I've heard the very same (invalid) arguments over and over again, when I was still playing EvE Online. An endless stream of ppl telling me I don't really *need* the epensive gear or ships to survive. All PvP-ers, of course. Meanwhile utterly not grasping that I simply *want* the good ships and gear. Has got nothing to do with survival.
It's about investment and trust, though. When something as widely used as the Borg set is not immediately fixed, and left 'as is' for several years, then it becomes reasonable to rely on its functionality as a behavior that was intended. Yes, even when it's good. To then wake up one day and hear all your 16 sets are gonna be nerfded after all, that stings, and it sucks (not necessarily in that particular order). And no amount of PvP-grandstanding about being able to survive *with* the nerf is gonna change that.
Well yes of course it sucks. True, it wasn't working as intended, but it was left like that for a very long time. And yes, a lot of people invested the time to grind to get it. Why they chose to fix it now, who knows? But from what I remember, too, originally the borg set was a mid-point, meant to help you out til you "found" the high-tier STF gear (MACO, Honor Guard, Omega). Perhaps they accidentally borked it when they created a Mk X and Mk XII version for the newer rep system. And maybe they are just now finding that out, after wondering why all the new "elite" enemies are too easy for most people.
Also, someone mentioned that it may have something to do with the upcoming Undine set, and it probably having some kind of hull regen bonus (like most Undine ships do). So yeah, maybe they fixed the Borg set so that their new toy would look more appealing and cause more people to grind for it. Who knows??
So yes, it sucks. But no one can honestly blame pvpers for this. Please. PvP and PvE are both equally affected, and the only ones in control of those changes are...the devs. Yes. Not PvPers. Not PvEers.
That being said, it's still going to be a powerful set bonus, probably one of the better ones in the game, in fact. Because it still only costs 2 pieces of the set. Not 3 or 4. Or 2 or 3 console slots. It's still a great bang for your buck.
One more thing...this IS the PvP Forum. So PvPers talking about survival in PvP with the upcoming changes is acceptable and expected. This should not boggle the mind. :rolleyes:
LOL. I don't hate PvP-ers. I *do* hate some of their arguments, though; like ppl coming out of the woodworks, telling you everthing can be done with blue gear: aka, looking at everything from a purely 'battle' perspective. If you only have a hammer, and all that.
Why don't you simply log into tribble and test it out for yourself? See if the fix actually makes a huge difference. But no, you simply sit here and rant about PvP ruining everything ...
Why, PvP-ers actually do ruin everything. :P Seriously, though, PvP-issues seem to have annoying way to spill over into PvE -- especially when ppl cry for nerfs. But, I actually *did* log on to Tribble, before posting here, and checked out the new Undine battlesphere in my Fleet Dreadnought. Can't say I noticed much of a difference, really; but the Undine are no Voth, don't subnuke you, and have some sort of yellow gravity well ('bubble', rather) that is easily avoided. In short, they offered no real basis to test out the effects of the nerf.
Also, someone mentioned that it may have something to do with the upcoming Undine set, and it probably having some kind of hull regen bonus (like most Undine ships do). So yeah, maybe they fixed the Borg set so that their new toy would look more appealing and cause more people to grind for it. Who knows??
You may well be right about this. And, if so, having an Undine ship + Borg set, even I can see how the whole deal together might become a mite too OP. I just wish Borticus would be a bit more straightforward about it then.
So yes, it sucks. But no one can honestly blame pvpers for this. Please. PvP and PvE are both equally affected, and the only ones in control of those changes are...the devs. Yes. Not PvPers. Not PvEers.
But blaming PvP-ers is sooo much easier! :P
One more thing...this IS the PvP Forum. So PvPers talking about survival in PvP with the upcoming changes is acceptable and expected. This should not boggle the mind. :rolleyes:
A fair point.
N.B. You made a good post. You could have blasted me, but you didn't. I suppose restraint is part of a PvP-er too.
LOL. I don't hate PvP-ers. I *do* hate some of their arguments, though; like ppl coming out of the woodworks, telling you everthing can be done with blue gear: aka, looking at everything from a purely 'battle' perspective. If you only have a hammer, and all that.
