Giving players the choice of burst effectiveness but longer gaps in effectiveness (All 3 team powers on 30 second CDs rather than rotating a Team every 15 seconds) is interesting gameplay - deciding whether to mete out my heals over time or blow them all at once determines how vulnerable I am/how many cards I still have in my hand over the next 15 seconds.
If this is the intent can you explain why the team skills still have a cooldown of 30 seconds each and a cooldown of 15 seconds between copies of the same skill? As I see it this change does not accomplish that stated goal, all this change does is allow someone to continue rotating tactical team every 15 seconds while also being able to enjoy the benefits of engineering and science team at the same time while doing so.
There's a difference between splitting TT and just dropping the Shield Distro from it.
There is, but the significance of that difference kind of depends upon what the new shield distribution power turns out to be. Suppose it were a high level Eng ability for example.
There is, but the significance of that difference kind of depends upon what the new shield distribution power turns out to be. Suppose it were a high level Eng ability for example.
I really appreciate reading about design and balance philosophy. Any time the Devs choose to share such vital information is fascinating to me. I am keenly interested in some of these things being brought up.
I wonder if having crew play a larger part in the effectiveness of in combat regen, resistances and abilities would work well. Maybe some adjustments on how they die are in order and maybe tie in crew regen into heals. It seems that a large crew should be an asset in some situations but a liability in other, so as a stat we should care about it when we choose or gear up a ship.
But that wasn't the point of the person you replied to...was it? He brought up why wasn't it brought up in the discussion just to remove it...to which a reply of they discussed splitting it...isn't the same thing. That's all I was saying.
Still, very sad to see its considered too big a change.
This game is seriously becoming less and less appealing each patch. The massive dps output issue and uselessness of science ship in the dps meta has been going on since the F2P patch and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Weapon power drain should return to what it used to be. This nonsense of weapons magically returning the power they used when the cycle is complete is absurd.
Tac team must lose shield auto balance.
Omega needs to lose its +Def, +turn +immunity and +dmg to all damage types (should only be weapon damage!) ... its just idiotic that one ability is the equivalent of using polarize hull, emg to engines and aux to dampeners on top of giving a huge damage boost.
AUX power should once again determine the turn ability of ships. @50 power ship turn rate should = their default value..higher than that they get a boost. Lower they lose turn rate.
But that wasn't the point of the person you replied to...was it? He brought up why wasn't it brought up in the discussion just to remove it...to which a reply of they discussed splitting it...isn't the same thing. That's all I was saying.
While I agree that many things in the game are...more powerful than necessary, not only in comparison to other abilities, but in general - that's the overall nature of the game, no?
Not only has there not been an increase in content difficulty, no increase in level cap to reflect any sort of increase in difficulty, but the content has actually been nerfed...all while oodles and oodles of powercreep have been added to the game. I can see no other way to take this than they are attempting to lower the bar to make the game as accessible as possible to the greatest possible number of players. They've basically said that, have they not? They're interested in attracting folks that may not be very good at gaming in the least but have some interest in Trek.
Thus such abilities are likely to see any changes, eh? Quite to the contrary, do we not instead see them adding more and more DOFFs to make various abilities even more powerful? Again, without any increase in difficulty.
You picture your average MMO and there's the carrot 'n stick. You run Content X to get Gear A so you can run Content Y to get Gear B so you can run Content Z to get Gear C...etc, etc, etc, etc. Throw in some level cap increases to be able to repeat the process, etc, etc, etc.
STO. No level cap increases. No Content Y or Z. It's just Content X...but we've done the Gear A, B, C, D, E, F, G...what are we on now?
Similarly, needing to use Tactical Team to survive meant Science or Engineering debuffs applied by Voth or Borg were extra frustrating due to feeling like the player made the best choice they could (surviving) but still being punished (not being able to use the dispel they have equipped and hadnt used)
Yes, Cryptic is operating under the opinion that a player having to think or make any choice is a punishment!
How many times do they have to tell us...that this is how the game is going to be...before we get it? Look back over the past couple of years...they've been telling us this since the F2P conversion.
Thanks for coming into the fray and taking the time to explain the reasoning behind something. We really appreciate posts like this.
That said, I haven't used Sci Team since back before the shared cooldown was added back in the day. It'll be nice to have the option of using it again.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
Tactical Team for shield redistribution never really made sense to me. Here's my idea:
Take the ship, hull, shields and crew status. Click one of the facings. That creates a standing order to redistribute shield strength to that facing. Just like the cruiser command auras are standing orders until you change them (or die or change zones). Make the distribution to any one shield facing just as effective as tac team is now. It will be less effective in combat, because you'll have to use your brain and choose whether you're balancing to one shield facing or another or to all of them.
That will add another dimension to space combat that this game sorely needs. Star Trek is about more than shooting things-- it's about finding solutions to problems other than shooting at them. The direction the OP mentioned sounds like a good start. The space combat in this game, as it is, is just generic scifi with star trek-shaped polygons, and it sorely needs balancing away from the unequivocal dominance of tac captains in scimitars with five superior operative boffs smacking things with FAW.
And this game really doesn't need super-easy elites either. Elites should be elite. The Voyager didn't win any meaningful engagements with the Borg by shooting at them, yet in this game we grind through them so fast it's a wonder there are any left. In fact, my fleet is now taking to winning elite STFs with the optional in tier 1 ships like the NX or the Oberth or the Miranda just to spite the devs...
There's been a lot of hubbub about the Tribble changes to the cooldown lockout between Tactical Team, Science Team, and Engineering Team, and I wanted to come give you a rundown of what the change accomplishes and why we chose to do it.
