What we need from a difficulty point of view is an artificial /intelligence/ rather than what we have now, with actual abilities to the tune of players at the designed level and more weapons with a lower damage level each so they work in the same manner as player weapons, give them some resists to go with and maybe reduce the HP a little.
NPC ships should have different skill-sets just like player ships so some ships have disables, others more escort-y, some more cruiser-y and some mixed just like the current range of player ships. Make it so that 80k dps groups have some major trouble trying to stay in a fight, with some real difficulty stupidly high dps builds would be very difficult to maintain, I think 20k may well become the safe limit without a healer which nobody wants to do.
Make it so some enemies get a high level FBP (as a passive) which again deters people from doing only dps builds.
What we need from a difficulty point of view is an artificial /intelligence/ rather than what we have now, with actual abilities to the tune of players at the designed level and more weapons with a lower damage level each so they work in the same manner as player weapons, give them some resists to go with and maybe reduce the HP a little.
NPC ships should have different skill-sets just like player ships so some ships have disables, others more escort-y, some more cruiser-y and some mixed just like the current range of player ships. Make it so that 80k dps groups have some major trouble trying to stay in a fight, with some real difficulty stupidly high dps builds would be very difficult to maintain, I think 20k may well become the safe limit without a healer which nobody wants to do.
Make it so some enemies get a high level FBP (as a passive) which again deters people from doing only dps builds.
I would also add to give bigger bosses (i.e. tac cubes) TT and HE. I find it odd that of all the enemies, the borg are the stupidest and don't adapt.
I would even go for less enemies and more enemy skills. Maybe only 4 spheres in ISE but each one gets TT and a TB, or something like that. I'm just throwing out ideas, but there's things that can be done right now, without huge AI changes. I actually miss the full EPtE the spheres had. It gave my science toon a need to use CC and SNB
What I would like to know is what the Cryptic folks are thinking? Sometimes their logic escapes me.
Take the Tricobalt nerf for example. They decreased the damage output presumably because people were doing things like blowing cubes on CSE while the probes beneath were still intact. Understandable, I guess, since that much raw damage was essentially breaking the intended mission structure.
But then hey! Here come the Rommies! And their Dreads! And the Dread's super pets that are better equipped than many player ships! And what do you know, I keep seeing Romulan Dreadnaughts blowing cubes on CSE with probes left very much alive beneath.
So, what was the point in nerfing Tricobalts again?
Oh.... hold on a moment... Tricobalt Mines and Dispersal Pattern Beta III are very easy to come by and cost essentially nothing. Romulan Dreadnaughts are more likely to be acquired with monies.
Hasn't survival also had power creep as well with all the new gear, DOFFs, and reps, plus now unlinked teams?
It they're gonna nerf Dps to make engis and sci standout; wouldn't nerfing defense be a better option? They (engi/sci) would stand out more and tac would want them around to put out their crazy damage without getting blown up.
It the goal of nerf herding is to bring tac damage down closer to engi and sci, then defense should be buffed for tac too- the only way to get it is through BOFF, kinda like how engi and sci get Dps buffs.
Hasn't survival also had power creep as well with all the new gear, DOFFs, and reps, plus now unlinked teams?
It they're gonna nerf Dps to make engis and sci standout; wouldn't nerfing defense be a better option? They (engi/sci) would stand out more and tac would want them around to put out their crazy damage without getting blown up.
It the goal of nerf herding is to bring tac damage down closer to engi and sci, then defense should be buffed for tac too- the only way to get it is through BOFF, kinda like how engi and sci get Dps buffs.
Double standards hurt everyone.
Tac are already too good at healing. Put a Tac in a science/eng ship built for survival. It will do crazy damage and heal itself. The thing is, a Tac can multiply its damage by a insane amount with no drawbacks on any ship. A Tac Com ship will do the most, but a Tac in any other ship still does more damage than any other class in the same ship. Alternatively, a Sci in an escort can't do the same levels of DPS.
To put it bluntly, a Tac should have reciprocal weaknesses to balance the massive damage boost they get. For instance, -50% to defense when APA is active or increasing the recharge rate of non-tactical abilities used while APA is active. If you can stack damage multipliers to as much as 350% or more, there needs to be some kind of risk tied to that. As it is, Tacs get tons of damage for nothing more than being a Tac.
