Actually having 8/8/4 makes more sense than just having 8/4.
You said it yourself, people like having specific builds, but switching powers between ground is just tedious and does not actually add anything to the game experience.
Yes, but I don't enjoy making sure all 16 powers are what I want them to be. I'm fine with 4/4/4/4
Why not just 8 passives, and 4 actives? People like having dedicated characters and because the way the skills and traits are set up you're either great at one or mediocre at both.
I am hoping that Cryptic is planning to move away from dedicated characters. The fact that dedicated characters exist is one of the biggest detriments to players looking to play within Ground PvP. The skill tree 44,000 skill point gap between ground and space typically results in most players going 66,000 in ground and then forgetting the ground game. They never pick it up because ground is so much more difficult without a full skill spec and they don't bother trying it because it may be something they do not enjoy.
However, the good news about this is that we're changing Species Traits to work the same way Reputation Traits work. That means you'll be able to change your Trait build for free without worrying about hoarding Trait Respecs. It also means you can try out new builds and explore the possibilities of gameplay at no cost other than thinking about your build. I'm hoping this makes Trait deckbuilding a lot more fun for a lot more people. This also means that if you want to spend a couple hours playing Ground content, you're able to spec out for that, then change your spec when you go back to Space later that day.
Is this a prelude to a speration of ground and space in respects to skill point allocation and traits? You already made it possible for the reputation system and the new system for traits is kind of a workaround. So what about future changes to skill point distribution. Will a complete split between the ground and space skillpoint-pool ever happen?
This is wonderful news Hawk, thanks for these changes, I just have two questions. Firstly, have you thought about allowing us to respec anytime while putting a cooldown on another respec? For example, putting a 15 minute cooldown on reputation trait and species trait respecs would significantly limit the ability to exploit battle cloak to cycle traits. Additionally, it would still allow players to run through ground content before jumping into space content (and vice versa).
Secondly, could you please put an Energy Credit cost on respeccing species traits? It would place a sink on Energy Credits and it would give players more of a value on having Energy Credits. I think that would also be quite nice for something like a skill tree respec token: 2,500,000 Energy Credits for a skill tree respec, 25,000 for a species trait respec, and free reputation trait respecs.
Yeah, that would be nice to have in the long run. I really hope they don't drop us down to 4 space species traits and 4 ground species traits. Reputation traits are one thing, I can work around that fact, but species traits - especially for Ground PvP - have greatly enhanced the character customization options within the ground game.
Capping traits was a very wise decision from a development perspective. Having what was effectively an unlimited number of traits over time was a surefire way to hinder the ability for new players to get up to speed with older level 50s. 4/4/4 may seem limiting, I even disliked it at first, but I decided I liked the change the more I thought about it. The new system will significantly limit the power creep and that is something we badly needed ingame.
Thats fine. Then I'll just play once a week or every two weeks for 10 mins. Since there is no point to do the reputation and Cryptic won't make any of the content harder.
Thats fine. Then I'll just play once a week or every two weeks for 10 mins. Since there is no point to do the reputation and Cryptic won't make any of the content harder.
No. Actually, since the content hasn't change. I only played PVP and STFS in elite mode the last year. So, my build it meant to play against high DPS, alpha strikes, and anything else a PVP player wants to do.
Thanks for the suggestion but it's not going work. Today was my first day I have not played STO in a year so I won't be missing anything. I started to cut my time down to maybe 10 or 5 mins the last 2 weeks as soon as I heard about the reputation change.
I am hoping that Cryptic is planning to move away from dedicated characters. The fact that dedicated characters exist is one of the biggest detriments to players looking to play within Ground PvP. The skill tree 44,000 skill point gap between ground and space typically results in most players going 66,000 in ground and then forgetting the ground game. They never pick it up because ground is so much more difficult without a full skill spec and they don't bother trying it because it may be something they do not enjoy.
Two words: Reputation gear.
Ground in this game isn't popular. Source queue numbers.
There are far superior games out there for a ground combat experience.
Why should players who have no desire to play ground be forced into taking anything ground that they have no intention of using?
Like I said any future reputation gear will have to be far superior to what is currently available to make me bother, which would defeat the purpose of "we doin this 2 eliminate power creepz".
Ground in this game isn't popular. Source queue numbers. There are far superior games out there for a ground combat experience.
Last I checked, none of those other games are Star Trek themed. Yes, most of the playerbase prefers Space to Ground because Star Trek's primary focus was space exploration. That said, many of us are looking for an away team experience in addition to Space combat.
Ground PvP could be highly enjoyable with just a few new new maps with a more open area. The biggest problem with Ground PvP at the moment is how limiting it is to player movement. Could you imagine a firefight on new Earth Spacedock? That map is so open and would be perfect for such a thing. There is plenty of cover, but the map has enough open spaces to maneuver and engage in an all out battle.
Why should players who have no desire to play ground be forced into taking anything ground that they have no intention of using?
Your argument is circular reasoning. Lacking ground enhancing slots to use ground bonuses in the first place would give any player another reason to avoid ground gameplay if they are already optimized for space gameplay.
