A better line of inquiry: Why are players so averse to teamwork. When I use Scattering Field, I can reduce your incoming hull damage by somewhere around 40% (or somewhat less if you already have heavy armor). All you have to do is get close to my carrier. But it never happens. Every time I see an ally explode while I have a Scattering Field up, which they were not inside, I am baffled. And that's an ability that has a flashy visual effect that SHOWS you where to be to get free cake.
I'm nudging toward thinking this is a pure laziness problem. People don't want to have to keep track of their team mates, they want free cake delivered to them while they Kirk around on their own.
:rolleyes:
One of the reasons people probably don't bother trying to zip around your ship and only around your ship is because 1. they'll probably have to dramatically reduce their speed/evasive maneuvering to receive your buffs which will drop their defense and or limit their ability to get out of firing arcs, ultimately netting them nothing. 2. With diminishing returns, the scattering field doesn't do nearly enough to warrant not simply getting the F out of there or zipping all around within 10km so you are in range of heals but not an easy target. Arguably 5km is too limited a range for that sci support skill either and it should probably be buffed to at least 10km as well.
The weapon drain resistance buff definitely works and works a treat
The range of the coverage is fine the buff is designed to buff the player primarily
The whole point of this design was to promote teamplay as most pve players don't know what this means in the slightest, if your going to work as a team you should be within 5 of each other anyway
If your zooming about user epte and omega being all Rambo about things then that's your own lookout to give it team wide would be op
I don't know what you're talking about, I want my team mates within 10km for support, but not within 5km where them getting scrambled/hit with other cheese will probably have me stuck in it too.
Why is everybody harping on this idea of buffs with smaller-than-10km-radius limiting the defensive mobility of team mates wanting the buff. I kind of figured that was by design. If you can kill anything except a boss in one strafing run and have a 75% chance to dodge anything shot at you, then why do you even care about the buffs offered by big slow ships? The people that should be caring are OTHER big slow ships. The power efficiency buff has a massive impact on beam performance, the flat +3 turn rate has a bigger impact on ships that start off only turning 5 or 6, and the shield hardness bonus is great if your ship is intended to sit and draw fire instead of evade it.
Maybe if you're that concerned about your defense value, you're not the intended target of this system?
Honestly if unimatrix lances can one stop pop you from 18-20k away, it isn't an unworldly request to widen the range on some of the auras like shield frequency/+ threat. Just not the weapons aura.
Why is everybody harping on this idea of buffs with smaller-than-10km-radius limiting the defensive mobility of team mates wanting the buff. I kind of figured that was by design. If you can kill anything except a boss in one strafing run and have a 75% chance to dodge anything shot at you, then why do you even care about the buffs offered by big slow ships? The people that should be caring are OTHER big slow ships. The power efficiency buff has a massive impact on beam performance, the flat +3 turn rate has a bigger impact on ships that start off only turning 5 or 6, and the shield hardness bonus is great if your ship is intended to sit and draw fire instead of evade it.
Maybe if you're that concerned about your defense value, you're not the intended target of this system?
Well if this is supposed to largely be for cruisers, maybe it should be that all friendly cruisers in the area receive your buffs, but team mates only get them if they get within 5km of the providing cruiser. It could be justified that cruisers with advanced comm arrays better communicate with one another than with sci ships or tac ships, though I doubt that would go over well with the escorts and scis.
I'm actually just fine with the 5 km range of the Cruiser Commands. There is a distance note in the team hull/shield bars HUD, and it makes more sense where your team only benefits from Cruiser Commands if they choose to actually pay attention to what said cruiser is doing. Ignore the cruiser, fly off on your own... no Cruiser Command bonus. When I'm not in a cruiser, I know to stay near the cruiser when I want the buff, and I can leave the area when mobility outweighs that bonus. Plus, Cruiser Command clusters have their own drawback this way, allowing for use of Charged Particle Burst, Gravity Well, Isometric Charge, Nadeon Detonator, Photonic Shockwave, Refracting Tetryon Cascade, Tractor Beam Repulsors, Tyken's Rift, etc. to serve as a reasonable counter (to varying degrees) to overlapping cluster-buffs... we don't need Cruiser Commands to be god mode, we just need them to be cool. They are :P
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
Plus it does nothing to emphasize any concept of formation or topography in the battle.
The emphasis on formation and topography is "Don't get too close cause we'll all get scrambled/grav welled/etc/etc!" Flying in formation in this game is THE WORST TACTIC EVER.
Not to mention we never really saw 'formations' in trek, this isn't a bunch of fighters flying in formation or ships of the line forming up and firing at each other from nice neat formations, star trek combat always had ships all over the place, and none of them were flying close, that would be stupid, when one ship blows up and damages all the others around it, or a piece of one ship gets blown off and hits the other ship or one ship loses control and flies into another... yeah, formations and topography=does not apply to trek, or this game.
I'm actually just fine with the 5 km range of the Cruiser Commands. There is a distance note in the team hull/shield bars HUD, and it makes more sense where your team only benefits from Cruiser Commands if they choose to actually pay attention to what said cruiser is doing. Ignore the cruiser, fly off on your own... no Cruiser Command bonus. When I'm not in a cruiser, I know to stay near the cruiser when I want the buff, and I can leave the area when mobility outweighs that bonus. Plus, Cruiser Command clusters have their own drawback this way, allowing for use of Charged Particle Burst, Gravity Well, Isometric Charge, Nadeon Detonator, Photonic Shockwave, Refracting Tetryon Cascade, Tractor Beam Repulsors, Tyken's Rift, etc. to serve as a reasonable counter (to varying degrees) to overlapping cluster-buffs... we don't need Cruiser Commands to be god mode, we just need them to be cool. They are :P
The point is that no one spends any meaningful amount of time that close to a cruiser, why do you think there are so many complaints about how hard it is to maintain an extend shields which has a range of 8km? Even if they expanded the range to 10km combat radius, which would make absolute sense that a cruiser's comms would at least cover their combat radius, most of their team would still likely spend most of their time outside the range of effect, but at least then it wouldn't be limited to TRACTOR range. Really? lol. This is how we can all tell that cruiser auras are only auras in theory, but mostly just cruiser buffs, one has to be so dangerously close to a cruiser to get the buff that it's tactically unsound as grouping=mass scrambles, mass grav wells, mass tykens rifts, mass into-darkness console, mas ams, etc, etc.
The emphasis on formation and topography is "Don't get too close cause we'll all get scrambled/grav welled/etc/etc!" Flying in formation in this game is THE WORST TACTIC EVER
Enemies that do anything like that: Elite Borg Negh'vars have isometric charge.
...
?
I think you may be mistaking "Star Trek: Online" with "Star Trek: The Irrelevant PVP Tumor". A common mistake.
Enemies that do anything like that: Elite Borg Negh'vars have isometric charge.
...
?
I think you may be mistaking "Star Trek: Online" with "Star Trek: The Irrelevant PVP Tumor". A common mistake.
He's mistaken in general. Never took that fella for the brightest bulb in the mix. Most of his suggestions ideas or comments all look like troll bait. As if anybody wanted/needed to hover around 5km from a cruiser. :rolleyes: It's a clear indication he's not running on a full battery.
