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Level 60 content - Everything is a damage sponge
admiraldunwall
Member Posts: 57 Arc User
This may just be a view I have and others do not share it, but I'm finding some of the numbers (mainly in space combat) are pretty damn high.
Now these numbers make sense on Vaudwaar ships, as they are supposed to be the new power and threat in the Delta quadrant, but when a Kazon Cruiser has 288,000 hull (and possibly a silly amount of DR), things suddenly become less fun solo. Kazon ships are meant to be held together by willpower and promises, so it saddens me to have full-on slugging matches with just one in a fully-armed Odyssey tactical cruiser.
Anyone else feel the same? Or should I be quiet and give in to Aux2Bat?
Now these numbers make sense on Vaudwaar ships, as they are supposed to be the new power and threat in the Delta quadrant, but when a Kazon Cruiser has 288,000 hull (and possibly a silly amount of DR), things suddenly become less fun solo. Kazon ships are meant to be held together by willpower and promises, so it saddens me to have full-on slugging matches with just one in a fully-armed Odyssey tactical cruiser.
Anyone else feel the same? Or should I be quiet and give in to Aux2Bat?
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Inflating numbers/prolonging late game encounters is probably one of my biggest pet peeves of MMO/RPG design. It defeats glass-cannon(high risk/reward) builds and, ironically enough, promotes min-maxed gameplay over variety(the encounters become a chore, so effort is made to marginalize the chore as much as possible - rather than have fun).
A starting point if nothing else
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
the vaadwaur are actually the first ground npcs that use ducking, which opens quite a nice opportunity for melee skills.
I which my boffs would duck. :P
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
yes. and vadwaur ships are actually disengaging and doing attack runs on you when they get shot at too. but the scripting is flawed, any ship with EPtE can keep pace and they will just fly forward forever, never reaching the distance from you that would trigger them to turn around. this is a good start for npc having behavior at least.
the DQ races are certainly more complex then average npcs, but they aren't a fraction of what the still should be. some might have 3 or 4 abilities, some might even synergize well, but they still got multi minute downtime, NPCS still exclusively rely on huge hitpoints for survivability, and not at all on skills applying resistance or healing. this makes debuffing and skill striping useless, there's a big difference between turning off a skill that provides resistance, and just building it in stock.
dreadnaught npcs should come with 8 weapons and 12 abilities, scaling down from there at battleship, cruiser and frigate ranks. their skills should have up time player ships enjoy, they should cycle EPt skills with full coverage, they should have only 30k to 100k hitpoints, and rely on healing and resistance levels for most of their survivability. making them dependent on abilities like that, gives sci debuffs teeth, the game wouldn't just be about DPS.
the working prototype for this already exists, its called every player ship. give npcs the same capabilities, add some simple if;then statements, for when they activate skills, and bam, engaging pve. pve that takes more then bind FAW to space bar
The Time to Kill in this game is so fast most enemies I face are underwhelming and from a in universe point of view they pose a limited credible threat, much like a TV show where the heroes can never die theres no tension for me
But I'd still prefer enemies to be smarter, Better armed more in line with player ships, and have access to more Abilities, including appropriate Reputation Powers, and new upcomming Ship traits, but I know thatds a lot to be asking for
I agree with everything else you said, but please not this. While i agree the lack of weapon systems on -for example- a tactical cube is rather stupid (and furthers this one-shot mentality of pve content) i'd rather have a true star trek feeling in pve, at least when it comes to the frequency weapons fire. 8 would just be any other spamming FAW ****** out there and would look just terrible. Maybe it would work if each weapon system could fire independently (then we would get the assimilation cube fight feeling from first contact) but i doubt that this is possible. With 8 weapons we'll just see a constant stream of coloured lines connecting target and attacker. Give them more weapons (the range of 4 energy [if they are not multidirectional] and 2-4 torps and call it a day) or mixed torp types, even fast fighter with mines (ala Orion slaver pets) would be neat.
i would assume they would keep normal mode as simple as ever. this kind of npc improvement is what advanced and elite difficulty is perfect for.
no npc would run 8 beam arrays. there would be any combination of beams and cannons and torps and mines on every ship. wouldn't look worse then what your own ship is doing.
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Considering that CSV looks like multiple massive uni-colour skittle packs are exploding away from my ship and Rapid Fire looks more like a constant stream of bullets then heavy short burts, i can safely say: less is more here - even for my owen ship.
