In our preparation for Delta Rising, we've been taking a hard look at Space powers and abilities that are underperforming, as well as a select few that dominate the choices players make across the board. The purpose of this thread is for the community to come together and discuss what powers they feel meet either of these two categories, and to talk frankly about any problems with the current metagame of Star Trek Online.
I'm going to largely be lurking in this thread, but may chime in from time to time. Let's see if we can civilly and rationally discuss what we think are problems, and more importantly why we think those powers are problematic. I want to see what you all care about, and see what changes we can make to address things that you care about while making the game a better game, with a more interesting decision-tree structure that defines your "best action to take at any given time" during space combat.
Heya Hawk, could you at least clarify a bit more the scope or at least what you are planning on/willing to change or adjust as to help keep this discussion on point? I see a lot of people stating the sad-but-seemingly-true sentiment that metagame is really what is wrong, and that the boff ability issue is more a symptom of that - but it is a moot point if that is beyond the scope of your planned changes.
Are we speaking about STRICTLY BoFF abilities and/or Captain powers? More clarification, good sir.
In all the star trek tv shows and movies we don't see ships do this. Fire everything just all the time like crazy. It needs to be more controlled and refined, less cluttered.
Beam weapons would stack say you have 4 forward and 4 aft. then your phaser beam weapon should fire 1 phaser x how ever many phaser banks you have installed + tact consoles.
torpedoes should fires Volly's of torpedoes . Say you have 4 forward torpedoes . then it should fire a Volly of 4 in a row + damage + tact console damage.
So your woundering what about Torp spread ? Keep it.
And Fire at will keep that too.
What about Dual beam banks ? Make the phaser beam thickness wider. But add the dual beams + singles + tact consoles damage together.
Point is. we need to DECLUTTER Space battles.
I 100% agree!
That would GREATLY enhance imersion IMO.
Starfleet Crusiers:
Idea to compensate the lack of DHCs
What about allowing Starfleet cruisers to equip several Omni Beams of the same type in their rear weapon slots?
By doing that we would get a 270 (forward) and 360 degrees (rear) that would make a much more Star Trek like weapons arc profile IMO.
Most Starfleet cruisers can't use cannon weapons due to their lack of enough tactical stations. So they are limited to boardsiding. My idea was to offer a alternative to that and make the game feel a bit more like Trek.
"...'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied--chains us all irrevocably.' ... The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. I fear that today--"
- (TNG) Picard, quoting Judge Aaron Satie
Interesting. VERY interesting indeed - it makes your "
Please reconsider ARC. Please make it optional, at the least. PLEASE.
It seems the vast majority of your most active players (forum regulars) hate the idea... and while that's a small subset of the playerbase, I think it's an important constituency.
THE PLAYERS DO NOT WANT THIS.
Been thinking about this thread for a while since seeing it on reddit.
Apologies for the following lump of text and if I'm repeating anything typed earlier.
Purpose: To try to fix two problems with one major change.
Problem one, the skewed dynamic between PvE and PvP.
Problem two, the narrowing of viable builds.
Solution. Three words. Remove All Stacking.
Boff skills.
Removing all stacking in this context means no more than one version of a power may be accessible.
I'd imagine it'd work by simply greying out the lower level version of the same skill.
Thus if you have TT1 and TT2 slotted, only TT2 would be useable.
Force players to create builds using a higher number of variables (skills).
Boff Traits.
Simply remove the ability of them to stack.
Two boffs with SRO loaded, only one of them gives you any bonus.
Use this as an opportunity to give all races a chance at a space trait.
Consoles
Only able to slot one of a given type of console.
No slotting of two neutroniums or RCS.
Fleet consoles secondary effects would not be counted.
Effectively meaning you get one fleet neutronium or RCS, regardless of sub-bonus.
Mark number would not count, meaning no mk X neutronium stacked with a mk XI one.
Again, force players to create builds using a larger pool of pieces.
IMO, the overall effect of this approach is to make decisions harder in endgame builds.
Min maxing has created a relatively narrow pool of viable endgame builds.
It's not min maxing per se though, its that stacking has allowed them to look at builds using a smaller number of pieces.
I can see a large number of ways in which stacking makes choices harder, and a lot of opportunities for lesser used skills, traits and consoles to get a balance pass and become viable, if stacking is disallowed.
edited to add, 'remove all stacking' would apply across the board.
And would most definitely include active doffs in space or ground slots.
Lol, everything being useless in PvE, is uninteresting / not used? Btw. do you even have a clue about for what PSW is used in PvP? It's the best offensive sci ability in PvP.
You're right, I should have qualified my post as being from a predominantly PvE perspective.
PSW is used in PvP in conjunction with a SNB to deal a killing blow. The erasure of the enemy ship's buffs, in combination with the disable of PSW making them unable to react, sets them up to be vaped.
"Hakeev is too badly injured to speak. He struggles only for a moment before he is finally still...Hakeev's end comes without any desperate speech or furious diatribe. As his plans collapse around him, only silence follows him into oblivion." -The original ending to Cutting the Cord
But on the other hand it can only be fired in the forward arc and is cleared by Hazard Emitters, making it much less useful in PvP. Most enemies in PvE only seem to be threatening when they throw out torpedoes that deal as much damage as we wish we could.
Tell that to the charred remains of my younger brother's Contortrix.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Dont nerf Aux2Batt, the rage isnt worth it. I say make other powers more competitive and allow build options that can compete with it.
I am not an expert and relying heavily on the wiki.
I noticed a lot of abilities that say they will do x damage over y seconds. While this seemed more affective at lower levels (lower tier ships with lower hull, and player has the commander ability), becomes rather useless at higher levels. Perhaps a percentage base of damage would be more useful.
Below are my thought on some of the powers, some I stay away from because they dont seem worth it.
Tac
Smoke grenade make smoke last longer. Possible flanking bonus at any angle.
Draw fire add damage resistance to self as well. Seems to pull agro pretty well when used on self.
Sub system targeting remove from shared beam cool down.
Eng
Aux to damepners never really used, but could come in handy if there are mass control builds.
Boarding party weak compared to NPC versions. Klingon borg boarding parties will at least knock my engines offline in Cure, when I use it against an NPC, they seem to be stopping by for tea.
Aceton Beam damage output should be risen; perhaps percentage.
Equipment diagnostics what is a mechanical debuff, and how often are these even encountered. Just apply to all debuffs.
Tachyon Beam increase drain ability. Does very little with modern shields, even on npcs.
Feedback Pulse player feedback pulse does not seem to be as effective as a NPCs. Just sayin.
Photonic Officer allow cool down to photonic fleet/phonic abilities
To truly reach some sort of balance all powers, their related doffs, traits, shared cool downs, etc, will need to be pulled together into some sort of huge balance chart. Maybe not an all encompassing one because that sound atrociously complicated maybe some sort of chart dividing out the offensive\defensive abilities of a career; damage\buff of each by career, etc. This chart should be dynamic enough for the addition of new doffs, traits, or powers. This will help keep balance in check when the new items are released.
During space battles, it seems like they are super cluttered with beams and weapons fire.
LESS is MORE and I think instead of having 8 beams firing out of a ship you have 1 beam that's 8 times more powerfull.
Just between us, I'm a bigger fan of the space combat mechanics deployed in Starfleet Command 3 and Bridge Commander.
STO has always been on the twitch/arcadey-side for me, and tends to breach my personal preferences for canonism. I still get tons of fun out of it - I find it helps to pretend that we're playing in some hybrid Star Trek universe.
I get that you're largely talking about art animations, but you're asking for an essential overhaul of fundamental game mechanics. Even though I'm in agreement, that ship has long since sailed.
I'm sure most of what I will say has been said but here is my opinions. This is PVE based feedback.
Tactical
General
AOE vs single target - We find ourselves most often fighting multiple enemies rather than single targets making aoe abilities far more practical in our limited slots than single target damage. In cruisers and science ships we feel we need to choose aoe over anything else due to this.
Beam vs Cannon - I agree with some people that Beams need a rapid fire skill and see no reason we can't combine the powers for use with both. Rapid Fire, Overload, Fire at will even target subsytem aren't exclusive to beam or cannon imo.
Subpar
Target Subsystem X - None of these seem worth using over FAW or BO the effect feels lackluster and barely noticeable end game. The enemies that it is noticeable on are easier to just kill and those that aren't seem hardly effected.
Beam Overload - This power is better now but it still won't replace FAW as the beam power of choice. Mostly because cruisers only use beam arrays which just aren't damaging enough for BO to be a better choice. I think some of it's problem is also that it's just not a very exciting power to use especially on beam arrays. While the damage numbers might be good it doesn't feel like much with one big shot every 30sec.
APD - This is a great tanking power but no cruisers can get the highest rank of this so it seems a little wasted.
High Yield Torp - Suffers several problems. The single target damage it has over spread isn't enough to take over TS and we find ourselves in more aoe situations than single target. Rank 1 is visually unimpressive. Target able torpedoes are too slow and will get shot down too easily to use on anything other than stationary unshielded targets.
Too good/required
Tactical Team - The shield balancing in this power make it darn near required for any build and one of the best teams. No one seems takes it for its other benefits and rank 2 and 3 are ignored. The funcionality of the shield balancing I feel is needed so I wouldn't want it to go away but maybe spread to some other abilities as well?
FAW - Is just too good at everything single target or aoe and will generally out shine BO. In contrast to BO it is very exciting visually to watch with beams rapidly firing everywhere. With it being a time based power you feel like you're getting something out of it.