"No formations in trek".. Clearly he's never seen Ds9 where they lay in an assault on the Dominion. Plenty of formations there. Just be prepared to be dazzled with irritation from that guy.
Since this is a support ability, why not make its range increase depending on AUX?
*ducks*
Lol I was just going to suggest this! 50auxpwr=5km, with a 1km increase for every 10auxpwr increase so at 100auxpwr it would become 10km with a cap at 12km for 125auxpwr.
Enemies that do anything like that: Elite Borg Negh'vars have isometric charge.
...
?
I think you may be mistaking "Star Trek: Online" with "Star Trek: The Irrelevant PVP Tumor". A common mistake.
Elite unimatrix ships use gravity wells and scrambles, not to mention several npc's that produce the "torp spread of doom" that will take out many players in one shot, so cluster together is just a recipe for disaster.
He's mistaken in general. Never took that fella for the brightest bulb in the mix. Most of his suggestions ideas or comments all look like troll bait. As if anybody wanted/needed to hover around 5km from a cruiser. :rolleyes: It's a clear indication he's not running on a full battery.
"No formations in trek".. Clearly he's never seen Ds9 where they lay in an assault on the Dominion. Plenty of formations there. Just be prepared to be dazzled with irritation from that guy.
I'm sorry, you say why would anyone want or need to hover around 5km from a cruiser... so are you trying to support what I'm saying or go against it? Cause you're right, no one wants to hover around within 5km of a cruiser, it's incredibly limiting, which is why these cruiser 'auras' are effectively self buffs. Which is entirely the point of the thread, if they are supposed to support other ships than just the cruiser they are on, they should have a greater range.
Yes, in ds9 we do see a few examples of ships flying in formation, and what happened to those formations? did they turn into a massive cluster F*** of ships everywhere flying as they may? Why yes, in nearly ever episode where ships are shown originally flying in formation, they ultimately break formation once the real fighting begins, or they get blown to hell, taking out/damaging near by ships highlighting what a horrible idea it is to fly in close formation.
And judging by your failed attempt at being insulting, my troll bait has clearly worked, cause look, here you are. Trololol.
I'm sorry, you say why would anyone want or need to hover around 5km from a cruiser... so are you trying to support what I'm saying or go against it? Cause you're right, no one wants to hover around within 5km of a cruiser, it's incredibly limiting, which is why these cruiser 'auras' are effectively self buffs. Which is entirely the point of the thread, if they are supposed to support other ships than just the cruiser they are on, they should have a greater range.
Yes, in ds9 we do see a few examples of ships flying in formation, and what happened to those formations? did they turn into a massive cluster F*** of ships everywhere flying as they may? Why yes, in nearly ever episode where ships are shown originally flying in formation, they ultimately break formation once the real fighting begins, or they get blown to hell, taking out/damaging near by ships highlighting what a horrible idea it is to fly in close formation.
And judging by your failed attempt at being insulting, my troll bait has clearly worked, cause look, here you are. Trololol.
The idea here is to pick a linear thought and follow through with it. Don't support your arguments with falsehoods like you are prone to do. Now you're flipped on your original statement on formations not being seen to seeing formations in battle. You do this every time. I wouldn't say you're a troll, more like a clueless mole. It's too tempting to whack with a hammer of reason every now and then.
The idea here is to pick a linear thought and follow through with it. Don't support your arguments with falsehoods like you are prone to do. Now you're flipped on your original statement on formations not being seen to seeing formations in battle. You do this every time. I wouldn't say you're a troll, more like a clueless mole. It's too tempting to whack with a hammer of reason every now and then.
DS9 has the highest concentration of some of the FEW examples shown of ships flying in formation in ALL OF TREK. It is an exception, not the rule. And all of those formations break down once combat starts, formations are basically used only to get to the battle ground and then it's a free for all, so no, I am not contradicting what I said, since you rarely see formations in trek, and nobody sticks to them when they are seen, I don't consider trek to have any proper examples of using formations in combat.
DS9 has the highest concentration of some of the FEW examples shown of ships flying in formation in ALL OF TREK. It is an exception, not the rule. And all of those formations break down once combat starts, formations are basically used only to get to the battle ground and then it's a free for all, so no, I am not contradicting what I said, since you rarely see formations in trek, and nobody sticks to them when they are seen, I don't consider trek to have any proper examples of using formations in combat.
Furthermore, we do not have combat anything LIKE what we saw in DS9. Galaxy's do not sweep in and cut enemy ships apart with a single blast from their main saucer array. You cannot fly in full 3D movement like the Defiant did. Ships in general have shields and do not die to a couple seconds of Quad Cannon Fire. Jem'Hadar Attack Ships cannot use Ramming Speed and take out a fresh Vor'Cha in one hit.
So trying to use DS9 style space combat as an example is a bit of a fool's errand when it is not supported by any of the rest of the combat in STO.
Besides, the reasons for why some of those battles occurred in DS9 was so fundamentally flawed that a child's grasp of Space could have pointed it out.
In STO getting close together is almost always a recipe for failure. There are a LOT of AoE attacks, splash damage, debuffs, and crowd control that will effect all of you if you decide to cluster around a single ship. Not the least of which can be the warp core explosions of your friends dying if something goes wrong.
However, that is mostly irrelevant because tight formation flying does not even work in STO due to the speeds and turn rates of the various ship types and the size and location of enemies you are trying to attack. It can mostly work against stationary targets that are not shooting back and while there are a few of those that is not the majority of targets.
Whether there are formations or not is not the issue. Whether you pick any season to example from is still not the point. IF you make a suggestion you've got to pick a solid reason as to why and run with it. Most of the devs aren't great at contemplative input and seem to miss the jist or point of what players give as feedback all the time. To them you have to take your idea, put it in a wrapper that's easy for them to understand and hope it sinks in.
It's not like you're rallying the players to support your idea because that would mean you're attempting demand which never works with devs either.
Missing the point is a fool's errand, just.
So yes some of the auras need expansion in size, like the shield aura but the weapon buff needs to be closer to home. That way it's not a star trek cruisers online with bubbles power = lazy play. See? Devs can understand that and why and it took 2 sentences.
Whether there are formations or not is not the issue. Whether you pick any season to example from is still not the point. IF you make a suggestion you've got to pick a solid reason as to why and run with it. Most of the devs aren't great at contemplative input and seem to miss the jist or point of what players give as feedback all the time. To them you have to take your idea, put it in a wrapper that's easy for them to understand and hope it sinks in.
It's not like you're rallying the players to support your idea because that would mean you're attempting demand which never works with devs either.
Missing the point is a fool's errand, just.
So yes some of the auras need expansion in size, like the shield aura but the weapon buff needs to be closer to home. That way it's not a star trek cruisers online with bubbles power = lazy play. See? Devs can understand that and why and it took 2 sentences.
