BO is more broadly useful and can be incorporated into combination builds pretty easily. Not every ship is able to use DHCs effectively--most science ships and cruisers cant use them at all, slower ships cant keep them on target or have to rely on decloak to use them. Everybody can run beams.
Was it for the highs and lows...to normalize it? I kind of figured it went something like this...
Hrmm, guys - BO doesn't get used much in PvE does it? It gets used often in PvP for those perceived one shot kills, and that's an issue as well. How can we make it more interesting to the PvE crowd while eliminating some of the complaints from the PvP crowd?
Well, we've got that new +2% bonus damage R&D trait that can stack up to three times to provide +6% bonus - so we could set the duration for that at a point where folks using just FAW couldn't get that to stack. This would require them to rotate through some of the beam abilities to stack it.
Yeah, well - odds are they're still not going to touch it because of the drain - it would result in a loss of DPS if they were to run with BO in the mix.
Okay then, we can kill the drain on it. Cause honestly, the amount of drain never really made sense when it's taking the four shots and combining them into one anyway.
Hrmmm, but it's not going to do enough damage for the average player to consider it - and - well, it's Beam Overload, man - it should be a fun and interesting ability - something exciting mixed in, right?
Yeah, yeah - it should. Okay, okay - let's make it always crit. For those that aren't running that much CrtH, it will give them some fun damage from time to time. For those that already do, they're not likely to give up that much of their other CrtH for CrtD since they're going to want to crit with their other attacks too.
What about the amount of damage that one could drop out then? Remember, we also wanted to deal with some of the perceived one-shot kills over in PvP.
Well then, yeah - even in PvE it's hitting too hard this way. If we reduce the base damage, that acts like a final damage modifier and would reduce all the hits. How about trying that?
Sure, cause then somebody that's hitting for 60k will only hit for 45k...eating ~15k damage. But the guy hitting for 30k will only lose out on ~7.5k while dropping down to 22.5k...with it being base/final like that, it will take a huge chunk out of the higher hits while taking smaller chunks out of the smaller hits.
Okay then, let's roll with that - drop it out in the wild and let folks play around with it. Drop it to Holodeck so we can get some real testing since so few folks bother with Tribble.
So then, we've still got some pretty hefty outliers out there. Some folks ramped up the CrtD over in PvP and some of the Roms over in PvE felt comfortable enough to make some changes there.
Well, maybe if we cut a little bit more off the top. Trim it there, that way the outliers will see more of a reduction than the average guys that we're getting pretty comfortable with their levels.
Sounds good...we'll give it a go and see what further tweaks it needs if any.
Reading over adjudicatorhawk's comments, I tend to think they had several goals in mind:
1. Make BO more attractive in PvE.
2. Make BO less of a trap for new players.
3. Reduce the spike damage in PvP.
Removing the drain on weapons power helps with goals 1 and 2. Decreasing the base damage, but making BO always critically hit, helps with goal 3. The question is whether they merely want to reduce the spike or whether they want to reduce the variability between players. In the latter case, making BO never critically hit and increasing the base damage would offer them more control over the range of damage. Of course, it would also reduce the ability of players to maximize the damage of their BOs.
Also, my tooltips give higher values for BO on Tribble than on Holodeck right now. Do the tooltip calculations on Tribble include crit severity, but those on Holodeck do not?
But CRF has a number of other advantages, as well: First, it fires ALL your cannon-type weapons, as opposed to BO, which fires only a SINGLE beam, leaving the rest of your beams sitting there with dumb looks on their faces, utterly useless. This means that BO simply is not a competitor to CRF, or FAW, at all, both of which share the property of operating all of the applicable weapons on the ship. BO is more a counterpart to a skill like THY, which operates only a single weapon. As such, BO would compete for your Tac and Weapon slots with a torpedo, NOT with FAW or CRF, as they do not share the same roles at all. In fact, it is typical for a boat operating in such a manner to carry both CRF to fire its cannons, and BO, to fire its single DBB, and possibly even THY, to follow this barrage with a torpedo. No boat intended to FAW should ever carry BO, simply because their shared CD and completely incompatible deployment renders them mutually incompatible.