Engineering
General
Most engineering powers are boring and passive. That's not saying there aren't useful ones but even those aren't very exciting to use. It also suffers from having the most cooldown overlap particularly at the ens/lt levels which is just frustrating on heavy eng ships. At higher ranks the power choices become less useful and poor. For example if you have access to two lt. comm powers your best bet is rank 3 of EPTx/Eng Team but now what do you do with your ens powers? So now I feel forced to use lower rank powers just because I have nothing else to put there. Now look at the Gal-R and you can see why that layout is frustrating.
Subpar
Direct Energy Modulation - Without Marion this power suffers from a weak effect and long cooldown and wouldn't normally be a choice.
Aceton Beam - Long cooldown and while the effect should be noticeable it really isn't and is easily cleansed.
Boarding Party - Never used it because the cooldown and effect is just not that great.
Aux to Batt - Without the doffs this power really isn't worth taking the effect is very short with a long cooldown and eats up precious aux power. The short duration means I feel it is meant to be used in a reactionary way but the effect is not powerful/immediate enough for this. The only thing that makes it good is the doffs and [AMP] cores.
EPTE - In combat usefulness falls behind the other ETPX abilities due to shared cooldowns. I only ever use this for mobility after combat.
Niche
EPTA - Suffers from having a cooldown with ETPS/W which are more generally useful. This is only really useful for science ships but since they have a lack of engineering slots and except for niche builds there is no reason to take this over EPTS/W or Eng Team
Extend Shield - Being a other player target only ability means it's only useful in a coordinated team where you have nothing better to put in it's place.
I don't think there is so much a required or too good power for engineering as much as there are useful ones and not useful ones and with shared cooldowns you take the useful ones.
Science
General
Science abilities for the most part suffer from long cooldowns and the effects are lackluster or ineffective.
Subpar
Jam Sensors - Single target means in aoe situations it isn't as useful and is easily broken and there are better powers at all ranks.
Mask Energy Signature - Never used it and never seen it used there are other powers I'd rather have slotted. I'll let others critique it.
Tachyon Beam - This power just isn't effective compared to just shooting the shields down.
Charged Particle Burst - Too close of a range and long cooldown and shield damage isn't high enough to warrant it's use.
Photonic Officer - The effect is nice but the long cooldown just kills it's usefulness outright compared to other powers.
Scramble Sensors - Doesn't seem to effect high level enemies much if at all and the radius is too small.
Photonic Shockwave - The range is too short and cooldown too long to use over another power.
Viral Matrix - Does this even effect high level enemies? I haven't used this in ages but the short subsytem disables didn't impress me.
Niche
Energy Siphon - The siphon portion doesn't seem to have much of an effect on enemies. The power boost is very short and without higher ranks or a lot of flow caps is really low. The cooldown compared to it's effects is too long. It is useful in some builds that focus on drains or with sufficient flow caps and rank is a nice if short power boost.
Feedback Pulse - Can be useful maybe I have never gotten much out of it but I can see where someone might.
Tyken's Rift - Good for drain builds does some aoe damage. It's biggest drawback is shared cooldown with grav well and the fact that it is really easy to just fly out of.
Too good/required
Gravity well - This is a if you can slot do so power. AOE hold is great for bunching up enemies for large strikes or just to keep something from going anywhere. Damage is pretty good too and will destroy any target able torpedoes fired near it. I don't think it is too good as much as it is really really really useful in comparison to other powers. I would even slot this over rank 3 of the science staples of HE/ST/TSS.
HE/TSS/ST/PH - These are not overpowered just more useful in comparison especially in ships with limited science slots.
Overall STO
Balance and the great DPS race - The game was originally designed around the trinity heal/tank/dps but content hasn't conformed to that for some time. This means there are ships and consoles and powers that are designed to be for these roles that just aren't as useful anymore. The Gal-r, armor consoles and extend shields are examples that come to mind. The game has become more how much damage you can do then anything else. I think you need to decide if you are going to stick with the trinity or not and start making changes to get things in line with whichever philosophy you decide.
Engineering Consoles - Aside from some Armor and Turn these things just are not useful anymore their effects are to small or not used. Armor suffers from diminishing returns so slotting more than a few is worthless.
Romulan Marks - We really need an elite space queue for these.
I don't know if Mimey has dropped by yet and put fourth his desire to see Subspace decompiler buffed and given consoles so I've just voiced it for him :P
In addition to that people seem to be forever complaining about phaser proc, I proposed an adjustment for it involving subspace decompiler (see my post here) I think it would be balanced myself.
I've seen posts here about overcapping which I think may be abusable, I think a way to adjust this as testing by various people seems to suggest it works to different extents (due to firing cycles and drain) for all weapon types. I would suggest Biteme's idea (as detailed here) to make drain build up shot by shot rather than drain all at once.
I think healing could use some changes I would implement a system of percentage based healing as it could be used to make healing numbers more predictable, can be applied blanketly across all ships and can be adjusted at a moments notice should healing need to increased or decreased at all.
On Aux2Batt.
I think the Aux2Batt issue would be fixed by making it an aux offline effect when used with the doffs in the same way the Aux2Damp doff works such that the effect would be carried over while the ability is not in effect meaning dual aux2batt builds wouldn't have time to recover their aux power, this would make DoTs a good counter to the build.
On tactical skills.
- Tactical team: The shield distribution being exclusive to this skill is bad, this should be added to all team skills and manual distribution should be sped up to match.
- Attack pattern Omega: This quite simply does too many things for one ability, most importantly it functions as an offensive and defensive skill. I would propose maybe splitting this skill up and adding it's offensive components to Beta and it's defensive components to Delta (while making it's disable and tractor immunities resistances instead).
- The innate subsystem targeting that science ships enjoy would benefit I think from scaling in level based on the ship's tier that that T1+2 get lvl 1 T3+4 get lvl 2 and T5 and onward get lvl 3, this would make it a serious thing to be concerned about and the fact you can't invest in reducing the cooldown on them this would balance itself.
On Science.
- I think science damage needs to be reoriented back to taking buffing focus from the skill table and aux power rather than straight base damage and needs an overall buff, on top of this tactical captain buffing for this should be reduced such that science and engineer captains that spec into them get good results while tac captains don't get overpowering results (they do afterall get buffs to weapon damage as well).
- I think that things like jam sensors need to be reworked such that the victim becomes blind to all ships in the area rather than just the person using the skill.
- Disables need a major looking at given they are tied to subspace decompiler which has the worst points to effect ratio in the game, the skill needs buffing (as mentioned earlier) and the base times on disables extended to make them effective.
One thing that wouls MAJORLY change the metagame would be the modification of NPCs so their ships match the capabilities of their player counterparts (same boff seatings, weapons capabilities, console setup, etc) with partially random boff ability selection and a random captain choice such that no two fights are the same. another thing to change is that every NPC seems to think it's a cruiser.
Lets the weeds grow as they will, pick out the ones that look interesting and start new threads from them.
Forum horticulture.
You can lead a ***** to culture...
I took AH's OP for essentially two things:
1) What commonalities show up repeatedly? Probably a sign that there's something there. Fortunately, most of these have been discussed ad infinitum in other places - A2B, FAW, BO... the list goes on.
2) What small details have been overlooked? We might take for granted that Stealth/Threat mechanics are kinda hopeless, so who bothers to draw attention to it elsewhere?
So yeah - both a top-down and bottom-up approach could be useful.
Being a bad player doesnt mean the abilitiy is useless. Especially not one of the three most powerful captain abilities ingame.
I usually have ample time to use it, and sometimes I even delay heals to get a better one. In my escorts.
Compare Go Down Fighting, which is super-situational, and does absolutely nothing 99.99% of the time unless you've just had your shields and half your hull blown off by one Borg torpedo. And then you die five seconds later anyways.
This thread unfortunately suffers from " too many chiefs, not enough indians" syndrome.
Everyone has ideas on which abilities are op or underpowered and how to fix them. But there is no discussion on those thoughts.
Unless Hawk was hoping to have a brainstorming soup of a thread, we kinda failed him as to what could've been an extremely insightful process.
Or maybe it's a trap to keep ability threads off the forum and made into suggestion posts in this thread...
Metric-wise one could at least make a word cloud of the abilities mentioned here and see some general consensus on things like engineering abilities, for example.
This is far too broad a topic for us to start debating EVERY power we have a problem with in detail, it'd be hundreds of pages long and incoherent if not impossible to follow without a team of dedicated readers.
I expect this is more of a brainstorm thing. They'll tally up what gets mentioned the most and then take it to the back and work it out with their own expertise.
Space Meta ideas and proposals. Sorry for the long post but there a lot of ideas and mechanics I think should be changed. I hope at least a few of these ideas find a place in sto.
Goals: Give engineering and science captains and Boffs more interesting flavors in the dps driven game play. In doing so promotes variety of player chooses, tactical driven ships shouldn't be the end all.
Getting rid of obsolete mechanics, and improving weaker abilities to be false chooses. While continuing support different gameplay.
Ideals:
Tactical : Burst damage dealing, defence tanks, Strong solo focused but with some strong group options. Fantasy equivalent Rogues or Rangers.
Engineering: sustained damage dealing, team support , Hull tank, Middle ground good solo,good support. Fantasy equivalent Warriors or Paladins
Science: Debuff damage, controllers,Shield tank, Group focused though not dependent. Fantasy equivalent Mages or Priests.
General updates :
Remove crew mechanic replace with a generic hull regeneration rate. The current system adds little interesting game play and even adds some questionable bugs.