I like the idea of fewer, but immensely stronger and smarter Borg. Perhaps their shields could have the adaptive mod so that they become highly resistance (e.g. 85%) to whatever damage type they are being hit with over time, thus each player would have to bring a different energy type or face a Borg that's nearly invulnerable to their weapons. Also, give the Borg an overpowered version of sensor analysis. Just for fun, throw in some NPC ships from various factions that become assimilated if you don't help them out and they start attacking you.
Off topic:
Ooh! I just had an idea for a new PvP scenario! A Borg PvP. One team plays as Fed/KDF and the other plays as the Borg. When you die, you become a Borg vessel and when one of the Borg die, they become Fed/KDF. The battle continues until one side is either all Fed/KDF or all Borg or the timer runs out (e.g. 15 minute match). The 5 players with the fewest deaths are declared the winners. So no matter what side you're on, your objective is to destroy as many enemies as you can without being destroyed yourself.
So the map is set up with two sides. The Fed/KDF side has a station with AI controlled defenses and the Borg side has a Borg Tactical Cube controlled by AI. Both are very hard targets (has a lot of hull and adaptive shields) and will take lots of punishment. Both must be repaired by players and cannot repair themselves. Borg players are "Borgified" (gets the assimilated Borg visuals) and come with a premade set of abilities that supplement your own in a separate tray. Your captain abilities are disabled while you're Borg.
Suggested Abilities:
*Borg Tractor beam - Does just what it sounds like
*Borg Sensor Analysis - A souped up version of Sci captain's ability that also drains shields
*Borg Adaption - Gain a progressive resistance to energy damage; gradually lose resistance if you stop receiving that energy type
*Borg Assimilation - Works like Viral Matrix, but doesn't grant a resistance after it expires
I think this really captures the feel of fighting the Borg if your own allies can be used against you and Borg ships have abilities like adaptive shields. I bet even STF's could be modified to play similarly to this.
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Tac are already too good at healing. Put a Tac in a science/eng ship built for survival. It will do crazy damage and heal itself. The thing is, a Tac can multiply its damage by a insane amount with no drawbacks on any ship. A Tac Com ship will do the most, but a Tac in any other ship still does more damage than any other class in the same ship. Alternatively, a Sci in an escort can't do the same levels of DPS.
To put it bluntly, a Tac should have reciprocal weaknesses to balance the massive damage boost they get. For instance, -50% to defense when APA is active or increasing the recharge rate of non-tactical abilities used while APA is active. If you can stack damage multipliers to as much as 350% or more, there needs to be some kind of risk tied to that. As it is, Tacs get tons of damage for nothing more than being a Tac.
I like the idea of fewer, but immensely stronger and smarter Borg. Perhaps their shields could have the adaptive mod so that they become highly resistance (e.g. 85%) to whatever damage type they are being hit with over time, thus each player would have to bring a different energy type or face a Borg that's nearly invulnerable to their weapons. Also, give the Borg an overpowered version of sensor analysis. Just for fun, throw in some NPC ships from various factions that become assimilated if you don't help them out and they start attacking you.
Off topic:
Ooh! I just had an idea for a new PvP scenario! A Borg PvP. One team plays as Fed/KDF and the other plays as the Borg. When you die, you become a Borg vessel and when one of the Borg die, they become Fed/KDF. The battle continues until one side is either all Fed/KDF or all Borg or the timer runs out (e.g. 15 minute match). The 5 players with the fewest deaths are declared the winners. So no matter what side you're on, your objective is to destroy as many enemies as you can without being destroyed yourself.
So the map is set up with two sides. The Fed/KDF side has a station with AI controlled defenses and the Borg side has a Borg Tactical Cube controlled by AI. Both are very hard targets (has a lot of hull and adaptive shields) and will take lots of punishment. Both must be repaired by players and cannot repair themselves. Borg players are "Borgified" (gets the assimilated Borg visuals) and come with a premade set of abilities that supplement your own in a separate tray. Your captain abilities are disabled while you're Borg.
Suggested Abilities:
*Borg Tractor beam - Does just what it sounds like
*Borg Sensor Analysis - A souped up version of Sci captain's ability that also drains shields
*Borg Adaption - Gain a progressive resistance to energy damage; gradually lose resistance if you stop receiving that energy type
*Borg Assimilation - Works like Viral Matrix, but doesn't grant a resistance after it expires
I think this really captures the feel of fighting the Borg if your own allies can be used against you and Borg ships have abilities like adaptive shields. I bet even STF's could be modified to play similarly to this.
