This may happen as well under "offense" settings with power set to 125 and overcapped as people have mentioned breaking DPS records now with this new bug.
It's possible incorrect geared people that did not have the correct warp/sigularity core and were not overcapping weapons power may have bested their personal best dps records. The same people probably aren't using a leech console that will leech 2.6 power or more per weapon as mine does. And probably don't have and use Marion Frances Delmur with DEM. However people using the correct gear and doffs and overcapping weapon power and using the correct warp/singularity core and leeching are seeing a dps loss.
My Romulan Tac and Human Engineer both rely on crit and crit severity and overcapping weapon power. Both use the correct warp/singularity core. Both leech. So both have suffered tremendously. Most especially my Engineer as he's got the better gear by far. I could previously do over 11k dps over the length of a Starbase fleet defense. Now i can't even break 8k dps. FYI the engineer's weapon power is overcapped to 174 during a FAW.
And Drake, i just copy/pasted and didn't remove the 2 things that do seem to work. However i didn't actually test weapons with the CrtH modifier. I did test the experimental romulan beam array and that worked. But it has an innate 6% crit chance and not an actual CrtH modifier. So i can't say for sure if weapons with CrtH actually do work during a FAW.
After extensive internal testing, we were able to track down an issue with energy drain as it relates to Fire-at-Will.
The gist of it is this: Instead of the related energy drain remaining consistent across the entire beam weapon firing cycle, FAW was activating the energy drain only on the first pulse and allowing Captains to 'regenerate' the lost energy over the remainder of the firing cycle. On a ship with a high Energy Transfer Rate (via abilities, skills, equipment, etc), this could sometimes appear as though no energy was being drained at all. Especially when their weapon firing cycles were staggered (which tends to happen during extended conflicts in STO).
We've corrected this error internally and hope to have it on Holodeck as soon as possible. After this fix, the energy drain associated with Fire at Will will remain far more consistent.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
After extensive internal testing, we were able to track down an issue with energy drain as it relates to Fire-at-Will.
The gist of it is this: Instead of the related energy drain remaining consistent across the entire beam weapon firing cycle, FAW was activating the energy drain only on the first pulse and allowing Captains to 'regenerate' the lost energy over the remainder of the firing cycle. On a ship with a high Energy Transfer Rate (via abilities, skills, equipment, etc), this could sometimes appear as though no energy was being drained at all. Especially when their weapon firing cycles were staggered (which tends to happen during extended conflicts in STO).
We've corrected this error internally and hope to have it on Holodeck as soon as possible. After this fix, the energy drain associated with Fire at Will will remain far more consistent.
Good god, please keep digging for the supposed other problems would you bort, and see if in fact there are in fact problems with weapon/skills procs. Me personally I can understand if there are some related acc decrease from bfaw usage considering it gets a wider array of target selection over CSV.
Good god, please keep digging for the supposed other problems would you bort, and see if in fact there are in fact problems with weapon/skills procs. Me personally I can understand if there are some related acc decrease from bfaw usage considering it gets a wider array of target selection over CSV.
I haven't been able to find any evidence of enhancements not attaching to FAW. This includes the innate weapon enhancements like Crit, Acc, Dmg, etc, but also extends to things like Doff Active Roster Abilities and Console Attachments (Leech, for example). They all seem to be in perfect working order.
The accuracy-overflow issue has yet to be investigated to the point of a solid answer, though.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
After extensive internal testing, we were able to track down an issue with energy drain as it relates to Fire-at-Will.
The gist of it is this: Instead of the related energy drain remaining consistent across the entire beam weapon firing cycle, FAW was activating the energy drain only on the first pulse and allowing Captains to 'regenerate' the lost energy over the remainder of the firing cycle. On a ship with a high Energy Transfer Rate (via abilities, skills, equipment, etc), this could sometimes appear as though no energy was being drained at all. Especially when their weapon firing cycles were staggered (which tends to happen during extended conflicts in STO).
We've corrected this error internally and hope to have it on Holodeck as soon as possible. After this fix, the energy drain associated with Fire at Will will remain far more consistent.
The power drain bug was offsetting the issue of low criticals and accuracy from FAW, if you fix the power drain without fixing the other issues then FAW goes back to a broken state where all of us who use FAW builds stop playing space content for the most part, like we did for the 3 weeks that FAW was hopelessly broken.
I haven't been able to find any evidence of enhancements not attaching to FAW. This includes the innate weapon enhancements like Crit, Acc, Dmg, etc, but also extends to things like Doff Active Roster Abilities and Console Attachments (Leech, for example). They all seem to be in perfect working order.