Add a new emergency power bar to all ships. This is apart of the changes that I believe will help engineering heavy ships become more interesting to play. Also fits their theme of superior use of ship tech. It would be a resource bar that start at full, but when a emergency power is used it drains from the reserves every second, but allows for stacking of different emergency power which drain the power faster for each power. It also very slowly refills, but allows for long buffs, that if misused leave you vulnerable for a counter attack.
Along with this change power transfer consoles etc into consoles which buff the amount emergency power available. Along with removal of power transfer rates in general, which don't benefit play style much at all. Allows console engineering heavy ships to increase the length of the buff.
Boff abilities need to be complete streamlined, and changed the current system is very new player unfriendly. Instead of training their abilities with expertise, they should be selected when you rank up a boff, example a new ensign joins your crew, you select their first ability from a list of possible abilities or train one of their possible abilities to another current crew member. But in doing either you spend a certain amount of expertise. The ability is already at what now is considered a fully trained ability.
Shield redistribution currently if you attempt to do this manually, it does it for a few seconds and then stops. This not only break immersion, but is extremely micro managing. If insert federation captain had to tell ___ officer to send power to the front shield every time that shield was getting low. He would reassign them for other duties... A simple fix would be to allow the player to click once to activate rerouting to that facing infinitely. Then click again to turn it off. This would help new players and some veteran players who don't make macro's to handle this mechanic.
Command aura's should really be 10km not 5kms players rarely fly in such close formations even in pvp.
Aux to ___ abilities should pull a set amount of aux power based on the buff they provide until the buff expires, this promotes there use only on higher aux ships, the buff should also expire not only on its duration counter but aux power dropping to 1. The effects of these abilities should be much more efficient power wise the higher rank it is. More gain vs power used even if the power used is greater each rank. Aux should also be able to over cap to provide max Aux power if it is available. In addition all these powers can be cast on others. Allowing for more support.
Make engine power more useful, along with change the way defense works slightly. Allow for more defense the more over the normal cap of 125 engine power you are. In addition turn rate should be increased over the normal cap.
Make shield power more useful allow for shield resistance to go just slightly increasingly higher then 75% if you have over the normal base of 125 shield power.
Aux shouldn't effect hanger times normalize them, and give fighters and even shuttles to lesser degree the ability to effectively resist some aoe damage currently they die too fast, to be anything but annoying to use in most pve and pvp.
Ramming speed damage should be a formula calculated by the inertia and speed.
Give fed ships a nice ability to all their ships, passive sensor sweep. Its activatable ability which enhances sensors to pick up cloaked ships, and grants ambush debuff that adds bonus damage taken to ships detected and hit while the sweep is on. It however drains a large amount of aux, and has to have the aux to remain active so if a aux battery buff expires the effect is disabled. This ability can not be used with cloak or mask energy signature on.
Give armor slot to all ships, reduce resistance on armor consoles or make them straight Hp boosts.
Tactical captain:
Only 3 abilities I believe need any changes.
Fire on my mark to similar to sensor scan the science captain ability.
It would be more interesting if this was turned into a team ability giving it debuff that upon expiring in a few seconds exposes the target making it vulnerable to attack, with a buff crit severity or chance on hit or damage. Making coordinating with teammates to exploit a the burst in damage, as well as giving the opponent a chance to coordinate a defense.
Tactical fleet
Just make the accuracy and defense buffs a flat %. More understandable then skill point numbers for new players.
Alpha strike:
It does enough with damage no need for it to have turn rate too... Besides there are other attack patterns that could be one of their defining characteristic.
Engineering captains:
Engineering fleet : similar to other fleet abilities give it flat bonuses instead of obscure skill ups, or damage resistances which have diminishing returns.
Eps transfer:
Good ability but I feel it could be made more interesting, during its duration all transfers of power through power settings should be instant. Allowing a engineering captain to go from aggressive to defensive quickly. It could present a lot of interesting situational strategies.
Nadion Inversion:
This should cover any ability or equipment which drains power from your ships systems.
Reducing the drain costs for any ability or equipment activated during its duration.
Science captains:
Photonic fleet: Minor changes really, just give them more support abilities to help heal or protect the ship who summons them.
Scattering field: Increase to at least 5km, also give it a residual field that last around the same time as a gravity well, which reduces the shield resistances of all enemies caught in it.
Science fleet: More of the same make skill ups percentage increases, like example 10% shield healing.
Tactical bridge officer abilities:
Cannon & mine skills moved down 1 rank level. There is no point in using any of these skills at commander level, when attack patterns give more overall dps.
Add attack pattern kappa or gamma: gives a accuracy bonus, a good pvp attack pattern to get.
Omega: Does too much. So change it to damage and turn rate only, upgrade the turn rate now that attack pattern alpha got turn rate increase taken.
Delta : give it instead of damage resistance give it defense bonus with a expose enemy for more damage on missed attack. But the target becomes immune to effect for ___ seconds after it expires.
Tactical team: remove the auto re balancing shields, replace it with a highly timed emergency buff. That all hits miss you in __ time increasing with rank of the ability. This will encourage use of higher levels, and allow tactical heavy ships to have some more survivability, in times of excessive fire. But not a choose you couldn't drop for something else if you had other survival abilities, unlike it is now.
Engineering bridge officer abilities:
Push up emergency powers III to commander level, move down all the other powers, emergency power to ____ is engineering's show piece just as attack patterns are tactical captains.
Aux to structural integrity field: Change the effect into a extra hull that will take the already resistance calculated damage before your hull does. This will help in pvp as well as pve to support allies and react to threats while being able to focus on other abilities, maneuvering. After the ability expires it should heal hull for the damage yet absorbed. It also fits the name better then a simple heal.
Aux to battery: changed to a ability which allows you to regenerate emergency power. It now gives power indirectly, but has allows ships to keep power levels up longer.
Aux to dampeners: Give it increase to turn rate and increase to impulse modifier. Rather then the percentages. Now with being able to cast others you will be able to get others out of bad situations like grav wells, and eject plasma fields. Also maybe cause it to reduce inertia ?
Boarding party : Feels more tactical by nature, the shuttles are too slow, they need to reacquire targets.
Extend shields : This should be a area bubble of at least 10km or a single target bubble, that absorbs some damage to allies shields to caster's shields. To 100% of damage to casters shields at level 3. Making it a great emergency save allies in pvp, though I could see some situational use in pve. When caster's shields run out or are disabled effect expires.
Aceton beam : This should act as a reverse Nadion Inversion style debuff. It should increase the amount of power used by any ability. Aux to ___ , emergency power to __, and weapons. Remove the damage its pointless anyways and allows it to be stopped by Hazard emitters instead make it removed by engineering team. That will make engineering team more useful.
Eject warp plasma: its effect needs to be slightly increased in size. As its a
little to easy to move around, also make the plasma fire damage a separate debuff from the slow. So Hazard emitters doesn't just clear every thing. Let them use aux to dampeners and polarize hull more.
All emergency power abilities should be changed to add more to max power output( over 125) much like warp cores. This goes well thematically with engineers being the masters of their tech. Power of the ship being its back bone. Each one adding more past max with each rank
Emergency power to weapons: only 2 ranks, one at Lt. Com and II at commander.
Emergency power to shields: Remove the shield heal. Add another ability in its place if engineering heavy ships fail to tank well enough with out the heal.
Emergency power to engines: Remove plus to turn remove with changes to how engine power works it shouldn't need it.
Science bridge officer abilities:
Everything but Gravity well, Tyken's Rift , charged particle burst, scramble sensors. Will be pushed down one level. Leaving them the only abilities of commander rank. They will stand out as the most powerful debuffs as well as aoe abilities. How every all the debuffs in this category get removed the moment you step out of the area.
Gravity well: Pretty much the same as now except it also has a defense debuff out side the pull effect up to 10kms, and by rank 2 or 3 it has much higher damage, should also have some shield penetration.
Tyken's Rift: Instant reduce power debuff to all systems by set number depending on two factors rank and distance from anomaly, with maximum reach of 10km from center but, of course very low debuff.
While damage only occurs closer like now with some shield penetration.
charged particle burst: This I think should be science captains answer to burst down opponents, but also the lowest aoe, staying at 5kms. The damage it deals to shields should be percentage based, based on the amount of shields they currently have so it becomes less powerful the lower the shield is but, every one within the 5km radius, have their shield regeneration reduce down to zero at rank 3 less % wise every rank below that.
scramble sensors: This ability on initial hit creates a confuse, but when that expires it reduces the accuracy of all ships within the field it creates.
Tractor beam: The damage of this should penetrate shields and is calculated by speed and inertia.
Tachyon beam: Make it more focused on one shield facing, not all, opponent rebalance shields should be the only reason it lowers other sides. Its a beam meant to punch holes in shields not reduce them holistically to nothing. Also make it a single powerful pulse.
Energy syphon: why is this not more like plasmonic leash ? It really should be it's far to weak now to be of serious use.
Photonic shockwave and viral matrix will feel much better not needing a commander for them, but I do think they need to be scaled a bit better for rank I would leave them being useable at lt. com and lt. only ensign would be to powerful for their effects.
Mask Energy Signature: Just make it as effective as normal cloak especially at rank 2 and romulan cloak at 3. Otherwise it's just a waste of ability and honestly should be removed.
Jam Sensors: This should be a complete short blind( can't target or fire on anything) on initial hit then placate debuff on expiring. It would make it more useful against enemies when allies as well as player is overwhelmed.
