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opo98
Member Posts: 435 Arc User
No, I'm not talking about SNB :mad:, or Sensor Scan :eek:.
I'm talking Science Bridge Officer abilities.
Recently, two notable powers named Tykens Rift and Gravity Well were buffed, and it subsequently made them more effective. Now, some may argue the way that they were buffed was bad. They made the scaling modifiers really low and made the base effectiveness way too high, but the fact is that they are now pretty useful.
Hazard Emitters and TSS are the most powerful heals in game with a good Aux, but what about the offensive science abilities?
Post your ideas about ways to improve any offensive science abilites you feel may be lacking so that we can maybe bring about a renaissance of non-drain science vessels.
Personally I would like to give Photonic Shockwave of all ranks the prtg scaling factor of the previous version of bugged Photonic Shockwave III so that science vessels can have a burst if they invest heavy in prtg. (Buffs KDF BoPs too! Those Romulans Alphas need to be shown up!):D
I'm talking Science Bridge Officer abilities.
Recently, two notable powers named Tykens Rift and Gravity Well were buffed, and it subsequently made them more effective. Now, some may argue the way that they were buffed was bad. They made the scaling modifiers really low and made the base effectiveness way too high, but the fact is that they are now pretty useful.
Hazard Emitters and TSS are the most powerful heals in game with a good Aux, but what about the offensive science abilities?
Post your ideas about ways to improve any offensive science abilites you feel may be lacking so that we can maybe bring about a renaissance of non-drain science vessels.
Personally I would like to give Photonic Shockwave of all ranks the prtg scaling factor of the previous version of bugged Photonic Shockwave III so that science vessels can have a burst if they invest heavy in prtg. (Buffs KDF BoPs too! Those Romulans Alphas need to be shown up!):D
Post edited by opo98 on
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I am Il Shadow and i approve these Shennanigans!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
That said, it doesn't mean that place can't be expanded.
CPB and Tachyon Beam. Both of these skills are overly resisted by the skill tree. Now, I'm not expecting to be able to completely remove someone's shields (unless the were completely TRIBBLE and spec'd nothing into insulators), but there's no reason why CPB and Tachyon beam shouldn't at least scare the other guy.
Remember that for sci to be really effective, they have to completely dedicate their build to the 1 thing they wish to do well. Want a drain boat? Better have at least 4 flow caps consoles. Want gravity well to really reach out and touch someone and you're going to need at least 4 graviton generators, and particle generators if you want it to do real damage in exchange for a smaller radius of effect. Viral? Well, there's not really much you can do to buff that, beyond the skill tree, so it's kind of a freebie (If anything this one needs consoles - decompilers - and the base disable effects need to be severely reduced). Finally, if you want to heal, better break out some shield emitters.
Fixing CPB and Tac Beam so that loading up on Flow Capacitors can, at the very least, make someone sweat a little wouldn't be such a bad thing. Plus adding another viable option for sci captains might help reduce all those cataclysmic cosmic events we've been seeing, as well as the ensuing sense of vertigo.
I think both of those skills can be fixed by doffs.... I think we need to remember why ti was those resists where added to the skill tree to begin with. I remember dive bombing in my brel with CBP 3 + tachyon 3 with only 3 flow cap consoles and pretty much one shotting anyone I wanted. That was just the silly end... the stupid end was 5 man intrepid teams that kept entire teams naked. No thanks don't want that back myself, and anything short and people will still say they blow.
How about instead they either change one of the doffs or add new ones to make those 2 skills usable... as it is pretty much every sci skill is only really good if doffed so it would self balance.
Proposed New Duty Officers.
Gravimetric. - Effects Charged Particle burst, extending its range. Extended Range targets are effected by a reduced skill effect.
Extended Range 10k. Duration and Strength of CPB halved for every 1k over base range.
