the same damage as a beam array. That way they still have a bonus, but they must first get through shields for it to show. Current dual heavy, rip through shields and then rip through hull is just ridiculous.
I think that the intention with dual heavy cannon type weapons was that they had the same range but for their high damage, they have a limited arc in front of the ship, of course, when you are as mobile as an escort, that is of little hindrance, however, escorts were meant to speed/evasion tank, if they stopped moving/slowed down, they would instapop, so the balance was that these weapons have high damage, but would be approximately 50% on, 50% off from doing attack runs on the target while a ship with beam arrays would have 100% on time. That intended balance obviously hasn't been executed properly.
When TT automatically adds shield strength to the facing taking damage, have the remaining shield facings lose ~50% more energy then is being added.
Basically, you have only perhaps 3 shield facings worth of energy when using TT instead of 4. Each facing is just as strong when hit individually, but shield transfer costs some shield energy representing inefficiency in the power grid, emitter limits, etc.
Have TSS reduce this penalty by ~40%/50%/60%, so it is beneficial to chain TSS and TT to avoid shield drain.
I wouldn't mind healing being removed from the game either, and yes, damage would need to be brought waaaaay down for that to happen. One may not want transfer shield strength to transfer all regeneration to their weakest shield facing, they may want it all in their strongest shield facing to keep it strong against incoming damage... so yeah...
Beam arrays have large arcs in the show, so it wouldn't make sense for them to trade places with cannons by giving them narrow arcs and whatnot. Something I proposed was that narrow arch weapons like dual heavy cannons/dual cannons/dual beam banks would have bonus damage to hull but against shields would do the same damage as a beam array. That way they still have a bonus, but they must first get through shields for it to show. Current dual heavy, rip through shields and then rip through hull is just ridiculous.
I think that the intention with dual heavy cannon type weapons was that they had the same range but for their high damage, they have a limited arc in front of the ship, of course, when you are as mobile as an escort, that is of little hindrance, however, escorts were meant to speed/evasion tank, if they stopped moving/slowed down, they would instapop, so the balance was that these weapons have high damage, but would be approximately 50% on, 50% off from doing attack runs on the target while a ship with beam arrays would have 100% on time. That intended balance obviously hasn't been executed properly.
Why put it in their strongest facing? Their weakest facing is likely the one the enemy is attacking most and this would help slower ships that can't easily turn a new face toward their attacker. The idea is to prevent the most damaged facing from complete failure.
I think instead of removing captain abilities, make them into boff abilities and hit them with the nerf hammer. First off, they would all be limited to the Cmdr. slot so you can only carry one of them and you'd have to lose a slot for your best level III abilities to have it.
Sub nuc: Reduce target's Starship Power Insulators by 60% of aux power level for 30 seconds.
Photonic fleet: Summon a cruiser one tier higher than player's ship for 60 seconds. On a tier 5 ship, summon a random photonic fleet escort or fleet cruiser.
Scattering Field: just remove the AoE, it's pretty useless as a team buff anyway.
Science Fleet: Just get rid of it. The same for the other two fleet abilities.
Sensor Scan: This is definitely a keeper. It's essential when searching for cloaked ships.
Miracle Worker: Lose the hull and shield heal, keep subsystem repair. At 25% crew or less, hull regen rate doubles. Hull must be at 50% or less to activate. Lasts 30 seconds. 2 minute CD.
EPS Transfer: Target ally only. Drains player's power to supplement ally.
Rotate Shield Frequency: Shields have 0% bleed-through, but take 10% more damage for 30 seconds.
Nadeon Inversion: Only weapons drain less power. Keep the percentages as they are.
Go Down Fighting: Available at 25% hull. This has obvious synergy with ramming speed and fleet support.
Tactical initiative: Instant recharge of tactical abilities currently in cool down. Using one of the affected abilities applies a 45 second global cool down to all of the affected abilities. 90 second cool down.
Fire on My Mark: Replace it with a 50% bonus to Starship Targeting Systems.
Attack Pattern Alpha: Transfer aux power to weapons and shields. Fortify forward shield facing by 60% and drain the other facings by 20% each. Lose the damage buff, keep the rest.
Now, on to weapons again. How about giving single cannons a 270 degree arc and limit them to aft? They still keep the medium range and have an advantage over beams but have a drawback too. Cannons are the TRIBBLE redheaded stepchild of weapons right now. They're not as good as the two dual cannons and they're no better nor worse than beams, but beams have subsystem targeting available. Cannons are just stronger turrets with half the arc. Without healing, there would need to be an option for reasonable damage on the aft section so ships can turn their facings about and have more damage potential on the tail and broadside. You could install one cannon and two turrets in the aft slots (or two cannons and a torp). More damage coming from all sides, but your bread and butter comes from the front.
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When TT automatically adds shield strength to the facing taking damage, have the remaining shield facings lose ~50% more energy then is being added.
Basically, you have only perhaps 3 shield facings worth of energy when using TT instead of 4. Each facing is just as strong when hit individually, but shield transfer costs some shield energy representing inefficiency in the power grid, emitter limits, etc.
Have TSS reduce this penalty by ~40%/50%/60%, so it is beneficial to chain TSS and TT to avoid shield drain.
Good god, no, then your shields would vaporize even more quickly than they already do even with tac team active.
Why put it in their strongest facing? Their weakest facing is likely the one the enemy is attacking most and this would help slower ships that can't easily turn a new face toward their attacker. The idea is to prevent the most damaged facing from complete failure.
Because if you do happen to be attacked on your strongest facing or if you do manage to turn your strongest facing to your opponent and want all your regeneration in that facing, instead regen in all the other facings was shut down and put into the weakest one... this skill would be far too complicated to use and unlikely to be helpful the way you envision it. If, perhaps, it worked sort of like a tac team and put all regeneration into the facing taking the most damage, that might work... though I still think nearly all healing should be removed from the game with few exceptions, one of them being transfer shield strength being able to take x points from your shields to transfer into an ally's shields. That way it's not "something for nothing" but rather a straight 1:1 transfer of shields from your grid to an ally who needs it.
I think instead of removing captain abilities, make them into boff abilities and hit them with the nerf hammer. First off, they would all be limited to the Cmdr. slot so you can only carry one of them and you'd have to lose a slot for your best level III abilities to have it.
Sub nuc: Reduce target's Starship Power Insulators by 60% of aux power level for 30 seconds.
The best power drains are at the commander level, so someone sacrifices that better power drain to debuff someone so that their lower level drains can perform better? This sounds like one would need two powers to accomplish the effect of a single power.
Photonic fleet: Summon a cruiser one tier higher than player's ship for 60 seconds. On a tier 5 ship, summon a random photonic fleet escort or fleet cruiser.
If this was turned into a boff ability, it might as well simply work the way it did before, it wasn't that powerful to begin with.
Scattering Field: just remove the AoE, it's pretty useless as a team buff anyway.
This might not be a bad defense buff, but if it kept the duration and cool of the captain ability, it would be pretty pointless. And this ability is currently not nearly as useful as it could be because the range needs a buff, 5km is arm's length in this game.
Miracle Worker: Lose the hull and shield heal, keep subsystem repair. At 25% crew or less, hull regen rate doubles. Hull must be at 50% or less to activate. Lasts 30 seconds. 2 minute CD.
with that kind of cool down and qualifiers and useless effect, no one would ever take that skill.
EPS Transfer: Target ally only. Drains player's power to supplement ally.
If this power took a straight x amount of power from the player's ship and sent it to an ally, it could cripple the giving ship, If it was percentage based, it probably wouldn't be a significant buff to the recipient. To not cripple the giver and be of any use to the recipient, it would have to work the way it currently does, magic "power from nowhere" That or it could simply be a self buff of EPS transfer rate for the duration.
Rotate Shield Frequency: Shields have 0% bleed-through, but take 10% more damage for 30 seconds.
Bleed through isn't currently a big deal, it's damage that ignores shields entirely that has become quite the bother. If this ability forced that kind of damage, grav wells, eject warp plasma, etc. to all hit the shields rather than the ship, then it could be useful. But not with a 10% bonus to damage. Not all abilities have to be cutting off your leg to gain an arm.
Go Down Fighting: Available at 25% hull. This has obvious synergy with ramming speed and fleet support.
You're saying keep this ability working as it already does but make it so you have to be at 25% to use it? 25% may not give one much of a chance to have a benefit, especially not with the new rep passives coming out that lets people kill you faster the lower your hull gets. (Really devs? WTF?)
Tactical initiative: Instant recharge of tactical abilities currently in cool down. Using one of the affected abilities applies a 45 second global cool down to all of the affected abilities. 90 second cool down.
This too makes this ability so tied up in caveats that no one would use it.
Fire on My Mark: Replace it with a 50% bonus to Starship Targeting Systems.
If we turned it into an accuracy buff, and if the engineering rotate shield frequency turns into "perfect shields" this ability could be "perfect accuracy" for a short duration, but I'm not sure who would take that over beta, a force multiplier, or omega with all it's epic awesome.
Attack Pattern Alpha: Transfer aux power to weapons and shields. Fortify forward shield facing by 60% and drain the other facings by 20% each. Lose the damage buff, keep the rest.
So make it some sort of aux to bat... weird thingie? Most ships that would be using this already have such low shields on each facing that even if given a 60% buff to the forward facing, which would probably be good, the -20% to the other facings would probably make them far too squishy from those angles to make this ability worth using.
Now, on to weapons again. How about giving single cannons a 270 degree arc and limit them to aft? They still keep the medium range and have an advantage over beams but have a drawback too. Cannons are the TRIBBLE redheaded stepchild of weapons right now. They're not as good as the two dual cannons and they're no better nor worse than beams, but beams have subsystem targeting available. Cannons are just stronger turrets with half the arc. Without healing, there would need to be an option for reasonable damage on the aft section so ships can turn their facings about and have more damage potential on the tail and broadside. You could install one cannon and two turrets in the aft slots (or two cannons and a torp). More damage coming from all sides, but your bread and butter comes from the front.
Most people don't use single cannons because the ships that use cannons tend to be escorts and escorts have the turn necessary to make use of dual heavy cannons with outperform all other weapons. Single cannons have higher DPS than beams and pair well with turrets on ships that can't use dual heavy cannons for a focus on forward/nearly side damage capability. Widening their arc would naturally come with a DPS nerf from the devs, and who would use cannons on the back? Any ship using dual heavies will use turrets to bolster their forward facing damage, and if a ship was using beams in the front, they wouldn't equip cannons in the back, so your suggestion would actually make cannons WAY worse. Beam subsystem targeting is only used by ships that have it built in, so that's really not a big deal.