Spoken like a true non tac. Can tac do good damage in another ship, sure. a Tac in a cruiser is not going to be an awesome healer. Look at the awesome healers and very seldom do they use any BOff abilities to heal themsleves only the Capt abilities. Tacs in cruiser end up using half their power on themselves because guess what they are the easiest to dmage down because once they go through their alloted powers there is no RSF or MW to save them. I do agree tacs should not be able to buff sci powers that do damage. But following your logic lets pigeon hole all the classes sci and engineer should not be able to kill effectively but guess what they do I guess we need to nerf them also.
Hey I Used to be Captain Data, well I guess I still am in game but the account link really screwed everything up :rolleyes:
It will make torpedos more attractive and help NPCs out a lot
It may need to be cut more that 25% but its a good place to start
Jellico....Engineer ground.....Da'val Romulan space Sci
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
Spoken like a true non tac. Can tac do good damage in another ship, sure. a Tac in a cruiser is not going to be an awesome healer. Look at the awesome healers and very seldom do they use any BOff abilities to heal themsleves only the Capt abilities. Tacs in cruiser end up using half their power on themselves because guess what they are the easiest to dmage down because once they go through their alloted powers there is no RSF or MW to save them. I do agree tacs should not be able to buff sci powers that do damage. But following your logic lets pigeon hole all the classes sci and engineer should not be able to kill effectively but guess what they do I guess we need to nerf them also.
Point of order, he never claimed to be as good of a healer, only just as effective in survival.
The overall point still stands though, the deliberate stacking of resistance debuffs to the point of negative values is blatantly out of whack. This is where all the inflated DPS parses are coming from, power creep from items is only a symptom of mechanical, linear behaviors. Think about it, would you have equivalent DPS parses if all of your sources of resistances were replaced with crit bonuses? I'd think not.
I'm not devaluing the need for resistance debuffs. They certainly have a place in the game, but historically, linear scaling for debuffs don't work well if the mechanics allow for negative unbounded values. This was an issue for games like WoW and EvE, eventually the scale was placed on a logarithmic scale, putting a soft limit in place.
However, due to the nature of resistances, it really doesn't make sense to have negative values in place. In fact, now that I think of it, do we really need fixed resistance values in the first place? Sensor Scan doesn't do this, it lowers by a percentage, not a fixed rate. Why not change APB and FoMM to do the same? This creates a soft limit of 0 for resistance while providing Tac captains a multiplicative bonus. The only possible flaw I see here is that as it stands now, AI ships may not have any appreciable resistance values to begin with upon which they may need a bump on their resistances, and a ding on their hull values to equal out their nominal TTK values.
Of course you'll see a forumload of complaining Tac captains, but that's to be expected when normalization has to be done.
Except that there's no difference between -25 resist rating and -25% resist. They are both the same thing positively or negatively. There's no cap to negative resist. There's a cap to positive resist at 75% with possibly 1-3 things that can actually get you above 75% that i know of. We have that cap for positive resist.
A cap needs to be put in place for negative resist as well. Or as you suggested make it to where you can't exceed 0% negatively. Then give mobs some positive resist values to make up for this and to ensure that using an ability to lower resist still has a purpose. Starbase 234 is a good example of a structure with positive resist. Why can't this be applied to NPC ships and structures that are in STFs as well. Seems reasonable to me.
But Tactical captains still need a serious nerf to their be ability to stack +x% damage abilities.
Except that there's no difference between -25 resist rating and -25% resist. They are both the same thing positively or negatively.
Ahem, not true, 1 Resistance rating is not equal to 1% resistance.
For example, to reach -100 resist requires a good 200 or so resistance rating loss with zero resist, add any form of resist into that and it becomes a lot more, I think it's safe to say it#s near impossible at the moment for anything with 30% resistance to get below -100 resist. (I can't tell right now as my laptop is off so I can't bring up my spreadsheet to look.)
Ahem, not true, 1 Resistance rating is not equal to 1% resistance.
For example, to reach -100 resist requires a good 200 or so resistance rating loss with zero resist, add any form of resist into that and it becomes a lot more, I think it's safe to say it#s near impossible at the moment for anything with 30% resistance to get below -100 resist. (I can't tell right now as my laptop is off so I can't bring up my spreadsheet to look.)