The accuracy-overflow issue has yet to be investigated to the point of a solid answer, though.
Many of us use accuracy heavy builds for both PvE and PvP. The fact that Accuracy is not overflowing correctly at this time is yielding losses of 3-5 percent critical chance across the board with all weapons.
It is my hope this is investigated and on tribble before the end of the week. This is now a month solid that FAW has been broken.
Why not just put it back to how it was before the double proc was fixed and start over?
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
I haven't been able to find any evidence of enhancements not attaching to FAW. This includes the innate weapon enhancements like Crit, Acc, Dmg, etc, but also extends to things like Doff Active Roster Abilities and Console Attachments (Leech, for example). They all seem to be in perfect working order.
The accuracy-overflow issue has yet to be investigated to the point of a solid answer, though.
Would it be to much to ask to at least leave the lack of drain using FAW until Acc has been figured out? Just don't do anything with FAW until you guys are sure you have gotten to the root of all the issues with it. Perhaps after it passes Q&A don't just patch it, but put it on Tribble first, so the community can verify it's correct working. Frankly, it's becoming a bit of a joke this way. Verifying FAW's/ Acc overflows proper working would spare you guys another emberassment, and seeing how the whole point of Tribble is to test things, I really cannot think of any reason to not test it there first.
Lost and Delirious... and Disenchanted too Apparently some forum posters have diplomatic immunity nowadays, where can I get mine?
I haven't been able to find any evidence of enhancements not attaching to FAW. This includes the innate weapon enhancements like Crit, Acc, Dmg, etc, but also extends to things like Doff Active Roster Abilities and Console Attachments (Leech, for example). They all seem to be in perfect working order.
The accuracy-overflow issue has yet to be investigated to the point of a solid answer, though.
i think you mentioned in the past being able to make mkXX [acc]x20 dev hax beam arrays for testing, if those dont overflow, huston we have a problem!
I will not insult the DEV team because I think I speak for many when; we the players really feel like doing so(those of us that understand the game mechanics to a considerable degree). That being said. I love STO and I'll even go as far; as to say I like that cryptic is the one that made this game.
This latest acc + dmg modifier issue is a pretty big one though. It's a major dps loss for those of us that are running pve DPS maximizing fleet AntiProton setups in which we're stacking a lot of acc to gain a considerable benefit from the crtH/D conversion in pve. As numbers said the weapon power drain issue with FAW was offsetting this considerable loss in dps from the currently bugged acc/dmg modifier issue. I understand that you fix things only when it is possible to do so.
However enough is enough. Before applying changes like this wouldn't it be logical to wait until the issue that is being offset by the power drain bug is addressed first? It's not that you guys don't fix issues. It's the timing that is the problem here(you usually don't take this long to fix game breakers like this). For those of us that are min/max'ers this continuous FAW issue is extremely disruptive to our gameplay. To the point that we have stopped participating in space content completely for past month.
The reason this is so impacting for us is because of the following.
1) The difficulty of your pve content.. including NWS/all elite content is trivial for us. On every single one of my characters spanning every type of captain and many ship combinations the difficulty is laughable; if there wasn't the requirement for 5 players to initially enter the STF, I would be able to solo all content and achieve optionals... for the most part. So the only thing we have to look forward to is DPS competition with our friends in said content. (We finish STFs in literally less than 2 minutes)
2) Utter and complete lack of hard modes or tiered hard modes for all said elite content. You don't have to create raid content but a few tier'd hard modes for each of the main STFs(Borg) and you would have a lot of happier players(reward differences would be nice).
3) In PVE the way content is designed. healer and tank roles are basically for player enjoyment and not optimal in current content because of the lack of said hard modes(what's the point in healing or tanking when your opponents don't do enough to damage you or have enough resistances to be challenging for our level of experience/skill). I understand you have to cater to the casual player... but that's why hard modes were invented in MMO's so that we can have our cake and eat it too.
All in all; my point here is you've given us min/max'ers nothing else to do. So when you break things that affect our min/maxing for literally a month(our currently only challenging thing to do in the game). What are we supposed to do?
Play another game? I'm not really interested in leaving STO or rather I'd prefer not to.
So if you want you can call these ideas distractions for us min/max'ers or w/e you want but I propose you consider developing hard modes to keep us occupied or if that's not an option. I propose longer test periods(2 weeks of tribble before patching with maintenance to prevent things like this spinning out every week - this might of been averted if more time was spent before throwing it on holodeck).