Limiting commander seat to 4 different chooses, and making those chooses meaningful will give more value to the choose of your ship. But these abilities need to be effective in both pvp and pve. At least have chooses that are effective in one or the other.
Take attack patterns for example, in the system I propose, you have quite a few chooses, for each that change your style of play.
Attack pattern omega: As a straight damage upgrade its great for solors in its own right, and players who want max damage potential. Especially if other players use attack pattern beta and other debuffs. Best in pve but it does have uses in pvp.
Attack pattern beta: Great team play assist, but also fairly good for solo play. Works well in pvp and pve.
Attack pattern delta: Defense is a great tool in pvp, and has some use in pve if a tactical ship wants to tank some.
attack pattern kappa or gamma: Accuracy is a good tool in pvp, every hit counts. It also acts as counter to delta.
c) Weapon Range:
This is a simple one, Weapon classes have differing ranges. Torpedo's should be the longest, with ranges from 0-20km (Based on torp)
I'm going to focus in on this. I do agree that giving different weapons different range characteristics is a good idea. It doesn't have to be additional range, though. Some weapons could do more damage closer in while others have more accuracy or better crit. We already have this to some extent, but I wouldn't mind seeing DBB's get an extra kilometer or two to compensate for limited arc. DHC's in contrast could get something like a shotgun effect at point-blank range.
I also like giving torps extended range. However. Most torps that are not high-yield are either hit or miss. You can't outrun them and you can't shoot them down. For this to work well, all torps would have to work like the HY torpedoes do... and I can't see Cryptic doing that.
I CAN see them making long-range torpedoes available as a power on a longer cooldown.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
In the spirit of "not changing the entire nature of space combat as it is, but tweaking it to work better in its current state " I'll offer my somewhat ill-informed, semi-casual player, amateur thoughts.
Since I don't know all the nitty-gritty details about all the powers, and I like to mostly 'fly' the ship rather than hit allthekeys at the exactperfecttimes, I use a "cheapy imperfect swiss-cheesey non-Marion A2B" (tm) on many of my ships. (Tacs and Engs). On Science, I use the standard spacebar-mash technique.
Here's what I know, mostly stolen from the wise STO forums/Reddit forums/what I like:
Tac:
TT: One is a must. Two is preferable. Hit it as often as humanly possible. This indicates some or most of what is provided by this power (speedy shield redistribute) should probably be innate to all ships, perhaps at a reduced level, but manual redistribution is woefully inadequate. [TBH, shields are controlled by the newly discovered tech called 'computers,' which can do stuff like this (detect and counteract really fast data input regarding incoming damage) far faster than people.] "New TT" should probably have slightly increased effectiveness on its other characteristics, scaling better with level (I/II/III).
APO: One of the ones you should almost always choose. Covers everything. Probably too good. Might should be split up into parts to Eng powers, parts to Sci powers.
Whoa. I see this would be too long for me to tackle, esp since I r n00b. So, summing up:
Since DPS is king, and in case that remains the case, overall thoughts: (pardon any plagiarism from previous posters; trying to add support to these ideas)
1. Please take care not to reduce rate of gain of loot (ie, crudely stated, Dil/minute). The current rate, esp after nerfs like the Cluster/Doff support reduction and the crafting changes, is barely acceptable, and imo, should be increased. But whatever is done to the Boff powers, please retain at least the current rate of Dil gain.
2. Make more sci and esp. Eng powers do, and/or add directly to, and/or do more, DPS. Make powers like Tyken's, Tachyon Beam, Aceton beam, etc. more attractive to players that would have to involve some combination of lower recharge times and/or higher 'effect' (dmg, or stripping, or whatever).
3. Random idea: put powers like APB and APD in the Science and/or Eng list, and put a new power like "Beam Rapid Fire" or "Cannon Overload" in their place. Debuffs seem to belong in Sci, (or eng), while Tacs really should focus on their 'wheelhouse', as it were. While you're at it, drop CRF1 to Ensign level, and CSV1 to T2 (is this already the case? Similar, lower a lot of the Eng and Sci abilities in rank so that more different builds can use them, and vary builds more. Please reduce damage dropoff by distance on cannons; this makes beams a very superior choice.
4. Can we get 3 or 5 seconds *after* the ship explodes (but before the secondary) to use Abandon Ship? Because most of my deaths are surprises, and I am old and slow. Git offa mah lawn.
5. Fix the Crew mechanic. Crew death is something I never notice. Making less crew desirable is antithetical, imo.
6. Please keep pets from 'going into the Light" (ie, warp core breach). Min Safe Distance at all times.
7. Reduce or eliminate stacking on some abilities (APB esp. comes to mind), but please see note 1 this needs some serious testing to stick to that idea. Rather than make the battles take longer, it should just require more/'other' abilities, while remaining close in aggregate level of abilities required.
8. I'm a fan of A2B, personally, so I wouldn't do that much to it, though if anything, make Marion less of a leap in relative power somehow would make me (the cheapster) happy. But that may have to be counted as a conflict of interest, so here are a few thousand grains of organic free-range cruelty-free sea-salt.
9. General note: PLEASE extend the testing further out from releases so the PLAYERS have more time to test. No insult intended to your testers, but as is evident, 5-10,000 (for example) players who participate in testing will brutalize your best developed programs in ways a small cadre of internal testers can never do.
10. Another random idea, related to a prior poster: make ship damage more frequent, *less* costly per occurrence (no way is making damage cost blue or even green materials acceptable, NEVER components, MAYBE white materials (I guess this would remove the need for Minor/major/crit repair materials). But make it EASIER to actually repair the ship. Either put a button in the UI, make it a clicky power, only usable if damaged, or allow a slash command the current 6-7 click method crushes me in my soul.
11. I don't, as a rule, PVP. Not my cup of crushed leaves steeped in nearly boiling water for several minutes. (Who thought that up??) But balancing the PvE game based on PvP seems incongruent, when 90+% of players are PvE. Just sayin'.
12. I agree with the general notion that escorts are really dominant, while cruisers (which I would have thought should dominate) are much less generally effective and thus, less prevalent. I personally prefer the 'tall ships' notion of the game vs. the 'fighter jets' idea, and I'd like to see it move in the 'tall ships' direction.
13. Please make the Galaxy-D better. Sorry, I can't help it. I have to ask every chance I get.
I'm spent. Thanks for listening. I hope some of these make it in, and thanks for others before (and after) my post for fleshing out details of these ideas.
Please reconsider ARC. Please make it optional, at the least. PLEASE.
It seems the vast majority of your most active players (forum regulars) hate the idea... and while that's a small subset of the playerbase, I think it's an important constituency.
THE PLAYERS DO NOT WANT THIS.
ideally, hawk will be able to run a query and get counts on what abilities are seldom used and also a comparison of what people will use tier 1 of compared to 2, 3 (e.g., tac team). this would hopefully narrow his field on the neglected powers.
I'd like to see the torpedo/kinetic weapons system revisited. I believe torpedoes are the only primary weapon category still on a global cool down. I get it that removing the global cool down for torps would create a dps monster as the system stands right now. That being said, a good solution to the OPness of doing that would be to reduce the amount of damage each torpedo deals. Also, I'd like to see the innate resistance to kinetic damage that all shields possess either reduced significantly or eliminated. I'm tired of beating on a destroyer sized ship for two minutes because the target's shields just reduced the imparted damage by almost 85%. My cannon/turret build could've wasted the same ship in one pass. I enjoy running a torpedo boat, but having your torpedoes basically nullified by even weak shields is frustrating. I would like kinetic weapons to be competitive to energy weapons, please.
DPS reliance: Because of the way the system works, DPS is incredibly dominant as compared to healing/buffing/surviability, leaving the only other really useful ability CC (and to some extent DPS-boosting stuff like resistance debuffs etc.) this is a problem. It unbalances things wildly in favour of TAC. There's a couple of different ways of tackling this, one would be a "nightmare" difficulty with better drops but permadeath (or at least some other type of seriously crippling penalty for dying) One small thing I'd suggest is to keep the damage-boosting powers to boosting weapons-only (so no bonus to science powers at least) it's a minor issue and not particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but probably a good idea.
Stacking: Most things in this game stacks without diminishing returns, except for damage resistance. The problem with this is that stacking DPS completely overshadows the resistances you can get from stacking survivability, not to mention that stacking DPS can make content go through rather effortlessly. This also applies to the doffing system: Certain DOFF's, when stacked and combined with the proper powers, can have a completely outsize influence.
Some limitation on the stacking of both DOFF's and consoles (possibly a diminishing returns formula) would be helpful. Something similar to ED in COH, which would also force people to diversify consoles a bit.
This kind of unlimited stacking also makes specialization way more effective than trying to diversify: You're almost always better off going all cannons or all beams of a specific type rather than mixing and maxing. Not sure what the solution should be though.
1; Pet ai. pets should not aim for the warp core explosions.
1a; Pet ai. pets should respond to the pet commands, IE it should not take 45 seconds for a ship sitting next to me, out of combat, to try to dock.
2; Tac Team shouldn't be able to push shields around so much more quickly than manual.
3; Dispersal Patterns would work better dropped down a rank or two (DPB III for commander slot? seriously?)
4; Maybe have shield damage reduction scale by remaining shield strength?
5; 1 point of shield health should not stop 75% of a torpedo's damage
6; THY should not be so destroyable. Either move faster, or tougher to destroy, or both.