There were multiple reasons to remove this shared cooldown:
Certain team powers were rarely getting use due to perceived or real mandatory nature of other team powers - Engineering Team suffered the most here, while Science Team was in-use but played a significant "second fiddle" to Tactical Team
Dispel-type abilities are timing-sensitive in nature, but holding off using non-dispel powers so that a dispel would be available when a debuff is applied is unsatisfying gameplay if the debuff never comes or gets put on someone else
Similarly, needing to use Tactical Team to survive meant Science or Engineering debuffs applied by Voth or Borg were extra frustrating due to feeling like the player made the best choice they could (surviving) but still being punished (not being able to use the dispel they have equipped and hadnt used)
The shared lockout itself was based on an old paradigm of design within the game that has since been moved away from. It was entirely thematic in its nature the Teams were already busy and not mechanical the effects are too powerful together justification.
The combination of parts 1 and 4 meant that Engineering powers (Emergency Power to Shields) were the most frequent Shield heals, and Science powers (Hazard Emitters) were the most frequent Hull heals. This is contrary to the desired niches of the abilities.
Engineering Ensign and Science stations were far less desirable than intended due to Science Team and Engineering Team being on CD when Tactical Team was used. This was discussed back when the DDeridex was created and again now when we relaunched the Galaxy.
Giving players the choice of burst effectiveness but longer gaps in effectiveness (All 3 team powers on 30 second CDs rather than rotating a Team every 15 seconds) is interesting gameplay - deciding whether to mete out my heals over time or blow them all at once determines how vulnerable I am/how many cards I still have in my hand over the next 15 seconds.
"This is disruptive to current meta-game is this intentional? Is this good?"
Its definitely intentional. We want players to be able to use Engineering Team and Science Team, but we recognize the importance of Tactical Team in the currently widespread gameplay pattern adopted by many players. We want to make Tactical Team less mandatory over time (and in fact think the power itself is quite overloaded in terms of what it does), but bringing Tac Teams effectiveness down substantially would be more disruptive than allowing players to use Sci and Eng Team in conjunction with Tac Team. Were also hopeful that players will now be more willing to use Science and Engineering Teams on allied players once this change is made, since they wont have to make as much of a choice between selfishness and selflessness as they did before.
The metagame in general is dominated by choices that are too good compared to the other choices available. This leaves players dissatisfied with false choice. For instance, Beam Fire at Will is ostensibly an AoE power, but deals more damage to a single-target than normal Beam Fire does. Conversely, Beam Overload is a single-target damage power, but actually lowers the users medium-term DPS despite providing burst due to its more-than-substantial power drain, and due to competing with Fire at Will for a power slot. Long term, the more real (nontrivial) choices we can present players with, the happier they will be with the game. This is exemplified in our Trait revamp and our upcoming Kit Revamp, and our ongoing efforts to make all of our ship classes competitive with each other but in different ways.
I would like to start off my reply with a quick state of thinking before directly addressing the post.
I think you have a whole lot of thinking to do about the state of the game right now. There have become huge polar extremes in the PvP world and PvE has becomes almost silly with certain ships.
PvP:
One the one hand, you have super powerful abilities that allow some PvPers to pretty much guarantee a kill on their target in a blink of an eye. Even with some of the strongest tanks, they might not be able to defend against it. On the other hand, anyone not in a vape ship, we have HUGE tanking issues where there is too much for an everyday person. It is at a point to where one of the strongest abilities to break it all is a subnuke. Elite fleet shields did not help the situation by adding a level of resistance beyond what anyone should be expected to break in PvP. It makes super tanks out of escorts and it makes uber tanks out of the large ships. There are just so many game broken mechanics going on in the PvP world that need a total review and rework it just isn't funny. Many of the universal consoles need a lookover in how they function. I understand that you don't want to TRIBBLE off people that got these consoles for these reasons but for many it turns them off to the PvP experience and in some ways the game itself. As you are working on balancing, don't just look at these team power or do it one at a time. Spend some time with the abilities and see how it fits into this new view of how combat should work. Then adjust accordingly.
PvE:
On the PvE spectrum, I can tell you by personal experience that taking my large dreadnought into battle doesn't even make me flinch. STFs don't worry me because I know I can tank everything thrown at me. The Voth was a step in the right direction in some ways but making shields that are invulnerable I think is a poor decision. I personally can take on many voth without the worry that I will die. Even the big dreadnoughts with their warping me around and fancy abilities doesn't cause all that much stress and in reality just becomes annoying after a while. I realize not everyone experiences PvE in the same way but it seems ships are able to shrug off most damage because of the defensive abilities of even the smallest ships. Maybe that was intentional?
The team abilities:
So where are we at now? We have adapting shields that give huge resistances without much effort. Now I can use a Sci team that used to be rare to clearing these things come in and not only clear all these sci abilities being used on me, but also gives me a huge shield heal. Because fleet shields and emergency power to shields gives a great amount of shield resistance, I can forgo using transfer shield strength and made it almost never used. We also have created super tanks with all the fleet consoles that boost hull resistance. Since those shields are getting huge refreshes every 15-30 seconds with all that resistance, not much is getting to that hull anyways, but even if it did, I'm getting a potential huge hull heal as well every 15-30 seconds. With the duty officers that speed up the ability being in the game, now I just need to carry one copy and it is as if I'm carrying 2. As people most likely have mentioned before me (I haven't read the entire thread) there is also a HUGE aux2batt problem going on. I'm guessing you have to be aware of it but if you aren't then this will happen. It used to be aux power was needed for heals, but now with all 3 abilities being open and NOT needing aux power to activate or be useful AND cycling around faster, these ships will now become super tanks. Aux power becomes useless for these ships, they get HUGE damage bonus by cycling all tac abilities around faster, AND can penetrate hulls. The abilities that would normally stop these ships (usually a sci captain doing either a nuke, scramble, or shutting off aux power at the right time) can now all be cleared with a sci team.
This brings up another point. You have pretty much turned off the Sci class against anyone that is carrying Sci team (which will now most likely be everyone). Sci captains already had it hard with all the resistances in the game against power drain/holds/disables along with the already high damage resistances. Shut their ability to turn things off and cripple targets effectively makes tactical captains squee for joy.