Even if healing were eliminated from the game, ship's primary damage should be fore and sides, most ships in canon were shown as having the aft be their weakest armed facing as damage is stypically fore-for chasing things, and sides, for engaging things in broad side and orbiting things, one is not typically shooting at things in their aft unless they are running away, and if they are running away, they need to just GTFO of there, or should only need enough fire power to shoot down incoming this or that.
Sorry to go shooting down all your ideas, I don't mean to be a negative nelly, I just know that you beat those abilities so hard with the nerf hammer that only one seemed to survive, and then you took cannons and was like, "You, red headed step child, TO THE BACK OF THE BUS!" as if that was better, lol.
Okay, never mind what I said about cannons before. New idea. DHC and DC lose 25% accuracy per kilometer beyond 5K from target. Beams lose 5% per kilometer past 5K and turrets/cannons lose 10% per kilometer past 5K. Torps are currently hard enough to land a hit, so they can stay as they are. That means, at 10K, DC and DHC have 0% accuracy, cannons/turrets lose 50%, and beams lose 25%. Conversely, all cannons gain 10% damage per kilometer under 5K (i.e. at 1K, damage is boosted by 40%). This would replace the effect range has on damage now. As you get farther away, accuracy decreases (5K or less being 100% of normal accuracy). As you get closer than 5K, cannon damage increases (i.e. damage is 140% of normal). If you want long range DPS, bring beams. If you want higher DPS, bring cannons and attack at close range.
Again, if we are to remove healing (and I think we should) abilities that used to heal need to be re-purposed to dealing with shifting capacity and regen around, either automatically or by the player's command. Maybe something that boosts the rate of the shield balancing command by lowering your rate of fire? I really do think that in terms of buffs and healing, that ships should take from one system to have gains in another. I think if you want to buff your weapons, for example, it should be done by sacrificing another power system just like it was done on the show (i.e. Aux to shields, engine power to weapons, etc.). Every bonus should be met with a reciprocal loss. You have X amount of power to share among 4 power systems, that should be all you have to work with. So an ability like TSS would be shifting power for you (instead of you having to do it yourself and switch it back manually) while giving some extra regen at a cost somewhere else.
Honestly, when I chose that change to Sub Nuc, I was thinking of Tach Beam, which is maxed out at LtC. Instead of having drain reduced by a factor of 2.6 (max skill, which is probably not that common, and two sci consoles; two is typical for an escort), it would be 1.8. If your tach beam drains 7000, it's reduced to 2700 and 3800 respectively. The drain increase would be 1100 more shield points. Sure, it won't be a huge bonus to siphon and tyken's, but you do get a bigger polaron and tetryon drain too. So it's not that much of a loss. It just requires a different strategy.
Addendum: I just did the math while thinking about your comment, and Tyken's III and ES II do less drain than Sub Nuc and ES II/Tyken's would. Add tet or pol damage to that and it becomes even better.
I think for most of your comments, you're looking at it as the game is now, but I'm looking at the game without healing and without healing, these powers become mega-OP. Perhaps making captain abilities into boff abilities is a bad idea? Maybe, they should be ship abilities and limited to one? But, you can change it any time you're not in system space (i.e. sector space and ground). After all, the command slots are exclusive to their respective ship anyway (i.e. tac has tac cmdr., etc), so going with a ship ability would make the Cmdr. slot open again and the abilities would be tied to their respective ships. So, you'll only get a Sub Nuc on a sci ship, MW on cruiser, and APA on an escort. You get an "elite" slot to put a ship ability in.
FOMM would be a crit boost because excess accuracy increases crits. The difference here to a straight-up crit bonus is that it has to be calculated against the target's evade rating (i.e. starship maneuvers). If you max out SS targeting and apply this ability, you have 150% change to hit, minus the target's evade and what's left over, if it's more than 100%, is a crit bonus. It's like the lucky rabbit's foot of damage.
Here's a few alterations to my previous ideas:
MW: Repairs subsystems and boosts EPS skill by 25% for 30 seconds. 90 second CD.
EPS transfer: Increase target ally's power recharge by 50% and reduce player's power recharge by 50% for 30 seconds. 90 second CD. There, no drain, just a regen boost in exchange for a regen loss. This seems fair when you realize that power doesn't just come from nowhere.
Rotate shield freq: Increases resistance to shield penetration by 90% and drains shield power subsystem by 3 points per second. 50% immunity to tractor beam. At 25 points or less this ability ends. Shield batteries and abilities that increase shield power do not effect duration. 30 second CD.
Scat Field: Increase range to 10K, but it effects allies and enemies equally for 15 seconds. 45 second CD.
GDF: At 50% hull or less, weapons and impulse engines are 25% faster. This ability ends when hull returns to 51% and CD for 60 seconds.
TI: Resets tac abilities in cool down. Each ability that was reset will gain an additional 10 second CD per ability when used. (i.e. the first ability would gain 10, second gains 20, and so on). 3 minute CD.
APA: Keep the previous stats and add a +10% CrtH. 30 second duration. 60 second CD.
Now that we've taken captain abilities away from the captains, how do we choose one captain over another in terms of space combat? Perhaps a class bonus? Sci gets a Starship Shield Emitters and Particle Generators bonus, Eng gets Hull Repair boost and EPS, and Tac gets Starship Maneuvers and Attack Patterns? Or, let the player choose one class skill boost at character creation and another at VA rank as extra traits?
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Okay, never mind what I said about cannons before. New idea. DHC and DC lose 25% accuracy per kilometer beyond 5K from target. Beams lose 5% per kilometer past 5K and turrets/cannons lose 10% per kilometer past 5K. Torps are currently hard enough to land a hit, so they can stay as they are. That means, at 10K, DC and DHC have 0% accuracy, cannons/turrets lose 50%, and beams lose 25%. Conversely, all cannons gain 10% damage per kilometer under 5K (i.e. at 1K, damage is boosted by 40%). This would replace the effect range has on damage now. As you get farther away, accuracy decreases (5K or less being 100% of normal accuracy). As you get closer than 5K, cannon damage increases (i.e. damage is 140% of normal). If you want long range DPS, bring beams. If you want higher DPS, bring cannons and attack at close range.
I think that these cannon vs beam accuracy rules are an attempt to reign in the ridiculous over performance of dual heavy cannons, but I don't think this is the way to go about it. Dual cannons have such high DPS because of their narrow arc, no one uses dual canons because if their ship can equip dual cannons, they can equip dual heavy cannons, and dual heavy cannons have a much higher damage per volley that makes them better for quickly blasting through shields and then obliterating the hull.
Dual heavy cannons probably should have never existed, escorts running around with dual heavy cannons that are absolute beasts would probably be far more tolerable with dual cannons.
Additionally, a point of blance for dual/dual heavy cannons was supposed to be that the ships that could use them were at a disadvantage in one way or another. Escorts were supposed to need to keep moving to stay alive, so they would not be able to continuously focus fire with dual heavy cannons, they would have to do damage in "passes." So they fly along doing heavy damage, then they have to keep moving, so right now their dual heavies are off of you. So it would be like a 50% exposure to their damage. However, escorts have become so tanky and or they are flying along behind you maintaining their evasion stat that this disadvantage has been largely negated. Large ships that can mount dual heavy cannons were at the disadvantage that they are very slow to turn so using the dual heavy cannons was difficult, particularly on fast moving targets.
I think the best way to balance this would be to... well, frankly, remove dual heavy cannons, or make normal dual cannons into dual heavies and then make all other weapons also have a higher damage per volley and lower firing rate. So essentially, we either get rid of dual heavies, or we make all of our current weapons function like "heavy" weapons.
The other thing should be that cruisers should have no evasion stat, they are the broad side of a barn, if your tac officer can't hit a cruiser, he is incompetent. To make up for having ZERO evasion, cruisers should have very high damage resistance/very thick hull and shields. This would allow a crusier to be just as effective at taking damage whether going full combat impulse or creeping along at 1/2 or 1/4. This way a cruiser's defense against escorts is to slow down so that an escort can not simply fly full speed behind the cruiser keeping their high evasion while blasting away at the cruiser. If the cruiser is moving more slowly, the escort has to slow down to stay behind it, evasion drops, and the escort is blown out of the sky, if the escort keeps flying fast to maintain evasion, there will be an on/off of his dual heavy cannons as he makes passes at the cruiser.
I believe that this would restore the intended mechanics of the game.
Again, if we are to remove healing (and I think we should) abilities that used to heal need to be re-purposed to dealing with shifting capacity and regen around, either automatically or by the player's command. Maybe something that boosts the rate of the shield balancing command by lowering your rate of fire? I really do think that in terms of buffs and healing, that ships should take from one system to have gains in another. I think if you want to buff your weapons, for example, it should be done by sacrificing another power system just like it was done on the show (i.e. Aux to shields, engine power to weapons, etc.). Every bonus should be met with a reciprocal loss. You have X amount of power to share among 4 power systems, that should be all you have to work with. So an ability like TSS would be shifting power for you (instead of you having to do it yourself and switch it back manually) while giving some extra regen at a cost somewhere else.
The game currently does force one to take from one system to give to another, we have a limited supply of energy that we must decide if we want it in weapons or shields or engines or aux, and how much in each of those systems with a mandatory minimum of 15. If the game eliminated healing and relied mostly on passive regeneration, not much would need to be done to current "heal" skills, they would just need to have their heal removed and be turned into resistance buffs or power buffs. If emergency power skills only gave power and there was no such thing as over capping, one could put 100 power to weapons, and then could use their emergency power to bolster shields. The "cost" associated with using an emergency power is where you are going to put it, if you can only have one, then you have to decide if you want it in weapons or shields or engines or aux. If auxiliary to structural doesn't give a heal but is just a solid resistance buff, then the choice is do you want bonus resistance from aux to structural or do you want better speed, maneuverability, inertia stat, and crew damage resistance from aux to damp, or do you want to use aux to bat... which, hmm... what if that gave your batteries a vastly extended duration? Batteries currently don't last very long at all, even with battery skill. So I think aux to bat would be a valuable skill for getting more power through your batteries (this ability wouldn't drain aux power the way it currently does) while still having power in aux for any sci abilities.
Honestly, when I chose that change to Sub Nuc, I was thinking of Tach Beam, which is maxed out at LtC. Instead of having drain reduced by a factor of 2.6 (max skill, which is probably not that common, and two sci consoles; two is typical for an escort), it would be 1.8. If your tach beam drains 7000, it's reduced to 2700 and 3800 respectively. The drain increase would be 1100 more shield points. Sure, it won't be a huge bonus to siphon and tyken's, but you do get a bigger polaron and tetryon drain too. So it's not that much of a loss. It just requires a different strategy.