I know its possible to code into an individual weapon "does x% less dmg vs players" [due to the compressed cryo weapon] but doing so for all weapons in the game is problematic is it possible to write a blanket scrip where player enters pvp mission all weapons do "50% less dmg".
It might cut down on the one-shots but still keep the pve players happy. You might even get some more players to try pvp, just a thought.
PS has the compressed cryo launcher does "x% less dmg vs players" been removed I didn't see the notation in the tooltip anymore or in the info card.
Just to address this one point: This is just another version of "perma-death" (in this case, "super-costly death"). Huge penalties for dying are a terrible idea for MMOs - making your players feel 'they are bad and they should feel bad' is the realm of other games (Eve comes to mind.) It also makes casual players play Playstation games instead of STO.
Nope: Make it only for Elite ques. Problem solved.
I'm going to focus in on this. I do agree that giving different weapons different range characteristics is a good idea. It doesn't have to be additional range, though. Some weapons could do more damage closer in while others have more accuracy or better crit. We already have this to some extent, but I wouldn't mind seeing DBB's get an extra kilometer or two to compensate for limited arc. DHC's in contrast could get something like a shotgun effect at point-blank range.
I also like giving torps extended range. However. Most torps that are not high-yield are either hit or miss. You can't outrun them and you can't shoot them down. For this to work well, all torps would have to work like the HY torpedoes do... and I can't see Cryptic doing that.
I CAN see them making long-range torpedoes available as a power on a longer cooldown.
Without an ability to negate a ships shield innate kinetic resists [at 75% irrc] it would not matter how far away you can fire said torpedo since it won't even tickle the targets shields and if it is moving slower than the Hargh'peng [which irrc has the fastest to target time of any torp] your target will easily evade the long range torpedo.
In an earlier post I suggested giving some of the sci abilities a "reduce resistance to kinetic damage for 10sec when used"
wrote:
Originally Posted by galadiman
Just to address this one point: This is just another version of "perma-death" (in this case, "super-costly death"). Huge penalties for dying are a terrible idea for MMOs - making your players feel 'they are bad and they should feel bad' is the realm of other games (Eve comes to mind.) It also makes casual players play Playstation games instead of STO.
Nope: Make it only for Elite ques. Problem solved.
Nope you want something like that add a new nitemare difficuly level to the game
The Galaxy-X Phaser Lance could also need a buff maybe not damage wise but definitively how often the weapon hits.
The Galaxy-X is a slow turning ship that means it is hard to to get into a shooting position when you than also miss the target you lost the one big benefit the Galaxy-X has for three minutes.
There are two options you reduce the cooldown of the Galaxy-X Phaser Lance, to a similar one of Beam Overload or you make the Lance hit all the time.
Nope you want something like that add a new nitemare difficuly level to the game
I think that is exactly what is coming. Maybe not exactly the way described (perma-death), but I bet it is coming. Elite matches will become only "Hard" while new content will be called elite and require a mythical gear-score (TC or something like that) to enter. If/when it happens, I hope there is a bigger penalty for letting ones ship blow up, or rather, for letting a teammate blow up.
Comments
Heya Hawk, could you at least clarify a bit more the scope or at least what you are planning on/willing to change or adjust as to help keep this discussion on point? I see a lot of people stating the sad-but-seemingly-true sentiment that metagame is really what is wrong, and that the boff ability issue is more a symptom of that - but it is a moot point if that is beyond the scope of your planned changes.
Are we speaking about STRICTLY BoFF abilities and/or Captain powers? More clarification, good sir.
I 100% agree!
That would GREATLY enhance imersion IMO.
Starfleet Crusiers:
Idea to compensate the lack of DHCs
What about allowing Starfleet cruisers to equip several Omni Beams of the same type in their rear weapon slots?
By doing that we would get a 270 (forward) and 360 degrees (rear) that would make a much more Star Trek like weapons arc profile IMO.
Most Starfleet cruisers can't use cannon weapons due to their lack of enough tactical stations. So they are limited to boardsiding. My idea was to offer a alternative to that and make the game feel a bit more like Trek.
Sci:
-Charged Particle Burst (useless)
-Tachyon Beam ( even more useless)
Eng:
-Acteon Beam (much to high Cooldown compare to the effect)
-Boarding Party Shuttles (I like to see them removed, an replaced by something useful)
All:
-Torpedos (needs an update in flight speed an should do damage to shields like Energy weapons)
It seems the vast majority of your most active players (forum regulars) hate the idea... and while that's a small subset of the playerbase, I think it's an important constituency.
THE PLAYERS DO NOT WANT THIS.
Apologies for the following lump of text and if I'm repeating anything typed earlier.
Purpose: To try to fix two problems with one major change.
Problem one, the skewed dynamic between PvE and PvP.
Problem two, the narrowing of viable builds.
Solution. Three words. Remove All Stacking.
Boff skills.
Removing all stacking in this context means no more than one version of a power may be accessible.
I'd imagine it'd work by simply greying out the lower level version of the same skill.
Thus if you have TT1 and TT2 slotted, only TT2 would be useable.
Force players to create builds using a higher number of variables (skills).
Boff Traits.
Simply remove the ability of them to stack.
Two boffs with SRO loaded, only one of them gives you any bonus.
Use this as an opportunity to give all races a chance at a space trait.
Consoles
Only able to slot one of a given type of console.
No slotting of two neutroniums or RCS.
Fleet consoles secondary effects would not be counted.
Effectively meaning you get one fleet neutronium or RCS, regardless of sub-bonus.
Mark number would not count, meaning no mk X neutronium stacked with a mk XI one.
Again, force players to create builds using a larger pool of pieces.
IMO, the overall effect of this approach is to make decisions harder in endgame builds.
Min maxing has created a relatively narrow pool of viable endgame builds.
It's not min maxing per se though, its that stacking has allowed them to look at builds using a smaller number of pieces.
I can see a large number of ways in which stacking makes choices harder, and a lot of opportunities for lesser used skills, traits and consoles to get a balance pass and become viable, if stacking is disallowed.
edited to add, 'remove all stacking' would apply across the board.
And would most definitely include active doffs in space or ground slots.
You're right, I should have qualified my post as being from a predominantly PvE perspective.
PSW is used in PvP in conjunction with a SNB to deal a killing blow. The erasure of the enemy ship's buffs, in combination with the disable of PSW making them unable to react, sets them up to be vaped.
Tell that to the charred remains of my younger brother's Contortrix.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I am not an expert and relying heavily on the wiki.
I noticed a lot of abilities that say they will do x damage over y seconds. While this seemed more affective at lower levels (lower tier ships with lower hull, and player has the commander ability), becomes rather useless at higher levels. Perhaps a percentage base of damage would be more useful.
Below are my thought on some of the powers, some I stay away from because they dont seem worth it.
Tac
- Smoke grenade make smoke last longer. Possible flanking bonus at any angle.
- Draw fire add damage resistance to self as well. Seems to pull agro pretty well when used on self.
- Sub system targeting remove from shared beam cool down.
Eng- Aux to damepners never really used, but could come in handy if there are mass control builds.
- Boarding party weak compared to NPC versions. Klingon borg boarding parties will at least knock my engines offline in Cure, when I use it against an NPC, they seem to be stopping by for tea.
- Aceton Beam damage output should be risen; perhaps percentage.
- Equipment diagnostics what is a mechanical debuff, and how often are these even encountered. Just apply to all debuffs.
SciTo truly reach some sort of balance all powers, their related doffs, traits, shared cool downs, etc, will need to be pulled together into some sort of huge balance chart. Maybe not an all encompassing one because that sound atrociously complicated maybe some sort of chart dividing out the offensive\defensive abilities of a career; damage\buff of each by career, etc. This chart should be dynamic enough for the addition of new doffs, traits, or powers. This will help keep balance in check when the new items are released.
God bless you hawk for going through all this.
Everyone has ideas on which abilities are op or underpowered and how to fix them. But there is no discussion on those thoughts.
Unless Hawk was hoping to have a brainstorming soup of a thread, we kinda failed him as to what could've been an extremely insightful process.
Or maybe it's a trap to keep ability threads off the forum and made into suggestion posts in this thread...
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
Just between us, I'm a bigger fan of the space combat mechanics deployed in Starfleet Command 3 and Bridge Commander.
STO has always been on the twitch/arcadey-side for me, and tends to breach my personal preferences for canonism. I still get tons of fun out of it - I find it helps to pretend that we're playing in some hybrid Star Trek universe.
I get that you're largely talking about art animations, but you're asking for an essential overhaul of fundamental game mechanics. Even though I'm in agreement, that ship has long since sailed.
Tactical
General
AOE vs single target - We find ourselves most often fighting multiple enemies rather than single targets making aoe abilities far more practical in our limited slots than single target damage. In cruisers and science ships we feel we need to choose aoe over anything else due to this.
Beam vs Cannon - I agree with some people that Beams need a rapid fire skill and see no reason we can't combine the powers for use with both. Rapid Fire, Overload, Fire at will even target subsytem aren't exclusive to beam or cannon imo.
Subpar
Target Subsystem X - None of these seem worth using over FAW or BO the effect feels lackluster and barely noticeable end game. The enemies that it is noticeable on are easier to just kill and those that aren't seem hardly effected.
Beam Overload - This power is better now but it still won't replace FAW as the beam power of choice. Mostly because cruisers only use beam arrays which just aren't damaging enough for BO to be a better choice. I think some of it's problem is also that it's just not a very exciting power to use especially on beam arrays. While the damage numbers might be good it doesn't feel like much with one big shot every 30sec.