Why, PvP-ers actually do ruin everything. :P Seriously, though, PvP-issues seem to have annoying way to spill over into PvE -- especially when ppl cry for nerfs. But, I actually *did* log on to Tribble, before posting here, and checked out the new Undine battlesphere in my Fleet Dreadnought. Can't say I noticed much of a difference, really; but the Undine are no Voth, don't subnuke you, and have some sort of yellow gravity well ('bubble', rather) that is easily avoided. In short, they offered no real basis to test out the effects of the nerf.
With the current state of PvE in STO, all that is needed IS the hammer. Full teams of FAW Scimitards tell you that. Healing? It's fairly useful, mainly used to keep pumping out damage on the off-chance that you get almost 1-shot by a Gate. Science/cc? Nah, just FAW all the things and be done in 2 minutes. The healers and science are MOST useful in PvP. Because players have brains. Players think much better than NPC's.
You may well be right about this. And, if so, having an Undine ship + Borg set, even I can see how the whole deal together might become a mite too OP. I just wish Borticus would be a bit more straightforward about it then.
But blaming PvP-ers is sooo much easier! :P
A fair point.
N.B. You made a good post. You could have blasted me, but you didn't. I suppose restraint is part of a PvP-er too.
And I just got a lot of respect for you, sir
I try to not be hot-headed. Sometimes I don't succeed, lol. :P
Edit: it's late, and I can't type or read. IPhones... Words!
But, I actually *did* log on to Tribble, before posting here, and checked out the new Undine battlesphere in my Fleet Dreadnought. Can't say I noticed much of a difference, really; but the Undine are no Voth, don't subnuke you, and have some sort of yellow gravity well ('bubble', rather) that is easily avoided. In short, they offered no real basis to test out the effects of the nerf.
The NPCs you fight shouldn't actually matter. Just the ship you fly in. Try it with your Mobius on tribble and on holodeck and look for how much the proc ticks. BTW, the borg proc can't be subnuked, as far as i know because it's a 'blue' buff.
It's about investment and trust, though. When something as widely used as the Borg set is not immediately fixed, and left 'as is' for several years, then it becomes reasonable to rely on its functionality as a behavior that was intended.
After a year in the wild or so, Cryptic massively nerfed the Borg shield proc. Another year later, they suddenly decided that they never really wanted the Borg set to be a 4-piece set and by splitting off the console they essentially pulled the plug on the shield proc altogether.
Changing something that obvious after years in the open is certainly bad game design, but with Cryptic it's really not such an unexpected thing.
Also, take a look at just how big of an influence the Borg proc has:
Are these numbers the amount of health gained by that specific power in contrast to other powers or is it the number of uses a specific power is given? It would be interesting to see an aggregated chart where healing is weighted in comparison to the amount that it is actually being used (and by uses i don't mean how many times it has been used in a match, just how many players in a match used it)
Are these numbers the amount of health gained by that specific power in contrast to other powers or is it the number of uses a specific power is given? It would be interesting to see an aggregated chart where healing is weighted in comparison to the amount that it is actually being used.
These charts show the magnitude of the healing. I need to write down the number of ticks of each ability and then I can also show activations (I currently only have total ticks without normalisation for instant/HoT abilities).
These charts show the magnitude of the healing. I need to write down the number of ticks of each ability and then I can also show activations (I currently only have total ticks without normalisation for instant/HoT abilities).
Shouldn't it be sufficient to know if a player in a match used a specific healing ability and how much it did heal? Do that for all players in a match and you should be good. You probably have a couple thousand matches recorded so actually "touching" each tick seems excessive. But if it's easier to code, i didn't say anything. :P
Ah. So you want to know how many players use ability xyz? Like "20% of all players have an Engineering Team"?
No no, you got it right the first time . I'd like to see something like this ([amount of heal of a specific healing power] / [number of uses of that healing power])
Where "number of uses" would be how many players used a healing ability in a match, which could then be expanded to the couple thousand matches you have recorded.
Like i said, you could also count each "tick" of an ability per match but that seems excessive.
What this weighted and aggretated value would show (hopefully) is how out of balance a specific healing power is. For example the valdore console. How much better then EPtS (just in respects of healing of course) is it?
What we have right now simply shows us, that it is being used and a lot of healing is done with it, but it could simply be that the console is just very prevelant in today's meta and it isn't unbalanced at all.