As far as solutions are concerned, you already have a distribute shields button without tactical team. Why not make more use of them by making players choose where their shield power should be and speed the transfer up when choosing a specific side and when choosing all 4 sides be faster than it is now but slower than choosing a side. Would add for a more dynamic gamestyle and allow you to break that ability off of tactical team and replace it with something like accuracy or defense boost as someone mentioned earlier. Then you can restore the old cooldowns and get people really deciding what they want to do with their ship to make more use of those abilities.
As far as crew is concerned, I see potential for a rework of that system. How crew die and get injured needs to be looked over as well as regen rates but I think some of the ideas behind that concept are sound. Large crews should mean for a better maintained ship and give the ability for boarding parties. Small ships hardly would want to do a boarding party but also don't need as large of a crew to maintain a small ship. Crew could be tied to how many debuffs can actually be removed (as a shortage of crew would suggest they might not be able to get to cleaning up everything). Just the start of an idea there.
Too tired to write more so I'll add more when I wake up and see some of the new posts.
Crew is silly right now. We could pretty much pull it out of the game, buff everyone's out-of-combat regeneration, and nobody would notice. It's on our short list of orphaned powers features. If anyone feels strongly that it should be left in the game, I'd be interested in hearing what you wish it did.
As much as the crew mechanic is broken right now, I'd still like to see it turned into something useful.
Bigger ships have more than just hull and boffs. All the crew onboard should be part of the game play proper.
Shuttles with 5 crew all the way up to the likes of the Vo'Quv with 4000 crew. What could all these crewman doing during battle? Why does a single torp kill like 10% of my crew on a Vo'Quv vs an escort despite being the size of a small city?
The possibly easiest thing to do (and what is most broken about crew atm) is make them relevant. Not some passive out of combat heal modifier no one actually cares about. Make your heals DEPENDANT on crew alive.
0% alive crew? How is your ship healing itself??
Make crew a final modifier for all heals.
Could all these crewman aboard your ship be helping with ship operations too? I'd think so.
Why not make it that boff ability CDs are based off, crew alive too?
50% crew alive, your boff abilities should take 50% longer to cool down. 0% crew? who's operating the warp core, deflector dish operations etc etc that all your abilities depend on. Boff abilities maybe then take 100% longer.
Surely that'd give people a reason to start caring for their alive crew??
The biggest thing by far that annoys me about the crew mechanic as it stands (useless/irrelevant or not) is that ships with large complements loose crew at the same rate as shuttles or escorts, as everything is percentage of crew based when applying damage to crew. Yet, all ships (without speccing into it) recover crew at the same rate.
So big 4000 crew ships can loose all crew in the same amount of time as an escort, yet takes 20x longer to recover them.
Loosing crew should be a simple crew subtraction, not a percentage game, so larger complements can have their crew effect the battle for longer before depleting.
Escort dukes it out with a cruiser, if cruiser survives the initial few moments and it turns into a slug fest, surely the ship with more crew will affect the ships operations more in a positive way to give them an advantage in the longer run.
Boarding parties could then actually become useful. Send them over to kill the crew of your victim. Slowing down their operations and effectiveness.
Boarding party is a pretty useless ability atm, that'd make it relevant again. Perhaps the boarding party kills X amount of crew every second for 15 secs unless something (other than current tac team implementation, lol) is used to route them out.
There was even suggestions about of making doffs your actual crew compliment. That'd really make you care for them! Brings a currency factor into it.
I'm sure there's many other good ideas for making crew relevant. Ignoring the fact that a cruiser has thousands of people on board yet not having any differing affect on gameplay vs a shuttle or BoP seems like a lost opportunity for game play.
Crew is silly right now. We could pretty much pull it out of the game, buff everyone's out-of-combat regeneration, and nobody would notice. It's on our short list of orphaned powers features. If anyone feels strongly that it should be left in the game, I'd be interested in hearing what you wish it did.
Only if you can find a way to make it relevant and not imbalanced (considering how different crew sizes actually are on the ships). Might be better to ditch it, especially since it's also thematically inconsistent with DOFFs. (I have more DOFFs than my Defiant has crew.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Crew was a nice idea 4 years ago... and has been nothing but a joke since.
I mean the "barge of the dead" jokes where funny the first time I noticed my 4000 crew carrier had one alive crew member.
I honestly can see anyway to really fix it with out just annoying people. If it mattered more then it did... sitting there for 10min waiting for 4000 crew to regen would be more then a bit annoying.
I also don't see how it is ever used in a balanced way... if you make it really matter you are going to have anyone with just a minor shread of RPer in them twiching... when the escort with 10 crew gets a bonus close to that of a massive cruiser with 2000 crew... and if you make it so the bonus is strong why would anyone fly ships that didn't have massive amounts of crew.
The mechanic has never really worked... and frankly there is so much other stuff that needs attention... I would do as you say. Just remove the mechanic and set everyones regen rates to a standard. (just be careful with the numbers as tuned wrong it could easily be a major buff for no reason to passive healing)
There's been a lot of hubbub about the Tribble changes to the cooldown lockout between Tactical Team, Science Team, and Engineering Team, and I wanted to come give you a rundown of what the change accomplishes and why we chose to do it.
There were multiple reasons to remove this shared cooldown:
Certain team powers were rarely getting use due to perceived or real mandatory nature of other team powers - Engineering Team suffered the most here, while Science Team was in-use but played a significant "second fiddle" to Tactical Team
Dispel-type abilities are timing-sensitive in nature, but holding off using non-dispel powers so that a dispel would be available when a debuff is applied is unsatisfying gameplay if the debuff never comes or gets put on someone else
Similarly, needing to use Tactical Team to survive meant Science or Engineering debuffs applied by Voth or Borg were extra frustrating due to feeling like the player made the best choice they could (surviving) but still being punished (not being able to use the dispel they have equipped and hadnt used)
The shared lockout itself was based on an old paradigm of design within the game that has since been moved away from. It was entirely thematic in its nature the Teams were already busy and not mechanical the effects are too powerful together justification.
The combination of parts 1 and 4 meant that Engineering powers (Emergency Power to Shields) were the most frequent Shield heals, and Science powers (Hazard Emitters) were the most frequent Hull heals. This is contrary to the desired niches of the abilities.