{CBP doesn't have to be a shield stripper to be useful... make it the ultimate decloak tool... I don't see this really upsetting balance much, seeing as 90% of the ships in use have some form of cloak these days it could see lots of builds packing CPB... using Grav doff makes it not possible to GW doff + CBP range doff or load more then one Range doff}
Warp Theorist (This doff already exists) - Simply increase the amount of Turn rate debuff added by this doff... make the buff linger for 5s or so. This is a stackable doffs... so if the base amount was in fact strong it could be very usable... as it is even with 3 right now its just not enough and doesn't last long enough.
Development Lab Scientist - Upgrades Tachyon beam skill. Target effected by tachyon beam will also have power level of their aux power system capped. Power will be capped by X every second tachyon beam applies, effect lingers for 5s after the beam is broken.
{ this could allow Tachyon to double as a good anti sci ship skill. The effect could function like the polaron proc where the power system max power is dropped by X each pulse... a full beam drain could basicly turn someones aux of for 5-10s depending on how well you are speced in flow cap}
Those would be my suggestions, I don't want to see massive shield strip teams around again it was silly the first time.
I think that Tachyon Beam (not CPB) should have a shield resistance debuff on it. It scales with aux power and Flow Caps. An unspecced Tachyon Beam 1 with 15 aux would reduce shield resists by maybe 1%. A fully maxxed out spec of Tachyon Beam 3 with 135 aux (presuming Obelisk Core), should be more like 40% or something.
Just pulled numbers of course. But I think that would be useful to help counter the insane, easily gained shield resists people can run around it. Even as a DOFF that'd be fine. Heck, it'd actually be useful in PvE because you could help weaken shields on a target (like a Voth Citadel). But it shouldn't multi-stack from different people using it. That'd be a bit much.
Ya'll know of course I am always behind improving SubD and adding consoles for it.
You do love your Doffs don't you?
I'm kinda against the idea of doffs having to compensate for a bad power. If CRF were a bad power, it would be like saying "Hey, if you want to use cannons, use up one of your valuable Doff slots!" Seeing as how a full Auxiliary Science Vessel is hardly a weapon damage powerhouse aside from the Vesta, or in rare instances tranny boats, I'm pretty sure their abilities are supposed to compensate for their lack of weapons.
I'd rather them make the base abilities effective and have all of their stats tied to auxiliary power and lower the base of the powers with a better scaling modifier, so that people can't run high energy weapon damage and have great science all in one basket.
This world of Doffs has really screwed with science. It did put science in a good place, but having to pay tens of millions of Energy Credits on Doffs to make each of your science abilities usable is a really backward way to approach balance. Granted, Doffs make science abilities a lot better, but you still have to essentially waste a couple of doff slots to do so.
Fully buffed gravity wells nowadays go for about 1k damage per sec for 20 secs with damage falloff from center. Even the fully buffed "Beam of Doom" Doffed TBR can only manage 1.9k dps for 10 secs in a 5 km range. Fully buffed DHC from an escort can go for 20k per second for 10 seconds. If we are talking ability damage here, there isn't any danger that science will become unbelievably OP if they are given a little more damage. The best burst science gets is literally only 10% of what the boring old cookie cutter cannon damage class gets. If not for PvP, at least for PvE. All I ever see are cruisers in PvE now because science vessels are so literally useless for any kind of damage. Really, the only people that get popped by purely science abilities are people that run without hull healing or the people that get mass spammed by gravity and beams of doom inside a cloud of doffed warp plasma.
Now if we talk disables and stuns, just look at mimey's post; SubD consoles needed please devs.
Drains are mostly fine, except for tachyon beam and target subs. I still think CPB is good for cloak detect and shouldn't primarily be a shield damage. I agree with making CPB much lighter on the shield damage while extending range to 15km; not with a Doff though. That makes CPB science vessels a threat to the god class meta of cloaking superior Romulans.
A lot of issues that could arise in PvP because of science spam could be fixed if stacking of science abilities did not occur. Anyways, those are my thoughts on it. Regardless of captain class, I don't think that a single lone science vessel would be anything resembling dangerous from my experience with them.