Addendum: I just did the math while thinking about your comment, and Tyken's III and ES II do less drain than Sub Nuc and ES II/Tyken's would. Add tet or pol damage to that and it becomes even better.
Well, if it is a substantial enough boost, it might actually be worth taking subnuke to boost all your other energy drain abilities.
I think for most of your comments, you're looking at it as the game is now, but I'm looking at the game without healing and without healing, these powers become mega-OP. Perhaps making captain abilities into boff abilities is a bad idea? Maybe, they should be ship abilities and limited to one? But, you can change it any time you're not in system space (i.e. sector space and ground). After all, the command slots are exclusive to their respective ship anyway (i.e. tac has tac cmdr., etc), so going with a ship ability would make the Cmdr. slot open again and the abilities would be tied to their respective ships. So, you'll only get a Sub Nuc on a sci ship, MW on cruiser, and APA on an escort. You get an "elite" slot to put a ship ability in.
I was considering your changes to the abilities as a general change, and no matter how you look at them, the skills were so "meh" or they required such a substantial sacrifice to use them that the trade off would pretty much never be worthwhile.
Turning them into ship abilities is a very interesting idea, if only sci ships have the hull emitters to summon a photonic fleet, if they have subnuke for boosting power drain abilities (according to your version of the power) then that could make sense. It would also prevent potentially op cross overs like a science captain in an escort nuking off all your resistance and then blowing through you.
FOMM would be a crit boost because excess accuracy increases crits. The difference here to a straight-up crit bonus is that it has to be calculated against the target's evade rating (i.e. starship maneuvers). If you max out SS targeting and apply this ability, you have 150% change to hit, minus the target's evade and what's left over, if it's more than 100%, is a crit bonus. It's like the lucky rabbit's foot of damage.
That would only be according to how the game works now where, supposedly, excess accuracy turns into crit. I don't have a problem with an accuracy boost, but I think that crits are starting to run away in this game, we really don't need to throw oil onto that fire.
MW: Repairs subsystems and boosts EPS skill by 25% for 30 seconds. 90 second CD.
This could actually be workable, especially if the "teams" have been largely removed/nerfed so that engineering team doesn't instantly repair subsystems.
EPS transfer: Increase target ally's power recharge by 50% and reduce player's power recharge by 50% for 30 seconds. 90 second CD. There, no drain, just a regen boost in exchange for a regen loss. This seems fair when you realize that power doesn't just come from nowhere.
It doesn't really make sense for one ship to be able to boost the recharge rate of another ship, especially not by sacrificing it's own. One ship can't increase the capacity of another's eps grid by some how turning theirs down. The most literal iteration of this power would be to take power from the giving ship and transfer it into the other ship, but the only time we saw this done was out of combat and for support like when the enterprise transferred power from their systems to a warbird. But really, most "captain skills" really don't make sense, if they were simply removed from the game, I think it would be much more playable with a more level playing field where choice of captain is more of a ground performance issue and less of a ship performance issue.
Rotate shield freq: Increases resistance to shield penetration by 90% and drains shield power subsystem by 3 points per second. 50% immunity to tractor beam. At 25 points or less this ability ends. Shield batteries and abilities that increase shield power do not effect duration. 30 second CD.
If this was the case, where your regen and resistance would be bottoming out at a rate of 3 per second, I don't see why shield boosting abilities shouldn't help keep it running. But all around it doesn't sound like it does anything. only 5-10% of damage goes through shields anyway without a special shield bypassing modifier or complete shield ignore. Even if it gave "perfect shields" that nothing went through, the regen and resistance bottoming out from power drain probably wouldn't be worth it. Like i said, not all abilities need to cut off your leg to give you an arm, rotate shield frequency could simply reduce shield bleed through for the duration. And would be more of a big deal if we had a scaling bleed mechanic where 60% in a shield facing meant 40% of damage passed through shields.
Scat Field: Increase range to 10K, but it effects allies and enemies equally for 15 seconds. 45 second CD.
If the ability affected both, there really wouldn't be much of a point to it, you could save an ally at the expense of saving an enemy too. Just make the ability self only and not have such a ridiculous cool as it does currently.
GDF: At 50% hull or less, weapons and impulse engines are 25% faster. This ability ends when hull returns to 51% and CD for 60 seconds.
faster engines means one could run away, which would not be going down fighting, 25% boost to firing rate, especially on top of other firing rate boosters could be massively OP. One would simply need to let their enemy take them to 50% hull, then heal shields without healing hull and blow them away. If go down fighting made it so that when your ship was destroyed, it gave you like 10... 15 seconds to pilot it into your enemy with a 'ramming speed' type mechanic and perhaps that boost to engines you mentioned, that might make sense. Then it would work like in first contact where worf was going to ram the defiant into the cube right before being destroyed.
TI: Resets tac abilities in cool down. Each ability that was reset will gain an additional 10 second CD per ability when used. (i.e. the first ability would gain 10, second gains 20, and so on). 3 minute CD.
Again, not all abilities need to come with a string of caveats, if it had a 1-2 minute cool and simply refreshed all tactical abilities when used, or if it had a 1-2 minute cool and significantly, but not "OP" improved cool on tactical abilities, like reduced their cool time to 75% or 50% of normal, it wouldn't be too big of a deal, but would give an edge.
APA: Keep the previous stats and add a +10% CrtH. 30 second duration. 60 second CD.
Previous stats being your previous stats? Your previous stats plus a 10% crit hit bonus still would be so circumstantial and risky that the ability would likely never be used.
Now that we've taken captain abilities away from the captains, how do we choose one captain over another in terms of space combat? Perhaps a class bonus? Sci gets a Starship Shield Emitters and Particle Generators bonus, Eng gets Hull Repair boost and EPS, and Tac gets Starship Maneuvers and Attack Patterns? Or, let the player choose one class skill boost at character creation and another at VA rank as extra traits?
Choice of captain doesn't have to affect space at all, it could just affect your performance on the ground, there's nothing wrong with that.
I think the best way to balance this would be to... well, frankly, remove dual heavy cannons, or make normal dual cannons into dual heavies and then make all other weapons also have a higher damage per volley and lower firing rate. So essentially, we either get rid of dual heavies, or we make all of our current weapons function like "heavy" weapons.
Alternatively, the DC could have a 60 degree arc compared to the 45 degree arc of a DHC and increase the power drain to 20 (i.e. 5 DHC's would drain your weapon power to zero). Then, there would be a real choice between the two. Either have more volley damage or more arc, the DPS would be the same. Then there's the quad cannons. Those should have a huge power drain (perhaps 30?) so it's only viable to equip one. Getting rid of DHC's and QC's would make a lot of people angry beyond the changes already suggested here. Nobody likes to have their favorite toys taken away, especially if they paid money to get them.
The other thing should be that cruisers should have no evasion stat, they are the broad side of a barn, if your tac officer can't hit a cruiser, he is incompetent. To make up for having ZERO evasion, cruisers should have very high damage resistance/very thick hull and shields. This would allow a crusier to be just as effective at taking damage whether going full combat impulse or creeping along at 1/2 or 1/4. This way a cruiser's defense against escorts is to slow down so that an escort can not simply fly full speed behind the cruiser keeping their high evasion while blasting away at the cruiser. If the cruiser is moving more slowly, the escort has to slow down to stay behind it, evasion drops, and the escort is blown out of the sky, if the escort keeps flying fast to maintain evasion, there will be an on/off of his dual heavy cannons as he makes passes at the cruiser.
I believe that this would restore the intended mechanics of the game.
I agree with this as well. A tank is a tank. It should be resilient, not evasive.
The game currently does force one to take from one system to give to another, we have a limited supply of energy that we must decide if we want it in weapons or shields or engines or aux, and how much in each of those systems with a mandatory minimum of 15. If the game eliminated healing and relied mostly on passive regeneration, not much would need to be done to current "heal" skills, they would just need to have their heal removed and be turned into resistance buffs or power buffs. If emergency power skills only gave power and there was no such thing as over capping, one could put 100 power to weapons, and then could use their emergency power to bolster shields. The "cost" associated with using an emergency power is where you are going to put it, if you can only have one, then you have to decide if you want it in weapons or shields or engines or aux. If auxiliary to structural doesn't give a heal but is just a solid resistance buff, then the choice is do you want bonus resistance from aux to structural or do you want better speed, maneuverability, inertia stat, and crew damage resistance from aux to damp, or do you want to use aux to bat... which, hmm... what if that gave your batteries a vastly extended duration? Batteries currently don't last very long at all, even with battery skill. So I think aux to bat would be a valuable skill for getting more power through your batteries (this ability wouldn't drain aux power the way it currently does) while still having power in aux for any sci abilities.
EPtX doesn't pull power from any systems, it comes out of a hypothetical "emergency" battery. I think EPtX should be a battery boosting power that extends the life of the battery and ignores battery cool down in favor of its own inherent cool down. Or, include a emergency capacitor that recharges over time after use, a fifth power system that doesn't govern any ship system, but exists to boost them when used. The power level would act as a "timer" and lower rank EPtX abilities would drain more than higher ranks. Your EPS skill would determine the amount of power gained above the minimum.
Well, if it is a substantial enough boost, it might actually be worth taking subnuke to boost all your other energy drain abilities.
It would be like an "Attack Pattern Beta" for Sci ships. You and your Sci buddies would have more drain on that target.
I was considering your changes to the abilities as a general change, and no matter how you look at them, the skills were so "meh" or they required such a substantial sacrifice to use them that the trade off would pretty much never be worthwhile.
Turning them into ship abilities is a very interesting idea, if only sci ships have the hull emitters to summon a photonic fleet, if they have subnuke for boosting power drain abilities (according to your version of the power) then that could make sense. It would also prevent potentially op cross overs like a science captain in an escort nuking off all your resistance and then blowing through you.
Exactly what I was thinking.
That would only be according to how the game works now where, supposedly, excess accuracy turns into crit. I don't have a problem with an accuracy boost, but I think that crits are starting to run away in this game, we really don't need to throw oil onto that fire.
Then invert it, make FOMM a debuff to evasion so allies can hit the target more easily. That would seem to fit the idea of "Fire on My Mark", a coordinated attack that has more effect on the target.
It doesn't really make sense for one ship to be able to boost the recharge rate of another ship, especially not by sacrificing it's own. One ship can't increase the capacity of another's eps grid by some how turning theirs down. The most literal iteration of this power would be to take power from the giving ship and transfer it into the other ship, but the only time we saw this done was out of combat and for support like when the enterprise transferred power from their systems to a warbird. But really, most "captain skills" really don't make sense, if they were simply removed from the game, I think it would be much more playable with a more level playing field where choice of captain is more of a ground performance issue and less of a ship performance issue.