44 DRR giving 30.2% DR would require -715 DRR to hit -100% DR.
44 DRR giving 30.2% DR would require -715 DRR to hit -100% DR.
Okay... so 5 Tholian carriers with elite weavers all using APB3 at exactly the same moment, as well as the pet timing all coinciding with the players would do it...
That's still a ridiculous amount of resistance debuffing, and not something you are ever likely to run into.
Okay... so 5 Tholian carriers with elite weavers all using APB3 at exactly the same moment, as well as the pet timing all coinciding with the players would do it...
That's still a ridiculous amount of resistance debuffing, and not something you are ever likely to run into.
Keeping in mind that TT's going to clear it...heh, yep - unless you're a NPC - you're not likely to see it.
Change the attack pattern on meshweaver pets to a different attack pattern or prevent it from stacking. Next change I would do is prevent different grades of the infiltrator trait from stacking so you can't get an almost 30 second decloak ambush bonus. Fix these 2 things and those 80k DPS runs will go away for the most part.
Fix these 2 things and those 80k DPS runs will go away for the most part.
Until the next thing comes along to facilitate it...
Two major faults with the game that make the dps issue worse are:
Lack of player education
Lack of any real difficulty
Lack of education
Kinda speaks for itself, there aren't any missions where the player is forced to think about what they are doing with their ship, no enemies that can beat the player if they make a wrong move (aside from the Defender D'D, though staying away from it is the easiest thing in the world) if more missions focussed on teaching the player the strengths and weaknesses of their given ships and there was more emphasis put on teaching about boff and doff skills and such, a lot more players would be a lot more competent.
Lack of real difficulty
In short, there is no balance in this game anymore, only dps and hps. If there was a complete revamp of boff skills, ship stats and consoles etc to make sure each one was balanced against the others in a pvp setting it would go a long way to wards fixing that aspect of the game, it would also lay the foundations for fixing the dps race in pve.
PvE could be redesigned from the ground up on this new balance, it would virtually balance itself, provided the AI got a rebuild to make it intelligent, the devs could give NPCs the same number of skills the equivalent player ship would have, with the same boff setup and a random captain class to go with. this would open the possibility for the devs to make truely challenging encounters, where the difference between difficulty levels would be how well the AI fights.
This is turn would reduce the number of complaints about things in pvp because people would be accustomed to seeing all these abilities and such and the requirement to build a ship and play to it's strengths. There will of course be those who are better than others but I doubt the difference would be so great and the highest safe level of dps would be reduced significantly as npcs would be able to drag out a fight and exploit player weaknesses, the rebalancing of skills, doffs, consoles, ships etc would also give the devs an opportunity to reduce the dps potential in the game.
People are obsessed with achieving the largest numbers, the biggest crits, the most 'awesome' parses.
...but only a small, vocal fraction of the people. There's two real 'groups' of the game, from what I can see. There's "the deeps kings", who are obsessed with getting the biggest DPS numbers, then there's "the rest of the game", who are either A, "trekkies" (who are more concerned with how canon a ship looks over THE DEEPS) or B, "very bad at making ship builds" (who are so horrible at building ships they've got Mk IV gear on a Gal-X dreadnaught at level 50 - have seen this happen). Or, C, obsessed with the deeps but know absolutely nothing about ship builds.
There's also a few isolated groups of sane people, who aren't all that concerned with THE DEEPS because A, they understand how ridiculously easy STO is or B, are completely satisfied that their ship does more than sufficient DEEPS despite it's only two dual cannon mounts. Or it's array of tetryon cannons.
People are obsessed with achieving the largest numbers, the biggest crits, the most 'awesome' parses.
...but only a small, vocal fraction of the people. There's two real 'groups' of the game, from what I can see. There's "the deeps kings", who are obsessed with getting the biggest DPS numbers, then there's "the rest of the game", who are either A, "trekkies" (who are more concerned with how canon a ship looks over THE DEEPS) or B, "very bad at making ship builds" (who are so horrible at building ships they've got Mk IV gear on a Gal-X dreadnaught at level 50 - have seen this happen). Or, C, obsessed with the deeps but know absolutely nothing about ship builds.
