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T.5 , T5 Fleet, T5-U, T6, T6 Fleet, T6 Lockbox -- Where is the DR balance Cryptic ?
aelfwin1
Member Posts: 2,896 Arc User
This post / question is a product of both P1 butchering my similar question to Capt. Gecko (at the time I was not aware of T.6 Fleet ships coming) , and Anazonda's recent not-poll ( T6, T5.75 or T5/5.5 - What's your pick) which did not include all the available ship options to play Delta Rising with .
Now , before I loose your attention , I will remind you that per this game's history , Cryptic has had a devil of a time trying to balance this game for THREE types of ships (regular , fleet , lockbox) , with the high influx of new gear that they put in lockboxes , new ships and new Doff powers .
Just ask anyone who plays PVP about this .
Even PVE-ers see the unbalance between their 3-12K DPS , and a 20-30K DPS of a Scimitar .
Thus my question :
If Cryptic had issues with balancing content for 3 types of ships , how are they planning to balance 6 type of ships ?
(and would it not have been smarter to retain the already problematic 3 types of ships framework ?)
Capt. Gecko has already provided two conflicting answers :
1) They are fine tuning Lvl 50-59 content to be playable in a non-Fleet escort .
2) They are upping the demand curve for ships to make T6 ships & gear more desirable .
As my title says , we will have 6 types of ships to do DR in .
Some (like T.6 Fleet ships & T6 lockbox ships) will not be available right away ... , however only a fool can ignore their eventual place & desirability in the game .
The only thing that I'm not clear on as of yet is : will our current (soon to be upgraded) Lockbox ships be equal to future T.6 Lockbox ships ?
If they will be then Cryptic only has to balance the game for 6 types of ships and not 7 ... .
The more likely scenario (from my perspective) is that they will either continue to balance the game for the top 3 types of ships ... (while ignoring the rest) , or they will fold on their "demand curve" idea and go for the lowest common denominator ... (Cryptic has a history with this approach as well) .
Only time will tell I suppose .
Now , before I loose your attention , I will remind you that per this game's history , Cryptic has had a devil of a time trying to balance this game for THREE types of ships (regular , fleet , lockbox) , with the high influx of new gear that they put in lockboxes , new ships and new Doff powers .
Just ask anyone who plays PVP about this .
Even PVE-ers see the unbalance between their 3-12K DPS , and a 20-30K DPS of a Scimitar .
Thus my question :
If Cryptic had issues with balancing content for 3 types of ships , how are they planning to balance 6 type of ships ?
(and would it not have been smarter to retain the already problematic 3 types of ships framework ?)
Capt. Gecko has already provided two conflicting answers :
1) They are fine tuning Lvl 50-59 content to be playable in a non-Fleet escort .
2) They are upping the demand curve for ships to make T6 ships & gear more desirable .
As my title says , we will have 6 types of ships to do DR in .
Some (like T.6 Fleet ships & T6 lockbox ships) will not be available right away ... , however only a fool can ignore their eventual place & desirability in the game .
The only thing that I'm not clear on as of yet is : will our current (soon to be upgraded) Lockbox ships be equal to future T.6 Lockbox ships ?
If they will be then Cryptic only has to balance the game for 6 types of ships and not 7 ... .
The more likely scenario (from my perspective) is that they will either continue to balance the game for the top 3 types of ships ... (while ignoring the rest) , or they will fold on their "demand curve" idea and go for the lowest common denominator ... (Cryptic has a history with this approach as well) .
Only time will tell I suppose .
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a team mate of mine has reached 60k+ dps on his scimitar and much much more than 30k dps can be archieved using several ships.
both pvp and pve are totally unbalanced
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
Who can actually navigate the mess?
Imagine a player that levels up his first character...
when he gets to Level 51, he can suddenly press "Upgrade" to turn his ship in a Tier 5 Upgrade. (Provided he has an ugpradeable ship in the first place).
So he does.
Then he finally gets to Level 60, and decides to keep playing, joins a fleet ,grinds some fleet credits and dilithium. And the he realizes there is a Fleet variant of his ship. But he must buy the Fleet variant seperately. And he must upgrade it afterwards. Two completely different processes to get a better version of your ship, and every one costs him money (or requires grind in some form to get the money), and he finds out he basically wasted resources on that Tier 5 upgrade, he should have gotten a fleet version first, but how was he supposed to know?
But hey, there are also Tier 6 ships out there. With Fleet options, of course.
And then we think of balance and realize that he may have paid for 3 upgrades on a ship but ultimately that ship will be barely as strong as that Tier 6 ship, and weaker than the Fleet Tier 6 ship.
That's just the new business plan working as intended.