Yes it does. Think about it. The cruiser is giving the benefit of its own fusion generators to the target ally. So, power generation on the cruiser would go be going to the ally and the cruiser would be getting less power to recharge its own systems. It's like jumper cables.
If this was the case, where your regen and resistance would be bottoming out at a rate of 3 per second, I don't see why shield boosting abilities shouldn't help keep it running. But all around it doesn't sound like it does anything. only 5-10% of damage goes through shields anyway without a special shield bypassing modifier or complete shield ignore. Even if it gave "perfect shields" that nothing went through, the regen and resistance bottoming out from power drain probably wouldn't be worth it. Like i said, not all abilities need to cut off your leg to give you an arm, rotate shield frequency could simply reduce shield bleed through for the duration. And would be more of a big deal if we had a scaling bleed mechanic where 60% in a shield facing meant 40% of damage passed through shields.
I'm not talking about bleed-through, this is resistance to penetration from abilities like DEM and Elachi weapons. Instead of the 100% penetration proc from crescent DHC's it would only be 10%.
If the ability affected both, there really wouldn't be much of a point to it, you could save an ally at the expense of saving an enemy too. Just make the ability self only and not have such a ridiculous cool as it does currently.
But it's a field. It would have the same impact on all ships in its AoE. But I see nothing wrong with making it a single ship buff and reducing the CD to 30 to 45 seconds.
faster engines means one could run away, which would not be going down fighting, 25% boost to firing rate, especially on top of other firing rate boosters could be massively OP. One would simply need to let their enemy take them to 50% hull, then heal shields without healing hull and blow them away. If go down fighting made it so that when your ship was destroyed, it gave you like 10... 15 seconds to pilot it into your enemy with a 'ramming speed' type mechanic and perhaps that boost to engines you mentioned, that might make sense. Then it would work like in first contact where worf was going to ram the defiant into the cube right before being destroyed.
How about making it a combination of ramming speed and warp core breach? You sacrifice your ship to take out another with huge burst damage.
Again, not all abilities need to come with a string of caveats, if it had a 1-2 minute cool and simply refreshed all tactical abilities when used, or if it had a 1-2 minute cool and significantly, but not "OP" improved cool on tactical abilities, like reduced their cool time to 75% or 50% of normal, it wouldn't be too big of a deal, but would give an edge.
Fine, make it an instant cool down of all tac abilities. Base cool down is 60 seconds, plus 10 seconds for each ability recharged. That should max out at about 1 minute, 20 seconds.
Previous stats being your previous stats? Your previous stats plus a 10% crit hit bonus still would be so circumstantial and risky that the ability would likely never be used.
The problem is that APA is insanely OP. It stacks on other damage buffs and boosts just about every kind of damage you can put out. Maybe APA should give the ship a higher evasion at lower speeds for a short time? Or, perhaps more turn rate when in reverse? That would allow an escort to do a strafe of a target, do a reverse turn and have its main weapons pointed at the target as it drifts away. Possibly both options together? That, I think, looks more like an "attack pattern" than a bunch of damage and crit boosts. So, +x to Starship Maneuvers and +x to turn when engines are in reverse? I use this tactic often in my Vesta. It makes keeping low arc weapons pointed at your target easier. It also make turning around easier because your turn radius is much smaller.
Choice of captain doesn't have to affect space at all, it could just affect your performance on the ground, there's nothing wrong with that.
I can live with that, but I think there should be more skill points so players don't have to make such a hard choice between space and ground. That's just stupid. You shouldn't have to choose what type of game play you want to focus on, especially since most PvE missions have a mix of both types of game play. One should not suffer for the sake of the other unless you can have a choice of playing pure space or pure ground. That is, sadly, not an option.
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Alternatively, the DC could have a 60 degree arc compared to the 45 degree arc of a DHC and increase the power drain to 20 (i.e. 5 DHC's would drain your weapon power to zero). Then, there would be a real choice between the two. Either have more volley damage or more arc, the DPS would be the same. Then there's the quad cannons. Those should have a huge power drain (perhaps 30?) so it's only viable to equip one. Getting rid of DHC's and QC's would make a lot of people angry beyond the changes already suggested here. Nobody likes to have their favorite toys taken away, especially if they paid money to get them.
You're right, no one likes to have their toys taken away, but the nerfs you're describing wouldn't go over any better, and even with an arc increase, which would come with a DPS nerf, the ships that currently use dual heavies would stick with dual heavies for the burst even with the small arc. The option that would likely go over best is turning all weapons into "heavy" weapons so that the people who have dual heavy cannons don't lose them but gain heavy turrets, and it levels the playing field a little more by allowing all ships to have higher burst damage which is the real issue of dual heavy cannons. But the option that would probably bring the game best into balance without a runaway of ridiculous burst damage everywhere, and the simplest option, would be to turn dual heavy cannons into dual cannons. The devs really do find themselves between a rock and a hard place on all things because someone is going to be pissed, no matter what you do.
EPtX doesn't pull power from any systems, it comes out of a hypothetical "emergency" battery. I think EPtX should be a battery boosting power that extends the life of the battery and ignores battery cool down in favor of its own inherent cool down. Or, include a emergency capacitor that recharges over time after use, a fifth power system that doesn't govern any ship system, but exists to boost them when used. The power level would act as a "timer" and lower rank EPtX abilities would drain more than higher ranks. Your EPS skill would determine the amount of power gained above the minimum.
Well that's basically what emergency power to X does now anyway, the only thing that's missing would be an associated graphic that shows you a capacitor that charges over 15 seconds and lets you use it for 30 seconds. Without the graphic, it's a theoretical capacitor or two or three (depending on how many emergency powers you equip) that give you their use for a time.
Yes it does. Think about it. The cruiser is giving the benefit of its own fusion generators to the target ally. So, power generation on the cruiser would go be going to the ally and the cruiser would be getting less power to recharge its own systems. It's like jumper cables.
It would make sense as a power boost but not as a transfer rate boost. If the giving ship is lending some of its power generation to another ship, then the giving ship loses power and the receiving ship gains some, but increasing transfer rate is not like jumper cables transferring power, that's like replacing the cables inside the ship with bigger, better cables that are capable of transferring more power, and then at the end of the EPS power, you tear all that new super cable out and put back in the old ones.
But if all captain abilities were removed, or made self-only ship specific powers. EPS transfer could be a built in cruiser ability that gives them enhanced power transfer rate for a time. Or... you know... what if captain abilities were turned into ship passives? What is cruisers had constant higher eps transfer and constantly higher power levels than other ships? they currently have +5 to all subsystems, lets make it +10. They could have reduced shield penetration or "bonus penetration" immunity so that the 5-10% of penetration that the equipped shield is all the cruiser will ever take, or if that's too much, give cruisers a constant 30% reduction to shield damage, this would be the cruiser answer to escort evasion tank. And miracle worker makes cruiser subsystem disables come back online much more quickly than other ships.
Subnuke beam could be a constant passive boost to all drain abilities on a sci ship, they could constantly have a holo-fleet, make it so the holo-ships don't take damage, kind of like when people would shoot at the doctor or throw a solid object at him or try to hit him and it would just pass through. It doesn't really make sense that holo ships can be destroyed. Scattering field could just be built in so that sci ships take less energy damage to hull but would still be susceptible to kinetic.
Go down fighting could be a constant passive where escort's damage and accuracy increases as their health decreases, but it would have to be subtle to not be op... something like 0% bonus at 100% health and 25% bonus at 1% health. Fire on my mark could be a constant passive accuracy increase, and attack pattern alpha could be a passive that prevents escorts from losing speed/evasion when turning. Right now, speed and evasion seem to drop the more one turns, so eliminating that from escorts that are supposed to evasion tank makes sense.
I'm not talking about bleed-through, this is resistance to penetration from abilities like DEM and Elachi weapons. Instead of the 100% penetration proc from crescent DHC's it would only be 10%.
I mentioned a possible change above, but discussing it as an active ability, would it also eliminate shield ignoring damage like making grav well damage hit the shields instead of the hull?
But it's a field. It would have the same impact on all ships in its AoE. But I see nothing wrong with making it a single ship buff and reducing the CD to 30 to 45 seconds.
It does make sense that a field would affect everyone inside of it, but by that same token, gravity wells and tykens rifts and eject warp plasma would all have to start affecting friend and foe alike, and we'd have to enable constant friendly fire capability to the game... which would make all the aoe/hazard powers pretty much useless as they would TRIBBLE everyone and no one would want to use them.
Fine, make it an instant cool down of all tac abilities. Base cool down is 60 seconds, plus 10 seconds for each ability recharged. That should max out at about 1 minute, 20 seconds.
I wouldn't add the warp core breach to it except if the enemy ship that was struck doesn't keep moving... because then it could be way OP.
The problem is that APA is insanely OP. It stacks on other damage buffs and boosts just about every kind of damage you can put out. Maybe APA should give the ship a higher evasion at lower speeds for a short time? Or, perhaps more turn rate when in reverse? That would allow an escort to do a strafe of a target, do a reverse turn and have its main weapons pointed at the target as it drifts away. Possibly both options together? That, I think, looks more like an "attack pattern" than a bunch of damage and crit boosts. So, +x to Starship Maneuvers and +x to turn when engines are in reverse? I use this tactic often in my Vesta. It makes keeping low arc weapons pointed at your target easier. It also make turning around easier because your turn radius is much smaller.
If an escort slows to reverse speed, their evasion should drop so low that they are easily blown out of the sky, so I think that the above mentioned passive that keeps escorts from losing speed or evasion when turning would be a good benefit to them.
I can live with that, but I think there should be more skill points so players don't have to make such a hard choice between space and ground. That's just stupid. You shouldn't have to choose what type of game play you want to focus on, especially since most PvE missions have a mix of both types of game play. One should not suffer for the sake of the other unless you can have a choice of playing pure space or pure ground. That is, sadly, not an option.
Well the devs have given a "maximum" number of points that can be spent in each category, so one can choose to focus more in one or the other. I know some people who have actually focused their builds in ground because they prefer ground game play/pvp to space. But it is pretty ironic for you to be saying we shouldn't have to choose when you've been such a big proponent of cutting off a leg to gain an arm with any space ability :P lol.
I am frequently frustrated with the captain skill tree because I don't really like having to choose what I'll be good at either, especially cause I could change my mind the next day and want to focus in a different area and then the devs wan't me to spend 5 bucks every time I want a different build. So I basically have to go with as balanced of a build as I can so that I can perform well enough no matter how I build my character. I understand the devs have to make money some way... so... meh. Though i would appreciate at least letting us have two builds we could switch between kind of like what WOW did. That way we could have like a "this is my captain build in a sci ship" and "this is my captain build in any other ship." Because flying a sci ship really is the only time one needs lots of sci damage/drain/etc boosts and in every other ship you really don't need much but the resists to science havoc.