I'm beginning to suspect english isn't your first language because the way you communicate is very incoherent... and it's ironic to have the way I communicate my ideas criticized in broken english, particularly when there's nothing wrong with anything I've said. -.-
I was not basing my point on canon and whether it was seen in star trek, even though 99.9% of canon supports that formations are a rare and magical unicorn, seen only if a blue moon occurs in a leap year on the winter equinox. My point and the point of this whole thread is that PEOPLE DO NOT FLY IN FORMATION. People rarely stay within 5km of ally cruisers, as it has been stated in a post above, the different speeds and turn rates of the vessels make escorts or sci ships trying to run in formation with cruisers prohibitive. And even if the speeds and turn rates weren't an issue, it's just stupid foolish to fly that close anyway.
In the game, in pvp, staying within 5km of one another is a recipe for disaster as there are grav wells and tykens rifts and the "into darkness" console and scramble sensors and all sorts of other aoe type horrors that are best avoided by spreading out.
In pve, there are borg torp spreads of doom, among other things, that make it foolish to cluster together around the tank, in fact, one should be as far away from the tank as possible, while hopefully still in heal range so you can lend support if necessary, but stay well away so you don't get hit by spreads.
And then, in the end, you basically agree with me and everyone else in the thread who have been saying the auras need a range increase so... why were you being insulting and starting TRIBBLE in the first place if you didn't disagree? My best guess is that this whole little skirmish occurred along the border best known as "the language barrier" where many a simple misunderstanding has turned unnecessarily hostile.
If you don't think the support of the cruiser is worth it, then don't go near the ship and this new feature will literally not affect you in any way. Is it a bad thing to add the possibility of a buff in exchange for accepting an addition burden of effort or danger? Why does everything have to be a pure and pristine bonus with no down side? Do players not like having to perform risk analysis?
The point is that no one spends any meaningful amount of time that close to a cruiser, why do you think there are so many complaints about how hard it is to maintain an extend shields which has a range of 8km? Even if they expanded the range to 10km combat radius, which would make absolute sense that a cruiser's comms would at least cover their combat radius, most of their team would still likely spend most of their time outside the range of effect, but at least then it wouldn't be limited to TRACTOR range. Really? lol. This is how we can all tell that cruiser auras are only auras in theory, but mostly just cruiser buffs, one has to be so dangerously close to a cruiser to get the buff that it's tactically unsound as grouping=mass scrambles, mass grav wells, mass tykens rifts, mass into-darkness console, mas ams, etc, etc.
I think I mentioned the AoEs in my first posting... and that the decision to risk that in exchange for your buff is that of the player. If you want to argue the making sense aspect, does it even make sense for a Comm Array to reduce weapon drain or buff shields in the first place? Seriously, are they transmitting "By the Profits, don't drain!" to their allies' weapons or "Hold together petaQ!" to their allies' shields? From a gameplay perspective, if you look at most MMOs aura buffs tend to require players to stay close to the character producing the aura, rather than at the edge of their combat range... which thereby risks being subjected to AoEs. If you want to name your cruiser the Paladin, by the way, that is rather apt.
As I mentioned, AoE vulnerability is a perfectly reasonable balance to gaining the benefit of the auras, especially in the case of a cruiser formation running all three of the pure buffs, and is sort of the point of making an aura and not just a team buff. My guess is that it could have been made a team buff if that was the intention; we have Engineering Fleet, Science Fleet, and Tactical Fleet available based on career which work clear across the map.
Don't get me wrong, it would be awesome if they worked out to 10km, or even across the entire operational area, but it certainly wouldn't help gameplay balance in the least bit.
With each passing day I wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality. The Cubs win the world series. Donald Trump is President. Britain leaves the EU. STO gets a dedicated PvP season. Engineers are "out of control" in STO.
If you don't think the support of the cruiser is worth it, then don't go near the ship and this new feature will literally not affect you in any way. Is it a bad thing to add the possibility of a buff in exchange for accepting an addition burden of effort or danger? Why does everything have to be a pure and pristine bonus with no down side? Do players not like having to perform risk analysis?
It isn't really beneficial to try and stay within 5km of a crusier for a minimal shield buff when trying to survive if that limits their evasive action and defense stat in the process, just like it wouldn't be beneficial for them to try and camp your voquv when you deploy your dispersal field.. or whatever it's called. If the bonus to defense isn't worth the bonus lost in defense to acquire, then what's the point? If the weapon bonus means everyone is so close that they all get scrambled and instapopped or sent into darkness or grav welled into a warp plasma theta radiation cloud web mine spree of doom, how is that ultimately helpful? The risk analysis shows it's not worth it, and thus these powers truly are cruiser buffs with the pretext of being auras to try and get the non-cruiser pilots to accept it quietly by marketing it as a gift to everyone.
And why are you so against an increase in range? Are you a cruiser pilot who wants these to essentially remain cruiser-only buffs, or are you some other sort of pilot that insanely wants these buffs to be as ineffective as possible by limiting their range?
I think I mentioned the AoEs in my first posting... and that the decision to risk that in exchange for your buff is that of the player. If you want to argue the making sense aspect, does it even make sense for a Comm Array to reduce weapon drain or buff shields in the first place? Seriously, are they transmitting "By the Profits, don't drain!" to their allies' weapons or "Hold together petaQ!" to their allies' shields? From a gameplay perspective, if you look at most MMOs aura buffs tend to require players to stay close to the character producing the aura, rather than at the edge of their combat range... which thereby risks being subjected to AoEs. If you want to name your cruiser the Paladin, by the way, that is rather apt.
As I mentioned, AoE vulnerability is a perfectly reasonable balance to gaining the benefit of the auras, especially in the case of a cruiser formation running all three of the pure buffs, and is sort of the point of making an aura and not just a team buff. My guess is that it could have been made a team buff if that was the intention; we have Engineering Fleet, Science Fleet, and Tactical Fleet available based on career which work clear across the map.
Don't get me wrong, it would be awesome if they worked out to 10km, or even across the entire operational area, but it certainly wouldn't help gameplay balance in the least bit.
Theoretically the shield one makes sense, if the cruiser has information on the enemy's weapon frequencies, they can direct other vessels in how to adapt their shielding to help reduce some of the damage, but you're right, the other ones are magic spells, whispered over an encrypted comm channel that provides some subtle buffs to those within earshot...limited...limited earshot.
I think there were two potential intentions, one, to simply buff cruisers in a way that didn't seem like just a cruiser buff, and two, they wanted to make cruisers more valuable to their team mates by providing these aoe support effects. If they wanted the former, that's pretty much what they've done, if they wanted the latter, the range is so limited that the support value is often minimal.
You know what would be interesting... though it would probably still require a range boost, but it would be interesting if cruisers affected by another cruiser's comm power became a relay for it. E.G. if just within the range of an ally cruiser's shield bonus, the receiving cruiser then acts like a signal repeater and extends the range of that cruiser's power over it's comm range. And likewise, the shield boosting crusier would pick up on the other cruiser's weapon power magic and broadcast it further. "But that would be OP!" Wah, fine, but I still think it's a nifty concept. Provided they don't just nix the range thing altogether.
>>It isn't really beneficial to try and stay within 5km of a crusier for a minimal shield buff when trying to survive if that limits their evasive action and defense stat in the process<<
Except there's plenty of situations where ships just park and DPS into a crowd or a boss. It would be disingenuous of you to say that every ship moves at full speed every second and that evasion is always more beneficial than firepower.