(Also, please don't follow this with L2P. Not only is that going to hurt my feelings, but that is a terrible thing to say to someone that has played PvP and PvE since Beta. Also, please no "Harden up Cupcake" posts. I'm not a cupcake, as the taste of my body is not sweet, nor do I have a delicious frosted coating.)
Doffs haven't "screwed" sci at all... it is also the cheapest stuff to doff up. Gravity well doffs cost 1/100 the price of say an Attack Pattern doff... you know the ones that make 1 min cool downs omegas not suck, doubling there up time... or Engi Tech doffs that also cost x10 the price of say a Scramble or VM Doff.
More stun consoles would be a terrible idea as well frankly. I remember stunning people for 4s in my bop it was fun for me not so much for them. Previous Devs made the CHOICE to not create SubD consoles... and I hope current and future ones don't chase a $ or two creating p2w items or consoles that do. (I doubt they would, stunning new players is a great way to pump turnover numbers which no company wants).
You can't compare DHC dmg to Science dmg... because the 2 are not comparable... you are comparing the Damage Class to the CC class... Science is NOT SUPPOSED To burst as a general rule. They are supposed to STOP those evil escorts from being able to Burst themselves... that's the idea... control the battle field. Which is one reason you see so many sci sci in Premades.
Its why I am saying really sci is completely 100% fine where it is... if anything its still a little over powered. However I won't go that far... as that is only true in skilled hands. Sci isn't the easiest class to fly, and it shouldn't be. As it has the most potential to determine the outcome of any match.
One of the reasons I suggest using DOFFS to boost anything like Tachyon or CPB is that you Don't want to make things powerful to a point that every hybrid cruiser / escort that has a lt. cmd sci loads a copy up and uses it to more effect then real sci ships. Look at GW for that... there changes recently to GW really did nothing for GW on a sci sci with massive particle spent and high aux... it however made GW 1 coming out of things like T'Varos 10x better then it had been. The same would happen if they just made blanket changes to things like CPB giving it crazy range. (I would say 15k would be just silly honestly... 10k is the range of almost everything and I think many people would even argue that is a bit far for a full decloak skill that could in theory decloak 5 people.)
If anything is going to get boosted at this point it needs to have a trade which is why you want to look at the doff route.
Every Ship class has its signature doffs right now... including sci... there is no reason to make a bunch of changes that would allow sci to do nothing but load defense doffs while everyone else has to load there signature doffs.
Escorts... have Attack Pattern Doffs... which are darn close to required to play proper escort... at that point I would say its almost equally required to load at least 2 dmg control doffs... as no escort can afford to choose between EPTE and EPTS anymore.
Cruisers... I won't go there but I think Tech Doffs are a pretty much standard thing... for the healing cruisers and "carrier healing things" there are signature healing doffs as well be it extend, sif doffs, Engi team doffs, ect.
Science... Right now for sci healers sci team doffs of course... but also Gravity well doffs which is pretty much a staple of every sci ship with a GW. There are plenty of other options however and everyone of them make all the standard sci skills 10x better... there are jam sensor doffs that I have discovered I can juice to allow me to do around 40k dmg before it breaks... there are the Scramble doffs that boarder on pure cheese... doffs that provide extra disables with VM and Siphen.
Honestly of the 3 ship classes... science ships are the ones that are really the most open when it comes to doff options. There is no reason they should get a free ride and have there skills bumped with no cost, not when sci in general is #1 in PvP... its not like its under performing. As it is with 6 doff slots now, adding one doff for your builds one main skill is hardly a cost at all. (its also likely the only way Cryptic would upgrade any skill anymore)
Yes the answer is one and that's target subsystem. The others are all cooldown doffs which only creep power up.