You whiny PvP people! Every time someone is even remotely able to have a good heal, you go cry to a dev to get it nerfed! And now you got my 2-piece Borg set nerfed. Proud of yourself, little man?!
It's high time they pulled the plug on PvP altogether; and the horse you rode in on.
[/rant]
I am just the messenger, I am not sure any of us PvPers have anything to do with the change. It seems they just stumbled over it on their own.
The bug was found after stats showed it healed more than all other hull heals combined. Something was definitively broken, it just took a player's years of data mining the combat logs to get the devs to take a second look. The heal was way over the top. Glad it's being brought back down to something reasonable.
Do you have a Dev Quote on that? Because I have not seen Borticus or AdjudicatorHawk mentioning how they found the bug.
It could very well be they found it when they made another new healing ability and noticed something odd. If I remember correctly, they were recently talking even about removing Crew as a game stat because it affected so little, saying the only change they would need to make would be buffing innate hull healing to compensate - maybe they stumbled upon this when they looked into that.
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Another thought I have is - i wonder how many people struggle in PvE missions just because they don't know they want the Assimilated two-set piece?
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
No no, you got it right the first time . I'd like to see something like this ([amount of heal of a specific healing power] / [number of uses of that healing power])
Where "number of uses" would be how many players used a healing ability in a match, which could then be expanded to the couple thousand matches you have recorded.
Like i said, you could also count each "tick" of an ability per match but that seems excessive.
What this weighted and aggretated value would show (hopefully) is how out of balance a specific healing power is. For example the valdore console. How much better then EPtS (just in respects of healing of course) is it?
What we have right now simply shows us, that it is being used and a lot of healing is done with it, but it could simply be that the console is just very prevelant in today's meta and it isn't unbalanced at all.
I think I finally understand it.
Hopefully this spreadsheet provides the data you want. (The link goes to an Excel file on SkyDrive.)
I have listed Hull and Shield heals, grouped by ability classes and individual abilities. One column is normalised data (total healing divided by number of players who used the ability), the other is total healing over all players. The grouped version is just summing over the individual abilities. One could also normalise by class use, but I'm not sure that this would be a good idea.
Now the problem with that normalised chart is that it shows what percentage an ability would have on a ship that carries one of each ability (or more, due to the data also inculding players who doubled up on abilities). This is of course not meaningful because no ship can equip that. So to see what the averages are on your average ship, you need to erase the numbers in some of rows and get the average ship with abilities x,y and z and then see the impact of abilities.
Currently the borg set looks rather balanced in the normalised data on the left side, but that is deceiving. Once you cut it down to what a regular ship can carry, you'll get closer and closer to the distribution on the right side (unless you look at a full healer type load-out).
This video shows how crazy tanking was with the originally proposed Borg set. (On Tribble before it was first released.) The tanking probably could have been even better had I used EPtS3 and low level hull heals instead of EPtS1 and high level hull heals (and an extend that was useless in this situation). Due to the tribble feedback (that Cryptic actually somewhat listened to in these days) we got the hidden cooldowns for the Borg set. As you can see in the video, the tribble version had essentially 100% uptime on the procs when under fire.
Hopefully this spredsheet provides the data you want. (The link goes to an Excel file on SkyDrive.)
I have listed Hull and Shield heals, grouped by ability classes and individual abilities. One column is normalised data (total healing divided by number of players who used the ability), the other is total healing over all players. The grouped version is just summing over the individual abilities. One could also normalise by class use, but I'm not sure that this would be a good idea.
Now the problem with that normalised chart is that it shows what percentage an ability would have on a ship that carries one of each ability (or more, due to the data also inculding players who doubled up on abilities). This is of course not meaningful because no ship can equip that. So to see what the averages are on your average ship, you need to erase the numbers in some of rows and get the average ship with abilities x,y and z and then see the impact of abilities.
Currently the borg set looks rather balanced in the normalised data on the left side, but that is deceiving. Once you cut it down to what a regular ship can carry, you'll get closer and closer to the distribution on the right side (unless you look at a full healer type load-out).
Thanks a bunch, that is VERY helpful. Now i'd just need to know what ratio of players double up on those abilities, then you could more accurately recreate what the healing of a specific ship would look like. Nevertheless, very much appreciated. Maybe you could link this table somewhere on your leaderboard page.