>> your voquv <<
I don't always carrier, but when I do, I use Recluse.
>> If the weapon bonus means everyone is so close that they all get scrambled and instapopped or sent into darkness or grav welled into a warp plasma theta radiation cloud web mine spree of doom <<
Signal to noise ratio dropping. I think we're getting PVP crosstalk again.
>> Are you a cruiser pilot who wants these to essentially remain cruiser-only buffs <<
I'm a cruiser captain (in 2 out of 3 cases) who wants to feel useful to the team without being taken for granted and also who wants to see more complexity and thought in space combat.
If your current position is "I'm better off on my own at all times", then participating in teamwork obviously isn't being incentivized enough to compete with your self interest. We need to make the cruiser buffs powerful enough to bring you over to "I need to look at the changing tactical situation to see if I'm better off on my own for now". It should add a new item to your decision making process, "is getting that ship's buff worth what it costs me in mobility?" If the answer is always no, then the feature isn't powerful enough. If the answer is always yes, then the feature is too powerful.
Basically everybody in the 10km radius camp wants something for nothing. That doesn't make the game more interesting at all, that's just generic power creep in the form of Passive Buff Of The Month Club. You might as well just give every ship in the game the same thing so nobody has to actually think about how they are playing or struggle with making decisions.
The 5km range on Comm Arrays has every appearance of being a "prisoner" of precedent ... and that is that all other PBAoE Aura abilities (Mask Energy Signature on Klingon Honor Guard/Adapted M.A.C.O., Scattering Field Science Captain ability) have ... wait for it(!) ... a 5 km radius. Therefore the precedent had been set that a "continuous" Aura Field buff to allies needs to have a 5 km radius (and ONLY a 5 km radius), because that's what the radius is on these other abilities too.
Of course, NEITER the Honor Guard aura nor the Scattering Field aura was seen "often enough" for players to become generally aware of their existence (let alone how they "work" or even "what to do" if there is one active somewhere nearby) because those other auras were Clicks, rather than Toggles ... meaning they didn't have 100% uptime ... meaning people didn't "mind" not receiving those buffs for the full duration in which they were active. They were temporary anyway, who cares, right?
Well now we have a PBAoE Ally Buff aura, and it's CONTINUOUS ... and it has been put on something that a large enough slice of Players actually play (ie. Starfleet Cruisers) ... and people are starting to "discover" that this entire idea of a 5 km radius for a PBAoE aura is just ... dumb. Perhaps not dumb in a statistical sense, since single target buffs to friends and allies usually have a 10 km range, or in some cases a 7.5 km range, so anything that's a spherical aura needs to have a radius of LESS THAN THAT in order to be "fair" and the most obvious stair step down from that is to peg those auras at 5 km. Simple right? Makes for a "logical" progression on how to code the spreadsheet that controls all this stuff, right? :rolleyes:
Well ... yeah ... except that this ISN'T HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED but an overwhelming majority of the Captains who play the content of the game (especially in pick up groups, where coordination is a bug, not a feature). Furthermore, the sheer number of AoE attacks available within the game is a Serious And Real deterrent (a "stick" if you will) that *discourages* any sort of Fly In Formation fighting style. The net result then is that the Cruiser Aura turns into essentially a Self Buff that is only occasionally relevant to anyone else on a Team, and even then it's going to be an "unexpected" buff that falls into the "nice to have" rather than being something useful/obvious enough for other players to seek out DELIBERATELY to take advantage of, and start building strategies and tactics around.
Speaking just for myself, I'm of the opinion that Cryptic (Adjudicator Hawk, perhaps?) ought to try testing out the prospect of simply bumping up *ALL* of the PBAoE Auras ... not just for Cruiser Comm Arrays but also for KHG Mask Energy Field and the Science Captain Scattering Field (and any others I might be forgetting about) from a baseline of 5 km up to 7.5 km, and see what effects, if any, that would have on *HOW* people play the game. Such a test could be run relatively easily/effectively using either the Tribble or Redshirt testing environment, and I'm sure if the relevant Devs were to issue a Call To Test so that they can monitor and datamine the results that a sufficiently large sampling of players would show up to assist with demonstrating how this would work In Game (and why it wouldn't be a "threat" to game balance to make such a change).
A secondary consideration for the Cruiser Comm Arrays is ... it's REALLY HARD TO NOTICE in the (relatively) fast pace of Space Combat where the Cruiser is, let alone which Aura it is running. Even worse, since there isn't any VISUAL indicator of how far the Aura extends (ie. which region of space it covers), it's really hard to know in advance if it will be advantageous to get close to a Cruiser, or not, and if so ... how close do you need to be (ie. where do I need to fly)?
This is one of those cases where having a "soap bubble" visual FX would go a LONG WAY towards helping the situation because it would make the Aura VISIBLE in a game where everything is Visual Flight Rules for where to go and how to maneuver. Even doing something like having a 90% transparent spherical "bubble" around the Cruiser, tinted to show the "type" of Aura the Cruiser is projecting, which VISIBLY shows the limit of the Aura's range would be a tremendously useful addition. Heck, if you wanted to get "fancy" with it, you could make the bubble be 90% transparent from the outside (so it doesn't "clutter up" the view *too much*) and make it 95% transparent from the inside (so it's just a very faint "tinting" effect showing you what lies beyond the radius of effect. This would then help Cruiser Captains "fly better" by giving them the ability to VISUALLY process "where they need to go" in order to cover more allies, and what the "limits" of their maneuverability is if they want to "lend cover" to more than one ally at the same time by keeping them within the Aura radius.
This kind of situation ought to be plenty familiar to Adjudicator Hawk, thanks to his work on City of Heroes and dealing with "bubble" abilities such as the Force Fields and Sonic Resonance sets having Aura Toggles where the player *projecting* the Aura needs to be able to see how far the Aura extends in order to position themselves most effectively ... while OTHER players ALSO need to be able to see the limits of the Aura in order to position THEMSELVES most effectively relative to the player projecting the Aura. The "failure" to create such a visual effect for Cruiser Comm Arrays is, I believe, a major component for why the 5 km radius being used feels so completely inadequate ... and why it ends up being more of a "self buff" than a "team buff" (let alone an "ally buff") simply because of the increased workload needed to employ it on behalf of others being functionally prohibitive to Quick And Fast Gameplay. Instead of "flying the HUD" you wind up needing to "fly the gauges" ... which is NEVER a good thing for this kind of game.
Except there's plenty of situations where ships just park and DPS into a crowd or a boss. It would be disingenuous of you to say that every ship moves at full speed every second and that evasion is always more beneficial than firepower.
The example I was discussing was when the cruiser was giving a defense buff and the ship in question needed as much defense/support as possible, it was not in reference to the "park and pwn" ships that just sit there and fire their cookie-cutter dual heavy cannon spam at the tac cube, and probably didnt' take threat control so that they don't have to worry about taking too much heat provided someone else has it.
>> If the weapon bonus means everyone is so close that they all get scrambled and instapopped or sent into darkness or grav welled into a warp plasma theta radiation cloud web mine spree of doom <<
Signal to noise ratio dropping. I think we're getting PVP crosstalk again.