Like I said any future reputation gear will have to be far superior to what is currently available to make me bother, which would defeat the purpose of "we doin this 2 eliminate power creepz".
Reputation gear can open up additional options for different forms of player builds. You don't need to have superior gear in order to provide additional build variance.
Capping traits was a very wise decision from a development perspective. Having what was effectively an unlimited number of traits over time was a surefire way to hinder the ability for new players to get up to speed with older level 50s. 4/4/4 may seem limiting, I even disliked it at first, but I decided I liked the change the more I thought about it. The new system will significantly limit the power creep and that is something we badly needed ingame.
This is so blatantly false. The rep passives were increased. 3% crit chance is now 5% crit chance. 10% crit severity is now 20% crit severity. The power creep is INCREASED and not decreased. I do way more damage on Tribble then on Holodeck. If i'm doing 30k dps and a newb is doing 3k dps that's a gap of 27k dps. If we both increased our dps by 20% i'm doing 36k dps and the newb is doing 3,600 dps and the gap is now 32,400dps. So the gap increased by 5,400dps. Whereas previously this would have been slightly over 1/2 that amount. The rep changes increases the gap when we need to decrease it.
Granted power creep is mainly using a leech console. Getting weapon power well above 125, and getting within 1km of the target. Player skill plays a large part as well. But the only thing the rep changes did was increase the gap. It's so obvious i'm amazed people comment with a positive view. I'm quite shocked and
This is so blatantly false. The rep passives were increased. 3% crit chance is now 5% crit chance. 10% crit severity is now 20% crit severity. The power creep is INCREASED and not decreased. I do way more damage on Tribble then on Holodeck. If i'm doing 30k dps and a newb is doing 3k dps that's a gap of 27k dps. If we both increased our dps by 20% i'm doing 36k dps and the newb is doing 3,600 dps and the gap is now 32,400dps. So the gap increased by 5,400dps. Whereas previously this would have been slightly over 1/2 that amount. The rep changes increases the gap when we need to decrease it.
Last I checked, you will be limited in the future. If you want to take another reputation passive, then you will be forced to deslot one of them. This limits the amount of power creep that may be used at any given moment in time.
Last I checked, none of those other games are Star Trek themed. Yes, most of the playerbase prefers Space to Ground because Star Trek's primary focus was space exploration. That said, many of us are looking for an away team experience in addition to Space combat.
Ground PvP could be highly enjoyable with just a few new new maps with a more open area. The biggest problem with Ground PvP at the moment is how limiting it is to player movement. Could you imagine a firefight on new Earth Spacedock? That map is so open and would be perfect for such a thing. There is plenty of cover, but the map has enough open spaces to maneuver and engage in an all out battle.
Your argument is circular reasoning. Lacking ground enhancing slots to use ground bonuses in the first place would give any player another reason to avoid ground gameplay if they are already optimized for space gameplay.
Reputation gear can open up additional options for different forms of player builds. You don't need to have superior gear in order to provide additional build variance.
That is why dedicated characters work. If you want to play ground you can do so well. If you want to play space you can do so well. In my opinion players shouldn't be forced to carry traits and skills for gameplay that they have no interest in.
Superior gear is just that, superior. I personally only use the most damage effective gear all around. So in order for any new rep system's gear to appeal to me, the gear has to be better than the gear I am using. There are a lot of people with this mindset as well, to use the best build all the time using the best gear. Whether or not new reputation gear boosts some bad build simply doesn't matter to players with this mentality.
In theory if space and ground were separated completely, each having independent skill points and trait slots that don't take away from what is already slotted, I wouldn't have any problems with that. People can play the game however they want to. I personally find ground in this game to be not worth playing, but if someone else wants to, then by all means. But I do not think that anything should be taken away from the way I enjoy the game, just because someone else wants something different.
Basically if dedicated characters are going to be changed, make it so they can do both well instead of mashing space and ground together.
Superior gear is just that, superior. I personally only use the most damage effective gear all around. So in order for any new rep system's gear to appeal to me, the gear has to be better than the gear I am using. There are a lot of people with this mindset as well, to use the best build all the time using the best gear. Whether or not new reputation gear boosts some bad build simply doesn't matter to players with this mentality.
The things is, there is no one single gear set that is better than all the rest.
In theory if space and ground were separated completely, each having independent skill points and trait slots that don't take away from what is already slotted, I wouldn't have any problems with that. People can play the game however they want to. I personally find ground in this game to be not worth playing, but if someone else wants to, then by all means. But I do not think that anything should be taken away from the way I enjoy the game, just because someone else wants something different.
Basically if dedicated characters are going to be changed, make it so they can do both well instead of mashing space and ground together.
That is exactly what I've been advocating. Ground and Space should have separate pools for all aspects of the game. It would ideally make players more willing to invest in and play both areas.
The things is, there is no one single gear set that is better than all the rest.
That is exactly what I've been advocating. Ground and Space should have separate pools for all aspects of the game. It would ideally make players more willing to invest in and play both areas.