APD - This is a great tanking power but no cruisers can get the highest rank of this so it seems a little wasted.
High Yield Torp - Suffers several problems. The single target damage it has over spread isn't enough to take over TS and we find ourselves in more aoe situations than single target. Rank 1 is visually unimpressive. Target able torpedoes are too slow and will get shot down too easily to use on anything other than stationary unshielded targets.
Too good/required
Tactical Team - The shield balancing in this power make it darn near required for any build and one of the best teams. No one seems takes it for its other benefits and rank 2 and 3 are ignored. The funcionality of the shield balancing I feel is needed so I wouldn't want it to go away but maybe spread to some other abilities as well?
FAW - Is just too good at everything single target or aoe and will generally out shine BO. In contrast to BO it is very exciting visually to watch with beams rapidly firing everywhere. With it being a time based power you feel like you're getting something out of it.
Engineering
General
Most engineering powers are boring and passive. That's not saying there aren't useful ones but even those aren't very exciting to use. It also suffers from having the most cooldown overlap particularly at the ens/lt levels which is just frustrating on heavy eng ships. At higher ranks the power choices become less useful and poor. For example if you have access to two lt. comm powers your best bet is rank 3 of EPTx/Eng Team but now what do you do with your ens powers? So now I feel forced to use lower rank powers just because I have nothing else to put there. Now look at the Gal-R and you can see why that layout is frustrating.
Subpar
Direct Energy Modulation - Without Marion this power suffers from a weak effect and long cooldown and wouldn't normally be a choice.
Aceton Beam - Long cooldown and while the effect should be noticeable it really isn't and is easily cleansed.
Boarding Party - Never used it because the cooldown and effect is just not that great.
Aux to Batt - Without the doffs this power really isn't worth taking the effect is very short with a long cooldown and eats up precious aux power. The short duration means I feel it is meant to be used in a reactionary way but the effect is not powerful/immediate enough for this. The only thing that makes it good is the doffs and [AMP] cores.
EPTE - In combat usefulness falls behind the other ETPX abilities due to shared cooldowns. I only ever use this for mobility after combat.
Niche
EPTA - Suffers from having a cooldown with ETPS/W which are more generally useful. This is only really useful for science ships but since they have a lack of engineering slots and except for niche builds there is no reason to take this over EPTS/W or Eng Team
Extend Shield - Being a other player target only ability means it's only useful in a coordinated team where you have nothing better to put in it's place.
I don't think there is so much a required or too good power for engineering as much as there are useful ones and not useful ones and with shared cooldowns you take the useful ones.
Science
General
Science abilities for the most part suffer from long cooldowns and the effects are lackluster or ineffective.
Subpar
Jam Sensors - Single target means in aoe situations it isn't as useful and is easily broken and there are better powers at all ranks.
Mask Energy Signature - Never used it and never seen it used there are other powers I'd rather have slotted. I'll let others critique it.
Tachyon Beam - This power just isn't effective compared to just shooting the shields down.
Charged Particle Burst - Too close of a range and long cooldown and shield damage isn't high enough to warrant it's use.
Photonic Officer - The effect is nice but the long cooldown just kills it's usefulness outright compared to other powers.
Scramble Sensors - Doesn't seem to effect high level enemies much if at all and the radius is too small.
Photonic Shockwave - The range is too short and cooldown too long to use over another power.
Viral Matrix - Does this even effect high level enemies? I haven't used this in ages but the short subsytem disables didn't impress me.
Niche
Energy Siphon - The siphon portion doesn't seem to have much of an effect on enemies. The power boost is very short and without higher ranks or a lot of flow caps is really low. The cooldown compared to it's effects is too long. It is useful in some builds that focus on drains or with sufficient flow caps and rank is a nice if short power boost.
Feedback Pulse - Can be useful maybe I have never gotten much out of it but I can see where someone might.
Tyken's Rift - Good for drain builds does some aoe damage. It's biggest drawback is shared cooldown with grav well and the fact that it is really easy to just fly out of.
Too good/required
Gravity well - This is a if you can slot do so power. AOE hold is great for bunching up enemies for large strikes or just to keep something from going anywhere. Damage is pretty good too and will destroy any target able torpedoes fired near it. I don't think it is too good as much as it is really really really useful in comparison to other powers. I would even slot this over rank 3 of the science staples of HE/ST/TSS.
HE/TSS/ST/PH - These are not overpowered just more useful in comparison especially in ships with limited science slots.
Overall STO
Balance and the great DPS race - The game was originally designed around the trinity heal/tank/dps but content hasn't conformed to that for some time. This means there are ships and consoles and powers that are designed to be for these roles that just aren't as useful anymore. The Gal-r, armor consoles and extend shields are examples that come to mind. The game has become more how much damage you can do then anything else. I think you need to decide if you are going to stick with the trinity or not and start making changes to get things in line with whichever philosophy you decide.
Engineering Consoles - Aside from some Armor and Turn these things just are not useful anymore their effects are to small or not used. Armor suffers from diminishing returns so slotting more than a few is worthless.
Romulan Marks - We really need an elite space queue for these.
Consider this the first sowing.
Lets the weeds grow as they will, pick out the ones that look interesting and start new threads from them.
Forum horticulture.
In addition to that people seem to be forever complaining about phaser proc, I proposed an adjustment for it involving subspace decompiler (see my post here) I think it would be balanced myself.
I've seen posts here about overcapping which I think may be abusable, I think a way to adjust this as testing by various people seems to suggest it works to different extents (due to firing cycles and drain) for all weapon types. I would suggest Biteme's idea (as detailed here) to make drain build up shot by shot rather than drain all at once.
I think healing could use some changes I would implement a system of percentage based healing as it could be used to make healing numbers more predictable, can be applied blanketly across all ships and can be adjusted at a moments notice should healing need to increased or decreased at all.
On Aux2Batt.
I think the Aux2Batt issue would be fixed by making it an aux offline effect when used with the doffs in the same way the Aux2Damp doff works such that the effect would be carried over while the ability is not in effect meaning dual aux2batt builds wouldn't have time to recover their aux power, this would make DoTs a good counter to the build.
On tactical skills.
- Tactical team: The shield distribution being exclusive to this skill is bad, this should be added to all team skills and manual distribution should be sped up to match.
- Attack pattern Omega: This quite simply does too many things for one ability, most importantly it functions as an offensive and defensive skill. I would propose maybe splitting this skill up and adding it's offensive components to Beta and it's defensive components to Delta (while making it's disable and tractor immunities resistances instead).
- The innate subsystem targeting that science ships enjoy would benefit I think from scaling in level based on the ship's tier that that T1+2 get lvl 1 T3+4 get lvl 2 and T5 and onward get lvl 3, this would make it a serious thing to be concerned about and the fact you can't invest in reducing the cooldown on them this would balance itself.
On Science.
- I think science damage needs to be reoriented back to taking buffing focus from the skill table and aux power rather than straight base damage and needs an overall buff, on top of this tactical captain buffing for this should be reduced such that science and engineer captains that spec into them get good results while tac captains don't get overpowering results (they do afterall get buffs to weapon damage as well).
- I think that things like jam sensors need to be reworked such that the victim becomes blind to all ships in the area rather than just the person using the skill.
- Disables need a major looking at given they are tied to subspace decompiler which has the worst points to effect ratio in the game, the skill needs buffing (as mentioned earlier) and the base times on disables extended to make them effective.
One thing that wouls MAJORLY change the metagame would be the modification of NPCs so their ships match the capabilities of their player counterparts (same boff seatings, weapons capabilities, console setup, etc) with partially random boff ability selection and a random captain choice such that no two fights are the same. another thing to change is that every NPC seems to think it's a cruiser.
You can lead a ***** to culture...
I took AH's OP for essentially two things:
1) What commonalities show up repeatedly? Probably a sign that there's something there. Fortunately, most of these have been discussed ad infinitum in other places - A2B, FAW, BO... the list goes on.
2) What small details have been overlooked? We might take for granted that Stealth/Threat mechanics are kinda hopeless, so who bothers to draw attention to it elsewhere?
So yeah - both a top-down and bottom-up approach could be useful.
Compare Go Down Fighting, which is super-situational, and does absolutely nothing 99.99% of the time unless you've just had your shields and half your hull blown off by one Borg torpedo. And then you die five seconds later anyways.
were you thinking of the great Dorothy Parker quote that begins....you can take a horticulture......?
Metric-wise one could at least make a word cloud of the abilities mentioned here and see some general consensus on things like engineering abilities, for example.
This is far too broad a topic for us to start debating EVERY power we have a problem with in detail, it'd be hundreds of pages long and incoherent if not impossible to follow without a team of dedicated readers.
I expect this is more of a brainstorm thing. They'll tally up what gets mentioned the most and then take it to the back and work it out with their own expertise.
Goals: Give engineering and science captains and Boffs more interesting flavors in the dps driven game play. In doing so promotes variety of player chooses, tactical driven ships shouldn't be the end all.
Getting rid of obsolete mechanics, and improving weaker abilities to be false chooses. While continuing support different gameplay.
Ideals:
Tactical : Burst damage dealing, defence tanks, Strong solo focused but with some strong group options. Fantasy equivalent Rogues or Rangers.
Engineering: sustained damage dealing, team support , Hull tank, Middle ground good solo,good support. Fantasy equivalent Warriors or Paladins
Science: Debuff damage, controllers,Shield tank, Group focused though not dependent. Fantasy equivalent Mages or Priests.