Well, at least the strength of Engineers on Ground justifies their existence still...seeing as they're the worst Space-based class.
This. So much this.
BO has two practical functions. To knock down shields for another strike, or to be the coup de grace and finish the target off. But it isn't the buzzsaw of constant damage that is required to take down some targets. It's a sniper shot.
Borg shields are not Perfect Shields. My concern was about Perfect Shields (no bleedthrough). Elachi shields are Perfect if I recall correctly. How would the TR-116 fare against them in canon? (Honest question because I don't watch the shows.)
Well canonically it's murky. Only the Borg and the species that STO adopted as the Elachi had shields in the series, and the Elachi were going up against the technologically inferior Earth of the 22nd century where the ships didn't even have shields.
The idea of a shield with no bleed through is interesting. Canonically and with the known science of Star Trek it would be difficult. Creating an impenetrable shield is difficult because it would require blocking every frequency of that energy weapon, which is extremely power consumption heavy. It's like blocking every frequency on a radio and not allowing static to get through either. The Borg achieved "perfect" shielding by adapting, they were able to perfectly match the frequency of the incoming weapons fire and by doing so they could block the precise frequency of energy that they needed to completely stop the incoming fire with the minimum amount of energy.
On the question of perfect shields, you should consider what Perfect Shields means in regards to Medical Vanguard. Shields with no bleed through. Those shields are still perfect.
But this isn't a case of the bullet ignoring no bleed through. Bleed through implies that the weapons fire hits the shield the shield absorb the energy, but some of the energy still gets through and damages the target. This is not that. Bullets bypass personal shields altogether. Their perfection is irrelevant. Personal shields are not deflector shields like on starships that repel particles and micro meteors and torpedoes. These shields stop energy attacks. It takes a lot more power to stop a physical object with that type of technology. It's not at the same level as the force fields that prevent you from moving forward.
The bullet isn't bleeding through, it's not hitting the shield at all.
You don't stop a bullet with a personal shield, you stop the bullet with armor.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
BO is more broadly useful and can be incorporated into combination builds pretty easily. Not every ship is able to use DHCs effectively--most science ships and cruisers cant use them at all, slower ships cant keep them on target or have to rely on decloak to use them. Everybody can run beams.
I was talking about escorts... currently every escort's build (for pvp) sacrifices crf to use bo3.... tipically you have bo3 and apo3 or apb3...
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
I was talking about escorts... currently every escort's build (for pvp) sacrifices crf to use bo3.... tipically you have bo3 and apo3 or apb3...
Mainly APO3, BO3 and CRF1, Man that hurts. Apo over APB for increased maneuverability, meaning staying more easily in target with narrow fiting arc of DHC.
P.S. Hey JP
Sad Pandas PvP - Starfleet Dental Member - Lag Industries Leader
--
"What a time it was, with all the world against us, what a time it was... When all we did seemed wrong,
we've broken all our bonds, but life kept going on, what a time, what a time it was..." - Clem Tholet
I was talking about escorts... currently every escort's build (for pvp) sacrifices crf to use bo3.... tipically you have bo3 and apo3 or apb3...
Well BO plus something else you can fire them at the same time and get the entire attack into a 2-second strike window. BO plus HY can be simulcast, BO deshields the target while the torp is in-flight, and there is no real reaction time to something like that (assuming you dont miss).
CRF works but you have to build around using it. I have pure CRF builds on some attack ships that are able to move around fast enough for it to work effectively (a Defiant, a Somraw, couple of others), but anything below 16 turn I am very likely to favor DBBs for time-on-target, especially if it cant recloak easily. Even my Armitage with EPtE and Zemok-powered APO, it turns very fast after all that but not fast enough to dogfight with bugship, and I have to run DBBs to get any damage on other escorts at all (and that is with Yellowstones slowing them down). Ships with cloaks are easier to build with cannons as well, but even then I often use BO3 plus HY to minimize the attack window.
i think every mission that kills doffs stopped auto slotting completely, which is still a bad idea.
it should auto slot every white quality doff, but not slot anything above that, so that all generic prisoners will get slotted, but the blue vorta/jemhadar prisoner is left alone instead of being the first pick to go into the grinder.