I hope i'm not over elaborating in this wall of text and I hope it doesn't come off as a total complaint.
Would it be to much to ask to at least leave the lack of drain using FAW until Acc has been figured out? Just don't do anything with FAW until you guys are sure you have gotten to the root of all the issues with it. Perhaps after it passes Q&A don't just patch it, but put it on Tribble first, so the community can verify it's correct working. Frankly, it's becoming a bit of a joke this way. Verifying FAW's/ Acc overflows proper working would spare you guys another emberassment, and seeing how the whole point of Tribble is to test things, I really cannot think of any reason to not test it there first.
the BOLD is half the problem with the Tribble server. they're too busy drooling over the new stuff to give a **** about the " little " stuff. and if they even report it, it's up to the small(er) team of devs to even pinpoint the problem. let alone, what to do about it. that is, until their priorities are to actually fix bugs that have been in-game since it was started.
guess I know where the money's going. and it's not to STO...
*note*
If your offended by the above comment of mine : just remember : this is just a game.
The young generation has no clue what freedom is. Because they do not know the limit of it.
Disenchanted for all my Characters
If one weapon is opposed to the other, it is enforcing or forced by the other to not do something or same thing. 1 BA is opposing it's will over another so it cannot butt in on its intended target.
If they all worked independently of each other, than they would be allowed to chose any and every target even ones targeted by another BA. :rolleyes:
But they are. Each beam selects its secondary target independently of the others, they don't interfere. But the same beam must always pick two different ones, a single beam shot cannot hit the same target twice.
I haven't been able to find any evidence of enhancements not attaching to FAW. This includes the innate weapon enhancements like Crit, Acc, Dmg, etc, but also extends to things like Doff Active Roster Abilities and Console Attachments (Leech, for example). They all seem to be in perfect working order.
The accuracy-overflow issue has yet to be investigated to the point of a solid answer, though.
Bort are you guys hiring? How can you not see that the [dmg] modifier does nothing and how can you not see that the quality of the weapon ie common, uncommon, rare, and very rare all show as doing the exact same damage during a FAW. It's fairly easy to replicate. Just equip one of each quality type of weapon and one with the [dmg] modifier. Then hit P and check each weapon. Better yet hit FAW 1, 2, or 3 and check your weapons on your weapons tray. They ALL show as doing the exact same damage.
Now having said that. It looks like a tooltip error possibly. Here i am testing again. This time i'll test common, uncommon, and rare weapons and rare weapons with [dmg]x2
sample size 10,000 hits
uncommon max hit=1,256
uncommon max faw3 hit=1,411
sample size 10,000 hits
rare max hit=1,266
rare max faw3 hit=1,430
sample size 10,000 hits
rare [dmg]x2 max hit=1,290
rare [dmg]x2 faw3 max hit=1,443
So this does show that the different quality of weapons do increase the damage. It's pretty miniscule and is why nobody in their right mind would ever use weapons with the [dmg] modifier. Going from the rare to a rare with [dmg]x2 is just under a 1% increase in damage. I did not include my uncommon results as i received a +2% damage accolade after testing the uncommon weapons, which were the weapons i tested first.
So this appears to be a tooltip error for FAW not showing any difference in damage between quality of weapons and weapons with the [dmg] modifier.
However you confirmed that there is a problem with weapon power usage. That's one down. You then confirm there is an issue with accuracy overflow. OK that's 2 down. That's is not the only 2 issues. Starship Targeting Systems does not work during a FAW. And just as importantly Starship Energy Weapon Specialization does NOT work during a FAW either.
Here's my testing results again. And again it confirms that neither accuracy not energy weapon specialization work during FAW.
My ship stats as viewed under ship/attack
Accuracy=25 (accurate trait +10% and targeting systems +15%)
Crit Chance=11.5
Crit severity=72.5%
99 points into energy weapon spec for +25% crit severity and 2% crit%
99 points into targeting systems for +15% accuracy
expected values
Crit Chance=13.5% (not including accuracy)
Crit Severity=97.5% (not including accuracy)
Test 1 with a sample size of 10,000 hits
weapons are common plasma beams
Plasma beam max crit=2643
Plasma beam max non crit=1256
[2643/1256=2.104 or ============110.4% crit severity]
Plasma beam FAW3 max Crit=2426
Plasma beam FAW3 max non crit=1411
[2426/1411=1.719 or =============71.9% crit severity]
FAW3's crit severity is lower then normal firing by 38.5%. Note it's doing base crit severity rate. Neither energy weapon spec nor accuracy has increased crit severity.