Engineering Ensign and Science stations were far less desirable than intended due to Science Team and Engineering Team being on CD when Tactical Team was used. This was discussed back when the DDeridex was created and again now when we relaunched the Galaxy.
Giving players the choice of burst effectiveness but longer gaps in effectiveness (All 3 team powers on 30 second CDs rather than rotating a Team every 15 seconds) is interesting gameplay - deciding whether to mete out my heals over time or blow them all at once determines how vulnerable I am/how many cards I still have in my hand over the next 15 seconds.
Crew is silly right now. We could pretty much pull it out of the game, buff everyone's out-of-combat regeneration, and nobody would notice. It's on our short list of orphaned powers features. If anyone feels strongly that it should be left in the game, I'd be interested in hearing what you wish it did.
So first, thanks for this extended civil dialogue with the community, that's always a luxury.
On crew, I don't think I'd be alone in saying that's a weird subject. As a starship captain, I want my crew to matter. I like that feature. But as it works now, it adds very little to combat and the rate of attrition and regen are somewhat immersion disrupting.
Off the top of my head, I've heard ideas about crew number being tied to boarding party effectiveness/defense, team power effectiveness or recharge, or even completely eliminating the crew on an enemy ship as an alternative way to score a kill. Maybe instead of respawning, your killed ship stays a hulk and the % of crew you managed to keep alive affects your respawn timer, simulating damage control teams getting you back into the fight? Maybe you could let doffs play a role, with purple doffs representing stronger crew that give a better bonnus or something and the like.
I'm sure the community has more ideas than me, and probably more creative ones, but these are all I can think of right now.
I guess I'll end my post by saying, I would mind if we just suddenly no longer had to worry about our crews, but I wouldn't mind if I didn't have to worry about the current crew.
Crew is silly right now. We could pretty much pull it out of the game, buff everyone's out-of-combat regeneration, and nobody would notice. It's on our short list of orphaned powers features. If anyone feels strongly that it should be left in the game, I'd be interested in hearing what you wish it did.
I'd always thought that crew should have been a non-perishable resource pool that you could "allocate" to different sections of your ship to aid in combat. Essentially tied to the subsystem power bars, you could allocate a certain amount of crew (up to 40%) to each area and they would help make "BOFF" and "Captain" abilities that use that particular subsystem more efficient in some way. It would've been a supplement to the skill points that you allot on your captain, and the crew effect on those abilities wouldn't be as effective as actually putting skill points into those areas overall, but since there's talk of revamping the skill system again anyway I don't know if it'd be applicable anymore.
This thread, communication, and the decision making re: game design decisions is brilliant and I would very much like to see more of this in future.
The change to team mechanics is something I've suggested for a very long time and is only resisted due to the current levels of healing in the game. Tactical Team is hilarious, it's OP, but without it, you wouldn't last a few seconds under concentrated fire.
The other team abilities, whilst strong heals, provide no resists, which are the reason ships can some times seem invincible. And this has to be dealt with next - perhaps a -50% nerf to all resist generating abilities and items.
Otherwise you could accomplish something similar with more shield debuffing abilities... EG an alteration to Tachyon Beam.
Crew could be made more important, at the moment, weapons kill a percentage of crew, theta radiation is broken, and hull healing pails in significance to the borg set. If weapons killed a fixed number of crew, theta radiation wasn't broken and crew regenerated after, and if the borg set no longer accounted for almost all of your hull regeneration, crew could be made important - but there are so many other things and systems you should be looking to fix first IMO.
The biggest thing by far that annoys me about the crew mechanic as it stands (useless/irrelevant or not) is that ships with large complements loose crew at the same rate as shuttles or escorts, as everything is percentage of crew based when applying damage to crew. Yet, all ships (without speccing into it) recover crew at the same rate.
So big 4000 crew ships can loose all crew in the same amount of time as an escort, yet takes 20x longer to recover them.
Loosing crew should be a simple crew subtraction, not a percentage game, so larger complements can have their crew effect the battle for longer before depleting.
Basically this. The flat recovery rate but percentage-based bonuses is what kills it for large crew ships. Fix that and you've then done a lot to un-gimp the system. I like the concept of crew too much to say scrap it, even though that would be the fastest way to solve the problems with it. There are a lot of good ideas for how crew system improvements can make it a positive aspect of gameplay.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
Although I'm personally leery of how the decouple will affect gameplay, kudos for posting the reasoning behind the change. The dispel/debuff mechanic will need a serious looking at too, especially since the dispels are team-castable, clear all debuffs at once and are coupled with strong spike heals. Perhaps there could be a system by which the Teams only dispel debuffs when sent to teammates, and only provide the heals when coupled with a Doff?
The Sensor Analysis change looks like it could be welcome. I'll remain cautiously optimistic about it, but please don't mess it up.
One of the primary reasons that engineering is the best shield healer is that it grants so heavy shield damage reduction. That's crucial to survival in PvE and PvP. Science Team doesn't grant that, so it might be that engineering will simply be healing both - hull and shields- while science will still be primarily hull heal and science clearance or science debuffs. Of course, a neat influx of extra shield points together with EPtS or Extend Shields is better than just EpTs or Extend Shields.
You may need to go back to STO before the grand power revamp from snix, a time when science team granted shield damage reduction and EPtS didn't (and wasn't very good, but since shield power also grants damage reduction now, it might still be popular even if you lower the damage reduction, especially if you pair it with a buff to the healing component.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Cleanses are too powerful. TT1, ET1, ST1, HE1 all cleanse as well as TT3, ET3, ST3, HE3. This is part of where an issue will arise in PvP and adversely affect Sci. This isn't adversely affecting Sci Captains or those in Sci Vessels...this adversely affects anybody that's using any offensive Sci ability. There was an opportunity cost - which I guess you guys saw as unsatisfying gameplay. I understand STO is not a game for folks with big boy pants, but c'mon - it's gone beyond getting silly.