Like it or not, pvp IS a part of this game, it is forced to live with the same mechanics as PVE, so the discussion of how this ability performs in both is entirely relevant. Additionally, as posted by autumnturning, there is plenty of aoe spam from npc's in the form of uber torp spreads of doom, there are npcs that use grav wells and tyken's rifts and scrambles, and in fact, this probably needs to be stepped up so that soft pve'ers might be better prepared to handle pvp and then it might not be so easy for you to marginalize.
>> Are you a cruiser pilot who wants these to essentially remain cruiser-only buffs <<
I'm a cruiser captain (in 2 out of 3 cases) who wants to feel useful to the team without being taken for granted and also who wants to see more complexity and thought in space combat.
I'm afraid I don't see how the 5km radius will make anyone appreciate you more, the range of your influence is so minimal that they aren't really of benefit to the team as a whole, but just whoever happens to be maneuvering in a way that happens to bring them into your aura, nor does it bring more complexity or thought to space combat, particularly not against NPC's, npc's even elite ones, are so predictable and easy-mode that there's little thought required. It's pvp that really requires thought and strategy and coordination.
If your current position is "I'm better off on my own at all times", then participating in teamwork obviously isn't being incentivized enough to compete with your self interest. We need to make the cruiser buffs powerful enough to bring you over to "I need to look at the changing tactical situation to see if I'm better off on my own for now". It should add a new item to your decision making process, "is getting that ship's buff worth what it costs me in mobility?" If the answer is always no, then the feature isn't powerful enough. If the answer is always yes, then the feature is too powerful.
The only way a 5km radius would be powerful enough to actually incentivise people to go out of their way to have the buff would be to make it OP. A cruiser's shield buff would have to be like an AOE extend shields, and even then... it sounds like you don't pvp, so you probably won't know this, but one of healer's biggest complaints is that their heal targets pretty much NEVER stay in range, healers are always having to chase their team mates down because combat is high speed and spread out, just like it was in any group combat situation in the shows. Extend shields at 8 (7.5) km is already a burden of range, even being able to heal out to 10km is a burden of range half the time.
And look at missions like khitomer accord... when is anyone within 5km of eachother? It's best to have someone or two someone's on probes, and then split up. If there's only one cruiser in the group, depending on where they get stuck, they're going to have, optimistically, one team mate in range at any given time, and likely not for long once any actual combat starts (by which I mean not pew-pewing at stationary objects or the gate where veryone just parks 8km off the side where they can't be hit.)
Basically everybody in the 10km radius camp wants something for nothing. That doesn't make the game more interesting at all, that's just generic power creep in the form of Passive Buff Of The Month Club. You might as well just give every ship in the game the same thing so nobody has to actually think about how they are playing or struggle with making decisions.
Erm, basically, everyone in the 10km camp has a realistic idea of what this game is, how it is played, and how it will always be played, the intention of these powers wasn't to suddenly "make the game more interesting" in some new and super different and force everyone into different tactics sort of way. It was just power creep, which always happens, so get over it, it was a buff to cruisers masked as a buff to everyone so that escorts wouldn't cry so much because cruisers became SLIGHTLY less target-practicy. Because yes, it's the PVP escorts that complain the most when someone else gets buffed out of obscurity. PVE escorts seem to typically be of the opinion "thank god, cruisers aren't quite so useless as they were and I won't die quite as much inside when I warp in and find myself on a team with one."
You seem to have some hiiiiiigh expectations for what these powers will/should do to the game, and I strongly suggest you adjust them, because I can pretty much guarantee they will not be met.
The 5km range on Comm Arrays has every appearance of being a "prisoner" of precedent ... and that is that all other PBAoE Aura abilities (Mask Energy Signature on Klingon Honor Guard/Adapted M.A.C.O., Scattering Field Science Captain ability) have ... wait for it(!) ... a 5 km radius. Therefore the precedent had been set that a "continuous" Aura Field buff to allies needs to have a 5 km radius (and ONLY a 5 km radius), because that's what the radius is on these other abilities too.
Of course, NEITER the Honor Guard aura nor the Scattering Field aura was seen "often enough" for players to become generally aware of their existence (let alone how they "work" or even "what to do" if there is one active somewhere nearby) because those other auras were Clicks, rather than Toggles ... meaning they didn't have 100% uptime ... meaning people didn't "mind" not receiving those buffs for the full duration in which they were active. They were temporary anyway, who cares, right?
Well now we have a PBAoE Ally Buff aura, and it's CONTINUOUS ... and it has been put on something that a large enough slice of Players actually play (ie. Starfleet Cruisers) ... and people are starting to "discover" that this entire idea of a 5 km radius for a PBAoE aura is just ... dumb. Perhaps not dumb in a statistical sense, since single target buffs to friends and allies usually have a 10 km range, or in some cases a 7.5 km range, so anything that's a spherical aura needs to have a radius of LESS THAN THAT in order to be "fair" and the most obvious stair step down from that is to peg those auras at 5 km. Simple right? Makes for a "logical" progression on how to code the spreadsheet that controls all this stuff, right? :rolleyes:
Well ... yeah ... except that this ISN'T HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED but an overwhelming majority of the Captains who play the content of the game (especially in pick up groups, where coordination is a bug, not a feature). Furthermore, the sheer number of AoE attacks available within the game is a Serious And Real deterrent (a "stick" if you will) that *discourages* any sort of Fly In Formation fighting style. The net result then is that the Cruiser Aura turns into essentially a Self Buff that is only occasionally relevant to anyone else on a Team, and even then it's going to be an "unexpected" buff that falls into the "nice to have" rather than being something useful/obvious enough for other players to seek out DELIBERATELY to take advantage of, and start building strategies and tactics around.
Speaking just for myself, I'm of the opinion that Cryptic (Adjudicator Hawk, perhaps?) ought to try testing out the prospect of simply bumping up *ALL* of the PBAoE Auras ... not just for Cruiser Comm Arrays but also for KHG Mask Energy Field and the Science Captain Scattering Field (and any others I might be forgetting about) from a baseline of 5 km up to 7.5 km, and see what effects, if any, that would have on *HOW* people play the game. Such a test could be run relatively easily/effectively using either the Tribble or Redshirt testing environment, and I'm sure if the relevant Devs were to issue a Call To Test so that they can monitor and datamine the results that a sufficiently large sampling of players would show up to assist with demonstrating how this would work In Game (and why it wouldn't be a "threat" to game balance to make such a change).
A secondary consideration for the Cruiser Comm Arrays is ... it's REALLY HARD TO NOTICE in the (relatively) fast pace of Space Combat where the Cruiser is, let alone which Aura it is running. Even worse, since there isn't any VISUAL indicator of how far the Aura extends (ie. which region of space it covers), it's really hard to know in advance] if it will be advantageous to get close to a Cruiser, or not, and if so ... how close do you need to be (ie. where do I need to fly)?