Test 2 with a sample size of 10,000 hits
Weapons are uncommon plasma beams with 20% crit severity
Plasma beam max crit=2884
Plasma beam max non crit=1249
[2884/1249=2.309 or ============130.9% crit severity]
Plasma beam FAW3 max Crit=2691
Plasma beam FAW3 max non crit=1407
[2691/1407=1.913 or =============91.3% crit severity]
FAW3's crit severity is lower then normal firing by 39.6%. Note it's doing base crit severity rate+20% crit severity via weapon's 20% crit severity. Neither energy weapon spec nor accuracy has increased crit severity
Test 3 with a sample size of 10,000 hits
Weapons are rare plasma beams with 40% crit severity
Plasma beam max crit=3188
Plasma beam max non crit=1266
[3188/1266=2.518 or ============151.8% crit severity]
Plasma beam FAW3 max Crit=3012
Plasma beam FAW3 max non crit=1430
[3012/1430=2.106 or =============110.6% crit severity[/color]]
FAW3's crit severity is lower then normal firing by 41.2%. Note it's doing base crit severity rate+40% crit severity via weapon's 40% crit severity. Neither energy weapon spec nor accuracy has increased crit severity.
So please check into Starship Energy Weapon Specialization as well as accuracy as it's clearly NOT working during Fire at Will. Crit Chance was lower then expected as well.
Did some testing on beam arrays vs beam banks with BFAW tonight. For this test I equiped 2 fleet antiproton arrays and 2 fleet antiproton dual beam banks, all other weapons were removed. All of them are the accx2 dmgx2 version. For the test I went into an ISE by myself and sat about 3km from the gateway and fired on it with these 4 weapons while parsing. I used BFAW 3 exclusively for this test, on an A2B scimitar. The test took nearly an hour and gave a sample size of 10,578 hits, roughly 2500 hits for each of the damage types listed below.
As you can see the beam arrays and dual beam banks are almost identical when not in FAW mode, a 0.57% difference in critical chance and 2.99% to critical severity. When FAW is activated however beam arrays get a 7.17% drop to critical chance but dual beam banks only get a 2.1% critical chance drop. Critical severity also drops less on dual beam banks, loosing 48.01% when beam arrays take a loss of 64.75.
The fact that the severity drop is not nearly so large as the chance drop between dual beam banks and beam arrays leads me to believe there are multiple issues effecting critical chance and severity on beam arrays and not all of them are effecting dual beam banks. As has been said before ACC overflow is one likely problem, but i believe there is likely other issues as well.
Antiproton Dual Beam Bank
Crit Chance: 25.67%
3826/1245=3.073 or 207.3% Crit Severity
Antiproton Dual Beam Bank FAW
Crit Chance: 23.47%
3610/1388=2.601 or 160.1% Crit Severity
The beam array faw is less then normal firing by 57.8%
The dual beam bank faw is less then normal firing by 47.2%
Your results are a little strange in that i would expect both the beam arrays and dual beam banks to perform identically during normal firing. But they're off by 10%. And during faw they're off by 20%.
Both show a serious drop off in crit severity and crit chance during a FAW. Attributed to accuracy and energy weapon specialization not working as acc by itself can not account for the difference alone.
I did not see a listed range for your test. Which is fine so long as you used the same range for non faw and faw testing. Also did not see what your acc was. Nor do i see ships stats/attack and weapons used to include mods. Also i don't know if you have any traits like Inspirational leader that can skew the results a bit, etc.
...
From Patch Notes, this does not include any user reported threads and issues:
Fire At Will once again benefits from weapon enhancements such as Nausicaan Power Leech, Tetryon Glider, Duty Officer Abilities, and Weapon Procs.
Resolved an issue that was causing certain powers to never apply Critical Severity to successful Critical hits such as when using Fire at Will.
Resolved some issues with some Tactical Bridge Officer powers.
All weapon modifying Tactical Bridge Officer powers are now unable to activate while the category of buff they give is already active, resulting in a 5 second CD. These changes affect Beam Fire At Will
Space energy procs, like Phasers Subsystem Offline or Plasma DoT, will now work with Fire at Will.
Updated Fire at Will:
Beam: Fire at Will is now capable of benefiting from weapon modifiers such as [Acc], [CrtH], etc.
The energy drain inflicted by Fire at Will activation now only happens if you are actually able to fire upon an enemy.