Now i'd just need to know what ratio of players double up on those abilities, then you could more accurately recreate what the healing of a specific ship would look like.
While I can detect it when a player uses two different versions of an ability (e.g. ET2+3), I cannot see if he has two copies of the same ability. And due to all the cooldown tinkering with doffs, it's also impossible to guess this from cooldowns. In essence, the data uses some kind of "average number of copies".
While I can detect it when a player uses two different versions of an ability (e.g. ET2+3), I cannot see if he has two copies of the same ability. And due to all the cooldown tinkering with doffs, it's also impossible to guess this from cooldowns. In essence, the data uses some kind of "average number of copies".
You could actually calculate it from cooldowns, since even with doffs and other cd reducing elements you'd multiply the healing power by X. X would be an element of (1..2]. Say you have two copies of A2B running you'd be nearly at 2 (at least for those 15 global cd abilities), maybe 1.9 with two copies of an ability you'd actually be at 2. You "just" need to find the average (normalised) value for X. The problem i see is actually determening the start of an ability, at least for abilities with multiple ticks, like HE. Well you could probably compare the timestamps and see if more than 15 sec have gone by between each tick.
On the other hand all of that would actually require everyone to constantly activate each and every healing ability when they are off GCD, so that the values would not be completely skewed. I really wonder what value X has right now on avereage for a certain ability, given that players usually situationally activate their abilities even if they have 2 copies available.
Hm, they made the change so that the set bonus would only proc when a certain percentage of hull was reached (or was that for the shields?), but the perceived activation of the set seems to be rather random (already activating when 95% hull strength is reached). Maybe that's what's contributing to the massive healing value of the set-bonus?
I think what you provided will completely do ..., but could you also do a table for shield heals please? :P
New idea: you could actually work resistances provided by abilities into the healing calculation. Consider it an overheal. Every damage percentage mitigated by the addtional resist during the abilities duration could be counted as a heal. This would illustrate even more why abilities like HE, TSS and EPtS are so important. Subukes or other stripping effects could be ignored, since you're usually dead anyways after that happen, hence no more damage received.
Sorry for text walling you here, but it's fun to ponder such things.
New idea: you could actually work resistances provided by abilities into the healing calculation. Consider it an overheal. Every damage percentage mitigated by the addtional resist during the abilities duration could be counted as a heal.
I think it is basically impossible to guess how much resist a heal has provided. It's scaling with aux and skills and the logged value is affected by armor consoles, skills and invisible abilities (e.g. Polarize Hull). I don't think one can reverse-engineer the resist value of a specific ability.
On tribble it's giving me 1,600 per tick, which is 1,000 less then what I'm getting on holodeck. So for me it's basically a free high aux HE2 (heal not cleanse obviously) every minute, which is a little less absurd than what it was before. Still a lot though.
I suspect it'll still be the number one 2-piece bonus.
Even HE III at max Aux tops off at about 1350 per tick. 1600 per tick is still much better than any other heal out there, not to mention to achieve this, the Borg Hull heal proc is not Aux dependent, while it's hard to activate HE at maximum Aux every single time. I think they need to bring this down another notch, otherwise, the average Borg Hull heal proc over time will still be close to double of what high end HE will do.
It's funny how neither the PvP or PvE folk are happy about this change.
Some of us purposely avoided the Borg set knowing intuitively that it is a broken toy and thus giving out an unfair advantage. It seems to me, based on the feedback in this thread, most pvpers know this as well - not exactly rocket science to figure it out even without mancom's excellent data / stats. Even the current users of this set acknowledge it's absurd but there is always going to be a few who will insist on using a broken toy and claim they represent everyone's opinion.
Hopefully this spreadsheet provides the data you want. (The link goes to an Excel file on SkyDrive.)
I have listed Hull and Shield heals, grouped by ability classes and individual abilities. One column is normalised data (total healing divided by number of players who used the ability), the other is total healing over all players. The grouped version is just summing over the individual abilities. One could also normalise by class use, but I'm not sure that this would be a good idea.
Now the problem with that normalised chart is that it shows what percentage an ability would have on a ship that carries one of each ability (or more, due to the data also inculding players who doubled up on abilities). This is of course not meaningful because no ship can equip that. So to see what the averages are on your average ship, you need to erase the numbers in some of rows and get the average ship with abilities x,y and z and then see the impact of abilities.