This is one of those cases where having a "soap bubble" visual FX would go a LONG WAY towards helping the situation because it would make the Aura VISIBLE in a game where everything is Visual Flight Rules for where to go and how to maneuver. Even doing something like having a 90% transparent spherical "bubble" around the Cruiser, tinted to show the "type" of Aura the Cruiser is projecting, which VISIBLY shows the limit of the Aura's range would be a tremendously useful addition. Heck, if you wanted to get "fancy" with it, you could make the bubble be 90% transparent from the outside (so it doesn't "clutter up" the view *too much*) and make it 95% transparent from the inside (so it's just a very faint "tinting" effect showing you what lies beyond the radius of effect. This would then help Cruiser Captains "fly better" by giving them the ability to VISUALLY process "where they need to go" in order to cover more allies, and what the "limits" of their maneuverability is if they want to "lend cover" to more than one ally at the same time by keeping them within the Aura radius.
This kind of situation ought to be plenty familiar to Adjudicator Hawk, thanks to his work on City of Heroes and dealing with "bubble" abilities such as the Force Fields and Sonic Resonance sets having Aura Toggles where the player *projecting* the Aura needs to be able to see how far the Aura extends in order to position themselves most effectively ... while OTHER players ALSO need to be able to see the limits of the Aura in order to position THEMSELVES most effectively relative to the player projecting the Aura. The "failure" to create such a visual effect for Cruiser Comm Arrays is, I believe, a major component for why the 5 km radius being used feels so completely inadequate ... and why it ends up being more of a "self buff" than a "team buff" (let alone an "ally buff") simply because of the increased workload needed to employ it on behalf of others being functionally prohibitive to Quick And Fast Gameplay. Instead of "flying the HUD" you wind up needing to "fly the gauges" ... which is NEVER a good thing for this kind of game.
And 100% this too. When they put up the blog about them, I asked in the comments if there could please be a persistent graphic of some sort that could perhaps be turned on and off by those who may not want to see this brave new bubbleverse, but alas... deaf dev ears.
Comments
But first, lets A) confirm they work and
One of the reasons people probably don't bother trying to zip around your ship and only around your ship is because 1. they'll probably have to dramatically reduce their speed/evasive maneuvering to receive your buffs which will drop their defense and or limit their ability to get out of firing arcs, ultimately netting them nothing. 2. With diminishing returns, the scattering field doesn't do nearly enough to warrant not simply getting the F out of there or zipping all around within 10km so you are in range of heals but not an easy target. Arguably 5km is too limited a range for that sci support skill either and it should probably be buffed to at least 10km as well.
I don't know what you're talking about, I want my team mates within 10km for support, but not within 5km where them getting scrambled/hit with other cheese will probably have me stuck in it too.
Maybe if you're that concerned about your defense value, you're not the intended target of this system?
Well if this is supposed to largely be for cruisers, maybe it should be that all friendly cruisers in the area receive your buffs, but team mates only get them if they get within 5km of the providing cruiser. It could be justified that cruisers with advanced comm arrays better communicate with one another than with sci ships or tac ships, though I doubt that would go over well with the escorts and scis.
Plus it does nothing to emphasize any concept of formation or topography in the battle.
The emphasis on formation and topography is "Don't get too close cause we'll all get scrambled/grav welled/etc/etc!" Flying in formation in this game is THE WORST TACTIC EVER.
Not to mention we never really saw 'formations' in trek, this isn't a bunch of fighters flying in formation or ships of the line forming up and firing at each other from nice neat formations, star trek combat always had ships all over the place, and none of them were flying close, that would be stupid, when one ship blows up and damages all the others around it, or a piece of one ship gets blown off and hits the other ship or one ship loses control and flies into another... yeah, formations and topography=does not apply to trek, or this game.
The point is that no one spends any meaningful amount of time that close to a cruiser, why do you think there are so many complaints about how hard it is to maintain an extend shields which has a range of 8km? Even if they expanded the range to 10km combat radius, which would make absolute sense that a cruiser's comms would at least cover their combat radius, most of their team would still likely spend most of their time outside the range of effect, but at least then it wouldn't be limited to TRACTOR range. Really? lol. This is how we can all tell that cruiser auras are only auras in theory, but mostly just cruiser buffs, one has to be so dangerously close to a cruiser to get the buff that it's tactically unsound as grouping=mass scrambles, mass grav wells, mass tykens rifts, mass into-darkness console, mas ams, etc, etc.
Enemies that do anything like that: Elite Borg Negh'vars have isometric charge.
...
?
I think you may be mistaking "Star Trek: Online" with "Star Trek: The Irrelevant PVP Tumor". A common mistake.
He's mistaken in general. Never took that fella for the brightest bulb in the mix. Most of his suggestions ideas or comments all look like troll bait. As if anybody wanted/needed to hover around 5km from a cruiser. :rolleyes: It's a clear indication he's not running on a full battery.
"No formations in trek".. Clearly he's never seen Ds9 where they lay in an assault on the Dominion. Plenty of formations there. Just be prepared to be dazzled with irritation from that guy.
Lol I was just going to suggest this! 50auxpwr=5km, with a 1km increase for every 10auxpwr increase so at 100auxpwr it would become 10km with a cap at 12km for 125auxpwr.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Elite unimatrix ships use gravity wells and scrambles, not to mention several npc's that produce the "torp spread of doom" that will take out many players in one shot, so cluster together is just a recipe for disaster.
I'm sorry, you say why would anyone want or need to hover around 5km from a cruiser... so are you trying to support what I'm saying or go against it? Cause you're right, no one wants to hover around within 5km of a cruiser, it's incredibly limiting, which is why these cruiser 'auras' are effectively self buffs. Which is entirely the point of the thread, if they are supposed to support other ships than just the cruiser they are on, they should have a greater range.
Yes, in ds9 we do see a few examples of ships flying in formation, and what happened to those formations? did they turn into a massive cluster F*** of ships everywhere flying as they may? Why yes, in nearly ever episode where ships are shown originally flying in formation, they ultimately break formation once the real fighting begins, or they get blown to hell, taking out/damaging near by ships highlighting what a horrible idea it is to fly in close formation.
And judging by your failed attempt at being insulting, my troll bait has clearly worked, cause look, here you are. Trololol.
The idea here is to pick a linear thought and follow through with it. Don't support your arguments with falsehoods like you are prone to do. Now you're flipped on your original statement on formations not being seen to seeing formations in battle. You do this every time. I wouldn't say you're a troll, more like a clueless mole. It's too tempting to whack with a hammer of reason every now and then.
DS9 has the highest concentration of some of the FEW examples shown of ships flying in formation in ALL OF TREK. It is an exception, not the rule. And all of those formations break down once combat starts, formations are basically used only to get to the battle ground and then it's a free for all, so no, I am not contradicting what I said, since you rarely see formations in trek, and nobody sticks to them when they are seen, I don't consider trek to have any proper examples of using formations in combat.
Furthermore, we do not have combat anything LIKE what we saw in DS9. Galaxy's do not sweep in and cut enemy ships apart with a single blast from their main saucer array. You cannot fly in full 3D movement like the Defiant did. Ships in general have shields and do not die to a couple seconds of Quad Cannon Fire. Jem'Hadar Attack Ships cannot use Ramming Speed and take out a fresh Vor'Cha in one hit.
So trying to use DS9 style space combat as an example is a bit of a fool's errand when it is not supported by any of the rest of the combat in STO.