Tachyon beam and CPB need a hell of a buff to be useful but more importantly this game needs stacking penalties. I mean how many problems have been caused by people using 5 something and it being stupid OP? We have it with damage, we have it with science, heaven forbid you get caught in a double GW3, tykens rift 3 combo from 4 science guys, one tac could annihilate you with a well timed torp spread.
This is without even mentioning how laughably useless these two abilities are in PvE, I mean why go though the trouble of getting 3-4 guys to time their CPB and torp spread when one guy with CSV can do the same? Another example of damage out of control.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Sci is still the most desiarable role for any team... I'll take another sci over another tac any day...and its not just about the nuke.
Sci and dmg both get nuts when there are more then one providing it.
I think the other thing to do is ensure the other skills are setup the same way and then maybe bring the damage effect up to current standards of defensive power given how science seems to have been left behind in this respect.
I can't really support further doffing of sci skills as there are already at least two doffs for most skills, if not more, they may be relatively cheap on their own but between doffs and tuning your gear towards your given objective it gets pretty darn expensive to build sci.
I wouldn't want to see teams of 5 people running the same build, that would get boring but equally with sci being undesirable to play due to anything a sci can do to do damage or reduce shields a tactical captain with tactical boffs can do better, some would say "What's the point?"
I do agree with Mimey that subspace decompiler needs consoles, if only to overcome Human boffs, you know, 80 points in subsystem repair overcomes 84 points in subspace decompiler and cuts into Viral's base time as well. I would also suggest increasing the disable time on PSW and tricobalts based on testing with inertial dampers, that's about 1% resist per point and a 2 second disable is seriously ineffective anyway, raise it to 5 seconds base and buff more from decompiler to make it a more valuable skill to a disable specialist.
So can I take that as your blessing to the dps guys with FAW :P
Yeah, we do agree on that, things do get silly when there's more than one providing it, makes me glad I'm getting into guild wars 2 where things stack sensibly, sure dps is a large driving force but you can't neglect everything for dps or you just end up dying all the time.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Seems to me that shield drains are okay now if you treat them the same as you treat power drains, IE stack 3-4 of them to have a cumulative effect and then they work. Tetryon Glider + Target Shields + Tractor Beam DOFF + Tachyon Beam = no shields. If they are still there throw a CPB and they will definitely go down. If you buff into flowcap consoles, you wont even need them all.
I would like to see tetryon proc changed to slow the rate of regen.
And I would like to see an EMP weapon (or console maybe) that can attack shield health directly.
Tachyon Beam needs a serious buff, but that is partly because of the counters to it, its limited arc (See http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=634741), and reputation passives making the drain a joke.
Tachyon Beam needs to:
1)Have its base drains increased.
2)Have its arc increased to 180.
Right now, it makes more sense to use the shield draining tractor beam officer and a tractor beam than tachyon beam 1. I don't know why I even bother writing this, I know the devs glance over these, but it takes at least a year for anything to change. I'm still waiting on that 2nd deflector that was promised to sci captains.
That's a pretty good set of options though, and while yes in an ideal world these powers would be useful if we look at other disciplines it's not as if everything is 100% functional or useful there.
Take tac for example, Torps are exceedingly hard to make use of for actually killing people outside of a good decloak striker (and even there it takes pretty high optimization to pull off regularly).
Mines, well, is pure damage dealer load outside of a B'rel or Tvaro really going to give up a high tier Tac slot for DPA or DPB?
APB is powerful when its spammed by pets, but not always that great of a power when used by an actual Escort.
Target subsystem abilities are heavily resisted, have short duration effects and also compete with other, significantly more important choices.
Engineering is actually in a really strong place, design wise, only boarding parties and aceton beam are questionable (and aceton's issue is primarily how easily it's cleared, not the actual debuff).
Main point being that I agree with Antonio that Sci is in a really good place right now, with quite a number of options and probably a lot more overall build diversity than any other discipline.
Coincidentally it also has some of the most flexible ships available (Wells, Palisade) allowing for amazing hybrid layouts as well as extremely specialized layouts.