Currently the borg set looks rather balanced in the normalised data on the left side, but that is deceiving. Once you cut it down to what a regular ship can carry, you'll get closer and closer to the distribution on the right side (unless you look at a full healer type load-out).
mancom, thanks for your hard work in compiling these data. You also make it very easy to understand and follow. I wish the Dev take note of these charts and tables because as it stands, Borg Hull heal proc is still way out of the line, despite some changes on Tribble.
My hunch is that the Dev are afraid of cutting the Borg hull heal proc down too much because they know many people are using it and some people like to knowingly use broken items.
Your data mining provided the irrefutable evidence that this set bonus is bugged. Prior to that, all I had was an intuition based on tests where my target would suddenly become almost unkillable after using the Borg 2 piece set whereas the exact same target would die in less 2 minutes just moments ago where the only changes were the Engine and Deflector used.
I think it is basically impossible to guess how much resist a heal has provided. It's scaling with aux and skills and the logged value is affected by armor consoles, skills and invisible abilities (e.g. Polarize Hull). I don't think one can reverse-engineer the resist value of a specific ability.
Yeah, even if you would look at the increase in damage mitigation during the up-time of an ability it would constantly fluctuate due to resistance buffs and debuffs you receive or even being overcapped on resistances. The best you could hope to achieve is displaying the average resistances of a player during a match, which will also vastly differ between career and ship choice. Hm, so much data, but still something is always missing when actually calculating precisely what you want. I wish they would actually write the Aux level into the combatlog and also every activatable ability. Can't be that hard. Each time you receive the acknowledge from the server, that you have succesfully activated an ability it will be written down in the combatlog with a timestamp. Powerlevels would also have to be transmitted, so they too could be written in the log.
BTW: Wow the valdore console would nearly double my shield healing power if i could equip it on my current ship ... and if i would actually ever play a romulan.
My hunch is that the Dev are afraid of cutting the Borg hull heal proc down too much because they know many people are using it and some people like to knowingly use broken items.
Uh-huh. Like the Valdore Console, you mean? Or double-tapping BO3? Or beta-stacking on your Recluse? Please! PvP-ers are known, en masse, for exploiting any and all broken things they can find. But you probably chalk those off as being 'knowledgeable.' So then it doesn't count, right?!
Uh-huh. Like the Valdore Console, you mean? Or double-tapping BO3? Or beta-stacking on your Recluse? Please! PvP-ers are known, en masse, for exploiting any and all broken things they can find. But you probably chalk those off as being 'knowledgeable.' So then it doesn't count, right?!
Each person pretty much draws his own line in what they believe to be broken or an exploit. When FAW mass proced every on-hit ability, did everybody suddenly stop using it? Please realize, that it's not the stupid A.I. anyone is fighting here, but people and when other people are involved egos are too. So why not find the most broken mechnic and exploit it to no end? I'm not rationalising or condoning those actions, but when you try to get the most out of a set game enviroment you inevitably discover broken stuff. To you use it is each individuals prerogative, so please stop with your generalization.
Not trying to troll but a lot of what I'm getting is hyperbole "this set is bugged!" or "This set is broken!". Utter bullocks.
I also pretty much can tl;dr this whole post to "Borg 2-Pc is making it hard to kill in PvP. Plz nerf."
Nope, the devs found a faulty mechanic and corrected it. No player actually gave any direct input here. I think some kind of internal hull modifier (like the shield modifier) affected the calculation of the set bonus and so smaller ships got shafted and bigger ships got even more out of the set. Now smaller ships are supposedly better off, while the bigger ones have a bit less healing available to them.
But what it always comes down to when i hear people moaning about a balance issue "nerfing" an item: people invest in a specific item; the item gets nerfed; people feel that their "investment" is now nullified; and subsequently get pissed ...
Nobody wants the set to be unusable, but actually balancing equipment and power brings one important ability to the player: choice. If there is always a best in slot, why even try anything different, right?
Please realize, that it's not the stupid A.I. anyone is fighting here, but people and when other people are involved egos are too. So why not find the most broken mechnic and exploit it to no end? I'm not rationalising or condoning those actions, but when you try to get the most out of a set game enviroment you inevitably discover broken stuff.