/snip
The whole clusterf*** that is TT is even funnier when you look at its history.
you said it more nicely then i was able to.
@hawk, can you please make sure that new sensor analysis is having synergies with Tac cpt abilites and cannons. I mean who would want sci ship abilities to work on sci skills, or god forbid sci captains. Whatever you do i m cool with it, as long Tac gets to reap the most benefits of it, maybe tie it to a romulan trait?
As Hilbert once said. The original Devs become more demi-god like geniuses of gamedesign with every passing week.
In a galaxy far far away....
Players: well systems your TT ain't doing much, not even on 3 tac ensign boats is it worth slotting since it interferes with the other teams which are infinitely more helpful.
Systems: After careful analysis we realized that no one uses tac team because it sucks. So we decided to buff it to ungodly levels introduce a new mechanic to it. We just thought giving all ships the ability to sit still and have 100% up-time on their target with small arc weapons would go down well. Who needs outside heals when everythings else stays the same but you know have 4x the shield HP that you had before. Manual rebalancing is still a viable game mechanic but we wanted to make sure that it works better on auto-pilot, player action and outcomes are to tightly linked in STO as is. It will also buff your attack and cleanse some cc abilities. Especially those encoutered in STFs (aka our only endgame at the time)! IN case there is anything left that tac team 1 doesn't help with, let us know we'll look into it. Just to make sure that no one is mistaken about this, we make TT2 an TT3 useless, since no one wants to face opportunity costs at lt Cmdr. new(tm)TT1 FTW.
Players: Umm that seems a bit OP don't you think? Here is some data from x matches showing you just how much of an inpact TT has on healing. It devalues the role of healing classes, and the opportunity cost for DPS is minimal, while cc and tank kind of suffer due to limi....
Systems:Glad you ask healing, ....meet [Adapt], global CD doffs, we would have buffed APO +TT if we could figure out how to open the spreadsheet for doing so
Players: How about toning it down just a notch
Systems: Please hold the line....
Players: This is really getiing silly, the new(tm) was a bad design, can we please do somethi...
Systems: LAZZZZOR T-REX
Players: Yup, t-rex with laser beams, but how about that balance thingy we keep discussing for 2 years now
Systems: TT is OP, its an integral part of the meta and cannot be changed EVER!!!!!!!, but to remedy it we remove the last bit of opportunity cost it had, now you can has perfect cycle of TT, and your good hold healing cleanses. enjoy!
Thanks for the detailed explanation, adjudicatorhawk.
This changes everything, now I have to think about all my builds again. I quite like the change, but I have not yet seen it in practice, so I reserve my possible rants and fears for later.
Crew is silly right now. We could pretty much pull it out of the game, buff everyone's out-of-combat regeneration, and nobody would notice. It's on our short list of orphaned powers features. If anyone feels strongly that it should be left in the game, I'd be interested in hearing what you wish it did.
While crew is currently pointless and it is nice to know Cryptic feels the same. I have had a bit of a think of what the crew system could do.
So, my first suggestion (more will follow over the next few days).
How about if the % of crew you have were to effect the cooldowns on your bridge officer abilities?
So if you lost 10% of your crew, your powers gained 10% on the cooldown.
So a torpedo hits you and takes out 20 crewmen, in a Galaxy, that's nothing you would not feel it but in a Defiant 20 crew would be a big deal as all your powers gain cooldown time.
I would cap this at 50% maximum (though that is my opinion, numbers subject to testing and balance changes), so a 2 minute skill like RSP3, would become a 3 minute skill, a 30 second skill like Tactical Team would become a 45 second skill.
Captain powers would not tie in to this - as we assume your character is always the last man standing on the ship.
Crew resistance and regeneration would need looking at, but weapons that directly take away crew would become more effective (In PvP and when tanking in PvE), escorts would not be so willing to sit tanking due to taking a few hits would really mess with their DPS and cruisers would be more useful (PvE) with threat control skills.
I'm also thinking crew based consoles (bio beds and force fields) would suddenly be handy as well for most ships - for when you do get shot at.
This is my first run at this idea, still rough around the edges but what do you think to idea 1?
You should wait a couple more weeks. (Also, the Vesta has a PBAoE heal console)
Just make sure to give such an AoE heal ability only to Science Vessels and comparable ships. STO really needs a bit more diversity, I am not talking about the "holy trinity", but advantages and disadvantages should become more recognizable. Right now, everybody is a damage dealer in STO. Rather dull... but then there are actually no instances/encounters in the game right now, that would require a group to look any different than the current 5-DDs-power-team...
Sort of "Super-elite" versions of STFs and other group missions could be something to offer players such an experience, where they actually have to fulfill roles of tank/healer/DD. If people do not like that sort of gameplay, they can stick with the current elite-type missions.
Long talk, short meaning: STO is too easy. "Elite" and "Normal" have long become "Easy" and "Beginners", respectively. That AoE heal space ability is probably coming as an universal console for yet another shiny C-store ship, so everything I've said is pointless
Hey Devs! Thanks so much for sharing this with us; explanations are good! Also, it's great to know that you are seeing the game imbalances we've been talking about as players for a while now.
I'm in full support of these changes to the teams, and look forward to hearing what will be done to balance Tac Team in the future.
Comments
If this is the intent can you explain why the team skills still have a cooldown of 30 seconds each and a cooldown of 15 seconds between copies of the same skill? As I see it this change does not accomplish that stated goal, all this change does is allow someone to continue rotating tactical team every 15 seconds while also being able to enjoy the benefits of engineering and science team at the same time while doing so.
There is, but the significance of that difference kind of depends upon what the new shield distribution power turns out to be. Suppose it were a high level Eng ability for example.
Um...no new shield distribution power.
Uh... well there would be if they split TT...
I really appreciate reading about design and balance philosophy. Any time the Devs choose to share such vital information is fascinating to me. I am keenly interested in some of these things being brought up.
I wonder if having crew play a larger part in the effectiveness of in combat regen, resistances and abilities would work well. Maybe some adjustments on how they die are in order and maybe tie in crew regen into heals. It seems that a large crew should be an asset in some situations but a liability in other, so as a stat we should care about it when we choose or gear up a ship.