Premade gear like 2-3 pieces from a reputation system all together? If so I could almost buy into that, if it weren't for the two Borg Sets.
But player organized gear, yeah there's effective and not so effective combinations that can be put together.
Take for example the Romulan Engines. Best engines in the game for damage as they boost attack patterns. Combine that with the best offensive deflector, the elite fleet deflector that boosts accuracy among other things both offensive and defensive. Then throw in a fleet shield, or if you really want to go all the way offensively the Nukara/Solanae shields that can reflect damage.
Now let's compare that with say a player using the Reman Deflector, the Nukara Engines, and the Dyson shield.
Assume for the sake of argument that the rest of the build is identical on both players, which one on paper out preforms the other damage wise?
Either way, for myself gear and passives in the future reputations to come will have to be more than just a little bit better than what I already have to make me bother working for it.
I like the fact they don't cap players traits and learned skills. Hell if you lose a ship without insaurance it will blow. It should be the same in STO, you get your ship blown up. You just end up in a escape pod. Then you end up in spacedock. Next you have to request a new ship if you don't have one in your inventory or buy a new one.
Hell no. Others have brought that up on the forums and the backlash is always the same: NOBODY wants to lose everything they worked hard for permanently upon death. That is a stupid idea. How is that gonna work if you're stuck in spacedock with no ship, no c-store ships unlocked, and no funds to buy a replacement ship at all? You'd be completely at a loss. Look at the backlash about limiting our reputation powers. That's something, in a sense, being taken away by limiting how many powers we can take compared to now, and most are completely against the idea.
I've been seeing this TRIBBLE pop up lately. This is NOT Eve Online, this is STAR TREK ONLINE. I'm getting sick of seeing people making suggestions "but eve has this and eve has that and STO should be exactly the same". No it shouldn't. First of all Eve Online is a completely different game. Second, Cryptic doesn't own the rights to anything of that game so they can't go around making things in STO to be exactly like Eve without worrying about possible lawsuits for copyright/trademark infringement.
You want permanent character death and the chance to permanently lose everything you worked months/years to obtain? Go play Eve then. We don't want that kind of garbage here.
The things is, there is no one single gear set that is better than all the rest.
That is exactly what I've been advocating. Ground and Space should have separate pools for all aspects of the game. It would ideally make players more willing to invest in and play both areas.
Not a bad idea. I like it. Having space skill points and ground skill points separate with us having so many points to distribute in each area would be nice. That way the "I HATE GROUND COMBATS" players don't have to worry about ground skills while having at least the same amount of space skill points we have now. Currently we can only put so many points into space skills and so many into ground skills, but the skill points aren't separate. This would leave it open to max out your space skills with enough points to make use of your ground skills if you wish to use them.
Because as it is now, if you hit the cap on space skills, you won't have a whole lot left over to work with for ground if you want to put 6 ranks or so into Admiral rank skills. You'd have little left to put into lower ranked skills making ground combat not feasible unless you spec for both ground and space at the same time.
366,000 total skill points with the space cap at 300,000 and ground at 100,000. Sure you could hit your space cap and have 66,000 skill points for ground and it may seem like a lot, but it isn't enough. It takes 3,000 skill points per rank for Admiral level skills, so if you want to put 6 ranks into both Admiral level ground skills, that's 36,000 skill points right there. You won't have much left to put 6 or more ranks into very many other ground skills.
Last I checked, you will be limited in the future. If you want to take another reputation passive, then you will be forced to deslot one of them. This limits the amount of power creep that may be used at any given moment in time.
The point he was making is that comparing the 8 passives on holodeck to the 4 passives on tribble, the 4 you do MORE DPS, and therefor the 4 increases the power creep even worse than it already is.
That is the reason i was advocating for an 8/8/4 cap system removing ALL the buffs that this system added so the levels stay as they are now instead of increasing. Now I'm all for more DPS, but the amount of extra DPS this system added was insane, especially when the whole point of it was to lower it. And now they're going to nerf those perks so we may not even be getting much of a bonus for losing 50% of what we earned.
I still believe that the only solution to this that will make the players happy is the 8/8/4 caps and no buffs. But the devs have now said that that won't happen, so we'll have to take this as it is and cue the massive amount of rage on the forums from everyone who didn't read the site or this.
And then when most likely over 70% of the players completely ignore the undine rep since there is no reason to do it with no slots for powers and no items that are good for anything other than anti-undine, MAYBE then the devs will realize that 4/4/4/buffs was a mistake.
I've written over a dozen paragraphs explaining it but if they want to still test it out that's on them. And who knows maybe i'm wrong. But the point of this system was to curb power creep and it dosn't do that, and it gives people no incentive to do future reps since they most likely already have the 4 powers they're going to use already.
In my fleet of almsot 400 members i have polled a good 75 and 60 of them said that they are goint to just do the undine missions a couple times to experience them and ignore the entire rep because they're not going to get anything out of it so what's the point.
Yes, it's unpleasant to lose the use of powers. We know that, and we wish we'd launched with the system built for the scalability we desired from it. That's definitely a big takeaway here for us. But in terms of the system we're making here, 4/4/4 is the better design.