Ground and space are basically two separate games and they often put both into the same mission. So forcing players to choose to focus on one or try to balance both is just ridiculous. Skill in space doesn't impact your abilities on ground or vice versa, they are quite discreet game modes, so why in the world do they have to share points that are short in supply? The mix of ground and space modes in almost every mission makes the whole idea of choosing between ground and space skills a really bad design decision. I don't think Cryptic is stupid or lazy. Balancing a game is a very tough job when the game is constantly evolving. However, I think they should take inspiration from other successful MMO's, such as Guild Wars. GW has very good balance in terms of damage and skills. It is probably the best balanced game I've ever played.
I really don't think the DC needs its damage reduced if its arc is increase to 60. It's still less than 90 and the DHC has a higher burst damage, which is much more important than DPS on a small arc weapon. Besides, it's only a difference of 15 degrees; that's not a huge difference.
My thinking on the EPtX abilities is that the lowest rank have a very small boost, but can be chained together to boost multiple power systems (i.e. 3 can be used at once) and higher ranks "consume" more power from the "capacitor", thus a bigger boost, so ranks II and III can use 2 and 1 at once respectively. So, for example, you can use two rank I and one rank II ability or 3 rank I abilities if you have 3 ensign eng slots.
It actually is like jumper cables. When the boosting car is operating, the alternator is generating power and a portion of that is transferred to the other car. That means the boosting car is loosing some power from the alternator and the other car gains power. Perhaps not as a boost to regen actually, but a boost to power levels.
Rotate Shield Frequency should only apply to weapons and abilities that effect them. It was used on the show as a tactic to resist Borg weapons and their tractor beam, as it should be.
Sub Nuc Beam as a passive? What? It's a beam, therefore it should affect a target. A debuff to drain resist is a decent effect without being OP.
I really don't think dumping all of those handy abilities into ship specific passives is the best solution. Maybe one or two might fit that, but not all of them. There should be some player choice involved on what ship powers to bring.
As far as GDF goes, don't you think that if a captain ordered his crew to ram the enemy that he wouldn't also initiate a warp core breach to coincide with the impact. I would. It's a last ditch effort and a sacrifice that would result in compensating for the impending loss of a ship. GDF should be ramming speed with a warp core breach. It makes perfect tactical sense. It's one final "stab" at your foe in hopes that you take them with you.
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Comments
so every one dies to decloak alphas in a few seconds then we can call this game cloak online instead of A2B FAW online :P
So, if one were to launch an alpha strike that did 50K DPS, it would be a 50K loss to all four facings combined (i.e. the affected facing and the others depleted). If you take 5K DPS to that facing for two seconds, there would be 7K missing from the facing, leaving 3K on that facing and the other facings would be 1K short each. That means pressure damage would be more effective against Tac Team than burst damage. Then Tac Team would no longer be a way to turn four shields into one nearly invincible shield.
@gthaatar
I like your ideas. I do have one thought though on certain stats of each ability. Make each ability scale with a particular power level. 10% of Aux applies to ST (i.e. power bonus and regen). 1.2% added per Engine power to TT (i.e. flight speed and crew resist). 2% of All power levels applies to ET (i.e. resists and repair duration).
Herm... I'm not sure how I feel about it being a "buff" to manual distribution, if that were the case, why not simply remove auto distribution and make manual distribution perform as quickly as tac team? Or tac team could keep auto distribution because people who don't want to use can better get by with manual distribution.
I assume that current manual distribution has a set transfer x points from other facings into selected facing over the course of 6 seconds, for example. I think it needs to be changed so that distributes are toggles that are active until you click/press them again (constant mashing is ridiculous) and could have a 10 second on 5 second off or 5 second on 5 second off type mechanic where, as long as they are active, they distribute shields at tac team speed with that 5 second "computer reaction time" or whatever we want to call it where the shields are vulnerable to punch through.
Though, actually, I think shield distribution as it stands would have been fine if our ships didn't put out such epic, overwhelming damage. If our damage to shield and hull ratios was more in line with how it was in star trek: bridge commander, it would take some time to whittle down a shield facing, it wouldn't be blown through in two seconds, and the only way to reduce a shield facing quickly would be to send a volley of 5 torps at it (torps worked more like they did in trek, and more like how the omega torpedo launcher works, they charged up 1 every few seconds to a max of 5 you could fire in a row, and torps were the spike damage, as it should be.) Of course, the ships didn't have massive heals so there was no yo-yo of epic damage knocking you down, then uber heals pulling you back up.
That said, I would like to see a massive reduction in energy damage so that it becomes our "pressure damage" and have torps be the spike damage, the way it should be.
And I would also like to see cannons have their damage reduced against shields and high against hull so that instead of being the "blows through your shields and your hull" they currently are, they would be quite effective against shields, but really shine when brought to bear on bare hull.
In such a mechanic, we would also have to reduce/remove spike heals and make them all heal over time or "repair rate buffs" as it were. and they would have to be more subtle, and probably some of them geared more toward a buff than a heal. Like auxiliary to structural should make you take less damage based off of auxiliary power, not be some magical hull heal, especially not one you can use on someone else's ship. Pray tell, how does one transfer their auxiliary power to the structural integrity field of a ship 10km away?... uhuh.
And if our native repair and defense rates were actually our highest and then our skills were mild "edges" given in one way or another, abilities wouldn't be such ridiculous stack upon stack of super ridiculous yo-yo extremes. Basically... look at how the game plays without skills. If there were no skills used, the base damage of our ships and current manual shield distribution would probably work just fine.
So actually, it looks like what we really need is a massive nerf to everything.
Doing it my way also allows the latter 3 to be interchangeable depending on build and intent, allowing greater build diversity.
And while I would agree with the idea of nerfing damage across the board, the problem is the most ultimate factor: players. Nerf damage across the board, and people will still gravitate towards whatever happens to still kill faster than anything else. Nerfing damage will help as a start to balancing PVP (and even PVE for that matter, where the chasm between rofl-stomp and "oh my god how is this thing not dead yet" is even greater) but without changing what people gravitate towards we will eventually see a return to where we were. Just that now instead of people gloating about 100k+ crits, they're talking about their uber 10k crits.
And this is a problem that pretty much everyone knows is in the room but seldom decide to acknowledge as the root of all other problems. DPS is far too important in all facets of this game, to the point where its the only important thing aside from its one counter (HPS). This shouldn't be, and other avenues of the almighty win should be fleshed out.
Objective based PVP (where killing isn't always the point) is a way towards this.
I'm now insanely curious to see how it would play out if abilities were not allowed in PvP. I think it would become much more strategic and less about DPS. It would be a fun experiment.
One should not have to pop a team ability to be able to distribute their shields in a timely manner, that like how eng team has +hull heal skill attached to it, so once you pop eng team (a heal) if you quickly heal with another hull heal immediately after, that heal will be boosted, having to pop a heal to make another heal more effective is silly.
Yes, people will still gravitate toward whatever does the most damage, the point is to reduce the contrast between weapons so that dual heavy cannons aren't obviously far and away the superior weapon when compared to a beam array, if they both did comparable damage against shields, but more focused weapons like dual heavy cannons had an advantage on hull, the would still be advantageous, but people might not super stack dual heavy cannons any more in favor of a more mixed build, or they might still stack them because they have the maneuverability to effectively use them to take out shields and then have super hull damage one through.
This game is basically a combat game, it will never REALLY be about exploring and whatnot, to delude ourselves otherwise is just imprudent. What we should do instead of "lets find ways to make these lame ships actually have something to do" is make them all comparable on damage and give them a different secondary. Technically, cruisers should have the highest damage and the highest shields and hull but TRIBBLE maneuverability and no evasion stat. Escorts should have slightly less damage than cruisers, but super maneuverability and evasion with medium shields and hull, science ships should do less damage than escorts (made up for by science damage/control) and have a mix of defense with medium evasion, good shields, and low hull, and good maneuverability.
If the ships were balanced thusly, they would all be equally good in combat but with different play styles. Cruisers being lumbering heavy hitters that can take a beating, because they have to, escorts that don't hit quite as hard but have the maneuverability and speed to zip around and take advantage of a weak shield facing or stay out of an enemy's best damage arcs coupled will good evasion. Science ships do respectable damage with their standard weapons, they have decent speed and maneuverability that gives them a leg up, but most importantly they have a whole host of debuffs and exotic damage abilities to compensate for their reduced armament.
So people could pick and choose, do they want to draw attention with high damage and hold the line in a cruiser, do they want to be strategic and hit the enemy where it hurts in an escort, or do they want to debuff and crowd control in a science ship.
All ships should be reasonably decent at healing themselves, but none of this yo-yo TRIBBLE, and cross healing should be waaay reduced, if not eliminated. Star trek ships very infrequently "healed" each other except out of battle where one ship could support another. So perhaps there could be an out of combat mechanic for one ship to speed repairs on another by lending them repair teams. And extending shields was risky business for, while it helped protect another ship, it reduced the efficacy of your own shields, so I would rework that power so that "extend shields" basically made your shield bubble significantly larger and allowed your allies to take refuge inside it, but it would have reduced capacity/regeneration for the duration.
I think the biggest problem most people have with this game is that it's too "typical mmo" and not enough trek mmo.
time to start some rounds of pvp with no bridge officers allowed, just straight ship to ship combat and see what happens, lol.
I think it would still be about dps, but concepts like "turn to present a healthy shield facing" and "manually distribute shields" would actually have a chance at being effective tactics. They aren't currently because manual distribution can no where near make up for the insane damage, and when someone can blow through your shield facing in two seconds, turning to present another only buys you 2 seconds.
Transfer Shield Strength: Make it do what its name implies. Transfer shield regeneration to the weakest shield facing. It would do this once per activation. So, that one facing would have 3x times the regeneration rate for 6,12,18 seconds and the others would have none for 18,12,6 seconds. A fair trade, I think. Make the shield resist aux level dependent. Lose the instant heal.
Viral Matrix: Double the global cool down so it can't be chained.
Torpedo Spread: change the number of torpedoes to 2,3,4 per volley and only one extra target per volley. Reduce the CD to 20 secs so it can be used more often. It's just too powerful as it is. With it's 100% chance to hit, and using quantum torpedoes, it can lay down 40K damage or more.
Reverse Shield Polarity: Keep it as it is, but add a reduced resistance to kinetic damage as a tradeoff.
