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Let's talk about: Kit Powers
adjudicatorhawk
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Hi all,
I'm currently taking a look at a number of Kit Powers that are largely ignored, and coming up with tweaks to them to make them more usable and more interesting. In some rare cases, powers are so unused that we can pretty much totally change their functionality completely *cough*CombatSupply*cough* - but in most cases, I'm taking care to retain the essence of any given power while making it more usable and more competitive with other Kit Powers.
So, why am I here on the forums, telling you all this? For one, I'm curious how you all feel about kits. Are they fun pieces of equipment? Do you enjoy switching them up to change playstyles from time to time? What Kit Powers do you find especially fulfilling and fun, and what Kit Powers do you really want to like but just aren't there yet?
Secondly, a number of the changes we're thinking about making involve increasing the cooldown of some Kit Powers, but boosting their effects to be worthy of the longer recharge. The reason for this is twofold - primarily, most of a player's actions on ground are Weapon activations, and the longer activation and root times of kit powers lend themselves less well to frequent use than do the short times of weapon powers. Second, having longer cooldown times on kit powers lets us make them really impactful when they do go off, so you only have to spend 1-2 seconds of animation to do something really cool.
How would you feel about, say, Weapons Malfunction being a 60 second cooldown instead of 30 seconds - but being a much bigger deal when it goes off? Are there any Kit Powers that you really like being able to use every 15 seconds?
Please feel free to provide general feedback on any Kit Powers you feel strongly about in any regard in this thread as well. Thanks!
I'm currently taking a look at a number of Kit Powers that are largely ignored, and coming up with tweaks to them to make them more usable and more interesting. In some rare cases, powers are so unused that we can pretty much totally change their functionality completely *cough*CombatSupply*cough* - but in most cases, I'm taking care to retain the essence of any given power while making it more usable and more competitive with other Kit Powers.
So, why am I here on the forums, telling you all this? For one, I'm curious how you all feel about kits. Are they fun pieces of equipment? Do you enjoy switching them up to change playstyles from time to time? What Kit Powers do you find especially fulfilling and fun, and what Kit Powers do you really want to like but just aren't there yet?
Secondly, a number of the changes we're thinking about making involve increasing the cooldown of some Kit Powers, but boosting their effects to be worthy of the longer recharge. The reason for this is twofold - primarily, most of a player's actions on ground are Weapon activations, and the longer activation and root times of kit powers lend themselves less well to frequent use than do the short times of weapon powers. Second, having longer cooldown times on kit powers lets us make them really impactful when they do go off, so you only have to spend 1-2 seconds of animation to do something really cool.
How would you feel about, say, Weapons Malfunction being a 60 second cooldown instead of 30 seconds - but being a much bigger deal when it goes off? Are there any Kit Powers that you really like being able to use every 15 seconds?
Please feel free to provide general feedback on any Kit Powers you feel strongly about in any regard in this thread as well. Thanks!
Post edited by adjudicatorhawk on
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Stealth Module... Hmm... well... I hear this one is "Op" Nerf it so you lose X perception while moving.
Sweeping Strikes... uhmm... can't think of a tac who uses this...
Also, can we see about swapping out forcefield dome for chroniton mines on the bunker fabrication kit? Mines I find to be more useful and have more practical applications with the rest of the powers on that kit than the dome
I find a lot of science kit powers are negated by the fact targets move, aside from that I find most are fine and dandy (apart from having found no practical effect from anything other than the medic kit but that may be my own fault.)
I can't comment on tactical ones as I don't use them often enough.
A cloaker in ground pvp, hurts their team as much as the people they are uncloaking on.
Combat supply is useless in ground pvp and pve.
Go into any ground pvp with a cloaker on a side they think isn't going to win. They will cloak, not help their team or come out of cloak only a few times, while their team works or dies to get them the credit.
Larger picture I do not like the ability model, but I understand they are rooted into the gameplay here, so that's really kind of irrelevant. Small picture is I really dislike pre-selected abilities as pre-built kits.
Maybe consider rank-based kits, and the ability to equip them onto BOFFs. That is - Not the MkXX system, but similar in that your character's rank determines what kits you use. But instead of merely higher-leveled abilities for higher ranks, there are new abilities. Say, on every Lieutenant Commander Tactical kit, you have Fire On My Mark.
That way, your captain characters can still keep unique power sets, but your BOFFs could be functionally viable to actually play when you're bored with your captain. But since your captain is obviously stronger by default, your lower-ranked officers would gain the ability to have security escorts of other lower-ranked BOFFs to come with them by default to balance their power with their capts. You'd pretty much have the choice of using captain kit abilities or using an extra NPC to help.