But that wasn't the point of the person you replied to...was it? He brought up why wasn't it brought up in the discussion just to remove it...to which a reply of they discussed splitting it...isn't the same thing. That's all I was saying.
Thank you. I missed that.
Still, very sad to see its considered too big a change.
This game is seriously becoming less and less appealing each patch. The massive dps output issue and uselessness of science ship in the dps meta has been going on since the F2P patch and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Weapon power drain should return to what it used to be. This nonsense of weapons magically returning the power they used when the cycle is complete is absurd.
Tac team must lose shield auto balance.
Omega needs to lose its +Def, +turn +immunity and +dmg to all damage types (should only be weapon damage!) ... its just idiotic that one ability is the equivalent of using polarize hull, emg to engines and aux to dampeners on top of giving a huge damage boost.
AUX power should once again determine the turn ability of ships. @50 power ship turn rate should = their default value..higher than that they get a boost. Lower they lose turn rate.
Ah. Gotcha.
While I agree that many things in the game are...more powerful than necessary, not only in comparison to other abilities, but in general - that's the overall nature of the game, no?
Not only has there not been an increase in content difficulty, no increase in level cap to reflect any sort of increase in difficulty, but the content has actually been nerfed...all while oodles and oodles of powercreep have been added to the game. I can see no other way to take this than they are attempting to lower the bar to make the game as accessible as possible to the greatest possible number of players. They've basically said that, have they not? They're interested in attracting folks that may not be very good at gaming in the least but have some interest in Trek.
Thus such abilities are likely to see any changes, eh? Quite to the contrary, do we not instead see them adding more and more DOFFs to make various abilities even more powerful? Again, without any increase in difficulty.
You picture your average MMO and there's the carrot 'n stick. You run Content X to get Gear A so you can run Content Y to get Gear B so you can run Content Z to get Gear C...etc, etc, etc, etc. Throw in some level cap increases to be able to repeat the process, etc, etc, etc.
STO. No level cap increases. No Content Y or Z. It's just Content X...but we've done the Gear A, B, C, D, E, F, G...what are we on now?
Heck, let's look at what Hawk said in his OP, eh?
Yes, Cryptic is operating under the opinion that a player having to think or make any choice is a punishment!
How many times do they have to tell us...that this is how the game is going to be...before we get it? Look back over the past couple of years...they've been telling us this since the F2P conversion.
It was my bad - I should have taken the time to be more clear.
That said, I haven't used Sci Team since back before the shared cooldown was added back in the day. It'll be nice to have the option of using it again.
Joined January 2009
Take the ship, hull, shields and crew status. Click one of the facings. That creates a standing order to redistribute shield strength to that facing. Just like the cruiser command auras are standing orders until you change them (or die or change zones). Make the distribution to any one shield facing just as effective as tac team is now. It will be less effective in combat, because you'll have to use your brain and choose whether you're balancing to one shield facing or another or to all of them.
That will add another dimension to space combat that this game sorely needs. Star Trek is about more than shooting things-- it's about finding solutions to problems other than shooting at them. The direction the OP mentioned sounds like a good start. The space combat in this game, as it is, is just generic scifi with star trek-shaped polygons, and it sorely needs balancing away from the unequivocal dominance of tac captains in scimitars with five superior operative boffs smacking things with FAW.
And this game really doesn't need super-easy elites either. Elites should be elite. The Voyager didn't win any meaningful engagements with the Borg by shooting at them, yet in this game we grind through them so fast it's a wonder there are any left. In fact, my fleet is now taking to winning elite STFs with the optional in tier 1 ships like the NX or the Oberth or the Miranda just to spite the devs...
I would like to start off my reply with a quick state of thinking before directly addressing the post.
I think you have a whole lot of thinking to do about the state of the game right now. There have become huge polar extremes in the PvP world and PvE has becomes almost silly with certain ships.
PvP:
One the one hand, you have super powerful abilities that allow some PvPers to pretty much guarantee a kill on their target in a blink of an eye. Even with some of the strongest tanks, they might not be able to defend against it. On the other hand, anyone not in a vape ship, we have HUGE tanking issues where there is too much for an everyday person. It is at a point to where one of the strongest abilities to break it all is a subnuke. Elite fleet shields did not help the situation by adding a level of resistance beyond what anyone should be expected to break in PvP. It makes super tanks out of escorts and it makes uber tanks out of the large ships. There are just so many game broken mechanics going on in the PvP world that need a total review and rework it just isn't funny. Many of the universal consoles need a lookover in how they function. I understand that you don't want to TRIBBLE off people that got these consoles for these reasons but for many it turns them off to the PvP experience and in some ways the game itself. As you are working on balancing, don't just look at these team power or do it one at a time. Spend some time with the abilities and see how it fits into this new view of how combat should work. Then adjust accordingly.
PvE:
On the PvE spectrum, I can tell you by personal experience that taking my large dreadnought into battle doesn't even make me flinch. STFs don't worry me because I know I can tank everything thrown at me. The Voth was a step in the right direction in some ways but making shields that are invulnerable I think is a poor decision. I personally can take on many voth without the worry that I will die. Even the big dreadnoughts with their warping me around and fancy abilities doesn't cause all that much stress and in reality just becomes annoying after a while. I realize not everyone experiences PvE in the same way but it seems ships are able to shrug off most damage because of the defensive abilities of even the smallest ships. Maybe that was intentional?