For me its not the matter of the powers and what they do its the principal of personally letting it go and sucking it up the first 200 times something like this was done. Although after grinding up those reps on every character I have pretty much over the course of the existence of the game. It has just been a continuous trend of grind grind and then we at Cryptic will then remove the bar to knock you down a few pegs and start over in a never ending cycle. So pretty much the blog about it was my last day to ever play sto.
Edit: Now if they were to do something where I don't lose anything I grinded for on so many characters and its reasonably balanced for what they aim is even though the sources of the power creep isn't even being scratched with this revamp lol. Plus some ppl cry out that every mmo does this but they don't completely rip stuff away they may nerf or buff a certain power but not remove it from you completely which is what this has done even with these magical 4/4/4 stuff is still over 200 passives lost for me lol. Someone at Cryptic says ha they say doom to this game they haven't seen anything yet we are gonna make this ghost town online!
Hell no. Others have brought that up on the forums and the backlash is always the same: NOBODY wants to lose everything they worked hard for permanently upon death. That is a stupid idea. How is that gonna work if you're stuck in spacedock with no ship, no c-store ships unlocked, and no funds to buy a replacement ship at all? You'd be completely at a loss. Look at the backlash about limiting our reputation powers. That's something, in a sense, being taken away by limiting how many powers we can take compared to now, and most are completely against the idea.
I've been seeing this TRIBBLE pop up lately. This is NOT Eve Online, this is STAR TREK ONLINE. I'm getting sick of seeing people making suggestions "but eve has this and eve has that and STO should be exactly the same". No it shouldn't. First of all Eve Online is a completely different game. Second, Cryptic doesn't own the rights to anything of that game so they can't go around making things in STO to be exactly like Eve without worrying about possible lawsuits for copyright/trademark infringement.
You want permanent character death and the chance to permanently lose everything you worked months/years to obtain? Go play Eve then. We don't want that kind of garbage here.
Wow. So Angry!
To take care of all the power creep. They just should have if someone overpower there ship too much something goes wrong. Weapons malfunction, warp core destablizes, etc etc with a time limit.
Just maybe the reason why people are suggesting other things now. Is because Star Trek Online or better yet Cryptic is not doing things to keep loyal players considering hard earn reputations are taken away. They are doing the opposite.
So, I have no problem say this. The ships Sister of Eve on Eve Online look like early Fed ships pretty cool. Also, Star Citizen might be interesting to check out once release. No caps, just play and build up skill and ships.
However, the good news about this is that we're changing Species Traits to work the same way Reputation Traits work. That means you'll be able to change your Trait build for free without worrying about hoarding Trait Respecs. It also means you can try out new builds and explore the possibilities of gameplay at no cost other than thinking about your build. I'm hoping this makes Trait deckbuilding a lot more fun for a lot more people. This also means that if you want to spend a couple hours playing Ground content, you're able to spec out for that, then change your spec when you go back to Space later that day.
Although I'm wondering if you might want to consider just making it into 8 species space and 8 species ground (and 1 wildcard for aliens?) so I can be lazy and not have to retrait when transitioning between the areas. :P Because that's effectively what you'll be enabling, might as well go all the way. 'Twould go well with finally separating the space and ground skill pools like you want to do (one of the worst mistakes ever made was combining them).
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.
Just maybe the reason why people are suggesting other things now. Is because Star Trek Online or better yet Cryptic is not doing things to keep loyal players considering hard earn reputations are taken away. They are doing the opposite.
I don't know why you keep on repeating that phrase "reputation taken away." You do not lose anything from the reputations. If you were to have tested the change, you'll see that the traits you have are still there... However, you seem content to gloss over that and still claim that it's being taken away from you, which is extremely false. You still keep the traits. You just don't get to keep the amount of traits you can have going at one time (this is the key phrase here, by the way). That seems to be the main issue for you...however, it's really a non-issue. So, here's what you should do: stop saying that traits are being taken away, since that's completely false, and by you saying it repeatedly doesn't make what you say any less false.
I'm a loyal player, and I have absoluletly no issue with this change.
It will be very much useful if you use torpedoes or mines. We're doubling down on the theme of Kinetic damage making sense against the Borg.
But your changes have made it so energy weapons are better then Kinetic against borg! I still don’t think it’s fair how Omega Graviton Amplifier is amazing for energy weapon but next to useless for Kinetic weapons. The reverse of what the Borg Proc it replaced was and odd when its a Kinetic bonues that's worse on Kinetic weapons.
To be honest I'd advocate 5/5/4 if only as a compromise between two extremes and for the basic fact it'd let you have one power from each of the 5 (at the time it goes live) rep systems. I suspect 4 is just going to end up 2/2/4 or 1/1/4 as everyone cookie cutters most of their rep-traits and has maybe one wild card to work with.
This also means that if you want to spend a couple hours playing Ground content, you're able to spec out for that, then change your spec when you go back to Space later that day.
As a player its really irritating to feel like you have to keep pausing each time you swap between space and ground to constantly change traits.