Updated Beam - Fire at Will:
All ranks of this power should now be capable of missing their target, rather than having an artificial 100% accuracy.
The accuracy of this power should now properly inherit the modifiers of the user and target.
Fire at Will Update:
Fire At Will now lasts for 10 seconds, instead of 15 seconds.
Dual beam banks under Fire At Will will fire on two targets if more than one is available.
Fire At Will should now be subject to accuracy.
Beam Fire at Will:
Improved Fire at Will to attack up to two targets per weapon.
One fires at the primary target, while the other attacks a different random target within arc.
This is compared to Cannon Scatter Volley that attacks up to three targets per weapon. One fires at the primary target, while the other two fire at different targets closest to the attacker within arc.
Beam Fire at Will:
Corrected error that had the damage improvement for beam array scaling differently from dual beam bank. Both now improve DPS by 25%, 32%, and 40% for versions I, II, III respectively.
Corrected error that had 360 degree weapons have a 250 degree arc when using Fire at Will. They now have a full 360 degree arc when using Fire at Will.
Audio has been updated for "Fire at Will" and "Beam Overload" when using Original Series-era ship phasers.
Beam arrays and Beam banks were incorrectly doing the same damage with Fire at Will and are now working properly with the power.
Time to add another one:
Fire At Will:
Resolved an issue that was incorrectly disabling Power Drain on all non-Phaser types of energy weapons.
Resolved an issue that was causing Fire At Will to drain power for only a single activation pulse, instead of over the entire firing cycle.
This was causing it to appear, for certain well-geared ships, as though no power was being drained, when it was actually just regenerating very quickly.
This fix now causes the Energy Drain to behave the same as a standard Beam firing cycle - it remains drained for all 5 firing pulses, then returns after the weapon stops firing.
======
But apparently it's still broken!
I don't understand why this one skill is getting so messed up!
Players would never stand if this was happening to an escort skill like Cannon Scatter Volley.
But BFaW just seems to be the joke of the month, getting nerfed, modified, stripped, bugged, but there is no other alternative to non escort ships.
We depend on this skill to spread Attack Patterns, debufs, procs, etc, yet there always seems to be something wrong with it. It is the go to skill for anyone with beams. Beam Overload is nice but uses way to much power. I haven't shot cannons in a long while but I don't remember having any power issues firing 4 DHC and 3 Turrets at my target. And Don't remember seeing CSV or CRF drain my ships power like Beam Fire at Will (before it was bugged again and not using any power).
Lets not forget the 5 seconds extra CD (20 seconds total) for BFaW, over say the very similar Cannon skill CSV which is only 15 seconds, allowing for perfect cycles of 2 of them being in the bar, where we have to wait the extra 5 seconds if using BFaW. Seriously, are we doing that much damage to warrant an extra 5 seconds for nothing?
Feels like Eng/Sci ships are just in the game to be there, and Escorts and their skills get top priority and best of the best.
If BFaW had a 15 second Cd like CSV, and if BOverload used 25 power instead of 50, or power equal to CRapidFire, that would at least make up some. The cannons do so much more damage, and their skills seem so much better, and beams are just craped on..
Comments
My Romulan Tac and Human Engineer both rely on crit and crit severity and overcapping weapon power. Both use the correct warp/singularity core. Both leech. So both have suffered tremendously. Most especially my Engineer as he's got the better gear by far. I could previously do over 11k dps over the length of a Starbase fleet defense. Now i can't even break 8k dps. FYI the engineer's weapon power is overcapped to 174 during a FAW.
And Drake, i just copy/pasted and didn't remove the 2 things that do seem to work. However i didn't actually test weapons with the CrtH modifier. I did test the experimental romulan beam array and that worked. But it has an innate 6% crit chance and not an actual CrtH modifier. So i can't say for sure if weapons with CrtH actually do work during a FAW.
The gist of it is this: Instead of the related energy drain remaining consistent across the entire beam weapon firing cycle, FAW was activating the energy drain only on the first pulse and allowing Captains to 'regenerate' the lost energy over the remainder of the firing cycle. On a ship with a high Energy Transfer Rate (via abilities, skills, equipment, etc), this could sometimes appear as though no energy was being drained at all. Especially when their weapon firing cycles were staggered (which tends to happen during extended conflicts in STO).