The team abilities:
So where are we at now? We have adapting shields that give huge resistances without much effort. Now I can use a Sci team that used to be rare to clearing these things come in and not only clear all these sci abilities being used on me, but also gives me a huge shield heal. Because fleet shields and emergency power to shields gives a great amount of shield resistance, I can forgo using transfer shield strength and made it almost never used. We also have created super tanks with all the fleet consoles that boost hull resistance. Since those shields are getting huge refreshes every 15-30 seconds with all that resistance, not much is getting to that hull anyways, but even if it did, I'm getting a potential huge hull heal as well every 15-30 seconds. With the duty officers that speed up the ability being in the game, now I just need to carry one copy and it is as if I'm carrying 2. As people most likely have mentioned before me (I haven't read the entire thread) there is also a HUGE aux2batt problem going on. I'm guessing you have to be aware of it but if you aren't then this will happen. It used to be aux power was needed for heals, but now with all 3 abilities being open and NOT needing aux power to activate or be useful AND cycling around faster, these ships will now become super tanks. Aux power becomes useless for these ships, they get HUGE damage bonus by cycling all tac abilities around faster, AND can penetrate hulls. The abilities that would normally stop these ships (usually a sci captain doing either a nuke, scramble, or shutting off aux power at the right time) can now all be cleared with a sci team.
This brings up another point. You have pretty much turned off the Sci class against anyone that is carrying Sci team (which will now most likely be everyone). Sci captains already had it hard with all the resistances in the game against power drain/holds/disables along with the already high damage resistances. Shut their ability to turn things off and cripple targets effectively makes tactical captains squee for joy.
As far as solutions are concerned, you already have a distribute shields button without tactical team. Why not make more use of them by making players choose where their shield power should be and speed the transfer up when choosing a specific side and when choosing all 4 sides be faster than it is now but slower than choosing a side. Would add for a more dynamic gamestyle and allow you to break that ability off of tactical team and replace it with something like accuracy or defense boost as someone mentioned earlier. Then you can restore the old cooldowns and get people really deciding what they want to do with their ship to make more use of those abilities.
As far as crew is concerned, I see potential for a rework of that system. How crew die and get injured needs to be looked over as well as regen rates but I think some of the ideas behind that concept are sound. Large crews should mean for a better maintained ship and give the ability for boarding parties. Small ships hardly would want to do a boarding party but also don't need as large of a crew to maintain a small ship. Crew could be tied to how many debuffs can actually be removed (as a shortage of crew would suggest they might not be able to get to cleaning up everything). Just the start of an idea there.
Too tired to write more so I'll add more when I wake up and see some of the new posts.
As much as the crew mechanic is broken right now, I'd still like to see it turned into something useful.
Bigger ships have more than just hull and boffs. All the crew onboard should be part of the game play proper.
Shuttles with 5 crew all the way up to the likes of the Vo'Quv with 4000 crew. What could all these crewman doing during battle? Why does a single torp kill like 10% of my crew on a Vo'Quv vs an escort despite being the size of a small city?
The possibly easiest thing to do (and what is most broken about crew atm) is make them relevant. Not some passive out of combat heal modifier no one actually cares about. Make your heals DEPENDANT on crew alive.
0% alive crew? How is your ship healing itself??
Make crew a final modifier for all heals.
Could all these crewman aboard your ship be helping with ship operations too? I'd think so.
Why not make it that boff ability CDs are based off, crew alive too?
50% crew alive, your boff abilities should take 50% longer to cool down. 0% crew? who's operating the warp core, deflector dish operations etc etc that all your abilities depend on. Boff abilities maybe then take 100% longer.
Surely that'd give people a reason to start caring for their alive crew??
The biggest thing by far that annoys me about the crew mechanic as it stands (useless/irrelevant or not) is that ships with large complements loose crew at the same rate as shuttles or escorts, as everything is percentage of crew based when applying damage to crew. Yet, all ships (without speccing into it) recover crew at the same rate.
So big 4000 crew ships can loose all crew in the same amount of time as an escort, yet takes 20x longer to recover them.
Loosing crew should be a simple crew subtraction, not a percentage game, so larger complements can have their crew effect the battle for longer before depleting.
Escort dukes it out with a cruiser, if cruiser survives the initial few moments and it turns into a slug fest, surely the ship with more crew will affect the ships operations more in a positive way to give them an advantage in the longer run.
Boarding parties could then actually become useful. Send them over to kill the crew of your victim. Slowing down their operations and effectiveness.
Boarding party is a pretty useless ability atm, that'd make it relevant again. Perhaps the boarding party kills X amount of crew every second for 15 secs unless something (other than current tac team implementation, lol) is used to route them out.
There was even suggestions about of making doffs your actual crew compliment. That'd really make you care for them! Brings a currency factor into it.
I'm sure there's many other good ideas for making crew relevant. Ignoring the fact that a cruiser has thousands of people on board yet not having any differing affect on gameplay vs a shuttle or BoP seems like a lost opportunity for game play.
Only if you can find a way to make it relevant and not imbalanced (considering how different crew sizes actually are on the ships). Might be better to ditch it, especially since it's also thematically inconsistent with DOFFs. (I have more DOFFs than my Defiant has crew.)
I mean the "barge of the dead" jokes where funny the first time I noticed my 4000 crew carrier had one alive crew member.
I honestly can see anyway to really fix it with out just annoying people. If it mattered more then it did... sitting there for 10min waiting for 4000 crew to regen would be more then a bit annoying.
I also don't see how it is ever used in a balanced way... if you make it really matter you are going to have anyone with just a minor shread of RPer in them twiching... when the escort with 10 crew gets a bonus close to that of a massive cruiser with 2000 crew... and if you make it so the bonus is strong why would anyone fly ships that didn't have massive amounts of crew.
The mechanic has never really worked... and frankly there is so much other stuff that needs attention... I would do as you say. Just remove the mechanic and set everyones regen rates to a standard. (just be careful with the numbers as tuned wrong it could easily be a major buff for no reason to passive healing)
Thank you for all of this!
So first, thanks for this extended civil dialogue with the community, that's always a luxury.
On crew, I don't think I'd be alone in saying that's a weird subject. As a starship captain, I want my crew to matter. I like that feature. But as it works now, it adds very little to combat and the rate of attrition and regen are somewhat immersion disrupting.