Besides, the reasons for why some of those battles occurred in DS9 was so fundamentally flawed that a child's grasp of Space could have pointed it out.
In STO getting close together is almost always a recipe for failure. There are a LOT of AoE attacks, splash damage, debuffs, and crowd control that will effect all of you if you decide to cluster around a single ship. Not the least of which can be the warp core explosions of your friends dying if something goes wrong.
However, that is mostly irrelevant because tight formation flying does not even work in STO due to the speeds and turn rates of the various ship types and the size and location of enemies you are trying to attack. It can mostly work against stationary targets that are not shooting back and while there are a few of those that is not the majority of targets.
It's not like you're rallying the players to support your idea because that would mean you're attempting demand which never works with devs either.
Missing the point is a fool's errand, just.
So yes some of the auras need expansion in size, like the shield aura but the weapon buff needs to be closer to home. That way it's not a star trek cruisers online with bubbles power = lazy play. See? Devs can understand that and why and it took 2 sentences.
I'm beginning to suspect english isn't your first language because the way you communicate is very incoherent... and it's ironic to have the way I communicate my ideas criticized in broken english, particularly when there's nothing wrong with anything I've said. -.-
I was not basing my point on canon and whether it was seen in star trek, even though 99.9% of canon supports that formations are a rare and magical unicorn, seen only if a blue moon occurs in a leap year on the winter equinox. My point and the point of this whole thread is that PEOPLE DO NOT FLY IN FORMATION. People rarely stay within 5km of ally cruisers, as it has been stated in a post above, the different speeds and turn rates of the vessels make escorts or sci ships trying to run in formation with cruisers prohibitive. And even if the speeds and turn rates weren't an issue, it's just stupid foolish to fly that close anyway.
In the game, in pvp, staying within 5km of one another is a recipe for disaster as there are grav wells and tykens rifts and the "into darkness" console and scramble sensors and all sorts of other aoe type horrors that are best avoided by spreading out.
In pve, there are borg torp spreads of doom, among other things, that make it foolish to cluster together around the tank, in fact, one should be as far away from the tank as possible, while hopefully still in heal range so you can lend support if necessary, but stay well away so you don't get hit by spreads.
And then, in the end, you basically agree with me and everyone else in the thread who have been saying the auras need a range increase so... why were you being insulting and starting TRIBBLE in the first place if you didn't disagree? My best guess is that this whole little skirmish occurred along the border best known as "the language barrier" where many a simple misunderstanding has turned unnecessarily hostile.
I think I mentioned the AoEs in my first posting... and that the decision to risk that in exchange for your buff is that of the player. If you want to argue the making sense aspect, does it even make sense for a Comm Array to reduce weapon drain or buff shields in the first place? Seriously, are they transmitting "By the Profits, don't drain!" to their allies' weapons or "Hold together petaQ!" to their allies' shields? From a gameplay perspective, if you look at most MMOs aura buffs tend to require players to stay close to the character producing the aura, rather than at the edge of their combat range... which thereby risks being subjected to AoEs. If you want to name your cruiser the Paladin, by the way, that is rather apt.
As I mentioned, AoE vulnerability is a perfectly reasonable balance to gaining the benefit of the auras, especially in the case of a cruiser formation running all three of the pure buffs, and is sort of the point of making an aura and not just a team buff. My guess is that it could have been made a team buff if that was the intention; we have Engineering Fleet, Science Fleet, and Tactical Fleet available based on career which work clear across the map.
Don't get me wrong, it would be awesome if they worked out to 10km, or even across the entire operational area, but it certainly wouldn't help gameplay balance in the least bit.
It isn't really beneficial to try and stay within 5km of a crusier for a minimal shield buff when trying to survive if that limits their evasive action and defense stat in the process, just like it wouldn't be beneficial for them to try and camp your voquv when you deploy your dispersal field.. or whatever it's called. If the bonus to defense isn't worth the bonus lost in defense to acquire, then what's the point? If the weapon bonus means everyone is so close that they all get scrambled and instapopped or sent into darkness or grav welled into a warp plasma theta radiation cloud web mine spree of doom, how is that ultimately helpful? The risk analysis shows it's not worth it, and thus these powers truly are cruiser buffs with the pretext of being auras to try and get the non-cruiser pilots to accept it quietly by marketing it as a gift to everyone.
And why are you so against an increase in range? Are you a cruiser pilot who wants these to essentially remain cruiser-only buffs, or are you some other sort of pilot that insanely wants these buffs to be as ineffective as possible by limiting their range?
Theoretically the shield one makes sense, if the cruiser has information on the enemy's weapon frequencies, they can direct other vessels in how to adapt their shielding to help reduce some of the damage, but you're right, the other ones are magic spells, whispered over an encrypted comm channel that provides some subtle buffs to those within earshot...limited...limited earshot.
I think there were two potential intentions, one, to simply buff cruisers in a way that didn't seem like just a cruiser buff, and two, they wanted to make cruisers more valuable to their team mates by providing these aoe support effects. If they wanted the former, that's pretty much what they've done, if they wanted the latter, the range is so limited that the support value is often minimal.
You know what would be interesting... though it would probably still require a range boost, but it would be interesting if cruisers affected by another cruiser's comm power became a relay for it. E.G. if just within the range of an ally cruiser's shield bonus, the receiving cruiser then acts like a signal repeater and extends the range of that cruiser's power over it's comm range. And likewise, the shield boosting crusier would pick up on the other cruiser's weapon power magic and broadcast it further. "But that would be OP!" Wah, fine, but I still think it's a nifty concept. Provided they don't just nix the range thing altogether.
Except there's plenty of situations where ships just park and DPS into a crowd or a boss. It would be disingenuous of you to say that every ship moves at full speed every second and that evasion is always more beneficial than firepower.
>> your voquv <<
I don't always carrier, but when I do, I use Recluse.
>> If the weapon bonus means everyone is so close that they all get scrambled and instapopped or sent into darkness or grav welled into a warp plasma theta radiation cloud web mine spree of doom <<
Signal to noise ratio dropping. I think we're getting PVP crosstalk again.
>> Are you a cruiser pilot who wants these to essentially remain cruiser-only buffs <<
I'm a cruiser captain (in 2 out of 3 cases) who wants to feel useful to the team without being taken for granted and also who wants to see more complexity and thought in space combat.
If your current position is "I'm better off on my own at all times", then participating in teamwork obviously isn't being incentivized enough to compete with your self interest. We need to make the cruiser buffs powerful enough to bring you over to "I need to look at the changing tactical situation to see if I'm better off on my own for now". It should add a new item to your decision making process, "is getting that ship's buff worth what it costs me in mobility?" If the answer is always no, then the feature isn't powerful enough. If the answer is always yes, then the feature is too powerful.
Basically everybody in the 10km radius camp wants something for nothing. That doesn't make the game more interesting at all, that's just generic power creep in the form of Passive Buff Of The Month Club. You might as well just give every ship in the game the same thing so nobody has to actually think about how they are playing or struggle with making decisions.