We've corrected this error internally and hope to have it on Holodeck as soon as possible. After this fix, the energy drain associated with Fire at Will will remain far more consistent.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
Good god, please keep digging for the supposed other problems would you bort, and see if in fact there are in fact problems with weapon/skills procs. Me personally I can understand if there are some related acc decrease from bfaw usage considering it gets a wider array of target selection over CSV.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
I haven't been able to find any evidence of enhancements not attaching to FAW. This includes the innate weapon enhancements like Crit, Acc, Dmg, etc, but also extends to things like Doff Active Roster Abilities and Console Attachments (Leech, for example). They all seem to be in perfect working order.
The accuracy-overflow issue has yet to be investigated to the point of a solid answer, though.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
The power drain bug was offsetting the issue of low criticals and accuracy from FAW, if you fix the power drain without fixing the other issues then FAW goes back to a broken state where all of us who use FAW builds stop playing space content for the most part, like we did for the 3 weeks that FAW was hopelessly broken.
Many of us use accuracy heavy builds for both PvE and PvP. The fact that Accuracy is not overflowing correctly at this time is yielding losses of 3-5 percent critical chance across the board with all weapons.
It is my hope this is investigated and on tribble before the end of the week. This is now a month solid that FAW has been broken.
Why not just put it back to how it was before the double proc was fixed and start over?
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
Would it be to much to ask to at least leave the lack of drain using FAW until Acc has been figured out? Just don't do anything with FAW until you guys are sure you have gotten to the root of all the issues with it. Perhaps after it passes Q&A don't just patch it, but put it on Tribble first, so the community can verify it's correct working. Frankly, it's becoming a bit of a joke this way. Verifying FAW's/ Acc overflows proper working would spare you guys another emberassment, and seeing how the whole point of Tribble is to test things, I really cannot think of any reason to not test it there first.
Apparently some forum posters have diplomatic immunity nowadays, where can I get mine? [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
i think you mentioned in the past being able to make mkXX [acc]x20 dev hax beam arrays for testing, if those dont overflow, huston we have a problem!
This latest acc + dmg modifier issue is a pretty big one though. It's a major dps loss for those of us that are running pve DPS maximizing fleet AntiProton setups in which we're stacking a lot of acc to gain a considerable benefit from the crtH/D conversion in pve. As numbers said the weapon power drain issue with FAW was offsetting this considerable loss in dps from the currently bugged acc/dmg modifier issue. I understand that you fix things only when it is possible to do so.
However enough is enough. Before applying changes like this wouldn't it be logical to wait until the issue that is being offset by the power drain bug is addressed first? It's not that you guys don't fix issues. It's the timing that is the problem here(you usually don't take this long to fix game breakers like this). For those of us that are min/max'ers this continuous FAW issue is extremely disruptive to our gameplay. To the point that we have stopped participating in space content completely for past month.
The reason this is so impacting for us is because of the following.
1) The difficulty of your pve content.. including NWS/all elite content is trivial for us. On every single one of my characters spanning every type of captain and many ship combinations the difficulty is laughable; if there wasn't the requirement for 5 players to initially enter the STF, I would be able to solo all content and achieve optionals... for the most part. So the only thing we have to look forward to is DPS competition with our friends in said content. (We finish STFs in literally less than 2 minutes)
2) Utter and complete lack of hard modes or tiered hard modes for all said elite content. You don't have to create raid content but a few tier'd hard modes for each of the main STFs(Borg) and you would have a lot of happier players(reward differences would be nice).
3) In PVE the way content is designed. healer and tank roles are basically for player enjoyment and not optimal in current content because of the lack of said hard modes(what's the point in healing or tanking when your opponents don't do enough to damage you or have enough resistances to be challenging for our level of experience/skill). I understand you have to cater to the casual player... but that's why hard modes were invented in MMO's so that we can have our cake and eat it too.
All in all; my point here is you've given us min/max'ers nothing else to do. So when you break things that affect our min/maxing for literally a month(our currently only challenging thing to do in the game). What are we supposed to do?
Play another game? I'm not really interested in leaving STO or rather I'd prefer not to.
So if you want you can call these ideas distractions for us min/max'ers or w/e you want but I propose you consider developing hard modes to keep us occupied or if that's not an option. I propose longer test periods(2 weeks of tribble before patching with maintenance to prevent things like this spinning out every week - this might of been averted if more time was spent before throwing it on holodeck).
I hope i'm not over elaborating in this wall of text and I hope it doesn't come off as a total complaint.
Just please consider it.
the BOLD is half the problem with the Tribble server. they're too busy drooling over the new stuff to give a **** about the " little " stuff. and if they even report it, it's up to the small(er) team of devs to even pinpoint the problem. let alone, what to do about it. that is, until their priorities are to actually fix bugs that have been in-game since it was started.
guess I know where the money's going. and it's not to STO...