Being able to change is nice for testing and settling into a set of powers but it hurts gameplay to feel like you have to respec between space and ground each time you swap.
This was my first thought too. If I want to do a quick colony invasion I'm not going to sit there after beam down reorganising my traits for ground.
Then redo it all again 10min later when back to space content.
@adjudicatorhawk Can we get separate ground and space captain (non rep) trait slots?
With species specific traits they should be an always enabled thing and not take a slot. If I'm an Orion I should always have access to the Seduce active power. etc etc.
Also, rep trait active powers, you're forcing users to combine ground and space actives, why not give separate ground and space active trait slots? Not putting it in now is delaying the inevitable (more active powers for ground and space down track, won't all fit in), or ruining quality of life for players switching between space and ground missions.
Do it now, saves the pain later?
I don't know why you keep on repeating that phrase "reputation taken away." You do not lose anything from the reputations. If you were to have tested the change, you'll see that the traits you have are still there... However, you seem content to gloss over that and still claim that it's being taken away from you, which is extremely false. You still keep the traits. You just don't get to keep the amount of traits you can have going at one time (this is the key phrase here, by the way). That seems to be the main issue for you...however, it's really a non-issue. So, here's what you should do: stop saying that traits are being taken away, since that's completely false, and by you saying it repeatedly doesn't make what you say any less false.
I'm a loyal player, and I have absoluletly no issue with this change.
Don't assume what I have not tested it out. I did test it out and still testing it out. Better yet, I stripped my ship of any stacking tactical consoles, no officers, no keybings, no jevonite hardening, and little doffs so no stacking all in elite mode. I am still able to blow away things on tribble.
So, yes. I still believe what I spent 100+ hours for to use has been taken away because I can only use 4. What if we get 100 choices to choose from we are still going only have 4 choices? (Total BS) Because Cryptic is to lazy to create content. Honestly I wouldn't mind less powerful 8/8/4 setup. 8/8/4 no buff would be less powerful but I earn those skills to play with.
As to the video, I simply died on Kerrat because I had to rush out the house and didn't care. I just wanted to see how many cubes I could easily blow up while a bunch of ships was trying to blow me up.
Now nerfing rom t2 and dyson t2. T2 Rom wasn't even doubled to start with.
And completely scrapping omega t2.
Nerfed everything, buffed it to make it look legit, nerfed everything again.
Yeah really promising here.
For any future systemz plz get it right the first time and have some type of vision so you don't end up TRIBBLE players over. Especially when your redo needs redoing.
Btw no matter what you do some passives are going to be better than others plain and simple. Cause all that matters is dps and aside from changing the entire game, dps will remain king.
I agree with other on the subject of projectile weapons. You devs should really consider to dump the innate kinetic resist of shields or at least tone it down to a more reasonable amount. Alternatively you could set the base kinetic resists of shields to 25% and simultaniously introduce an equal base all-energy resist to hull.
Also PLEASE make Romulan Operative unstackable. This would solve most of the crith/critd power creep in this game.
After 20+ pages here and 200+ in another thread, and the same arguments being thrown around its now getting beyond a joke. Cryptic claim they're cutting the number of passives we can use to cull the power creep. Fair enough, but they increase others compensate for the cull makes no sense, Since they are in essence robbing Peter to pay Paul. At the end of the day Cryptic will do what they want, hell its their right its their software. But all that being said I can only hope that Cryptic are more competent and capable than what they seem. A lot of the problems caused by power creep is primarily down to lack of forward thinking on their part. A lot of people saw this coming just a pity that cryptic had got the blinkers on. Their are people in the game with ideas, some of them are very good others just not practical. But there is little or no interaction between the players and Devs unless it involves issues like we're facing here.
Hell I've two manned KAGE on both the holodeck and tribble (old vs. new) and we tore through the new system in a faster time than on the old. These were meant to be a 5 man co-op team mission. We shouldn't be able to do it with anything less. We're now seeing players tear through missions like ISE in under 2 minutes again this shouldn't be happening. The current proposed changes do nothing to address these things, but will and do only serve to make things worse.
Cryptic constantly panders to the minority which happen to be PvP'ers and are focused on getting new players into the game. The new players are a good thing but they need to understand that its takes time to get any where and not to expect to compete straight of the bat with some one that might have hundreds of hours of game play under their belt.
But on the other hand cryptic also needs to look at whats available for the end gamers after all with out those this game would not have made it this far. And whether cryptic or anyone else in this game like it or not the veteran subscribers/life timers are cryptics bread and butter in this game. If they choose to ignore and alienate that player base then they do so to their own detriment.
I agree with other on the subject of projectile weapons. You devs should really consider to dump the innate kinetic resist of shields or at least tone it down to a more reasonable amount. Alternatively you could set the base kinetic resists of shields to 25% and simultaniously introduce an equal base all-energy resist to hull.
Also PLEASE make Romulan Operative unstackable. This would solve most of the crith/critd power creep in this game.
No do not cut Romulan abilities. Learn how to freaken play. I seen so many blown up scimitars and other Romulan ships.