General updates :
Remove crew mechanic replace with a generic hull regeneration rate. The current system adds little interesting game play and even adds some questionable bugs.
Add a new emergency power bar to all ships. This is apart of the changes that I believe will help engineering heavy ships become more interesting to play. Also fits their theme of superior use of ship tech. It would be a resource bar that start at full, but when a emergency power is used it drains from the reserves every second, but allows for stacking of different emergency power which drain the power faster for each power. It also very slowly refills, but allows for long buffs, that if misused leave you vulnerable for a counter attack.
Along with this change power transfer consoles etc into consoles which buff the amount emergency power available. Along with removal of power transfer rates in general, which don't benefit play style much at all. Allows console engineering heavy ships to increase the length of the buff.
Boff abilities need to be complete streamlined, and changed the current system is very new player unfriendly. Instead of training their abilities with expertise, they should be selected when you rank up a boff, example a new ensign joins your crew, you select their first ability from a list of possible abilities or train one of their possible abilities to another current crew member. But in doing either you spend a certain amount of expertise. The ability is already at what now is considered a fully trained ability.
Shield redistribution currently if you attempt to do this manually, it does it for a few seconds and then stops. This not only break immersion, but is extremely micro managing. If insert federation captain had to tell ___ officer to send power to the front shield every time that shield was getting low. He would reassign them for other duties... A simple fix would be to allow the player to click once to activate rerouting to that facing infinitely. Then click again to turn it off. This would help new players and some veteran players who don't make macro's to handle this mechanic.
Command aura's should really be 10km not 5kms players rarely fly in such close formations even in pvp.
Aux to ___ abilities should pull a set amount of aux power based on the buff they provide until the buff expires, this promotes there use only on higher aux ships, the buff should also expire not only on its duration counter but aux power dropping to 1. The effects of these abilities should be much more efficient power wise the higher rank it is. More gain vs power used even if the power used is greater each rank. Aux should also be able to over cap to provide max Aux power if it is available. In addition all these powers can be cast on others. Allowing for more support.
Make engine power more useful, along with change the way defense works slightly. Allow for more defense the more over the normal cap of 125 engine power you are. In addition turn rate should be increased over the normal cap.
Make shield power more useful allow for shield resistance to go just slightly increasingly higher then 75% if you have over the normal base of 125 shield power.
Aux shouldn't effect hanger times normalize them, and give fighters and even shuttles to lesser degree the ability to effectively resist some aoe damage currently they die too fast, to be anything but annoying to use in most pve and pvp.
Ramming speed damage should be a formula calculated by the inertia and speed.
Give fed ships a nice ability to all their ships, passive sensor sweep. Its activatable ability which enhances sensors to pick up cloaked ships, and grants ambush debuff that adds bonus damage taken to ships detected and hit while the sweep is on. It however drains a large amount of aux, and has to have the aux to remain active so if a aux battery buff expires the effect is disabled. This ability can not be used with cloak or mask energy signature on.
Give armor slot to all ships, reduce resistance on armor consoles or make them straight Hp boosts.
Tactical captain:
Only 3 abilities I believe need any changes.
Fire on my mark to similar to sensor scan the science captain ability.
It would be more interesting if this was turned into a team ability giving it debuff that upon expiring in a few seconds exposes the target making it vulnerable to attack, with a buff crit severity or chance on hit or damage. Making coordinating with teammates to exploit a the burst in damage, as well as giving the opponent a chance to coordinate a defense.
Tactical fleet
Just make the accuracy and defense buffs a flat %. More understandable then skill point numbers for new players.
Alpha strike:
It does enough with damage no need for it to have turn rate too... Besides there are other attack patterns that could be one of their defining characteristic.
Engineering captains:
Engineering fleet : similar to other fleet abilities give it flat bonuses instead of obscure skill ups, or damage resistances which have diminishing returns.
Eps transfer:
Good ability but I feel it could be made more interesting, during its duration all transfers of power through power settings should be instant. Allowing a engineering captain to go from aggressive to defensive quickly. It could present a lot of interesting situational strategies.
Nadion Inversion:
This should cover any ability or equipment which drains power from your ships systems.
Reducing the drain costs for any ability or equipment activated during its duration.
Science captains:
Photonic fleet: Minor changes really, just give them more support abilities to help heal or protect the ship who summons them.
Scattering field: Increase to at least 5km, also give it a residual field that last around the same time as a gravity well, which reduces the shield resistances of all enemies caught in it.
Science fleet: More of the same make skill ups percentage increases, like example 10% shield healing.
Tactical bridge officer abilities:
Cannon & mine skills moved down 1 rank level. There is no point in using any of these skills at commander level, when attack patterns give more overall dps.
Add attack pattern kappa or gamma: gives a accuracy bonus, a good pvp attack pattern to get.
Omega: Does too much. So change it to damage and turn rate only, upgrade the turn rate now that attack pattern alpha got turn rate increase taken.
Delta : give it instead of damage resistance give it defense bonus with a expose enemy for more damage on missed attack. But the target becomes immune to effect for ___ seconds after it expires.
Tactical team: remove the auto re balancing shields, replace it with a highly timed emergency buff. That all hits miss you in __ time increasing with rank of the ability. This will encourage use of higher levels, and allow tactical heavy ships to have some more survivability, in times of excessive fire. But not a choose you couldn't drop for something else if you had other survival abilities, unlike it is now.
Engineering bridge officer abilities:
Push up emergency powers III to commander level, move down all the other powers, emergency power to ____ is engineering's show piece just as attack patterns are tactical captains.
Aux to structural integrity field: Change the effect into a extra hull that will take the already resistance calculated damage before your hull does. This will help in pvp as well as pve to support allies and react to threats while being able to focus on other abilities, maneuvering. After the ability expires it should heal hull for the damage yet absorbed. It also fits the name better then a simple heal.
Aux to battery: changed to a ability which allows you to regenerate emergency power. It now gives power indirectly, but has allows ships to keep power levels up longer.
Aux to dampeners: Give it increase to turn rate and increase to impulse modifier. Rather then the percentages. Now with being able to cast others you will be able to get others out of bad situations like grav wells, and eject plasma fields. Also maybe cause it to reduce inertia ?
Boarding party : Feels more tactical by nature, the shuttles are too slow, they need to reacquire targets.
Extend shields : This should be a area bubble of at least 10km or a single target bubble, that absorbs some damage to allies shields to caster's shields. To 100% of damage to casters shields at level 3. Making it a great emergency save allies in pvp, though I could see some situational use in pve. When caster's shields run out or are disabled effect expires.
Aceton beam : This should act as a reverse Nadion Inversion style debuff. It should increase the amount of power used by any ability. Aux to ___ , emergency power to __, and weapons. Remove the damage its pointless anyways and allows it to be stopped by Hazard emitters instead make it removed by engineering team. That will make engineering team more useful.
Eject warp plasma: its effect needs to be slightly increased in size. As its a
little to easy to move around, also make the plasma fire damage a separate debuff from the slow. So Hazard emitters doesn't just clear every thing. Let them use aux to dampeners and polarize hull more.
All emergency power abilities should be changed to add more to max power output( over 125) much like warp cores. This goes well thematically with engineers being the masters of their tech. Power of the ship being its back bone. Each one adding more past max with each rank
Emergency power to weapons: only 2 ranks, one at Lt. Com and II at commander.
Emergency power to shields: Remove the shield heal. Add another ability in its place if engineering heavy ships fail to tank well enough with out the heal.
Emergency power to engines: Remove plus to turn remove with changes to how engine power works it shouldn't need it.
Science bridge officer abilities:
Everything but Gravity well, Tyken's Rift , charged particle burst, scramble sensors. Will be pushed down one level. Leaving them the only abilities of commander rank. They will stand out as the most powerful debuffs as well as aoe abilities. How every all the debuffs in this category get removed the moment you step out of the area.
Gravity well: Pretty much the same as now except it also has a defense debuff out side the pull effect up to 10kms, and by rank 2 or 3 it has much higher damage, should also have some shield penetration.
Tyken's Rift: Instant reduce power debuff to all systems by set number depending on two factors rank and distance from anomaly, with maximum reach of 10km from center but, of course very low debuff.
While damage only occurs closer like now with some shield penetration.
charged particle burst: This I think should be science captains answer to burst down opponents, but also the lowest aoe, staying at 5kms. The damage it deals to shields should be percentage based, based on the amount of shields they currently have so it becomes less powerful the lower the shield is but, every one within the 5km radius, have their shield regeneration reduce down to zero at rank 3 less % wise every rank below that.
scramble sensors: This ability on initial hit creates a confuse, but when that expires it reduces the accuracy of all ships within the field it creates.
Tractor beam: The damage of this should penetrate shields and is calculated by speed and inertia.
Tachyon beam: Make it more focused on one shield facing, not all, opponent rebalance shields should be the only reason it lowers other sides. Its a beam meant to punch holes in shields not reduce them holistically to nothing. Also make it a single powerful pulse.
Energy syphon: why is this not more like plasmonic leash ? It really should be it's far to weak now to be of serious use.
Photonic shockwave and viral matrix will feel much better not needing a commander for them, but I do think they need to be scaled a bit better for rank I would leave them being useable at lt. com and lt. only ensign would be to powerful for their effects.
Mask Energy Signature: Just make it as effective as normal cloak especially at rank 2 and romulan cloak at 3. Otherwise it's just a waste of ability and honestly should be removed.
Jam Sensors: This should be a complete short blind( can't target or fire on anything) on initial hit then placate debuff on expiring. It would make it more useful against enemies when allies as well as player is overwhelmed.