That's all fine. But then I don't want to hear "some people like to knowingly use broken items," as as an excuse to get one particular item nerfed. If looking "to get the most out of a set game enviroment" is okay, then so was using the pre-nerfed Borg set. You can't have your cookie and eat it.
Comments
Well yes of course it sucks. True, it wasn't working as intended, but it was left like that for a very long time. And yes, a lot of people invested the time to grind to get it. Why they chose to fix it now, who knows? But from what I remember, too, originally the borg set was a mid-point, meant to help you out til you "found" the high-tier STF gear (MACO, Honor Guard, Omega). Perhaps they accidentally borked it when they created a Mk X and Mk XII version for the newer rep system. And maybe they are just now finding that out, after wondering why all the new "elite" enemies are too easy for most people.
Also, someone mentioned that it may have something to do with the upcoming Undine set, and it probably having some kind of hull regen bonus (like most Undine ships do). So yeah, maybe they fixed the Borg set so that their new toy would look more appealing and cause more people to grind for it. Who knows??
So yes, it sucks. But no one can honestly blame pvpers for this. Please. PvP and PvE are both equally affected, and the only ones in control of those changes are...the devs. Yes. Not PvPers. Not PvEers.
That being said, it's still going to be a powerful set bonus, probably one of the better ones in the game, in fact. Because it still only costs 2 pieces of the set. Not 3 or 4. Or 2 or 3 console slots. It's still a great bang for your buck.
One more thing...this IS the PvP Forum. So PvPers talking about survival in PvP with the upcoming changes is acceptable and expected. This should not boggle the mind. :rolleyes:
LOL. I don't hate PvP-ers. I *do* hate some of their arguments, though; like ppl coming out of the woodworks, telling you everthing can be done with blue gear: aka, looking at everything from a purely 'battle' perspective. If you only have a hammer, and all that.
Why, PvP-ers actually do ruin everything. :P Seriously, though, PvP-issues seem to have annoying way to spill over into PvE -- especially when ppl cry for nerfs. But, I actually *did* log on to Tribble, before posting here, and checked out the new Undine battlesphere in my Fleet Dreadnought. Can't say I noticed much of a difference, really; but the Undine are no Voth, don't subnuke you, and have some sort of yellow gravity well ('bubble', rather) that is easily avoided. In short, they offered no real basis to test out the effects of the nerf.
You may well be right about this. And, if so, having an Undine ship + Borg set, even I can see how the whole deal together might become a mite too OP. I just wish Borticus would be a bit more straightforward about it then.
But blaming PvP-ers is sooo much easier! :P
A fair point.
N.B. You made a good post. You could have blasted me, but you didn't. I suppose restraint is part of a PvP-er too.
With the current state of PvE in STO, all that is needed IS the hammer. Full teams of FAW Scimitards tell you that. Healing? It's fairly useful, mainly used to keep pumping out damage on the off-chance that you get almost 1-shot by a Gate. Science/cc? Nah, just FAW all the things and be done in 2 minutes. The healers and science are MOST useful in PvP. Because players have brains. Players think much better than NPC's.
And I just got a lot of respect for you, sir
I try to not be hot-headed. Sometimes I don't succeed, lol. :P
Edit: it's late, and I can't type or read. IPhones... Words!
The NPCs you fight shouldn't actually matter. Just the ship you fly in. Try it with your Mobius on tribble and on holodeck and look for how much the proc ticks. BTW, the borg proc can't be subnuked, as far as i know because it's a 'blue' buff.
Changing something that obvious after years in the open is certainly bad game design, but with Cryptic it's really not such an unexpected thing.
Also, take a look at just how big of an influence the Borg proc has:
Are these numbers the amount of health gained by that specific power in contrast to other powers or is it the number of uses a specific power is given? It would be interesting to see an aggregated chart where healing is weighted in comparison to the amount that it is actually being used (and by uses i don't mean how many times it has been used in a match, just how many players in a match used it)
Shouldn't it be sufficient to know if a player in a match used a specific healing ability and how much it did heal? Do that for all players in a match and you should be good. You probably have a couple thousand matches recorded so actually "touching" each tick seems excessive. But if it's easier to code, i didn't say anything. :P
There's too much fantasy in my sci-fi.