There's also a few isolated groups of sane people, who aren't all that concerned with THE DEEPS because A, they understand how ridiculously easy STO is or B, are completely satisfied that their ship does more than sufficient DEEPS despite it's only two dual cannon mounts. Or it's array of tetryon cannons.
Can't really lump all the "DEEPS" folks in together...they're not all into "DEEPS" for the same reason, eh? Some aren't actually concerned about DPS - they're looking at burst - they need to kill their opponent before that person's insane healing prevents such from taking place. There's the folks that are just looking to push the boundaries to see what can be done and how fast it can be done. There's the folks looking at trying to do all the grinds in the most efficient manner possible. There's all sorts of folks interested in damage for a variety of reasons...
...to call those folks insane, by calling the group not interested in that sane - well, that's kind of insulting, no? Different folks play for different reasons, they enjoy different things. Some folks are perfectly fine having a "pat on the back machine" hooked up to their spacebars while flying around without a clue in the world...doesn't mean that we should insult them.
Perhaps by "sane" he means "just don't care that much" about min/max.
I'm part of the category of people that just want my ship to do well enough that I won't get spiked and I stand a good chance of turning the tables on them. I care more about strategy than gear, I suppose. So I'm always thinking about what kind of combinations I can create to get interesting results, not necessarily high DPS. As a primary Sci captain, I'm interested in ways to neutralize my opponent. Or at least take away their advantage.
Go here and show your support for a better Foundry!
Comments
NPC ships should have different skill-sets just like player ships so some ships have disables, others more escort-y, some more cruiser-y and some mixed just like the current range of player ships. Make it so that 80k dps groups have some major trouble trying to stay in a fight, with some real difficulty stupidly high dps builds would be very difficult to maintain, I think 20k may well become the safe limit without a healer which nobody wants to do.
Make it so some enemies get a high level FBP (as a passive) which again deters people from doing only dps builds.
I would also add to give bigger bosses (i.e. tac cubes) TT and HE. I find it odd that of all the enemies, the borg are the stupidest and don't adapt.
I would even go for less enemies and more enemy skills. Maybe only 4 spheres in ISE but each one gets TT and a TB, or something like that. I'm just throwing out ideas, but there's things that can be done right now, without huge AI changes. I actually miss the full EPtE the spheres had. It gave my science toon a need to use CC and SNB
Take the Tricobalt nerf for example. They decreased the damage output presumably because people were doing things like blowing cubes on CSE while the probes beneath were still intact. Understandable, I guess, since that much raw damage was essentially breaking the intended mission structure.
But then hey! Here come the Rommies! And their Dreads! And the Dread's super pets that are better equipped than many player ships! And what do you know, I keep seeing Romulan Dreadnaughts blowing cubes on CSE with probes left very much alive beneath.
So, what was the point in nerfing Tricobalts again?
Oh.... hold on a moment... Tricobalt Mines and Dispersal Pattern Beta III are very easy to come by and cost essentially nothing. Romulan Dreadnaughts are more likely to be acquired with monies.
OK, never mind. I found the logic.
Hasn't survival also had power creep as well with all the new gear, DOFFs, and reps, plus now unlinked teams?
It they're gonna nerf Dps to make engis and sci standout; wouldn't nerfing defense be a better option? They (engi/sci) would stand out more and tac would want them around to put out their crazy damage without getting blown up.
It the goal of nerf herding is to bring tac damage down closer to engi and sci, then defense should be buffed for tac too- the only way to get it is through BOFF, kinda like how engi and sci get Dps buffs.
Double standards hurt everyone.
Tac are already too good at healing. Put a Tac in a science/eng ship built for survival. It will do crazy damage and heal itself. The thing is, a Tac can multiply its damage by a insane amount with no drawbacks on any ship. A Tac Com ship will do the most, but a Tac in any other ship still does more damage than any other class in the same ship. Alternatively, a Sci in an escort can't do the same levels of DPS.
To put it bluntly, a Tac should have reciprocal weaknesses to balance the massive damage boost they get. For instance, -50% to defense when APA is active or increasing the recharge rate of non-tactical abilities used while APA is active. If you can stack damage multipliers to as much as 350% or more, there needs to be some kind of risk tied to that. As it is, Tacs get tons of damage for nothing more than being a Tac.