I've just been discussing the same scenario in another thread. This is especially likely since side-by-side, the upgrade looks like a better deal than the fleet variant as a first step (especially if they have the same price point).
But, but, but, Cryptic is telling us that...
T5-U ~ T6
FT5-U ~ FT6
...sure, we're laughing our asses off - but that's what they're telling us.
So that person that bought their T5 ship, bought and enjoyed the use of their T5-U upgraded ship, went and bought the Fleet T5 ship and the T5-U upgrade to be able to fly a Fleet T5-U ship...according to Cryptic, they're roughly on the same level as somebody that bought a Fleet T6 ship and are even ahead of the person that only bought the T6 ship.
Yes, we're rolling around on the floor laughing our asses off and trying not to wet ourselves....
...but hey, it's what Cryptic said.
Then again, they said outside of whatever queues might require more - that everything could be done in the Standard T5 or Fleet T5 ships anyway, right?
Course, the sheer amount of power creep - no, it's not creep - it's a freakin' avalanche of power coming with Delta Rising just kind of raises the question of WTF? Cause uh, well - yeah, that's the question that comes to mind...WTF???
The 50-60 hitpoint scaling was the first good hard numerical representation of things.
It's just a hair over 20% increase.
Aha ... but that was my entire point !
(which you intentionally missed :P)
There are plenty of threads discussing ships (for better or worse) since it's all theoretical at this point until we see actual performance of our ships through Lvl 50-59 and then see if they have something of a boost in difficulty in Lvl 60 content .
Which is why I chose to sidestep the issue of the ships and chose to look at things from the opposite angle (the Dev angle) -- in regards of the difficulty of the content , and the difficulty of balancing said content to so many (too many) different ship categories .
Should see ~21.21% increase in HP for T5-U/T6 ships from 50-60.
L60 T5-U/T6 ships should have ~33.33% more HP than L60 T5 ships that do not have the HP scaling.
Course, I'm not a big fan in the least of how Cryptic runs with ratios/percentages.
Say we compare a T5-U Fleet B'rel and a T5-U Recluse, eh?
L50's unmodified base is 33,000 for T5-U ships.
It's easy to figure it out for the B'rel, since we have access to both the Standard and Fleet variants. We know that the B'rel has a 0.825 hull modifier - cause it's got 24,750 base hull for the Standard variant. The +10% for the Fleet version does not modify the hull mod nor does it provide a simple boost, it provides that boost to the base - along the lines of how the T5-U/T6 ships gets a boost to their base. So that 24,750 * 1.1 gives us the 27,225 we see on the Fleet variant.
So we can run that 0.825 hull modifier against the 33,000 to get the T5-U HP of 27,225 and then multiply that by 1.1 to get 29,947.5 which I hope they rounded up - lol - to give us 29,948 base HP.
The Recluse on the other hand, well - does it have that 1.45 hull modifier or does it have a 1.305 hull modifier and then gets +10% to that? I honestly don't know. We can look at it both ways with one of the numbers being wrong...hopefully somebody can point out the correct number and that can be noted.
w/ 1.45: 33,000 * 1.45 = 47,850 base HP
w/ 1.305: 33,000 * 1.305 = 43,065 * 1.1 = 47371.5...47,372 base HP
Yes, a minor difference of sorts at this level - but I honestly don't know which they go with that, meh.
Those are our L50 numbers. Here are the L60 numbers.
B'rel: 40,000 * 0.825 = 33000 * 1.1 = 36,300 base HP
Recluse (1.45): 40,000 * 1.45 = 58,000 base HP
Recluse (1.305): 40,000 * 1.305 = 52,200 * 1.1 = 57,420 base HP
All of them are a 21.21% increase over what they were at L50, but what is the actual amount of the increase?
B'rel: 36,300 - 29,948 = 6,352
Recluse (1.45): 58,000 - 47,850 = 10,150
Recluse (1.305): 57,420 - 47,372 = 10,048
That's just the difference in the base HP. What if they had 9 in Structural Integrity? We can multiply each of those by 1.3 to see...
8,258 vs. 13,195/13,063
The more you add, though the percentages change - the greater the disparity in what each ship gains will grow...
Heck, how about a comparison of the person that doesn't upgrade their Fleet B'rel and the one that does, eh? Each with 9 SI, hrmm?
35,393 vs. 47,190; a gain of 11,797 HP by upgrading.
And the Recluse? Using the 1.45 hull mod? With 9 SI again, eh?
56,550 vs. 75,400; a gain of 18,850 HP by upgrading.
D'oh, wait...the Recluse gets the Carrier Starship Mastery passives where one is +10% HP. So we're looking at...*1.4 instead of *1.3 for that.
56,550 vs. 81,200; a gain of 24,650 HP by upgrading.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of all the ratios/percentages that Cryptic does...meh.