No no, you got it right the first time
Where "number of uses" would be how many players used a healing ability in a match, which could then be expanded to the couple thousand matches you have recorded.
Like i said, you could also count each "tick" of an ability per match but that seems excessive.
What this weighted and aggretated value would show (hopefully) is how out of balance a specific healing power is. For example the valdore console. How much better then EPtS (just in respects of healing of course) is it?
What we have right now simply shows us, that it is being used and a lot of healing is done with it, but it could simply be that the console is just very prevelant in today's meta and it isn't unbalanced at all.
I am just the messenger, I am not sure any of us PvPers have anything to do with the change. It seems they just stumbled over it on their own.
Do you have a Dev Quote on that? Because I have not seen Borticus or AdjudicatorHawk mentioning how they found the bug.
It could very well be they found it when they made another new healing ability and noticed something odd. If I remember correctly, they were recently talking even about removing Crew as a game stat because it affected so little, saying the only change they would need to make would be buffing innate hull healing to compensate - maybe they stumbled upon this when they looked into that.
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Another thought I have is - i wonder how many people struggle in PvE missions just because they don't know they want the Assimilated two-set piece?
Hopefully this spreadsheet provides the data you want. (The link goes to an Excel file on SkyDrive.)
I have listed Hull and Shield heals, grouped by ability classes and individual abilities. One column is normalised data (total healing divided by number of players who used the ability), the other is total healing over all players. The grouped version is just summing over the individual abilities. One could also normalise by class use, but I'm not sure that this would be a good idea.
Now the problem with that normalised chart is that it shows what percentage an ability would have on a ship that carries one of each ability (or more, due to the data also inculding players who doubled up on abilities). This is of course not meaningful because no ship can equip that. So to see what the averages are on your average ship, you need to erase the numbers in some of rows and get the average ship with abilities x,y and z and then see the impact of abilities.
Currently the borg set looks rather balanced in the normalised data on the left side, but that is deceiving. Once you cut it down to what a regular ship can carry, you'll get closer and closer to the distribution on the right side (unless you look at a full healer type load-out).
This video shows how crazy tanking was with the originally proposed Borg set. (On Tribble before it was first released.) The tanking probably could have been even better had I used EPtS3 and low level hull heals instead of EPtS1 and high level hull heals (and an extend that was useless in this situation). Due to the tribble feedback (that Cryptic actually somewhat listened to in these days) we got the hidden cooldowns for the Borg set. As you can see in the video, the tribble version had essentially 100% uptime on the procs when under fire.
Thanks a bunch, that is VERY helpful. Now i'd just need to know what ratio of players double up on those abilities, then you could more accurately recreate what the healing of a specific ship would look like. Nevertheless, very much appreciated. Maybe you could link this table somewhere on your leaderboard page.
You could actually calculate it from cooldowns, since even with doffs and other cd reducing elements you'd multiply the healing power by X. X would be an element of (1..2]. Say you have two copies of A2B running you'd be nearly at 2 (at least for those 15 global cd abilities), maybe 1.9 with two copies of an ability you'd actually be at 2. You "just" need to find the average (normalised) value for X. The problem i see is actually determening the start of an ability, at least for abilities with multiple ticks, like HE. Well you could probably compare the timestamps and see if more than 15 sec have gone by between each tick.
On the other hand all of that would actually require everyone to constantly activate each and every healing ability when they are off GCD, so that the values would not be completely skewed. I really wonder what value X has right now on avereage for a certain ability, given that players usually situationally activate their abilities even if they have 2 copies available.
Hm, they made the change so that the set bonus would only proc when a certain percentage of hull was reached (or was that for the shields?), but the perceived activation of the set seems to be rather random (already activating when 95% hull strength is reached). Maybe that's what's contributing to the massive healing value of the set-bonus?
I think what you provided will completely do ..., but could you also do a table for shield heals please? :P
New idea: you could actually work resistances provided by abilities into the healing calculation. Consider it an overheal. Every damage percentage mitigated by the addtional resist during the abilities duration could be counted as a heal. This would illustrate even more why abilities like HE, TSS and EPtS are so important. Subukes or other stripping effects could be ignored, since you're usually dead anyways after that happen, hence no more damage received.