Seriously, make a build that beat a Romulan ship period. Sounds like you aren't doing that.
Finally, I wanted to talk about the Omega "+10% damage" trait. Right now, this is a no brainer. It used to buff Weapon Skill, which was also a no-brainer but was more esoteric - so we made it +% damage to make its effect more clear.
Right now, the way damage bonuses work in general is pretty esoteric. There are several categories of damage bonuses. Within each category, damage bonuses stack additively; across categories, they stack multiplicatively. It is not possible to tell from reading the tooltips which category a bonus belongs to. For example, as of 4/2/2014 on Tribble, "Omega Weapon Training" belongs to a different category than "Auxiliary Power Configuration - Offense". Also, the 2-piece T'varo and Obelisk bonuses belong to different categories than the other 2-piece bonuses.
Comments
Yes, but I don't enjoy making sure all 16 powers are what I want them to be. I'm fine with 4/4/4/4
Two words: Reputation gear.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
Is this a prelude to a speration of ground and space in respects to skill point allocation and traits? You already made it possible for the reputation system and the new system for traits is kind of a workaround. So what about future changes to skill point distribution. Will a complete split between the ground and space skillpoint-pool ever happen?
Thats fine. Then I'll just play once a week or every two weeks for 10 mins. Since there is no point to do the reputation and Cryptic won't make any of the content harder.
You could always try to play in PvP.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
No. Actually, since the content hasn't change. I only played PVP and STFS in elite mode the last year. So, my build it meant to play against high DPS, alpha strikes, and anything else a PVP player wants to do.
Thanks for the suggestion but it's not going work. Today was my first day I have not played STO in a year so I won't be missing anything. I started to cut my time down to maybe 10 or 5 mins the last 2 weeks as soon as I heard about the reputation change.
Ground in this game isn't popular. Source queue numbers.
There are far superior games out there for a ground combat experience.
Why should players who have no desire to play ground be forced into taking anything ground that they have no intention of using?
Like I said any future reputation gear will have to be far superior to what is currently available to make me bother, which would defeat the purpose of "we doin this 2 eliminate power creepz".
Ground PvP could be highly enjoyable with just a few new new maps with a more open area. The biggest problem with Ground PvP at the moment is how limiting it is to player movement. Could you imagine a firefight on new Earth Spacedock? That map is so open and would be perfect for such a thing. There is plenty of cover, but the map has enough open spaces to maneuver and engage in an all out battle.
Your argument is circular reasoning. Lacking ground enhancing slots to use ground bonuses in the first place would give any player another reason to avoid ground gameplay if they are already optimized for space gameplay.
Reputation gear can open up additional options for different forms of player builds. You don't need to have superior gear in order to provide additional build variance.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
This is so blatantly false. The rep passives were increased. 3% crit chance is now 5% crit chance. 10% crit severity is now 20% crit severity. The power creep is INCREASED and not decreased. I do way more damage on Tribble then on Holodeck. If i'm doing 30k dps and a newb is doing 3k dps that's a gap of 27k dps. If we both increased our dps by 20% i'm doing 36k dps and the newb is doing 3,600 dps and the gap is now 32,400dps. So the gap increased by 5,400dps. Whereas previously this would have been slightly over 1/2 that amount. The rep changes increases the gap when we need to decrease it.
Granted power creep is mainly using a leech console. Getting weapon power well above 125, and getting within 1km of the target. Player skill plays a large part as well. But the only thing the rep changes did was increase the gap. It's so obvious i'm amazed people comment with a positive view. I'm quite shocked and
Last I checked, you will be limited in the future. If you want to take another reputation passive, then you will be forced to deslot one of them. This limits the amount of power creep that may be used at any given moment in time.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
That is why dedicated characters work. If you want to play ground you can do so well. If you want to play space you can do so well. In my opinion players shouldn't be forced to carry traits and skills for gameplay that they have no interest in.
Superior gear is just that, superior. I personally only use the most damage effective gear all around. So in order for any new rep system's gear to appeal to me, the gear has to be better than the gear I am using. There are a lot of people with this mindset as well, to use the best build all the time using the best gear. Whether or not new reputation gear boosts some bad build simply doesn't matter to players with this mentality.
In theory if space and ground were separated completely, each having independent skill points and trait slots that don't take away from what is already slotted, I wouldn't have any problems with that. People can play the game however they want to. I personally find ground in this game to be not worth playing, but if someone else wants to, then by all means. But I do not think that anything should be taken away from the way I enjoy the game, just because someone else wants something different.
Basically if dedicated characters are going to be changed, make it so they can do both well instead of mashing space and ground together.
That is exactly what I've been advocating. Ground and Space should have separate pools for all aspects of the game. It would ideally make players more willing to invest in and play both areas.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
Premade gear like 2-3 pieces from a reputation system all together? If so I could almost buy into that, if it weren't for the two Borg Sets.
But player organized gear, yeah there's effective and not so effective combinations that can be put together.