Sci already has zone denial and area control, it has several options for direct to hull damage, has the best single target control, has access to crippling drain builds, has some of the best heals, and absolutely critical cleanses.
wile GW has issues with base performance vs specing into it, on principle it is not wrong at all if a tac captain can cause a sci skill to deal damage better then a sci captain can. is it wrong that sci captains can cross heal as well or better then eng captains? is it wrong that BO3 fired from a sci ship or cruiser deals the same damage is if it was fired from an escort? these are all independent variables and no arbitrary restrictions should be placed on how you can fit them together.
doffs are a backdoor way to add skills and an expanded number of effects into the game, without having to cut into the very bones of the game. doffs are of great benefit to the game, and partially balanced by only being able to run a small number of them at once. i dont care for how they are monetized new releases of them though, and create a finite supply by them only poping from lockbox packs. there should be a more normalized way to attain them, they should all be added to randomly generated doff loot pools, from exchange officer and officer exchange program missions, so the game cant literally run out of certain ones.
This is the main issue I have w/Sci Boff powers. It's analogous to having weapon power skills with a 10% impact on damage of an energy weapon (which is ~ the impact of a fully spec'd 4 console last I looked). Basically an APO1 can be a better boost for damage then specing/equiping into a damage boosting skill.
The second would be pets, Rommy Singularity Powers, gear etc being as or more effective then Spec'd Sci Boff powers. These should be supplemental w/marginal boosts imo if at all.
The third would be opportunity cost into spec for Sci powers compared to Tac powers. Most Sci powers have 2 skill trains to spec into and only 1 of them may be boosted by ship gear etc at a time and as mentioned before w/minimal impact. Really, most builds can do w/o Tac skills from T4 and T5 and have nearly as effective damage builds.
Random Quote from Kerrat
"Sumlobus@****: your mums eat Iced Targ Poo"
C&H Fed banter
Just wanted to respond with this. The chances of Science skill doffs becoming super expensive are about zero.
Look at recent history... with things like the repulsor pull doff... it was expensive for 1-2 days when they first dropped... and after that they dropped to prices lower then say eject warp plasmas doff ect. (not top tier doffs).
The chances of any science doff ever getting up to pricing of... old sub nuke doffs... or cannons doffs... or attack pattern doffs... or overload doffs... or tech doffs... or even damage control. It's pretty much impossible.
The thing is.... Science ships are not that great in PvE... so 90% of the player base could care less about doffs aimed at lt. cmd and commander science skills. (look at VM doffs which you can pick up purples for under 1mil ec).
Even for PvP players... ask half the people you see flying science ships what there "main" toon is and they won't say there science. The demand just isn't there to drive it up... all those pve players that pull any new science doffs out of packs will unload em.
You might have a point there... then again with over half of the pve guys running tech doffs perhaps not. lol
half of pve and 99.9 of pvp :rolleyes:
That already exists. It's called Photonic Officer + DOFF :P
Or aux to battery +3 doffs after using HE :P
Not all non tactical doffs are cheap Antonio, the matter anti-matter doff, RSP doff and VM (spread) are pretty pricey last I looked. A-AM doff I could see being more expensive than Zemok and Marion...well he's already eclipsing most.
Still science is the cheapest a lot of the time but I do remember the tykens rift after shock doffs being a bit before the crystalline entity.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
I don't think he's saying "all" non-tac doffs are cheap, he means in general.
Another point he was making is that the sci doffs that are effective but inexpensive have little application in PvE, where as two of the DOFFs you listed (Fab: RSP DOFF, M/AM: AID DOFF) have broad application across the board for all builds in PvE and PvP.
I'm pretty sure there was someone (or several) hustling that market niche until the CE DOFF collapsed its value.
This is why I prefer the newest lockbox traits, you get one or the other so your option to open a lockbox is more likely to reward you with what you want.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.