Another suggestion is to separate captains and BOFFs into sub-careers(Security, Operations, and Medical) for the sake of kit powers(and whatever else you want). This could diversify the dynamic of ground combat and give players more of a role. Science would be a debuff career, while Medical could be a buffer/healer, for instance.
Just throwing ideas out there.
Edit: And just for the record, we really appreciate you guys coming to us here on the forums and communicating this openly about the state of the game and how it can be improved.
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For my sci captain, I use an Analyst Kit. I feel the kit is pretty good, although the Anesthizine Gas power that goes with that kit doesn't seem all that good. Sonic Pulse and Tachyon Harmonics are great.
On my Tac Character, I use the close in Close Combat kit that has Lunge and Sweeping Strikes. I have a blast with Sweeping Strikes, particularly against the Salt Vampires in the mine rescue scenario. The only other Tac kit I've tried is Firearms Specialist, and I prefer the Close Combat Specialist kit much more.
Anyways, I play my Bunker Fabrication Engineer with a passion and what I really miss is ONE ability which allows me to place all my turrets and generators in ONE go (like totem skills for shamans in WoW). Put a higher CD on that ability or to tie it to an Engineering skill... but, please, make it more convenient to set up all your turrets/generators.
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As for abilities, I would like to see some new ones added, for both ground and space. We need new abilities to help define our classes. For example tactical are more DPS and Tank oriented, science is healing and debuffing, and engineers have worthless generators and a coulpe of good debuffs. Tacs can use some abilities that increase damage and threat, sci's need more healing abilities and some health buffs, and eng's could use a defense buff/debuff and a damage buff.
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I like throwing grenades.
Basically, two (or even all three) of the ground devices granted by Combat Supply, except applied immediately rather than requiring players to root around in their inventories and waste precious seconds to get the benefit of practically-free devices that many are probably carrying around anyway (if they're interested in the buffs, at least).
The two kits with Combat Supply carry at least one machine as well (in addition to the Engineer's own Support Drone), so the machine heal is never wasted, but still encourages combination with more sources of machine pets (an Eng boff with a phaser turret and Combat Supply to accompany a Fabrication Spec-carrying Captain, for example, or a Support Technician Captain with a Bunker Fabrication Captain).
I've gotten used to be able to activate Shield Recharge on my Engs and Medical Tricorder on my Scis very often. So I'd dislike them having longer CDs. But that might just be my noobishness on ground.
Overall, you're right that I generally spend more time activating buffs/debuffs than actually shooting on ground. And while doing it, I often feel like a sitting duck (even if not sitting but running around). Therefore the abilities having longer CDs and possibly durations would sorta streamline ground combat. A rather good thing if you ask me.
Toi'Va, Ti'vath, Toivia, Ty'Vris, Tia Vex, Toi'Virth: Add Tier 6 KDF Carrier and Raider.
Tae'Va, T'Vaya, To'Var, Tevra, T'Vira, To'Vrak: Give us Asylums for Romulans.
Don't make ARC mandatory! Keep it optional only!
Heading there now, actually.
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All plans subject to change, of course, but since a number of you were commenting on my joke about its usefulness, just thought I'd expound a bit.
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For instance, fuse armor has a short cool down. By itself it can hurt. Stacked from 2-3 engineers? It can be a bit heavy since the hold gives no resistance to the affected target.
I like the kit mechanic and having the flexibility to use one kit or the other, depending on the situation.
Tactical: close combat kit is pointless, yea yea yea Captain Kirk fist fight blahblahblah. That's all well and good except no npc is having a fist fight with you let alone another player.
Complaints about operative are hardly founded anymore. Even if you don't detect the user, everyone is so tanky now it's sheer luck to get killed that way.
Engineer: The big issue with weapons malfunction is how the resistance works. Yea it shouldn't be possible to just chain one after the other to perma-disable weapons but should the resistance timer reset if Weapons malfunction is applied while it's up? I don't think so.
Aside from the breech engineer kit, I'd like to see the bunker fab be more useful. You guys probably didn't intend this but you've kinda made fab kits useless sticking a mortar on the mine kit for the spire. The mines are so strong one mine is enough burst to kill most npcs. Throw a mortar doff with WM mines and you've got a strong setup that easily trumps any other eng kit IMO.