*note*
If your offended by the above comment of mine : just remember : this is just a game.
The young generation has no clue what freedom is. Because they do not know the limit of it.
Disenchanted for all my Characters
Yes it does. Remember, most things in STFs don't move. They are complete sitting ducks, resulting in massive Acc overflow.
I am not 100% sure on this, but I don't think it effects crith so much as it does effect critd severity.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
I have around 47.5 accuracy overflow on my builds with [Acc]X2 [Dmg]x2 weapons which nets in 4% [CrtH] and 16 [CrtD].
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Bort are you guys hiring? How can you not see that the [dmg] modifier does nothing and how can you not see that the quality of the weapon ie common, uncommon, rare, and very rare all show as doing the exact same damage during a FAW. It's fairly easy to replicate. Just equip one of each quality type of weapon and one with the [dmg] modifier. Then hit P and check each weapon. Better yet hit FAW 1, 2, or 3 and check your weapons on your weapons tray. They ALL show as doing the exact same damage.
Now having said that. It looks like a tooltip error possibly. Here i am testing again. This time i'll test common, uncommon, and rare weapons and rare weapons with [dmg]x2
sample size 10,000 hits
uncommon max hit=1,256
uncommon max faw3 hit=1,411
sample size 10,000 hits
rare max hit=1,266
rare max faw3 hit=1,430
sample size 10,000 hits
rare [dmg]x2 max hit=1,290
rare [dmg]x2 faw3 max hit=1,443
So this does show that the different quality of weapons do increase the damage. It's pretty miniscule and is why nobody in their right mind would ever use weapons with the [dmg] modifier. Going from the rare to a rare with [dmg]x2 is just under a 1% increase in damage. I did not include my uncommon results as i received a +2% damage accolade after testing the uncommon weapons, which were the weapons i tested first.
So this appears to be a tooltip error for FAW not showing any difference in damage between quality of weapons and weapons with the [dmg] modifier.
However you confirmed that there is a problem with weapon power usage. That's one down. You then confirm there is an issue with accuracy overflow. OK that's 2 down. That's is not the only 2 issues. Starship Targeting Systems does not work during a FAW. And just as importantly Starship Energy Weapon Specialization does NOT work during a FAW either.
Here's my testing results again. And again it confirms that neither accuracy not energy weapon specialization work during FAW.
My ship stats as viewed under ship/attack
Accuracy=25 (accurate trait +10% and targeting systems +15%)
Crit Chance=11.5
Crit severity=72.5%
99 points into energy weapon spec for +25% crit severity and 2% crit%
99 points into targeting systems for +15% accuracy
expected values
Crit Chance=13.5% (not including accuracy)
Crit Severity=97.5% (not including accuracy)
Test 1 with a sample size of 10,000 hits
weapons are common plasma beams
Plasma beam max crit=2643
Plasma beam max non crit=1256
[2643/1256=2.104 or ============110.4% crit severity]
Plasma beam FAW3 max Crit=2426
Plasma beam FAW3 max non crit=1411
[2426/1411=1.719 or =============71.9% crit severity]
FAW3's crit severity is lower then normal firing by 38.5%. Note it's doing base crit severity rate. Neither energy weapon spec nor accuracy has increased crit severity.
Test 2 with a sample size of 10,000 hits
Weapons are uncommon plasma beams with 20% crit severity
Plasma beam max crit=2884
Plasma beam max non crit=1249
[2884/1249=2.309 or ============130.9% crit severity]
Plasma beam FAW3 max Crit=2691
Plasma beam FAW3 max non crit=1407
[2691/1407=1.913 or =============91.3% crit severity]
FAW3's crit severity is lower then normal firing by 39.6%. Note it's doing base crit severity rate+20% crit severity via weapon's 20% crit severity. Neither energy weapon spec nor accuracy has increased crit severity
Test 3 with a sample size of 10,000 hits
Weapons are rare plasma beams with 40% crit severity
Plasma beam max crit=3188
Plasma beam max non crit=1266
[3188/1266=2.518 or ============151.8% crit severity]
Plasma beam FAW3 max Crit=3012
Plasma beam FAW3 max non crit=1430
[3012/1430=2.106 or =============110.6% crit severity[/color]]
FAW3's crit severity is lower then normal firing by 41.2%. Note it's doing base crit severity rate+40% crit severity via weapon's 40% crit severity. Neither energy weapon spec nor accuracy has increased crit severity.