@rmy1081
I like the idea of fewer, but immensely stronger and smarter Borg. Perhaps their shields could have the adaptive mod so that they become highly resistance (e.g. 85%) to whatever damage type they are being hit with over time, thus each player would have to bring a different energy type or face a Borg that's nearly invulnerable to their weapons. Also, give the Borg an overpowered version of sensor analysis. Just for fun, throw in some NPC ships from various factions that become assimilated if you don't help them out and they start attacking you.
Off topic:
Ooh! I just had an idea for a new PvP scenario! A Borg PvP. One team plays as Fed/KDF and the other plays as the Borg. When you die, you become a Borg vessel and when one of the Borg die, they become Fed/KDF. The battle continues until one side is either all Fed/KDF or all Borg or the timer runs out (e.g. 15 minute match). The 5 players with the fewest deaths are declared the winners. So no matter what side you're on, your objective is to destroy as many enemies as you can without being destroyed yourself.
So the map is set up with two sides. The Fed/KDF side has a station with AI controlled defenses and the Borg side has a Borg Tactical Cube controlled by AI. Both are very hard targets (has a lot of hull and adaptive shields) and will take lots of punishment. Both must be repaired by players and cannot repair themselves. Borg players are "Borgified" (gets the assimilated Borg visuals) and come with a premade set of abilities that supplement your own in a separate tray. Your captain abilities are disabled while you're Borg.
Suggested Abilities:
*Borg Tractor beam - Does just what it sounds like
*Borg Sensor Analysis - A souped up version of Sci captain's ability that also drains shields
*Borg Adaption - Gain a progressive resistance to energy damage; gradually lose resistance if you stop receiving that energy type
*Borg Assimilation - Works like Viral Matrix, but doesn't grant a resistance after it expires
I think this really captures the feel of fighting the Borg if your own allies can be used against you and Borg ships have abilities like adaptive shields. I bet even STF's could be modified to play similarly to this.
Spoken like a true non tac. Can tac do good damage in another ship, sure. a Tac in a cruiser is not going to be an awesome healer. Look at the awesome healers and very seldom do they use any BOff abilities to heal themsleves only the Capt abilities. Tacs in cruiser end up using half their power on themselves because guess what they are the easiest to dmage down because once they go through their alloted powers there is no RSF or MW to save them. I do agree tacs should not be able to buff sci powers that do damage. But following your logic lets pigeon hole all the classes sci and engineer should not be able to kill effectively but guess what they do I guess we need to nerf them also.
It will make torpedos more attractive and help NPCs out a lot
It may need to be cut more that 25% but its a good place to start
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
Point of order, he never claimed to be as good of a healer, only just as effective in survival.
The overall point still stands though, the deliberate stacking of resistance debuffs to the point of negative values is blatantly out of whack. This is where all the inflated DPS parses are coming from, power creep from items is only a symptom of mechanical, linear behaviors. Think about it, would you have equivalent DPS parses if all of your sources of resistances were replaced with crit bonuses? I'd think not.
I'm not devaluing the need for resistance debuffs. They certainly have a place in the game, but historically, linear scaling for debuffs don't work well if the mechanics allow for negative unbounded values. This was an issue for games like WoW and EvE, eventually the scale was placed on a logarithmic scale, putting a soft limit in place.
However, due to the nature of resistances, it really doesn't make sense to have negative values in place. In fact, now that I think of it, do we really need fixed resistance values in the first place? Sensor Scan doesn't do this, it lowers by a percentage, not a fixed rate. Why not change APB and FoMM to do the same? This creates a soft limit of 0 for resistance while providing Tac captains a multiplicative bonus. The only possible flaw I see here is that as it stands now, AI ships may not have any appreciable resistance values to begin with upon which they may need a bump on their resistances, and a ding on their hull values to equal out their nominal TTK values.
Of course you'll see a forumload of complaining Tac captains, but that's to be expected when normalization has to be done.
A cap needs to be put in place for negative resist as well. Or as you suggested make it to where you can't exceed 0% negatively. Then give mobs some positive resist values to make up for this and to ensure that using an ability to lower resist still has a purpose. Starbase 234 is a good example of a structure with positive resist. Why can't this be applied to NPC ships and structures that are in STFs as well. Seems reasonable to me.
But Tactical captains still need a serious nerf to their be ability to stack +x% damage abilities.
Ahem, not true, 1 Resistance rating is not equal to 1% resistance.