Science: I'd like to see the xenobiologist kit and analyst kit be more useful. Dylovene and melorazine are pointless also. Again, why a physical damage boost when most people aren't punching anything? I know one of those gives a physical damage boost. Not sure which, I never use them. :P
I hope when you're implementing these changes you'll also consider how tactical initiative is going to play into it. If you drop the normal CD on something to 15 secs when tactical initiative is already doing that with the current set up there might be some unintended results from that. I also hope you'll consider duty officer interactions also. Say for instance you drop the CD on exothermic induction field( which I'm sure you've seen a spike in usage for (cough biochemist doff cough. Where's that debuff stack limit you told me about?)when there are doffs of which you can equip 3 to reduce the cool downs on that kit.
I'm glad to see you're looking at some of the lesser used powers but I hope you'll make adjustments in a balanced way. There are a lot of passives and duty officers that make the task your undertaking much more complicated then it should be but I'm very interested in seeing what you come up with.
Vanilla Ground PvP information
Wasn't there talk some time ago of reducing the number of powers per kit, but allowing us to equip two kits?
I think more customization is a good thing.
That's not a bad idea.
What about the Mortars on the XII Enemy neuetralization Eng kit? The Embassey Eng Kit got a plasma turret... how about one of those voth chroniton mortars for this kit?
I really want to use the engineering buff powers, but they just aren't in the kits I use. I like that Quick Fix is in the romulan kit, though, since I use it to heal my android officer.
I personally don't use barrier field much, because I want more variety in my kit powers than Bunker Fabrication provides. The mines in the Spire version seems nice, but I like to mix and match fortifications and targeted powers.
Stasis Field is useful, but I hate it when my boffs decide to shoot at my target and break the hold. Maybe the power could more effectively drop boff aggro?
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Honestly, I'm very happy with the shorter cooldown timers in ground combat right now on the "good" ground kits. The short duration and short cooldowns contribute to the fast paced nature of the ground game. Longer cooldowns would take away significantly from that aspect. Anything with a cooldown longer than 45 seconds is questionable in ground combat due to the game's fast pace. There are some exceptions with tactical abilities, such as Ambush and Overwatch, but Tactical Initiative helps with bringing back those powerful abilities quickly.
Kit abilities are an integral part of the ground combat game. Every class has at least one kit capable of tanking, dealing high damage, or acting as a special utility. The kit abilities define the role a player is undertaking. As an example, a medic is able to fulfill their healing role due to a nice balance of short cooldown and longer cooldown abilities. Shifting to the Physicist kit will change the medic from a team healer to a team damage dealer with a nice set of area of effect damage abilities. This is one thing I love about kits, I'm not stuck in a single role due to the versatility of kit choices.
Unfortunately, there are some kit abilities that aren't useful or they have limited effectiveness. They could be very effective if changed or finely tuned. I've listed them below along with the reason behind each listing:
That pretty much covers the abilities that are rarely used in PvP or PvE. The rest of the kit abilities in the game are useful and competitive. There's also the matter of the Grenade Satchel kit, but that's due to the fact that all grenades are on a shared cooldown, which essentially makes the kit a one ability kit.
Stealth Module is fine now that shattering harmonics exists. Legacy of Romulus provided us with a hard counter.
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Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
It seems that the main problem is the time players have to take to actually grab the stuff from the supply, equip them, hotkey them if they didn't automatically, then use them. If they're just hotkeyed directly, they could still have their 5 charges(uses) per item.
Edit: Also, maybe make it a targetable, give-the-charges-directly-to-the-target ability?
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Currently my bridge-officers have a set of skills that they activate through tricorders, through wrist panels and so forth. My captain does so as well. Lets do away with the entire physical "kit" concept and visualization.... I mean seriously why am I lugging all that gear when my BOs do not?
Instead of kits, let us choose what powers we want from a store... just like we choose for our bridge officers. Costs a minimum of energy credits to swap out a skill/retrain/reequip whatever.
That way I can pick the four or five powers that matter to me the most. I like drones. I also like turrets. I would also like to pick something not related to those... maybe fuse armor or some other engineering power.