Extend Shields: Add a severe loss of shield regen and resistance to the ship using the ability.
For captain abilities.
Attack Pattern Alpha: Replace the damage boost with a reduction to power drain from weapons using the same percentages (i.e. The maximum reduction would be 60% at commander level and 9 points in attack patterns.).
Tactical Fleet: Same as APA. No team benefit.
Subnucleonic Beam: Only offensive buffs are removed and put into cool down, multiplied by their current listed percentages. Example: Attack Pattern Alpha hit with a captain level SNB would be put in a cooldown of 51 seconds.
Science Fleet: Make it AoE with a range of 3K.
Miracle Worker: Replace the shield heal with a global boost to power levels.
Engineering Fleet: Replace everything with a bonus to Starship Hull Plating and Starship Armor Reinforcement. 5K AoE.
This would be too micromanaging, one would have to activate the ability and tell it which shield facing you want your "shield strength" transferred to, it would additionally eliminate it as a support ability. I say transfer shield strength should be literal, it doesn't work on yourself, it is support only and it transfers X amount of points from your shield into your target's shields.
In my experience, viral matrix is a mild annoyance at best, I really don't think it needs to be nerfed.
You mean 40k damage total when hitting multiple targets, right? Cause it doesn't do anywhere near that much on single targets/few targets. And because kinetic does such little damage to shields and almost everything is shielded, I don't think this ability is too powerful, what's silly is that high yield isn't significantly more powerful even though it's a single target attack.
Interesting concept, would have to see how it works in game to see if that would be good.
I agree with this one except that the ships that use it tend to be sitting ducks for escorts already, without a significant buff to cruiser innate survival ability, compromising their defense further might make extend completely unusable.
Lets just remove them from the game, they're so freaking problematic.
This would kind of be turning attack pattern alpha into the engineer's nadeon inversion.
Again, nadeon inversion. The point of a "fleet" ability is for it to affect the whole team.
Let's just remove captain abilities... but otherwise, just put everything on ridiculous cool down but don't strip active buffs, having both is overkill.
There is a thread titled 'cruiser commands aoe is too small' and comm powers have a range of 5km, 3km wouldn't help anyone but the captain using it, again, neglecting the 'fleet' of it.
This would be a repeat of engineer captain's eps power transfer skill just with added hull heal, and it's shields that really keep you alive, hull tanking is a joke, so the miracle you need is usually more shields than hull.
Taking the fleet abilities and making them tac-not fleet, sci-no where near big enough to be fleet, eng, still no where near big enough to be fleet, and largely nerfing them into the ground? Yes... i still think simply removing them would be best.
Actually, the transfer would be automated and would favor the weakest facing. What I'm trying to say with these changes is that healing abilities are silly because they only exist because this game should really be called "DPS Online". Personally, I think all healing should be wiped from the game and leave it to passive regeneration. This would obviously require a significant curtailing of damage buffs.
Here's what I'd truly like to see: No more healing nor APA type damage buffs. Ships would deal with damage mitigation through strategic control of power systems, shield balancing, and maneuvering. You want more damage? Equip DHC's and cycle your weapons to max power. You want more shield regen? Cycle your shield power to max and start hitting your shield balance keys to refill weak facings or turn that face away from the attacker. You want speed? Cycle to engines and hit evasive (it's available to every captain and isn't OP, so why not?).
Additionally, the weapons need a few changes as well. High DPS energy weapons need to have differing effective ranges. As an example, DC's and DHC's should have a minimum effective range of 5K because they're cannons and they're powerful. Anything that uses a DHC should have to be a high risk, high reward play style and anything beyond 5K should make them unable to fire. Beams should be the long range weapon of choice, but a narrower arc. They should have a minimum effective range of 10K. Turrets and cannons should be somewhere in between (i.e. 7.5K); being a middle of the road choice. Therefore single cannons would have similar damage than a beam, but a wider arc (basically, cannons and beams would swap arcs, but DBB would stay as it is), and turrets have the 360? arc, so they should remain the same damage-wise.
I wouldn't mind healing being removed from the game either, and yes, damage would need to be brought waaaaay down for that to happen. One may not want transfer shield strength to transfer all regeneration to their weakest shield facing, they may want it all in their strongest shield facing to keep it strong against incoming damage... so yeah...
Beam arrays have large arcs in the show, so it wouldn't make sense for them to trade places with cannons by giving them narrow arcs and whatnot. Something I proposed was that narrow arch weapons like dual heavy cannons/dual cannons/dual beam banks would have bonus damage to hull but against shields would do the same damage as a beam array. That way they still have a bonus, but they must first get through shields for it to show. Current dual heavy, rip through shields and then rip through hull is just ridiculous.
I think that the intention with dual heavy cannon type weapons was that they had the same range but for their high damage, they have a limited arc in front of the ship, of course, when you are as mobile as an escort, that is of little hindrance, however, escorts were meant to speed/evasion tank, if they stopped moving/slowed down, they would instapop, so the balance was that these weapons have high damage, but would be approximately 50% on, 50% off from doing attack runs on the target while a ship with beam arrays would have 100% on time. That intended balance obviously hasn't been executed properly.
When TT automatically adds shield strength to the facing taking damage, have the remaining shield facings lose ~50% more energy then is being added.
Basically, you have only perhaps 3 shield facings worth of energy when using TT instead of 4. Each facing is just as strong when hit individually, but shield transfer costs some shield energy representing inefficiency in the power grid, emitter limits, etc.
Have TSS reduce this penalty by ~40%/50%/60%, so it is beneficial to chain TSS and TT to avoid shield drain.
Why put it in their strongest facing? Their weakest facing is likely the one the enemy is attacking most and this would help slower ships that can't easily turn a new face toward their attacker. The idea is to prevent the most damaged facing from complete failure.
I think instead of removing captain abilities, make them into boff abilities and hit them with the nerf hammer. First off, they would all be limited to the Cmdr. slot so you can only carry one of them and you'd have to lose a slot for your best level III abilities to have it.
Sub nuc: Reduce target's Starship Power Insulators by 60% of aux power level for 30 seconds.
Photonic fleet: Summon a cruiser one tier higher than player's ship for 60 seconds. On a tier 5 ship, summon a random photonic fleet escort or fleet cruiser.
Scattering Field: just remove the AoE, it's pretty useless as a team buff anyway.
Science Fleet: Just get rid of it. The same for the other two fleet abilities.
Sensor Scan: This is definitely a keeper. It's essential when searching for cloaked ships.
Miracle Worker: Lose the hull and shield heal, keep subsystem repair. At 25% crew or less, hull regen rate doubles. Hull must be at 50% or less to activate. Lasts 30 seconds. 2 minute CD.
EPS Transfer: Target ally only. Drains player's power to supplement ally.
Rotate Shield Frequency: Shields have 0% bleed-through, but take 10% more damage for 30 seconds.
Nadeon Inversion: Only weapons drain less power. Keep the percentages as they are.
Go Down Fighting: Available at 25% hull. This has obvious synergy with ramming speed and fleet support.
Tactical initiative: Instant recharge of tactical abilities currently in cool down. Using one of the affected abilities applies a 45 second global cool down to all of the affected abilities. 90 second cool down.
Fire on My Mark: Replace it with a 50% bonus to Starship Targeting Systems.
Attack Pattern Alpha: Transfer aux power to weapons and shields. Fortify forward shield facing by 60% and drain the other facings by 20% each. Lose the damage buff, keep the rest.
Now, on to weapons again. How about giving single cannons a 270 degree arc and limit them to aft? They still keep the medium range and have an advantage over beams but have a drawback too. Cannons are the TRIBBLE redheaded stepchild of weapons right now. They're not as good as the two dual cannons and they're no better nor worse than beams, but beams have subsystem targeting available. Cannons are just stronger turrets with half the arc. Without healing, there would need to be an option for reasonable damage on the aft section so ships can turn their facings about and have more damage potential on the tail and broadside. You could install one cannon and two turrets in the aft slots (or two cannons and a torp). More damage coming from all sides, but your bread and butter comes from the front.
Good god, no, then your shields would vaporize even more quickly than they already do even with tac team active.
Because if you do happen to be attacked on your strongest facing or if you do manage to turn your strongest facing to your opponent and want all your regeneration in that facing, instead regen in all the other facings was shut down and put into the weakest one... this skill would be far too complicated to use and unlikely to be helpful the way you envision it. If, perhaps, it worked sort of like a tac team and put all regeneration into the facing taking the most damage, that might work... though I still think nearly all healing should be removed from the game with few exceptions, one of them being transfer shield strength being able to take x points from your shields to transfer into an ally's shields. That way it's not "something for nothing" but rather a straight 1:1 transfer of shields from your grid to an ally who needs it.
The best power drains are at the commander level, so someone sacrifices that better power drain to debuff someone so that their lower level drains can perform better? This sounds like one would need two powers to accomplish the effect of a single power.
If this was turned into a boff ability, it might as well simply work the way it did before, it wasn't that powerful to begin with.
This might not be a bad defense buff, but if it kept the duration and cool of the captain ability, it would be pretty pointless. And this ability is currently not nearly as useful as it could be because the range needs a buff, 5km is arm's length in this game.
This ability probably has enough utility and a decent uptime to cool time ratio that it could actually work as a boff power.
with that kind of cool down and qualifiers and useless effect, no one would ever take that skill.
If this power took a straight x amount of power from the player's ship and sent it to an ally, it could cripple the giving ship, If it was percentage based, it probably wouldn't be a significant buff to the recipient. To not cripple the giver and be of any use to the recipient, it would have to work the way it currently does, magic "power from nowhere" That or it could simply be a self buff of EPS transfer rate for the duration.
Bleed through isn't currently a big deal, it's damage that ignores shields entirely that has become quite the bother. If this ability forced that kind of damage, grav wells, eject warp plasma, etc. to all hit the shields rather than the ship, then it could be useful. But not with a 10% bonus to damage. Not all abilities have to be cutting off your leg to gain an arm.
That's pretty much all this ability is good for already, so I'm not sure what the difference would be, lol.
You're saying keep this ability working as it already does but make it so you have to be at 25% to use it? 25% may not give one much of a chance to have a benefit, especially not with the new rep passives coming out that lets people kill you faster the lower your hull gets. (Really devs? WTF?)
This too makes this ability so tied up in caveats that no one would use it.
If we turned it into an accuracy buff, and if the engineering rotate shield frequency turns into "perfect shields" this ability could be "perfect accuracy" for a short duration, but I'm not sure who would take that over beta, a force multiplier, or omega with all it's epic awesome.