Maybe that is also partly a symptom of cd reduction and general spammability of abilities but this game borders on sensory overload sometimes.
i agree that canon trek was very minimalistic in its weapons fire, unlike STO. but this an entirely different issue, not cause to keep npcs such a joke
No, not entirely different. They can actually kill two birds with one stone here. Give the enemies more weapons then the current standard enemies, but keep them at a normalized comparative damage level. I for instance really like the damage ratio of the CE's beam attack.
Usually strips one shield facing and can even punch through to your bare hull. That's what they could be aiming for without decending into epilepsy inducing territory.
In general, they shouldn't actually use base player abilities on npcs anyway. They just don't scale to well with npc levels and hidden multiplicators. The npc exclusive special epte is a great example of that.
there's a very good reason to increase the number of weapons and lower the base damage multiplier at the same time, and that is torpedoes. energy weapons are are balanced so you spam 6, 7 or 8 of them at once, torps you can only really send down range 1 at a time. so, when an npc is shooting 1 beam and 1 torp at you, the beam isn't too scarey, but their THY3 can 1 shot you. both the 1 beam and 1 torp get the same flat damage multiplyer, when that damage multiplier should be 2 or 3 times lower, but the ship should deal the same level of energy damage, but with 2 or 3 differnt beams. then the torp isn't incorrectly being super boosted as much.
this is why you get 1 shot in pve, especially in stfs. the borg gear is protecting you from plasma damage, but what you really need is defense from their monster kinetic damage. npcs having as many weapons as player ships would make freak 1 shots disappear
Example; when Cryptic revamped the Undine, they did gain a few more of our powers, but by and large they gained new unique abilities that fit with their kind. And fairly obviously, it took a bit of effort that was already going in with the theme of the expansion, so they lined up.
Revamping every NPC group pattern with new abilities would take considerably more effort, I believe, and that's without giving them new unique powers that fit with the group.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
+1 All around excellent post.
It's not like i said to not increase the amount of weapons used ... but yeah torps are the most problematic concerning one-shots. I can almost always anticipate when a tac cube will launch its invisi torp at me and boost my resists accordingly, but even that will bring me down to 66% through full shields (with nearly max resists and hull at about 50% resists, 60% with BFI on). The torp spread of certain enemies is even worse. The borg's unimatrix command ship's torp spread is nearly always deadly.
They should just split the multipliers between energy and kinetic damage so they can actually adjust them more precisely. Want to have a boss that only uses one strong beam weapon and a massive amount of torps ... easy as pie now (not that you could completely spam torps with this 1 sec global ...).
You are absolutely not alone.
Indeed indeed. DR content should be balanced roughly around (but still above) the same point as the previous endgame because we are NOT going to be able to keep our equipment upgrades/replacements on par with leveling/story progression (especially on multiple toons). As it is I feel that my gear is entirely obsolete (well chosen rep and fleet gear so just imagine how the "average" player is going to feel) because of how much stronger standard enemies are now and without any alternative but to chuck massive resources at the upgrade system I don't think that this is a workable situation for october. I may still be able to win every fight but its easily crossing the line between "challenge" and "tedium."
Something absolutely needs to be done about this (because rebalancing core gameplay at this scale and in this direction can easily spoil everything).
...and I'm not talking about a massive and fundamental overhaul of STO PVE combat. That's going to take the development of a new GAME. I won't trust any dev to tackle that sort of problem with an existing MMO for the above reason that if you get it wrong you have the very real (and much more significant) potential of ruining everything. Here we're just dealing with NPC health/damage that's scaled a bit too far. You want them to try to address that by developing an entirely new model for STO PVE space combat? That might turn out well but the chances of that happening (because its a much more complicated problem) are so much more remote than a small balance tweak to address the specific combat issues [ex. normal story content/patrols] we're seeing now with this expansion pack. I'd rather Cryptic fixes what needs fixing, and ensure I still have a game I want to play in October, than chance its destruction on the mere hope of satisfying those who want something else.
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I agree with all this, I've been running the story content on elite and have been at 60 for awhile now and the hull HP on some of these enemies is just absurd. This toon is a sci and doesn't do obnoxiously high dps nor do I desire to on him, it's taking way too long to kill just one ship let alone over a dozen ships in some missions. It has gotten to a point where when another wave of enemies pops up in a mission I feel like rage quitting because I don't want to spend 10 minutes chasing after a ship with 650k hull while having 2 other 650k hull ships chasing me. I don't mind the challenge but actually make enemies challenging, there's been some good suggestions in this thread on how to do it.