Take for example the Romulan Engines. Best engines in the game for damage as they boost attack patterns. Combine that with the best offensive deflector, the elite fleet deflector that boosts accuracy among other things both offensive and defensive. Then throw in a fleet shield, or if you really want to go all the way offensively the Nukara/Solanae shields that can reflect damage.
Now let's compare that with say a player using the Reman Deflector, the Nukara Engines, and the Dyson shield.
Assume for the sake of argument that the rest of the build is identical on both players, which one on paper out preforms the other damage wise?
Either way, for myself gear and passives in the future reputations to come will have to be more than just a little bit better than what I already have to make me bother working for it.
Hell no. Others have brought that up on the forums and the backlash is always the same: NOBODY wants to lose everything they worked hard for permanently upon death. That is a stupid idea. How is that gonna work if you're stuck in spacedock with no ship, no c-store ships unlocked, and no funds to buy a replacement ship at all? You'd be completely at a loss. Look at the backlash about limiting our reputation powers. That's something, in a sense, being taken away by limiting how many powers we can take compared to now, and most are completely against the idea.
I've been seeing this TRIBBLE pop up lately. This is NOT Eve Online, this is STAR TREK ONLINE. I'm getting sick of seeing people making suggestions "but eve has this and eve has that and STO should be exactly the same". No it shouldn't. First of all Eve Online is a completely different game. Second, Cryptic doesn't own the rights to anything of that game so they can't go around making things in STO to be exactly like Eve without worrying about possible lawsuits for copyright/trademark infringement.
You want permanent character death and the chance to permanently lose everything you worked months/years to obtain? Go play Eve then. We don't want that kind of garbage here.
Not a bad idea. I like it. Having space skill points and ground skill points separate with us having so many points to distribute in each area would be nice. That way the "I HATE GROUND COMBATS" players don't have to worry about ground skills while having at least the same amount of space skill points we have now. Currently we can only put so many points into space skills and so many into ground skills, but the skill points aren't separate. This would leave it open to max out your space skills with enough points to make use of your ground skills if you wish to use them.
Because as it is now, if you hit the cap on space skills, you won't have a whole lot left over to work with for ground if you want to put 6 ranks or so into Admiral rank skills. You'd have little left to put into lower ranked skills making ground combat not feasible unless you spec for both ground and space at the same time.
366,000 total skill points with the space cap at 300,000 and ground at 100,000. Sure you could hit your space cap and have 66,000 skill points for ground and it may seem like a lot, but it isn't enough. It takes 3,000 skill points per rank for Admiral level skills, so if you want to put 6 ranks into both Admiral level ground skills, that's 36,000 skill points right there. You won't have much left to put 6 or more ranks into very many other ground skills.
The point he was making is that comparing the 8 passives on holodeck to the 4 passives on tribble, the 4 you do MORE DPS, and therefor the 4 increases the power creep even worse than it already is.
That is the reason i was advocating for an 8/8/4 cap system removing ALL the buffs that this system added so the levels stay as they are now instead of increasing. Now I'm all for more DPS, but the amount of extra DPS this system added was insane, especially when the whole point of it was to lower it. And now they're going to nerf those perks so we may not even be getting much of a bonus for losing 50% of what we earned.
I still believe that the only solution to this that will make the players happy is the 8/8/4 caps and no buffs. But the devs have now said that that won't happen, so we'll have to take this as it is and cue the massive amount of rage on the forums from everyone who didn't read the site or this.
And then when most likely over 70% of the players completely ignore the undine rep since there is no reason to do it with no slots for powers and no items that are good for anything other than anti-undine, MAYBE then the devs will realize that 4/4/4/buffs was a mistake.
I've written over a dozen paragraphs explaining it but if they want to still test it out that's on them. And who knows maybe i'm wrong. But the point of this system was to curb power creep and it dosn't do that, and it gives people no incentive to do future reps since they most likely already have the 4 powers they're going to use already.
In my fleet of almsot 400 members i have polled a good 75 and 60 of them said that they are goint to just do the undine missions a couple times to experience them and ignore the entire rep because they're not going to get anything out of it so what's the point.
For me its not the matter of the powers and what they do its the principal of personally letting it go and sucking it up the first 200 times something like this was done. Although after grinding up those reps on every character I have pretty much over the course of the existence of the game. It has just been a continuous trend of grind grind and then we at Cryptic will then remove the bar to knock you down a few pegs and start over in a never ending cycle. So pretty much the blog about it was my last day to ever play sto.
Edit: Now if they were to do something where I don't lose anything I grinded for on so many characters and its reasonably balanced for what they aim is even though the sources of the power creep isn't even being scratched with this revamp lol. Plus some ppl cry out that every mmo does this but they don't completely rip stuff away they may nerf or buff a certain power but not remove it from you completely which is what this has done even with these magical 4/4/4 stuff is still over 200 passives lost for me lol. Someone at Cryptic says ha they say doom to this game they haven't seen anything yet we are gonna make this ghost town online!
Wow. So Angry!
To take care of all the power creep. They just should have if someone overpower there ship too much something goes wrong. Weapons malfunction, warp core destablizes, etc etc with a time limit.