So make it some sort of aux to bat... weird thingie? Most ships that would be using this already have such low shields on each facing that even if given a 60% buff to the forward facing, which would probably be good, the -20% to the other facings would probably make them far too squishy from those angles to make this ability worth using.
Most people don't use single cannons because the ships that use cannons tend to be escorts and escorts have the turn necessary to make use of dual heavy cannons with outperform all other weapons. Single cannons have higher DPS than beams and pair well with turrets on ships that can't use dual heavy cannons for a focus on forward/nearly side damage capability. Widening their arc would naturally come with a DPS nerf from the devs, and who would use cannons on the back? Any ship using dual heavies will use turrets to bolster their forward facing damage, and if a ship was using beams in the front, they wouldn't equip cannons in the back, so your suggestion would actually make cannons WAY worse. Beam subsystem targeting is only used by ships that have it built in, so that's really not a big deal.
Even if healing were eliminated from the game, ship's primary damage should be fore and sides, most ships in canon were shown as having the aft be their weakest armed facing as damage is stypically fore-for chasing things, and sides, for engaging things in broad side and orbiting things, one is not typically shooting at things in their aft unless they are running away, and if they are running away, they need to just GTFO of there, or should only need enough fire power to shoot down incoming this or that.
Sorry to go shooting down all your ideas, I don't mean to be a negative nelly, I just know that you beat those abilities so hard with the nerf hammer that only one seemed to survive, and then you took cannons and was like, "You, red headed step child, TO THE BACK OF THE BUS!" as if that was better, lol.
Again, if we are to remove healing (and I think we should) abilities that used to heal need to be re-purposed to dealing with shifting capacity and regen around, either automatically or by the player's command. Maybe something that boosts the rate of the shield balancing command by lowering your rate of fire? I really do think that in terms of buffs and healing, that ships should take from one system to have gains in another. I think if you want to buff your weapons, for example, it should be done by sacrificing another power system just like it was done on the show (i.e. Aux to shields, engine power to weapons, etc.). Every bonus should be met with a reciprocal loss. You have X amount of power to share among 4 power systems, that should be all you have to work with. So an ability like TSS would be shifting power for you (instead of you having to do it yourself and switch it back manually) while giving some extra regen at a cost somewhere else.
Honestly, when I chose that change to Sub Nuc, I was thinking of Tach Beam, which is maxed out at LtC. Instead of having drain reduced by a factor of 2.6 (max skill, which is probably not that common, and two sci consoles; two is typical for an escort), it would be 1.8. If your tach beam drains 7000, it's reduced to 2700 and 3800 respectively. The drain increase would be 1100 more shield points. Sure, it won't be a huge bonus to siphon and tyken's, but you do get a bigger polaron and tetryon drain too. So it's not that much of a loss. It just requires a different strategy.
Addendum: I just did the math while thinking about your comment, and Tyken's III and ES II do less drain than Sub Nuc and ES II/Tyken's would. Add tet or pol damage to that and it becomes even better.
I think for most of your comments, you're looking at it as the game is now, but I'm looking at the game without healing and without healing, these powers become mega-OP. Perhaps making captain abilities into boff abilities is a bad idea? Maybe, they should be ship abilities and limited to one? But, you can change it any time you're not in system space (i.e. sector space and ground). After all, the command slots are exclusive to their respective ship anyway (i.e. tac has tac cmdr., etc), so going with a ship ability would make the Cmdr. slot open again and the abilities would be tied to their respective ships. So, you'll only get a Sub Nuc on a sci ship, MW on cruiser, and APA on an escort. You get an "elite" slot to put a ship ability in.
FOMM would be a crit boost because excess accuracy increases crits. The difference here to a straight-up crit bonus is that it has to be calculated against the target's evade rating (i.e. starship maneuvers). If you max out SS targeting and apply this ability, you have 150% change to hit, minus the target's evade and what's left over, if it's more than 100%, is a crit bonus. It's like the lucky rabbit's foot of damage.
Here's a few alterations to my previous ideas:
MW: Repairs subsystems and boosts EPS skill by 25% for 30 seconds. 90 second CD.
EPS transfer: Increase target ally's power recharge by 50% and reduce player's power recharge by 50% for 30 seconds. 90 second CD. There, no drain, just a regen boost in exchange for a regen loss. This seems fair when you realize that power doesn't just come from nowhere.
Rotate shield freq: Increases resistance to shield penetration by 90% and drains shield power subsystem by 3 points per second. 50% immunity to tractor beam. At 25 points or less this ability ends. Shield batteries and abilities that increase shield power do not effect duration. 30 second CD.
Scat Field: Increase range to 10K, but it effects allies and enemies equally for 15 seconds. 45 second CD.
GDF: At 50% hull or less, weapons and impulse engines are 25% faster. This ability ends when hull returns to 51% and CD for 60 seconds.
TI: Resets tac abilities in cool down. Each ability that was reset will gain an additional 10 second CD per ability when used. (i.e. the first ability would gain 10, second gains 20, and so on). 3 minute CD.
APA: Keep the previous stats and add a +10% CrtH. 30 second duration. 60 second CD.
Now that we've taken captain abilities away from the captains, how do we choose one captain over another in terms of space combat? Perhaps a class bonus? Sci gets a Starship Shield Emitters and Particle Generators bonus, Eng gets Hull Repair boost and EPS, and Tac gets Starship Maneuvers and Attack Patterns? Or, let the player choose one class skill boost at character creation and another at VA rank as extra traits?
I think that these cannon vs beam accuracy rules are an attempt to reign in the ridiculous over performance of dual heavy cannons, but I don't think this is the way to go about it. Dual cannons have such high DPS because of their narrow arc, no one uses dual canons because if their ship can equip dual cannons, they can equip dual heavy cannons, and dual heavy cannons have a much higher damage per volley that makes them better for quickly blasting through shields and then obliterating the hull.
Dual heavy cannons probably should have never existed, escorts running around with dual heavy cannons that are absolute beasts would probably be far more tolerable with dual cannons.
Additionally, a point of blance for dual/dual heavy cannons was supposed to be that the ships that could use them were at a disadvantage in one way or another. Escorts were supposed to need to keep moving to stay alive, so they would not be able to continuously focus fire with dual heavy cannons, they would have to do damage in "passes." So they fly along doing heavy damage, then they have to keep moving, so right now their dual heavies are off of you. So it would be like a 50% exposure to their damage. However, escorts have become so tanky and or they are flying along behind you maintaining their evasion stat that this disadvantage has been largely negated. Large ships that can mount dual heavy cannons were at the disadvantage that they are very slow to turn so using the dual heavy cannons was difficult, particularly on fast moving targets.
I think the best way to balance this would be to... well, frankly, remove dual heavy cannons, or make normal dual cannons into dual heavies and then make all other weapons also have a higher damage per volley and lower firing rate. So essentially, we either get rid of dual heavies, or we make all of our current weapons function like "heavy" weapons.
The other thing should be that cruisers should have no evasion stat, they are the broad side of a barn, if your tac officer can't hit a cruiser, he is incompetent. To make up for having ZERO evasion, cruisers should have very high damage resistance/very thick hull and shields. This would allow a crusier to be just as effective at taking damage whether going full combat impulse or creeping along at 1/2 or 1/4. This way a cruiser's defense against escorts is to slow down so that an escort can not simply fly full speed behind the cruiser keeping their high evasion while blasting away at the cruiser. If the cruiser is moving more slowly, the escort has to slow down to stay behind it, evasion drops, and the escort is blown out of the sky, if the escort keeps flying fast to maintain evasion, there will be an on/off of his dual heavy cannons as he makes passes at the cruiser.
I believe that this would restore the intended mechanics of the game.
The game currently does force one to take from one system to give to another, we have a limited supply of energy that we must decide if we want it in weapons or shields or engines or aux, and how much in each of those systems with a mandatory minimum of 15. If the game eliminated healing and relied mostly on passive regeneration, not much would need to be done to current "heal" skills, they would just need to have their heal removed and be turned into resistance buffs or power buffs. If emergency power skills only gave power and there was no such thing as over capping, one could put 100 power to weapons, and then could use their emergency power to bolster shields. The "cost" associated with using an emergency power is where you are going to put it, if you can only have one, then you have to decide if you want it in weapons or shields or engines or aux. If auxiliary to structural doesn't give a heal but is just a solid resistance buff, then the choice is do you want bonus resistance from aux to structural or do you want better speed, maneuverability, inertia stat, and crew damage resistance from aux to damp, or do you want to use aux to bat... which, hmm... what if that gave your batteries a vastly extended duration? Batteries currently don't last very long at all, even with battery skill. So I think aux to bat would be a valuable skill for getting more power through your batteries (this ability wouldn't drain aux power the way it currently does) while still having power in aux for any sci abilities.
Well, if it is a substantial enough boost, it might actually be worth taking subnuke to boost all your other energy drain abilities.
I was considering your changes to the abilities as a general change, and no matter how you look at them, the skills were so "meh" or they required such a substantial sacrifice to use them that the trade off would pretty much never be worthwhile.
Turning them into ship abilities is a very interesting idea, if only sci ships have the hull emitters to summon a photonic fleet, if they have subnuke for boosting power drain abilities (according to your version of the power) then that could make sense. It would also prevent potentially op cross overs like a science captain in an escort nuking off all your resistance and then blowing through you.
That would only be according to how the game works now where, supposedly, excess accuracy turns into crit. I don't have a problem with an accuracy boost, but I think that crits are starting to run away in this game, we really don't need to throw oil onto that fire.
This could actually be workable, especially if the "teams" have been largely removed/nerfed so that engineering team doesn't instantly repair subsystems.
It doesn't really make sense for one ship to be able to boost the recharge rate of another ship, especially not by sacrificing it's own. One ship can't increase the capacity of another's eps grid by some how turning theirs down. The most literal iteration of this power would be to take power from the giving ship and transfer it into the other ship, but the only time we saw this done was out of combat and for support like when the enterprise transferred power from their systems to a warbird. But really, most "captain skills" really don't make sense, if they were simply removed from the game, I think it would be much more playable with a more level playing field where choice of captain is more of a ground performance issue and less of a ship performance issue.
If this was the case, where your regen and resistance would be bottoming out at a rate of 3 per second, I don't see why shield boosting abilities shouldn't help keep it running. But all around it doesn't sound like it does anything. only 5-10% of damage goes through shields anyway without a special shield bypassing modifier or complete shield ignore. Even if it gave "perfect shields" that nothing went through, the regen and resistance bottoming out from power drain probably wouldn't be worth it. Like i said, not all abilities need to cut off your leg to give you an arm, rotate shield frequency could simply reduce shield bleed through for the duration. And would be more of a big deal if we had a scaling bleed mechanic where 60% in a shield facing meant 40% of damage passed through shields.