So please check into Starship Energy Weapon Specialization as well as accuracy as it's clearly NOT working during Fire at Will. Crit Chance was lower then expected as well.
Antiproton Beam Array
Crit Chance: 26.24%
Crit Severity 304.24%
Antiproton Beam Array FAW
Crit Chance: 19.07%
Crit Severity 239.49%
Antiproton Dual Beam Bank
Crit Chance: 25.67%
Crit Severity 307.23%
Antiproton Dual Beam Bank FAW
Crit Chance: 23.47%
Crit Severity 259.22%
As you can see the beam arrays and dual beam banks are almost identical when not in FAW mode, a 0.57% difference in critical chance and 2.99% to critical severity. When FAW is activated however beam arrays get a 7.17% drop to critical chance but dual beam banks only get a 2.1% critical chance drop. Critical severity also drops less on dual beam banks, loosing 48.01% when beam arrays take a loss of 64.75.
The fact that the severity drop is not nearly so large as the chance drop between dual beam banks and beam arrays leads me to believe there are multiple issues effecting critical chance and severity on beam arrays and not all of them are effecting dual beam banks. As has been said before ACC overflow is one likely problem, but i believe there is likely other issues as well.
The combat log for this testing is available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6lioe5yc53mqvft/BFAW%20Test%20Log.Log
So as not to confuse people it's;
Antiproton Beam Array
Crit Chance: 26.24%
2908/977=2.976 or 197.6% Crit Severity
Antiproton Beam Array FAW
Crit Chance: 19.07%
2568/1071=2.398 or 139.8% Crit Severity
Antiproton Dual Beam Bank
Crit Chance: 25.67%
3826/1245=3.073 or 207.3% Crit Severity
Antiproton Dual Beam Bank FAW
Crit Chance: 23.47%
3610/1388=2.601 or 160.1% Crit Severity
The beam array faw is less then normal firing by 57.8%
The dual beam bank faw is less then normal firing by 47.2%
Your results are a little strange in that i would expect both the beam arrays and dual beam banks to perform identically during normal firing. But they're off by 10%. And during faw they're off by 20%.
Both show a serious drop off in crit severity and crit chance during a FAW. Attributed to accuracy and energy weapon specialization not working as acc by itself can not account for the difference alone.
I did not see a listed range for your test. Which is fine so long as you used the same range for non faw and faw testing. Also did not see what your acc was. Nor do i see ships stats/attack and weapons used to include mods. Also i don't know if you have any traits like Inspirational leader that can skew the results a bit, etc.
BTW thanks for the testing and the log.
Time to add another one:
Fire At Will:
Resolved an issue that was incorrectly disabling Power Drain on all non-Phaser types of energy weapons.
Resolved an issue that was causing Fire At Will to drain power for only a single activation pulse, instead of over the entire firing cycle.
This was causing it to appear, for certain well-geared ships, as though no power was being drained, when it was actually just regenerating very quickly.
This fix now causes the Energy Drain to behave the same as a standard Beam firing cycle - it remains drained for all 5 firing pulses, then returns after the weapon stops firing.
======
But apparently it's still broken!
I don't understand why this one skill is getting so messed up!
Players would never stand if this was happening to an escort skill like Cannon Scatter Volley.
But BFaW just seems to be the joke of the month, getting nerfed, modified, stripped, bugged, but there is no other alternative to non escort ships.
We depend on this skill to spread Attack Patterns, debufs, procs, etc, yet there always seems to be something wrong with it. It is the go to skill for anyone with beams. Beam Overload is nice but uses way to much power. I haven't shot cannons in a long while but I don't remember having any power issues firing 4 DHC and 3 Turrets at my target. And Don't remember seeing CSV or CRF drain my ships power like Beam Fire at Will (before it was bugged again and not using any power).
Lets not forget the 5 seconds extra CD (20 seconds total) for BFaW, over say the very similar Cannon skill CSV which is only 15 seconds, allowing for perfect cycles of 2 of them being in the bar, where we have to wait the extra 5 seconds if using BFaW. Seriously, are we doing that much damage to warrant an extra 5 seconds for nothing?
Feels like Eng/Sci ships are just in the game to be there, and Escorts and their skills get top priority and best of the best.
If BFaW had a 15 second Cd like CSV, and if BOverload used 25 power instead of 50, or power equal to CRapidFire, that would at least make up some. The cannons do so much more damage, and their skills seem so much better, and beams are just craped on..
/end rant.