The mission chains in the area around DS9 that take civilians for the labor colony on fed side still autoslots your best doffs. Even though it says in red at the top that you are NOT going to get them back. I stopped trying to do that one as it was too much of an annoyance to go through, click change, click off everything I don't want to send, and then repeat those steps 4-5 times.
Also on that list of things wrong with the doff popup UI. I would like a button to select or deselect all the options of doffs. There are some projects that I care which profession I send on it. There are others that I do not care what profession I send. There are others were I only want to send whites (officer exchanges) and others where I don't want to send whites (most of the rest), in both cases I end up having to check or uncheck a lot of boxes to get it narrowed down to what I want.
If I could click on box to toggle everything on or off and then click just the ones i want off or on it would make it a much easier to deal with the interface. This change and having the popup window remember my settings while I am working on 1 project would make it fairly close to the pre-s9.5 patch, and I would be much more comforable with it.
BO has two practical functions. To knock down shields for another strike, or to be the coup de grace and finish the target off. But it isn't the buzzsaw of constant damage that is required to take down some targets. It's a sniper shot.
Well canonically it's murky. Only the Borg and the species that STO adopted as the Elachi had shields in the series, and the Elachi were going up against the technologically inferior Earth of the 22nd century where the ships didn't even have shields.
The idea of a shield with no bleed through is interesting. Canonically and with the known science of Star Trek it would be difficult. Creating an impenetrable shield is difficult because it would require blocking every frequency of that energy weapon, which is extremely power consumption heavy. It's like blocking every frequency on a radio and not allowing static to get through either. The Borg achieved "perfect" shielding by adapting, they were able to perfectly match the frequency of the incoming weapons fire and by doing so they could block the precise frequency of energy that they needed to completely stop the incoming fire with the minimum amount of energy.
On the question of perfect shields, you should consider what Perfect Shields means in regards to Medical Vanguard. Shields with no bleed through. Those shields are still perfect.
But this isn't a case of the bullet ignoring no bleed through. Bleed through implies that the weapons fire hits the shield the shield absorb the energy, but some of the energy still gets through and damages the target. This is not that. Bullets bypass personal shields altogether. Their perfection is irrelevant. Personal shields are not deflector shields like on starships that repel particles and micro meteors and torpedoes. These shields stop energy attacks. It takes a lot more power to stop a physical object with that type of technology. It's not at the same level as the force fields that prevent you from moving forward.
The bullet isn't bleeding through, it's not hitting the shield at all.
You don't stop a bullet with a personal shield, you stop the bullet with armor.
The fact that bullets bypass shields was also pointed out in the one TNG movie where Picard uses a tommy gun to kill borg on the holodeck. If he had used a phaser or any of there more common weapons the borg would have adapted after a couple of shots and his weapon would have been rendered useless.
I do find it interesting that swords and such only have 80% shield penetration in game, it would seem that the shielding can block a large chunk of metal to an extent but can't do much against a small one traveling at much higher speed.
Using the info of holo machineguns being able to kill borg with ease I would set up a ship with holoemitters on all decks and equip my security teams with holo guns when fighting borg. I would set up safeties such that rounds fired would be lethal when striking a enemy but harmless if they struck a friendly. Would probably take a fair amount of computing power to manage that but it would be very effective. Possibly supply a secondary set of physical weapons to be used if the main computer is lost and the holo weapons go poof. Of course that is what local redundancies are for..
Mainly APO3, BO3 and CRF1, Man that hurts. Apo over APB for increased maneuverability, meaning staying more easily in target with narrow fiting arc of DHC.