As for combat supply -- no powerups. Lets get away from the whole Mario-Sonic vibe and get back to something resembling Star Trek. How about doing away with it entirely and making a new power from scratch.
im a pretty serious space guy, and extreamly casual ground guy. i'll second this though, i love sweeping strike, especially on colony invasion with those salt vampires always trying to get into melee range. ive got now 3 doffs adding electricity damage to it, and 3 adding crit chance to hand to hand damage, making it hella strong.
it pretty much replaces the butt strike effectively, and seems better then any melee weapon, especially with those doffs, plus i can carry 2 guns and have such strong melee at the same time.
ah with the introductions of those rollover buffs, that change seems like a no brainer
The best sci kit is still the Borg Medical Analyzer. Medic is decent, although the Spire version adds a weak power. Analyst is okay but mixed, as is Physicist - Xenobiologist, Physician and Biologist are near worthless.
Good powers: Medical Tricorder, Triage, Vascular Regenerator, Nanite Health Monitor, Tachyon Harmonic, Sonic Pulse
Mediocre powers: (Good only with high skill points or supporting doffs): Exo-thermic Induction Field, Electro-Gravitic Field
Bad powers:
Hyperonic Radiation (Pathetic damage, small aoe)
Anesthizine Gas (Little to no observable affect or use)
Stasis Field (Single target, short duration, easily broken)
Biofilter Sweep (Weak effects compared to heals, only on weak kits)
Hypospray - Melorazine (weak effects)
Hypospray - Dylovene (Melee buff on a class with no other skills or stats to support it, extremely pointless and non-synergistic. Okay if used on tacs, but only present on a very weak kit overall).
2) I think activation times are too long and too cumbersome to 'chain cast' on most ground abilities, especially self buffs.
3) What problem in the game does "longer but more impactful" cooldowns solve? Usually when I'm playing, combat is so fast and enemies so frequent that it feels like I can't activate my powers enough.
Powers that are on long cooldowns start to push into "too good to be used for this fight against mooks".
Players end up saving them even longer than the 1 minute cooldown to "use them when they really need them".
This is already what happens with most long CD career ground powers.
If most powers were on long cooldowns, unless they had long durations, players would (in PvE) just be running around firing their 1/2 weapon modes most of the time - that sounds exceedingly boring.
Also, in PvP long cooldown bigger impact powers could prove severely problematic - I'll let actually ground PvP guys chime in here.
1) I have never run a Ground STF.
2) I have only done Ground PvP once, and that was well over 20 months ago.
3) I have never done the Borg Invasion of Defera.
4) I have never done the Tholian Incursion.
5) I have only been to the new Dyson Battlezone once.
The "normal Ground missions while leveling? Sure.
Ran around Nimbus while leveling a Reman? Sure.
So in general, for those last two - if kits didn't exist, I wouldn't have noticed, since the Ground combat at that "level"...well, you can min your Ground SP on the Captain and equip both the Captain and BOFFs with whatever hodgepodge of gear you happen upon to breeze through them. It might be mildly entertaining to equip everybody with KB shotguns, but that only lasts so long. You could find the same form of mild entertainment from equipping everybody with dual pistols, turning the sound down, and making pew pew laser sounds while running around in circles until things die.
Looking through my nine guys, these are the following kits they have:
Willard the Rat (50) - Physicist Mk X
Exothermic Induction Field II, Hyperonic Radiation III, Sonic Pulse III, Electro-Gravitic Field III
Prophet (50) - Fabrication Specialist Mk X
Seeker Drone Fabrication III, Quantum Mortar Fabrication III, Medical Generator Fabrication III, Turret Fabrication III
Geist (50) - Physicist Mk X
Exothermic Induction Field II, Hyperonic Radiation III, Sonic Pulse III, Electro-Gravitic Field III
Tselina (50) - Fire Team Mk V
Ambush I, Plasma Grenade I, Suppressing Fire II
Zark (16) - Physician Mk IV
Hypospray - Melorazine I, Vascular Regenerator II, Hypospray - Dylovene II
Saraquael (50) - Fire Team Mk IV
Plasma Grenade I, Suppressing Fire II, Battle Strategies II
Notus (50) - Bunker Fabrication Mk V
Force Field Dome I, Medical Generator Fabrication I, Turret Fabrication II
Plague (50) - Bunker Fabrication Mk X
Force Field Dome III, Medical Generator Fabrication III, Turret Fabrication III, Shield Generator Fabrication III
Boreas (50) - Equipment Technician Mk X
Fuse Armor II, Equipment Diagnostics III, Weapons Malfunction III, Shield Recharge III
But you can't really talk about Kit Abilities without talking about BOFF Abilities...heh, duh. The following are pretty much my two standard Away Teams:
Battle Strategies I, Target Optics I, Overwatch I, Stun Grenade I
Shield Recharge I, Shield Generator Fabrication I, Medical Generator Fabrication I, Support Drone Fabrication I
Medical Tricorder I, Medical Tricorder II, Vascular Regenerator II, Nanite Health Monitor I
Medical Tricorder I, Vascular Regenerator I, Vascular Regenerator II, Anetrizine Gas I
The Tac BOFF might be switched out for the following Eng BOFF:
Shield Recharge I, Turret Fabrication I, Quantum Mortar Fabrication I, Support Drone Fabrication I
But even with that, I'm not sure that any toon's got more than one or two Common or Uncommon Ground DOFFs equipped if that. For the Ground that I do, it's all relatively moot...just equip guys with whatever and run around in circles until the enemy is dead.