Off the top of my head, I've heard ideas about crew number being tied to boarding party effectiveness/defense, team power effectiveness or recharge, or even completely eliminating the crew on an enemy ship as an alternative way to score a kill. Maybe instead of respawning, your killed ship stays a hulk and the % of crew you managed to keep alive affects your respawn timer, simulating damage control teams getting you back into the fight? Maybe you could let doffs play a role, with purple doffs representing stronger crew that give a better bonnus or something and the like.
I'm sure the community has more ideas than me, and probably more creative ones, but these are all I can think of right now.
I guess I'll end my post by saying, I would mind if we just suddenly no longer had to worry about our crews, but I wouldn't mind if I didn't have to worry about the current crew.
I'd always thought that crew should have been a non-perishable resource pool that you could "allocate" to different sections of your ship to aid in combat. Essentially tied to the subsystem power bars, you could allocate a certain amount of crew (up to 40%) to each area and they would help make "BOFF" and "Captain" abilities that use that particular subsystem more efficient in some way. It would've been a supplement to the skill points that you allot on your captain, and the crew effect on those abilities wouldn't be as effective as actually putting skill points into those areas overall, but since there's talk of revamping the skill system again anyway I don't know if it'd be applicable anymore.
Commanding Officer: Captain Pyotr Ramonovich Amosov
Dedication Plaque: "Nil Intentatum Reliquit"
The change to team mechanics is something I've suggested for a very long time and is only resisted due to the current levels of healing in the game. Tactical Team is hilarious, it's OP, but without it, you wouldn't last a few seconds under concentrated fire.
The other team abilities, whilst strong heals, provide no resists, which are the reason ships can some times seem invincible. And this has to be dealt with next - perhaps a -50% nerf to all resist generating abilities and items.
Otherwise you could accomplish something similar with more shield debuffing abilities... EG an alteration to Tachyon Beam.
Crew could be made more important, at the moment, weapons kill a percentage of crew, theta radiation is broken, and hull healing pails in significance to the borg set. If weapons killed a fixed number of crew, theta radiation wasn't broken and crew regenerated after, and if the borg set no longer accounted for almost all of your hull regeneration, crew could be made important - but there are so many other things and systems you should be looking to fix first IMO.
Basically this. The flat recovery rate but percentage-based bonuses is what kills it for large crew ships. Fix that and you've then done a lot to un-gimp the system. I like the concept of crew too much to say scrap it, even though that would be the fastest way to solve the problems with it. There are a lot of good ideas for how crew system improvements can make it a positive aspect of gameplay.
Joined January 2009
The Sensor Analysis change looks like it could be welcome. I'll remain cautiously optimistic about it, but please don't mess it up.
One of the primary reasons that engineering is the best shield healer is that it grants so heavy shield damage reduction. That's crucial to survival in PvE and PvP. Science Team doesn't grant that, so it might be that engineering will simply be healing both - hull and shields- while science will still be primarily hull heal and science clearance or science debuffs. Of course, a neat influx of extra shield points together with EPtS or Extend Shields is better than just EpTs or Extend Shields.
You may need to go back to STO before the grand power revamp from snix, a time when science team granted shield damage reduction and EPtS didn't (and wasn't very good, but since shield power also grants damage reduction now, it might still be popular even if you lower the damage reduction, especially if you pair it with a buff to the healing component.)
The whole clusterf*** that is TT is even funnier when you look at its history.
you said it more nicely then i was able to.
@hawk, can you please make sure that new sensor analysis is having synergies with Tac cpt abilites and cannons. I mean who would want sci ship abilities to work on sci skills, or god forbid sci captains. Whatever you do i m cool with it, as long Tac gets to reap the most benefits of it, maybe tie it to a romulan trait?
As Hilbert once said. The original Devs become more demi-god like geniuses of gamedesign with every passing week.
a history of sto pvp: 2010 - 2011
a history of sto pvp: 2012 - 2013
This changes everything, now I have to think about all my builds again. I quite like the change, but I have not yet seen it in practice, so I reserve my possible rants and fears for later.
While crew is currently pointless and it is nice to know Cryptic feels the same. I have had a bit of a think of what the crew system could do.
So, my first suggestion (more will follow over the next few days).
How about if the % of crew you have were to effect the cooldowns on your bridge officer abilities?
So if you lost 10% of your crew, your powers gained 10% on the cooldown.
So a torpedo hits you and takes out 20 crewmen, in a Galaxy, that's nothing you would not feel it but in a Defiant 20 crew would be a big deal as all your powers gain cooldown time.
I would cap this at 50% maximum (though that is my opinion, numbers subject to testing and balance changes), so a 2 minute skill like RSP3, would become a 3 minute skill, a 30 second skill like Tactical Team would become a 45 second skill.
Captain powers would not tie in to this - as we assume your character is always the last man standing on the ship.
Crew resistance and regeneration would need looking at, but weapons that directly take away crew would become more effective (In PvP and when tanking in PvE), escorts would not be so willing to sit tanking due to taking a few hits would really mess with their DPS and cruisers would be more useful (PvE) with threat control skills.
I'm also thinking crew based consoles (bio beds and force fields) would suddenly be handy as well for most ships - for when you do get shot at.
This is my first run at this idea, still rough around the edges but what do you think to idea 1?
Just make sure to give such an AoE heal ability only to Science Vessels and comparable ships. STO really needs a bit more diversity, I am not talking about the "holy trinity", but advantages and disadvantages should become more recognizable. Right now, everybody is a damage dealer in STO. Rather dull... but then there are actually no instances/encounters in the game right now, that would require a group to look any different than the current 5-DDs-power-team...
Sort of "Super-elite" versions of STFs and other group missions could be something to offer players such an experience, where they actually have to fulfill roles of tank/healer/DD. If people do not like that sort of gameplay, they can stick with the current elite-type missions.
Long talk, short meaning: STO is too easy. "Elite" and "Normal" have long become "Easy" and "Beginners", respectively. That AoE heal space ability is probably coming as an universal console for yet another shiny C-store ship, so everything I've said is pointless
STOWiki admin.
I'm in full support of these changes to the teams, and look forward to hearing what will be done to balance Tac Team in the future.