Well BO plus something else you can fire them at the same time and get the entire attack into a 2-second strike window. BO plus HY can be simulcast, BO deshields the target while the torp is in-flight, and there is no real reaction time to something like that (assuming you dont miss).
This is exactally what I am trying sto explain.. You can prepare BO and it's a istant shoot... but you can't prepare CRF... You must activate CRF when you are pointing your opponent and you have to take your target in your firing arc for the entire duration of CRF... in the meantime, your hopponet can activate several ability to avoid the damage.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
The fact that bullets bypass shields was also pointed out in the one TNG movie where Picard uses a tommy gun to kill borg on the holodeck. If he had used a phaser or any of there more common weapons the borg would have adapted after a couple of shots and his weapon would have been rendered useless.
I do find it interesting that swords and such only have 80% shield penetration in game, it would seem that the shielding can block a large chunk of metal to an extent but can't do much against a small one traveling at much higher speed.
Using the info of holo machineguns being able to kill borg with ease I would set up a ship with holoemitters on all decks and equip my security teams with holo guns when fighting borg. I would set up safeties such that rounds fired would be lethal when striking a enemy but harmless if they struck a friendly. Would probably take a fair amount of computing power to manage that but it would be very effective. Possibly supply a secondary set of physical weapons to be used if the main computer is lost and the holo weapons go poof. Of course that is what local redundancies are for..
That would be a brilliant defense. The Borg however would likely adapt by starting to assimilate the computer or the holoemitters.
Better to replicate real guns, barring the obvious ammo issue.
Physical melee weapons not having 100% penetration is highly unusual, likely a compromise to keep melee weapons from completely dominating all combat.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
Comments
Reading over adjudicatorhawk's comments, I tend to think they had several goals in mind:
1. Make BO more attractive in PvE.
2. Make BO less of a trap for new players.
3. Reduce the spike damage in PvP.
Removing the drain on weapons power helps with goals 1 and 2. Decreasing the base damage, but making BO always critically hit, helps with goal 3. The question is whether they merely want to reduce the spike or whether they want to reduce the variability between players. In the latter case, making BO never critically hit and increasing the base damage would offer them more control over the range of damage. Of course, it would also reduce the ability of players to maximize the damage of their BOs.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=18307591&postcount=16
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=18307871&postcount=25
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=18307971&postcount=30
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=18307981&postcount=31
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=18308231&postcount=43
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=18308281&postcount=45
Here's a question that I don't think anyone has asked: Is that 13% of the base damage before or after the Tribble patch on July 30, 2014. Compare:
OldAvg = 1 + CritChance * CritSeverity
NewAvg1 = (1 - 0.25 - 0.13)*(1 + CritSeverity) = 0.62*(1 + CritSeverity)
NewAvg2 = (1 - 0.25)*(1 - 0.13)*(1 + CritSeverity) = 0.6525*(1 + CritSeverity)
Also, my tooltips give higher values for BO on Tribble than on Holodeck right now. Do the tooltip calculations on Tribble include crit severity, but those on Holodeck do not?
BO has two practical functions. To knock down shields for another strike, or to be the coup de grace and finish the target off. But it isn't the buzzsaw of constant damage that is required to take down some targets. It's a sniper shot.
Well canonically it's murky. Only the Borg and the species that STO adopted as the Elachi had shields in the series, and the Elachi were going up against the technologically inferior Earth of the 22nd century where the ships didn't even have shields.
The idea of a shield with no bleed through is interesting. Canonically and with the known science of Star Trek it would be difficult. Creating an impenetrable shield is difficult because it would require blocking every frequency of that energy weapon, which is extremely power consumption heavy. It's like blocking every frequency on a radio and not allowing static to get through either. The Borg achieved "perfect" shielding by adapting, they were able to perfectly match the frequency of the incoming weapons fire and by doing so they could block the precise frequency of energy that they needed to completely stop the incoming fire with the minimum amount of energy.
On the question of perfect shields, you should consider what Perfect Shields means in regards to Medical Vanguard. Shields with no bleed through. Those shields are still perfect.