Just maybe the reason why people are suggesting other things now. Is because Star Trek Online or better yet Cryptic is not doing things to keep loyal players considering hard earn reputations are taken away. They are doing the opposite.
So, I have no problem say this. The ships Sister of Eve on Eve Online look like early Fed ships pretty cool. Also, Star Citizen might be interesting to check out once release. No caps, just play and build up skill and ships.
http://autophiliac.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/dude-wait-what.jpg
Duuuuuuuuude. That's cool. :eek:
Although I'm wondering if you might want to consider just making it into 8 species space and 8 species ground (and 1 wildcard for aliens?) so I can be lazy and not have to retrait when transitioning between the areas. :P Because that's effectively what you'll be enabling, might as well go all the way. 'Twould go well with finally separating the space and ground skill pools like you want to do (one of the worst mistakes ever made was combining them).
Thank god for that.
Joined January 2009
I'm a loyal player, and I have absoluletly no issue with this change.
I assume that means that space Borg will be having all their shields removed. to tie in with canon?
I don't see the point of making that trait apply to torpedos and mines against the Borg, when shields remove 75% + of the damage anyways..
As for the 8/8/4 and 4/4/4 debacle, it just means I will find a happy medium (the most useful for all content) and stick to those traits.
You would have to make new rep traits OP for me to warrant leveling the reputation and using the traits, which to me, defeats the purpose.
This was my first thought too. If I want to do a quick colony invasion I'm not going to sit there after beam down reorganising my traits for ground.
Then redo it all again 10min later when back to space content.
@adjudicatorhawk Can we get separate ground and space captain (non rep) trait slots?
With species specific traits they should be an always enabled thing and not take a slot. If I'm an Orion I should always have access to the Seduce active power. etc etc.
Also, rep trait active powers, you're forcing users to combine ground and space actives, why not give separate ground and space active trait slots? Not putting it in now is delaying the inevitable (more active powers for ground and space down track, won't all fit in), or ruining quality of life for players switching between space and ground missions.
Do it now, saves the pain later?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9SjhX0Guq8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9SjhX0Guq8
Don't assume what I have not tested it out. I did test it out and still testing it out. Better yet, I stripped my ship of any stacking tactical consoles, no officers, no keybings, no jevonite hardening, and little doffs so no stacking all in elite mode. I am still able to blow away things on tribble.
So, yes. I still believe what I spent 100+ hours for to use has been taken away because I can only use 4. What if we get 100 choices to choose from we are still going only have 4 choices? (Total BS) Because Cryptic is to lazy to create content. Honestly I wouldn't mind less powerful 8/8/4 setup. 8/8/4 no buff would be less powerful but I earn those skills to play with.
As to the video, I simply died on Kerrat because I had to rush out the house and didn't care. I just wanted to see how many cubes I could easily blow up while a bunch of ships was trying to blow me up.
Buffed all passives to compensate.
Now nerfing rom t2 and dyson t2. T2 Rom wasn't even doubled to start with.
And completely scrapping omega t2.
Nerfed everything, buffed it to make it look legit, nerfed everything again.
Yeah really promising here.
For any future systemz plz get it right the first time and have some type of vision so you don't end up TRIBBLE players over. Especially when your redo needs redoing.
Btw no matter what you do some passives are going to be better than others plain and simple. Cause all that matters is dps and aside from changing the entire game, dps will remain king.
Also PLEASE make Romulan Operative unstackable. This would solve most of the crith/critd power creep in this game.
Hell I've two manned KAGE on both the holodeck and tribble (old vs. new) and we tore through the new system in a faster time than on the old. These were meant to be a 5 man co-op team mission. We shouldn't be able to do it with anything less. We're now seeing players tear through missions like ISE in under 2 minutes again this shouldn't be happening. The current proposed changes do nothing to address these things, but will and do only serve to make things worse.
Cryptic constantly panders to the minority which happen to be PvP'ers and are focused on getting new players into the game. The new players are a good thing but they need to understand that its takes time to get any where and not to expect to compete straight of the bat with some one that might have hundreds of hours of game play under their belt.
But on the other hand cryptic also needs to look at whats available for the end gamers after all with out those this game would not have made it this far. And whether cryptic or anyone else in this game like it or not the veteran subscribers/life timers are cryptics bread and butter in this game. If they choose to ignore and alienate that player base then they do so to their own detriment.
No do not cut Romulan abilities. Learn how to freaken play. I seen so many blown up scimitars and other Romulan ships.
Seriously, make a build that beat a Romulan ship period. Sounds like you aren't doing that.
Right now, the way damage bonuses work in general is pretty esoteric. There are several categories of damage bonuses. Within each category, damage bonuses stack additively; across categories, they stack multiplicatively. It is not possible to tell from reading the tooltips which category a bonus belongs to. For example, as of 4/2/2014 on Tribble, "Omega Weapon Training" belongs to a different category than "Auxiliary Power Configuration - Offense". Also, the 2-piece T'varo and Obelisk bonuses belong to different categories than the other 2-piece bonuses.