Sorry for text walling you here, but it's fun to ponder such things.
I think it is basically impossible to guess how much resist a heal has provided. It's scaling with aux and skills and the logged value is affected by armor consoles, skills and invisible abilities (e.g. Polarize Hull). I don't think one can reverse-engineer the resist value of a specific ability.
Even HE III at max Aux tops off at about 1350 per tick. 1600 per tick is still much better than any other heal out there, not to mention to achieve this, the Borg Hull heal proc is not Aux dependent, while it's hard to activate HE at maximum Aux every single time. I think they need to bring this down another notch, otherwise, the average Borg Hull heal proc over time will still be close to double of what high end HE will do.
Some of us purposely avoided the Borg set knowing intuitively that it is a broken toy and thus giving out an unfair advantage. It seems to me, based on the feedback in this thread, most pvpers know this as well - not exactly rocket science to figure it out even without mancom's excellent data / stats. Even the current users of this set acknowledge it's absurd but there is always going to be a few who will insist on using a broken toy and claim they represent everyone's opinion.
mancom, thanks for your hard work in compiling these data. You also make it very easy to understand and follow. I wish the Dev take note of these charts and tables because as it stands, Borg Hull heal proc is still way out of the line, despite some changes on Tribble.
My hunch is that the Dev are afraid of cutting the Borg hull heal proc down too much because they know many people are using it and some people like to knowingly use broken items.
Your data mining provided the irrefutable evidence that this set bonus is bugged. Prior to that, all I had was an intuition based on tests where my target would suddenly become almost unkillable after using the Borg 2 piece set whereas the exact same target would die in less 2 minutes just moments ago where the only changes were the Engine and Deflector used.
Yeah, even if you would look at the increase in damage mitigation during the up-time of an ability it would constantly fluctuate due to resistance buffs and debuffs you receive or even being overcapped on resistances. The best you could hope to achieve is displaying the average resistances of a player during a match, which will also vastly differ between career and ship choice. Hm, so much data, but still something is always missing when actually calculating precisely what you want. I wish they would actually write the Aux level into the combatlog and also every activatable ability. Can't be that hard. Each time you receive the acknowledge from the server, that you have succesfully activated an ability it will be written down in the combatlog with a timestamp. Powerlevels would also have to be transmitted, so they too could be written in the log.
BTW: Wow the valdore console would nearly double my shield healing power if i could equip it on my current ship ... and if i would actually ever play a romulan.
Uh-huh. Like the Valdore Console, you mean? Or double-tapping BO3? Or beta-stacking on your Recluse? Please! PvP-ers are known, en masse, for exploiting any and all broken things they can find. But you probably chalk those off as being 'knowledgeable.' So then it doesn't count, right?!
I also pretty much can tl;dr this whole post to "Borg 2-Pc is making it hard to kill in PvP. Plz nerf."
^^ And that, man-friend, is the mother of all inconvenient truths!
Each person pretty much draws his own line in what they believe to be broken or an exploit. When FAW mass proced every on-hit ability, did everybody suddenly stop using it? Please realize, that it's not the stupid A.I. anyone is fighting here, but people and when other people are involved egos are too. So why not find the most broken mechnic and exploit it to no end? I'm not rationalising or condoning those actions, but when you try to get the most out of a set game enviroment you inevitably discover broken stuff. To you use it is each individuals prerogative, so please stop with your generalization.
Nope, the devs found a faulty mechanic and corrected it. No player actually gave any direct input here. I think some kind of internal hull modifier (like the shield modifier) affected the calculation of the set bonus and so smaller ships got shafted and bigger ships got even more out of the set. Now smaller ships are supposedly better off, while the bigger ones have a bit less healing available to them.
But what it always comes down to when i hear people moaning about a balance issue "nerfing" an item: people invest in a specific item; the item gets nerfed; people feel that their "investment" is now nullified; and subsequently get pissed ...
Nobody wants the set to be unusable, but actually balancing equipment and power brings one important ability to the player: choice. If there is always a best in slot, why even try anything different, right?
That's all fine. But then I don't want to hear "some people like to knowingly use broken items," as as an excuse to get one particular item nerfed. If looking "to get the most out of a set game enviroment" is okay, then so was using the pre-nerfed Borg set. You can't have your cookie and eat it.