Of course, NEITER the Honor Guard aura nor the Scattering Field aura was seen "often enough" for players to become generally aware of their existence (let alone how they "work" or even "what to do" if there is one active somewhere nearby) because those other auras were Clicks, rather than Toggles ... meaning they didn't have 100% uptime ... meaning people didn't "mind" not receiving those buffs for the full duration in which they were active. They were temporary anyway, who cares, right?
Well now we have a PBAoE Ally Buff aura, and it's CONTINUOUS ... and it has been put on something that a large enough slice of Players actually play (ie. Starfleet Cruisers) ... and people are starting to "discover" that this entire idea of a 5 km radius for a PBAoE aura is just ... dumb. Perhaps not dumb in a statistical sense, since single target buffs to friends and allies usually have a 10 km range, or in some cases a 7.5 km range, so anything that's a spherical aura needs to have a radius of LESS THAN THAT in order to be "fair" and the most obvious stair step down from that is to peg those auras at 5 km. Simple right? Makes for a "logical" progression on how to code the spreadsheet that controls all this stuff, right? :rolleyes:
Well ... yeah ... except that this ISN'T HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED but an overwhelming majority of the Captains who play the content of the game (especially in pick up groups, where coordination is a bug, not a feature). Furthermore, the sheer number of AoE attacks available within the game is a Serious And Real deterrent (a "stick" if you will) that *discourages* any sort of Fly In Formation fighting style. The net result then is that the Cruiser Aura turns into essentially a Self Buff that is only occasionally relevant to anyone else on a Team, and even then it's going to be an "unexpected" buff that falls into the "nice to have" rather than being something useful/obvious enough for other players to seek out DELIBERATELY to take advantage of, and start building strategies and tactics around.
Speaking just for myself, I'm of the opinion that Cryptic (Adjudicator Hawk, perhaps?) ought to try testing out the prospect of simply bumping up *ALL* of the PBAoE Auras ... not just for Cruiser Comm Arrays but also for KHG Mask Energy Field and the Science Captain Scattering Field (and any others I might be forgetting about) from a baseline of 5 km up to 7.5 km, and see what effects, if any, that would have on *HOW* people play the game. Such a test could be run relatively easily/effectively using either the Tribble or Redshirt testing environment, and I'm sure if the relevant Devs were to issue a Call To Test so that they can monitor and datamine the results that a sufficiently large sampling of players would show up to assist with demonstrating how this would work In Game (and why it wouldn't be a "threat" to game balance to make such a change).
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
This is one of those cases where having a "soap bubble" visual FX would go a LONG WAY towards helping the situation because it would make the Aura VISIBLE in a game where everything is Visual Flight Rules for where to go and how to maneuver. Even doing something like having a 90% transparent spherical "bubble" around the Cruiser, tinted to show the "type" of Aura the Cruiser is projecting, which VISIBLY shows the limit of the Aura's range would be a tremendously useful addition. Heck, if you wanted to get "fancy" with it, you could make the bubble be 90% transparent from the outside (so it doesn't "clutter up" the view *too much*) and make it 95% transparent from the inside (so it's just a very faint "tinting" effect showing you what lies beyond the radius of effect. This would then help Cruiser Captains "fly better" by giving them the ability to VISUALLY process "where they need to go" in order to cover more allies, and what the "limits" of their maneuverability is if they want to "lend cover" to more than one ally at the same time by keeping them within the Aura radius.
This kind of situation ought to be plenty familiar to Adjudicator Hawk, thanks to his work on City of Heroes and dealing with "bubble" abilities such as the Force Fields and Sonic Resonance sets having Aura Toggles where the player *projecting* the Aura needs to be able to see how far the Aura extends in order to position themselves most effectively ... while OTHER players ALSO need to be able to see the limits of the Aura in order to position THEMSELVES most effectively relative to the player projecting the Aura. The "failure" to create such a visual effect for Cruiser Comm Arrays is, I believe, a major component for why the 5 km radius being used feels so completely inadequate ... and why it ends up being more of a "self buff" than a "team buff" (let alone an "ally buff") simply because of the increased workload needed to employ it on behalf of others being functionally prohibitive to Quick And Fast Gameplay. Instead of "flying the HUD" you wind up needing to "fly the gauges" ... which is NEVER a good thing for this kind of game.
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
The example I was discussing was when the cruiser was giving a defense buff and the ship in question needed as much defense/support as possible, it was not in reference to the "park and pwn" ships that just sit there and fire their cookie-cutter dual heavy cannon spam at the tac cube, and probably didnt' take threat control so that they don't have to worry about taking too much heat provided someone else has it.
Like it or not, pvp IS a part of this game, it is forced to live with the same mechanics as PVE, so the discussion of how this ability performs in both is entirely relevant. Additionally, as posted by autumnturning, there is plenty of aoe spam from npc's in the form of uber torp spreads of doom, there are npcs that use grav wells and tyken's rifts and scrambles, and in fact, this probably needs to be stepped up so that soft pve'ers might be better prepared to handle pvp and then it might not be so easy for you to marginalize.
I'm afraid I don't see how the 5km radius will make anyone appreciate you more, the range of your influence is so minimal that they aren't really of benefit to the team as a whole, but just whoever happens to be maneuvering in a way that happens to bring them into your aura, nor does it bring more complexity or thought to space combat, particularly not against NPC's, npc's even elite ones, are so predictable and easy-mode that there's little thought required. It's pvp that really requires thought and strategy and coordination.
The only way a 5km radius would be powerful enough to actually incentivise people to go out of their way to have the buff would be to make it OP. A cruiser's shield buff would have to be like an AOE extend shields, and even then... it sounds like you don't pvp, so you probably won't know this, but one of healer's biggest complaints is that their heal targets pretty much NEVER stay in range, healers are always having to chase their team mates down because combat is high speed and spread out, just like it was in any group combat situation in the shows. Extend shields at 8 (7.5) km is already a burden of range, even being able to heal out to 10km is a burden of range half the time.
And look at missions like khitomer accord... when is anyone within 5km of eachother? It's best to have someone or two someone's on probes, and then split up. If there's only one cruiser in the group, depending on where they get stuck, they're going to have, optimistically, one team mate in range at any given time, and likely not for long once any actual combat starts (by which I mean not pew-pewing at stationary objects or the gate where veryone just parks 8km off the side where they can't be hit.)
Erm, basically, everyone in the 10km camp has a realistic idea of what this game is, how it is played, and how it will always be played, the intention of these powers wasn't to suddenly "make the game more interesting" in some new and super different and force everyone into different tactics sort of way. It was just power creep, which always happens, so get over it, it was a buff to cruisers masked as a buff to everyone so that escorts wouldn't cry so much because cruisers became SLIGHTLY less target-practicy. Because yes, it's the PVP escorts that complain the most when someone else gets buffed out of obscurity. PVE escorts seem to typically be of the opinion "thank god, cruisers aren't quite so useless as they were and I won't die quite as much inside when I warp in and find myself on a team with one."
You seem to have some hiiiiiigh expectations for what these powers will/should do to the game, and I strongly suggest you adjust them, because I can pretty much guarantee they will not be met.
100% this.
And 100% this too. When they put up the blog about them, I asked in the comments if there could please be a persistent graphic of some sort that could perhaps be turned on and off by those who may not want to see this brave new bubbleverse, but alas... deaf dev ears.