If the ability affected both, there really wouldn't be much of a point to it, you could save an ally at the expense of saving an enemy too. Just make the ability self only and not have such a ridiculous cool as it does currently.
faster engines means one could run away, which would not be going down fighting, 25% boost to firing rate, especially on top of other firing rate boosters could be massively OP. One would simply need to let their enemy take them to 50% hull, then heal shields without healing hull and blow them away. If go down fighting made it so that when your ship was destroyed, it gave you like 10... 15 seconds to pilot it into your enemy with a 'ramming speed' type mechanic and perhaps that boost to engines you mentioned, that might make sense. Then it would work like in first contact where worf was going to ram the defiant into the cube right before being destroyed.
Again, not all abilities need to come with a string of caveats, if it had a 1-2 minute cool and simply refreshed all tactical abilities when used, or if it had a 1-2 minute cool and significantly, but not "OP" improved cool on tactical abilities, like reduced their cool time to 75% or 50% of normal, it wouldn't be too big of a deal, but would give an edge.
Previous stats being your previous stats? Your previous stats plus a 10% crit hit bonus still would be so circumstantial and risky that the ability would likely never be used.
Choice of captain doesn't have to affect space at all, it could just affect your performance on the ground, there's nothing wrong with that.
Alternatively, the DC could have a 60 degree arc compared to the 45 degree arc of a DHC and increase the power drain to 20 (i.e. 5 DHC's would drain your weapon power to zero). Then, there would be a real choice between the two. Either have more volley damage or more arc, the DPS would be the same. Then there's the quad cannons. Those should have a huge power drain (perhaps 30?) so it's only viable to equip one. Getting rid of DHC's and QC's would make a lot of people angry beyond the changes already suggested here. Nobody likes to have their favorite toys taken away, especially if they paid money to get them.
I agree with this as well. A tank is a tank. It should be resilient, not evasive.
EPtX doesn't pull power from any systems, it comes out of a hypothetical "emergency" battery. I think EPtX should be a battery boosting power that extends the life of the battery and ignores battery cool down in favor of its own inherent cool down. Or, include a emergency capacitor that recharges over time after use, a fifth power system that doesn't govern any ship system, but exists to boost them when used. The power level would act as a "timer" and lower rank EPtX abilities would drain more than higher ranks. Your EPS skill would determine the amount of power gained above the minimum.
It would be like an "Attack Pattern Beta" for Sci ships. You and your Sci buddies would have more drain on that target.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Then invert it, make FOMM a debuff to evasion so allies can hit the target more easily. That would seem to fit the idea of "Fire on My Mark", a coordinated attack that has more effect on the target.
Yes it does. Think about it. The cruiser is giving the benefit of its own fusion generators to the target ally. So, power generation on the cruiser would go be going to the ally and the cruiser would be getting less power to recharge its own systems. It's like jumper cables.
I'm not talking about bleed-through, this is resistance to penetration from abilities like DEM and Elachi weapons. Instead of the 100% penetration proc from crescent DHC's it would only be 10%.
But it's a field. It would have the same impact on all ships in its AoE. But I see nothing wrong with making it a single ship buff and reducing the CD to 30 to 45 seconds.
How about making it a combination of ramming speed and warp core breach? You sacrifice your ship to take out another with huge burst damage.
Fine, make it an instant cool down of all tac abilities. Base cool down is 60 seconds, plus 10 seconds for each ability recharged. That should max out at about 1 minute, 20 seconds.
The problem is that APA is insanely OP. It stacks on other damage buffs and boosts just about every kind of damage you can put out. Maybe APA should give the ship a higher evasion at lower speeds for a short time? Or, perhaps more turn rate when in reverse? That would allow an escort to do a strafe of a target, do a reverse turn and have its main weapons pointed at the target as it drifts away. Possibly both options together? That, I think, looks more like an "attack pattern" than a bunch of damage and crit boosts. So, +x to Starship Maneuvers and +x to turn when engines are in reverse? I use this tactic often in my Vesta. It makes keeping low arc weapons pointed at your target easier. It also make turning around easier because your turn radius is much smaller.
I can live with that, but I think there should be more skill points so players don't have to make such a hard choice between space and ground. That's just stupid. You shouldn't have to choose what type of game play you want to focus on, especially since most PvE missions have a mix of both types of game play. One should not suffer for the sake of the other unless you can have a choice of playing pure space or pure ground. That is, sadly, not an option.
You're right, no one likes to have their toys taken away, but the nerfs you're describing wouldn't go over any better, and even with an arc increase, which would come with a DPS nerf, the ships that currently use dual heavies would stick with dual heavies for the burst even with the small arc. The option that would likely go over best is turning all weapons into "heavy" weapons so that the people who have dual heavy cannons don't lose them but gain heavy turrets, and it levels the playing field a little more by allowing all ships to have higher burst damage which is the real issue of dual heavy cannons. But the option that would probably bring the game best into balance without a runaway of ridiculous burst damage everywhere, and the simplest option, would be to turn dual heavy cannons into dual cannons. The devs really do find themselves between a rock and a hard place on all things because someone is going to be pissed, no matter what you do.
Well that's basically what emergency power to X does now anyway, the only thing that's missing would be an associated graphic that shows you a capacitor that charges over 15 seconds and lets you use it for 30 seconds. Without the graphic, it's a theoretical capacitor or two or three (depending on how many emergency powers you equip) that give you their use for a time.
It would make sense as a power boost but not as a transfer rate boost. If the giving ship is lending some of its power generation to another ship, then the giving ship loses power and the receiving ship gains some, but increasing transfer rate is not like jumper cables transferring power, that's like replacing the cables inside the ship with bigger, better cables that are capable of transferring more power, and then at the end of the EPS power, you tear all that new super cable out and put back in the old ones.
But if all captain abilities were removed, or made self-only ship specific powers. EPS transfer could be a built in cruiser ability that gives them enhanced power transfer rate for a time. Or... you know... what if captain abilities were turned into ship passives? What is cruisers had constant higher eps transfer and constantly higher power levels than other ships? they currently have +5 to all subsystems, lets make it +10. They could have reduced shield penetration or "bonus penetration" immunity so that the 5-10% of penetration that the equipped shield is all the cruiser will ever take, or if that's too much, give cruisers a constant 30% reduction to shield damage, this would be the cruiser answer to escort evasion tank. And miracle worker makes cruiser subsystem disables come back online much more quickly than other ships.
Subnuke beam could be a constant passive boost to all drain abilities on a sci ship, they could constantly have a holo-fleet, make it so the holo-ships don't take damage, kind of like when people would shoot at the doctor or throw a solid object at him or try to hit him and it would just pass through. It doesn't really make sense that holo ships can be destroyed. Scattering field could just be built in so that sci ships take less energy damage to hull but would still be susceptible to kinetic.
Go down fighting could be a constant passive where escort's damage and accuracy increases as their health decreases, but it would have to be subtle to not be op... something like 0% bonus at 100% health and 25% bonus at 1% health. Fire on my mark could be a constant passive accuracy increase, and attack pattern alpha could be a passive that prevents escorts from losing speed/evasion when turning. Right now, speed and evasion seem to drop the more one turns, so eliminating that from escorts that are supposed to evasion tank makes sense.
I mentioned a possible change above, but discussing it as an active ability, would it also eliminate shield ignoring damage like making grav well damage hit the shields instead of the hull?
It does make sense that a field would affect everyone inside of it, but by that same token, gravity wells and tykens rifts and eject warp plasma would all have to start affecting friend and foe alike, and we'd have to enable constant friendly fire capability to the game... which would make all the aoe/hazard powers pretty much useless as they would TRIBBLE everyone and no one would want to use them.
I wouldn't add the warp core breach to it except if the enemy ship that was struck doesn't keep moving... because then it could be way OP.
If an escort slows to reverse speed, their evasion should drop so low that they are easily blown out of the sky, so I think that the above mentioned passive that keeps escorts from losing speed or evasion when turning would be a good benefit to them.
Well the devs have given a "maximum" number of points that can be spent in each category, so one can choose to focus more in one or the other. I know some people who have actually focused their builds in ground because they prefer ground game play/pvp to space. But it is pretty ironic for you to be saying we shouldn't have to choose when you've been such a big proponent of cutting off a leg to gain an arm with any space ability :P lol.
I am frequently frustrated with the captain skill tree because I don't really like having to choose what I'll be good at either, especially cause I could change my mind the next day and want to focus in a different area and then the devs wan't me to spend 5 bucks every time I want a different build. So I basically have to go with as balanced of a build as I can so that I can perform well enough no matter how I build my character. I understand the devs have to make money some way... so... meh. Though i would appreciate at least letting us have two builds we could switch between kind of like what WOW did. That way we could have like a "this is my captain build in a sci ship" and "this is my captain build in any other ship." Because flying a sci ship really is the only time one needs lots of sci damage/drain/etc boosts and in every other ship you really don't need much but the resists to science havoc.
I really don't think the DC needs its damage reduced if its arc is increase to 60. It's still less than 90 and the DHC has a higher burst damage, which is much more important than DPS on a small arc weapon. Besides, it's only a difference of 15 degrees; that's not a huge difference.
My thinking on the EPtX abilities is that the lowest rank have a very small boost, but can be chained together to boost multiple power systems (i.e. 3 can be used at once) and higher ranks "consume" more power from the "capacitor", thus a bigger boost, so ranks II and III can use 2 and 1 at once respectively. So, for example, you can use two rank I and one rank II ability or 3 rank I abilities if you have 3 ensign eng slots.
It actually is like jumper cables. When the boosting car is operating, the alternator is generating power and a portion of that is transferred to the other car. That means the boosting car is loosing some power from the alternator and the other car gains power. Perhaps not as a boost to regen actually, but a boost to power levels.
Rotate Shield Frequency should only apply to weapons and abilities that effect them. It was used on the show as a tactic to resist Borg weapons and their tractor beam, as it should be.
Sub Nuc Beam as a passive? What? It's a beam, therefore it should affect a target. A debuff to drain resist is a decent effect without being OP.
I really don't think dumping all of those handy abilities into ship specific passives is the best solution. Maybe one or two might fit that, but not all of them. There should be some player choice involved on what ship powers to bring.
As far as GDF goes, don't you think that if a captain ordered his crew to ram the enemy that he wouldn't also initiate a warp core breach to coincide with the impact. I would. It's a last ditch effort and a sacrifice that would result in compensating for the impending loss of a ship. GDF should be ramming speed with a warp core breach. It makes perfect tactical sense. It's one final "stab" at your foe in hopes that you take them with you.