Limiting commander seat to 4 different chooses, and making those chooses meaningful will give more value to the choose of your ship. But these abilities need to be effective in both pvp and pve. At least have chooses that are effective in one or the other.
Take attack patterns for example, in the system I propose, you have quite a few chooses, for each that change your style of play.
Attack pattern omega: As a straight damage upgrade its great for solors in its own right, and players who want max damage potential. Especially if other players use attack pattern beta and other debuffs. Best in pve but it does have uses in pvp.
Attack pattern beta: Great team play assist, but also fairly good for solo play. Works well in pvp and pve.
Attack pattern delta: Defense is a great tool in pvp, and has some use in pve if a tactical ship wants to tank some.
attack pattern kappa or gamma: Accuracy is a good tool in pvp, every hit counts. It also acts as counter to delta.
I'm going to focus in on this. I do agree that giving different weapons different range characteristics is a good idea. It doesn't have to be additional range, though. Some weapons could do more damage closer in while others have more accuracy or better crit. We already have this to some extent, but I wouldn't mind seeing DBB's get an extra kilometer or two to compensate for limited arc. DHC's in contrast could get something like a shotgun effect at point-blank range.
I also like giving torps extended range. However. Most torps that are not high-yield are either hit or miss. You can't outrun them and you can't shoot them down. For this to work well, all torps would have to work like the HY torpedoes do... and I can't see Cryptic doing that.
I CAN see them making long-range torpedoes available as a power on a longer cooldown.
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Since I don't know all the nitty-gritty details about all the powers, and I like to mostly 'fly' the ship rather than hit allthekeys at the exactperfecttimes, I use a "cheapy imperfect swiss-cheesey non-Marion A2B" (tm) on many of my ships. (Tacs and Engs). On Science, I use the standard spacebar-mash technique.
Here's what I know, mostly stolen from the wise STO forums/Reddit forums/what I like:
Tac:
TT: One is a must. Two is preferable. Hit it as often as humanly possible. This indicates some or most of what is provided by this power (speedy shield redistribute) should probably be innate to all ships, perhaps at a reduced level, but manual redistribution is woefully inadequate. [TBH, shields are controlled by the newly discovered tech called 'computers,' which can do stuff like this (detect and counteract really fast data input regarding incoming damage) far faster than people.] "New TT" should probably have slightly increased effectiveness on its other characteristics, scaling better with level (I/II/III).
APO: One of the ones you should almost always choose. Covers everything. Probably too good. Might should be split up into parts to Eng powers, parts to Sci powers.
Whoa. I see this would be too long for me to tackle, esp since I r n00b. So, summing up:
Since DPS is king, and in case that remains the case, overall thoughts: (pardon any plagiarism from previous posters; trying to add support to these ideas)
1. Please take care not to reduce rate of gain of loot (ie, crudely stated, Dil/minute). The current rate, esp after nerfs like the Cluster/Doff support reduction and the crafting changes, is barely acceptable, and imo, should be increased. But whatever is done to the Boff powers, please retain at least the current rate of Dil gain.
2. Make more sci and esp. Eng powers do, and/or add directly to, and/or do more, DPS. Make powers like Tyken's, Tachyon Beam, Aceton beam, etc. more attractive to players that would have to involve some combination of lower recharge times and/or higher 'effect' (dmg, or stripping, or whatever).
3. Random idea: put powers like APB and APD in the Science and/or Eng list, and put a new power like "Beam Rapid Fire" or "Cannon Overload" in their place. Debuffs seem to belong in Sci, (or eng), while Tacs really should focus on their 'wheelhouse', as it were. While you're at it, drop CRF1 to Ensign level, and CSV1 to T2 (is this already the case? Similar, lower a lot of the Eng and Sci abilities in rank so that more different builds can use them, and vary builds more. Please reduce damage dropoff by distance on cannons; this makes beams a very superior choice.
4. Can we get 3 or 5 seconds *after* the ship explodes (but before the secondary) to use Abandon Ship? Because most of my deaths are surprises, and I am old and slow. Git offa mah lawn.
5. Fix the Crew mechanic. Crew death is something I never notice. Making less crew desirable is antithetical, imo.
6. Please keep pets from 'going into the Light" (ie, warp core breach). Min Safe Distance at all times.
7. Reduce or eliminate stacking on some abilities (APB esp. comes to mind), but please see note 1 this needs some serious testing to stick to that idea. Rather than make the battles take longer, it should just require more/'other' abilities, while remaining close in aggregate level of abilities required.
8. I'm a fan of A2B, personally, so I wouldn't do that much to it, though if anything, make Marion less of a leap in relative power somehow would make me (the cheapster) happy. But that may have to be counted as a conflict of interest, so here are a few thousand grains of organic free-range cruelty-free sea-salt.
9. General note: PLEASE extend the testing further out from releases so the PLAYERS have more time to test. No insult intended to your testers, but as is evident, 5-10,000 (for example) players who participate in testing will brutalize your best developed programs in ways a small cadre of internal testers can never do.
10. Another random idea, related to a prior poster: make ship damage more frequent, *less* costly per occurrence (no way is making damage cost blue or even green materials acceptable, NEVER components, MAYBE white materials (I guess this would remove the need for Minor/major/crit repair materials). But make it EASIER to actually repair the ship. Either put a button in the UI, make it a clicky power, only usable if damaged, or allow a slash command the current 6-7 click method crushes me in my soul.
11. I don't, as a rule, PVP. Not my cup of crushed leaves steeped in nearly boiling water for several minutes. (Who thought that up??) But balancing the PvE game based on PvP seems incongruent, when 90+% of players are PvE. Just sayin'.
12. I agree with the general notion that escorts are really dominant, while cruisers (which I would have thought should dominate) are much less generally effective and thus, less prevalent. I personally prefer the 'tall ships' notion of the game vs. the 'fighter jets' idea, and I'd like to see it move in the 'tall ships' direction.
13. Please make the Galaxy-D better. Sorry, I can't help it. I have to ask every chance I get.
I'm spent. Thanks for listening. I hope some of these make it in, and thanks for others before (and after) my post for fleshing out details of these ideas.
It seems the vast majority of your most active players (forum regulars) hate the idea... and while that's a small subset of the playerbase, I think it's an important constituency.
THE PLAYERS DO NOT WANT THIS.
DPS reliance: Because of the way the system works, DPS is incredibly dominant as compared to healing/buffing/surviability, leaving the only other really useful ability CC (and to some extent DPS-boosting stuff like resistance debuffs etc.) this is a problem. It unbalances things wildly in favour of TAC. There's a couple of different ways of tackling this, one would be a "nightmare" difficulty with better drops but permadeath (or at least some other type of seriously crippling penalty for dying) One small thing I'd suggest is to keep the damage-boosting powers to boosting weapons-only (so no bonus to science powers at least) it's a minor issue and not particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but probably a good idea.
Stacking: Most things in this game stacks without diminishing returns, except for damage resistance. The problem with this is that stacking DPS completely overshadows the resistances you can get from stacking survivability, not to mention that stacking DPS can make content go through rather effortlessly. This also applies to the doffing system: Certain DOFF's, when stacked and combined with the proper powers, can have a completely outsize influence.
Some limitation on the stacking of both DOFF's and consoles (possibly a diminishing returns formula) would be helpful. Something similar to ED in COH, which would also force people to diversify consoles a bit.
This kind of unlimited stacking also makes specialization way more effective than trying to diversify: You're almost always better off going all cannons or all beams of a specific type rather than mixing and maxing. Not sure what the solution should be though.
1; Pet ai. pets should not aim for the warp core explosions.
1a; Pet ai. pets should respond to the pet commands, IE it should not take 45 seconds for a ship sitting next to me, out of combat, to try to dock.
2; Tac Team shouldn't be able to push shields around so much more quickly than manual.
3; Dispersal Patterns would work better dropped down a rank or two (DPB III for commander slot? seriously?)
4; Maybe have shield damage reduction scale by remaining shield strength?
5; 1 point of shield health should not stop 75% of a torpedo's damage
6; THY should not be so destroyable. Either move faster, or tougher to destroy, or both.
7; Vaping should not be a thing.
It might cut down on the one-shots but still keep the pve players happy. You might even get some more players to try pvp, just a thought.
PS has the compressed cryo launcher does "x% less dmg vs players" been removed I didn't see the notation in the tooltip anymore or in the info card.
Nope: Make it only for Elite ques. Problem solved.
Without an ability to negate a ships shield innate kinetic resists [at 75% irrc] it would not matter how far away you can fire said torpedo since it won't even tickle the targets shields and if it is moving slower than the Hargh'peng [which irrc has the fastest to target time of any torp] your target will easily evade the long range torpedo.
In an earlier post I suggested giving some of the sci abilities a "reduce resistance to kinetic damage for 10sec when used"
Nope you want something like that add a new nitemare difficuly level to the game
The Galaxy-X is a slow turning ship that means it is hard to to get into a shooting position when you than also miss the target you lost the one big benefit the Galaxy-X has for three minutes.
There are two options you reduce the cooldown of the Galaxy-X Phaser Lance, to a similar one of Beam Overload or you make the Lance hit all the time.
I think that is exactly what is coming. Maybe not exactly the way described (perma-death), but I bet it is coming. Elite matches will become only "Hard" while new content will be called elite and require a mythical gear-score (TC or something like that) to enter. If/when it happens, I hope there is a bigger penalty for letting ones ship blow up, or rather, for letting a teammate blow up.