But this isn't a case of the bullet ignoring no bleed through. Bleed through implies that the weapons fire hits the shield the shield absorb the energy, but some of the energy still gets through and damages the target. This is not that. Bullets bypass personal shields altogether. Their perfection is irrelevant. Personal shields are not deflector shields like on starships that repel particles and micro meteors and torpedoes. These shields stop energy attacks. It takes a lot more power to stop a physical object with that type of technology. It's not at the same level as the force fields that prevent you from moving forward.
The bullet isn't bleeding through, it's not hitting the shield at all.
You don't stop a bullet with a personal shield, you stop the bullet with armor.
I was talking about escorts... currently every escort's build (for pvp) sacrifices crf to use bo3.... tipically you have bo3 and apo3 or apb3...
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
Mainly APO3, BO3 and CRF1, Man that hurts. Apo over APB for increased maneuverability, meaning staying more easily in target with narrow fiting arc of DHC.
P.S. Hey JP
we've broken all our bonds, but life kept going on, what a time, what a time it was..." - Clem Tholet
CRF works but you have to build around using it. I have pure CRF builds on some attack ships that are able to move around fast enough for it to work effectively (a Defiant, a Somraw, couple of others), but anything below 16 turn I am very likely to favor DBBs for time-on-target, especially if it cant recloak easily. Even my Armitage with EPtE and Zemok-powered APO, it turns very fast after all that but not fast enough to dogfight with bugship, and I have to run DBBs to get any damage on other escorts at all (and that is with Yellowstones slowing them down). Ships with cloaks are easier to build with cannons as well, but even then I often use BO3 plus HY to minimize the attack window.
The mission chains in the area around DS9 that take civilians for the labor colony on fed side still autoslots your best doffs. Even though it says in red at the top that you are NOT going to get them back. I stopped trying to do that one as it was too much of an annoyance to go through, click change, click off everything I don't want to send, and then repeat those steps 4-5 times.
Also on that list of things wrong with the doff popup UI. I would like a button to select or deselect all the options of doffs. There are some projects that I care which profession I send on it. There are others that I do not care what profession I send. There are others were I only want to send whites (officer exchanges) and others where I don't want to send whites (most of the rest), in both cases I end up having to check or uncheck a lot of boxes to get it narrowed down to what I want.
If I could click on box to toggle everything on or off and then click just the ones i want off or on it would make it a much easier to deal with the interface. This change and having the popup window remember my settings while I am working on 1 project would make it fairly close to the pre-s9.5 patch, and I would be much more comforable with it.
The fact that bullets bypass shields was also pointed out in the one TNG movie where Picard uses a tommy gun to kill borg on the holodeck. If he had used a phaser or any of there more common weapons the borg would have adapted after a couple of shots and his weapon would have been rendered useless.
I do find it interesting that swords and such only have 80% shield penetration in game, it would seem that the shielding can block a large chunk of metal to an extent but can't do much against a small one traveling at much higher speed.
Using the info of holo machineguns being able to kill borg with ease I would set up a ship with holoemitters on all decks and equip my security teams with holo guns when fighting borg. I would set up safeties such that rounds fired would be lethal when striking a enemy but harmless if they struck a friendly. Would probably take a fair amount of computing power to manage that but it would be very effective. Possibly supply a secondary set of physical weapons to be used if the main computer is lost and the holo weapons go poof. Of course that is what local redundancies are for..
I know... it's what I have on my escort for pvp.
This is exactally what I am trying sto explain.. You can prepare BO and it's a istant shoot... but you can't prepare CRF... You must activate CRF when you are pointing your opponent and you have to take your target in your firing arc for the entire duration of CRF... in the meantime, your hopponet can activate several ability to avoid the damage.
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
That would be a brilliant defense. The Borg however would likely adapt by starting to assimilate the computer or the holoemitters.
Better to replicate real guns, barring the obvious ammo issue.
Physical melee weapons not having 100% penetration is highly unusual, likely a compromise to keep melee weapons from completely dominating all combat.