Oh, it was kind of nifty with the Elachi there during the LoR Beta - but - they didn't fit in with the run around in circles until the enemy was dead...so they were changed.
Yes, I outlined much more that I do not do with Ground at the start of this post compared to what I do...so I can't offer any feedback on how Kits and Ground Abilities play out in those things I do not play, however - it is a striking difference when comparing Ground and Space Abilities in that sense...looking at the Ground content I do.
Picking Space Abilities can mean the world of difference in how one levels - that overall experience. I've never found that to be the case with Ground. They're relatively meh.
That being said, I'd like to say three things:
1) Thanks for coming to the community with this.
2) I hope that you get some great feedback from the folks that participate more in Ground at the endgame level, doing the various AZ, BZ, STFs, and PvP.
3) Since the Systems guys already work with the Content guys in regard to other objects (mobs, etc) for the content...perhaps there's something that could be done to make any of it feel the least bit fun or useful during the leveling process?
I'm sorry that I couldn't really offer more specific feedback on any particular abilities, but Hell - until I looked at the toons, I couldn't have even guessed at what Kits they had. It's usually just 1+2, sometimes hitting Z to switch to a melee weapon...just to 1+2. /shrug
Oh, ahem, I know it's way off topic - but the longer CD idea...and I know I'll get slaughtered for this, is something that feels woefully missing from Space where it is just so damn spammy...but anyway, yeah - I'll leave this thread to the feedback from folks that are very active in Ground.
This is a bit of a minefield. I know you only used this just as an example, but I use Weapons Malfunction on a couple of bridge officers/captains and things on the ground usually don't live long enough before the debuff has run out on them, so in effect increasing its cooldown would actually be stopping me from using it more often against other opponents. And on places like the Voth Battlezone, where enemy NPCs generally have more hitpoints, that could mean the difference between me killing something or me being killed.
The same goes for Chroniton Mines, just in case you're wondering. Now the real thing that slightly annoys me are turrets, they're pretty weak even with the new traits and they despawn after a time, I'd prefer if they stayed until I either re-summon them or they are destroyed.
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First, the kit system in general feels very limited and confining when compared to, say, the trait system, or the way boff abilities work. In either case, we can pick and choose abilities alacarte off a menu, mix and match them at will, retrain them as desired.
So I guess removing kits entirely and giving us 4-5 active ground power slots is definitely on my STO wish list. However, it doesn't look like that is under consideration. In part, that desire is driven by the fact that every kit has 1-2 abilities I either ignore or just plain forget about.
When I began playing in 2010, and for along time, I mostly ignored kit powers. I just mashed the 1-2 keys like an idiot. It took me a year or longer to realize that I could even rearrange the order of abilities in the tray, which probably didn't help. (this was my first MMO, stop laughing at me)
Now I've gotten a lot better at ground combat, because I now know to pick kits that have at least a majority of abilities I'll actually use- and I use them as often as I possibly can. Fuse Armor, Weapons Malfunction, Shield Recharge, Medical Tricorder, Tachyon Harmonic...
Increasing the cooldowns of kit powers, accompanied by increasing their effectiveness, is something that needs to be done with care. It might help things like Weapons Malfunction. It would really hurt heals, though.
Eliminating the dead weight of worthless powers like Combat Supply will definitely give the system a boost. Adding a little variety might help, too. I gravitate toward kits that mix offensive and defensive powers (Equipment Technician on eng is the example I use). But there aren't enough of those, by design I presume.
2.) Targettable powers with long cooldowns(a 60 second weapon malfunction, for example) does not play well with the PvE content you create. We spend the majority of the time mowing down waves and waves of enemies in PvE. Targettable powers with long cooldowns are made for PvP and only PvP. Theres a similar effect in space <cough>science boff powers <cough>.
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Yep, I agree completely. This is what I was trying to express as well.