For example, to reach -100 resist requires a good 200 or so resistance rating loss with zero resist, add any form of resist into that and it becomes a lot more, I think it's safe to say it#s near impossible at the moment for anything with 30% resistance to get below -100 resist. (I can't tell right now as my laptop is off so I can't bring up my spreadsheet to look.)
44 DRR giving 30.2% DR would require -715 DRR to hit -100% DR.
Okay... so 5 Tholian carriers with elite weavers all using APB3 at exactly the same moment, as well as the pet timing all coinciding with the players would do it...
That's still a ridiculous amount of resistance debuffing, and not something you are ever likely to run into.
Keeping in mind that TT's going to clear it...heh, yep - unless you're a NPC - you're not likely to see it.
Until the next thing comes along to facilitate it...
Two major faults with the game that make the dps issue worse are:
Lack of player education
Lack of any real difficulty
Lack of education
Kinda speaks for itself, there aren't any missions where the player is forced to think about what they are doing with their ship, no enemies that can beat the player if they make a wrong move (aside from the Defender D'D, though staying away from it is the easiest thing in the world) if more missions focussed on teaching the player the strengths and weaknesses of their given ships and there was more emphasis put on teaching about boff and doff skills and such, a lot more players would be a lot more competent.
Lack of real difficulty
In short, there is no balance in this game anymore, only dps and hps. If there was a complete revamp of boff skills, ship stats and consoles etc to make sure each one was balanced against the others in a pvp setting it would go a long way to wards fixing that aspect of the game, it would also lay the foundations for fixing the dps race in pve.
PvE could be redesigned from the ground up on this new balance, it would virtually balance itself, provided the AI got a rebuild to make it intelligent, the devs could give NPCs the same number of skills the equivalent player ship would have, with the same boff setup and a random captain class to go with. this would open the possibility for the devs to make truely challenging encounters, where the difference between difficulty levels would be how well the AI fights.
This is turn would reduce the number of complaints about things in pvp because people would be accustomed to seeing all these abilities and such and the requirement to build a ship and play to it's strengths. There will of course be those who are better than others but I doubt the difference would be so great and the highest safe level of dps would be reduced significantly as npcs would be able to drag out a fight and exploit player weaknesses, the rebalancing of skills, doffs, consoles, ships etc would also give the devs an opportunity to reduce the dps potential in the game.
I think I've run out of brainpower for a while...
So much yes.
"Butbutbut the deeps"
People are obsessed with achieving the largest numbers, the biggest crits, the most 'awesome' parses.
...but only a small, vocal fraction of the people. There's two real 'groups' of the game, from what I can see. There's "the deeps kings", who are obsessed with getting the biggest DPS numbers, then there's "the rest of the game", who are either A, "trekkies" (who are more concerned with how canon a ship looks over THE DEEPS) or B, "very bad at making ship builds" (who are so horrible at building ships they've got Mk IV gear on a Gal-X dreadnaught at level 50 - have seen this happen). Or, C, obsessed with the deeps but know absolutely nothing about ship builds.
There's also a few isolated groups of sane people, who aren't all that concerned with THE DEEPS because A, they understand how ridiculously easy STO is or B, are completely satisfied that their ship does more than sufficient DEEPS despite it's only two dual cannon mounts. Or it's array of tetryon cannons.
Can't really lump all the "DEEPS" folks in together...they're not all into "DEEPS" for the same reason, eh? Some aren't actually concerned about DPS - they're looking at burst - they need to kill their opponent before that person's insane healing prevents such from taking place. There's the folks that are just looking to push the boundaries to see what can be done and how fast it can be done. There's the folks looking at trying to do all the grinds in the most efficient manner possible. There's all sorts of folks interested in damage for a variety of reasons...
...to call those folks insane, by calling the group not interested in that sane - well, that's kind of insulting, no? Different folks play for different reasons, they enjoy different things. Some folks are perfectly fine having a "pat on the back machine" hooked up to their spacebars while flying around without a clue in the world...doesn't mean that we should insult them.
I'm part of the category of people that just want my ship to do well enough that I won't get spiked and I stand a good chance of turning the tables on them. I care more about strategy than gear, I suppose. So I'm always thinking about what kind of combinations I can create to get interesting results, not necessarily high DPS. As a primary Sci captain, I'm interested in ways to neutralize my opponent. Or at least take away their advantage.