Now as for ground combat, where is the content? Yes we have the kobali zone but there is absolutely no challenging content there... the voth zone is more of a challenge I think. The episodes have barely any content for ground and we face the same enemy everytime.. the Vaadwaur (minus the goofy bugs). Where are the kazon ground mobs? Where are the hazari, I'd imagine they would be awesome to fight on the ground. If DR were released today I'd classify the content as such:
Space = irritating/too DPS oriented/unimaginative
Ground = boring/lack of new enemies/not challenging
The first thing NPC need to be able to do is to spam shield distribution and tac teams....
Anyway, I would rather see Kazon ships in mass 6 to 12+ in missions with maybe 100k hulls than hulking behemoth HP juggernauts.
Why has the AI not been developed better? As was stated previously, just juicing up HP only works against the experience....
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
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Actually I'd say they are. Vaadwuar will make distinct attack runs and will try to disengage from battle. The heirarchy have a mean combination of abilities too which comes in at the other side of the problem (abilty use versus behavior.) However that doesn't show up too much in practical combat (despite the long engagement times) because the massive health increase obscures any other appreciation of combat.
You may notice "hey, that ship is doing something new" but that thought has to fight for a slim amount of space next to "BORED!"
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Hmmm...... I cant say I've seen any pattern or other such "new" stuff... I sit an play chicken and see what happens next time.
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
The Glorious, Kirk’s Protegè
But I guess that's too much AI to ask for.
All that giving critters access to those abilities does, is end up giving them a higher Effective HP value. And in the case of that particular power setup, a potentially infinite one (if the player can't out-damage the healing).
It might 'feel' a bit more engaging in the moment-to-moment gameplay, but ultimately it's setting the player up for failure, which isn't generally considered strong game design. The same goal (longer fights, where choices matter more) can be accomplished without that risk, by increasing Actual HP instead of Effective HP.
I'm not saying this to dismiss the argument that Post-50 critters may have too many hitpoints currently - that's actually something under investigation at the moment - but just to point out a potential design flaw in some of the proposed solutions being discussed in this thread (and others).
We'd all love smarter, more engaging AI. But it's a beautiful fantasy to assume that there is some magical quick-fix available such as "just give them healing abilities."
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thats not all it does. it makes them vulnerable to debuffs, when their ability to heal and resist is delayed or taken away. this gives an entire captain type a reason to exist, that it does NOT have right now in pve. it gives higher effective hitpoints only if they survive long enough to use abilities, and spike builds can see to it that they don't. sudenly 2 of the most important play styles in pvp can work in pve too.
there's already 3 different difficulty levels in place, even we that would like healing npcs know that normal mode should not see any of this type of thing, because the lowest skill players still need to limp through everything somehow. this isn't setting a player up for failure, its teaching them how to actually play the game, to use whats available to them to its actual potential. and they can always go back to normal if they cant hack it. what better way to create incentive to log on, grind and PAY money for things other then content thats actually changeling?
just cranking up hitpoints and damage may technically make it harder, but it also cranks up boredom twice as much along with it. it also leaves no purpose for ANYTHING but raw DPS. spike is worthelss, sci captains are worthless, sci debuffs are worthless, tanking is worthless, how can this be considered stronger game design? the wheel doesn't need to be reinvented, everything you need for this has been in the system since game launch. the only thing missing then was the different difficulty levels, but that got added the first year.
tl;dr
npcs dependent on abilties= debuffs and spike actually lower their base line performance, DPS isn't the only thing that maters, science becomes as strong as tac in pve. fun achieved, if to hard play normal
npcs that just have only bloated hitpoints= debuffs do nothing, the peeks and valleys in DPS for spike builds is counter intuitive, game play favors nothing but tac and dps, everything else is lesser or worthless, super boring
You could do something like have them a limited number of "charges" to use these abilities, or have them only use it on specific occasions that are not gonna repeat themselves. (E.g. trigger when first hit, when first reduced to 50 % shields, when first reduced to 0 % shields, when first reduced to 50 % hit points, and then never again). Then players with counters like SNB or whatever could still have something to do to counter them, but players that don't know about counters-strategies still can eventually whittle them down.
In other words - if infinite healing is a problem, don't let it become infinite.
Similar to how Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition give people limited healing ability via healing surges, and further limited practical available healing by requiring certain, limited, trigger powers. That was more something for the players than the NPCs, but it can also be applied to NPCs.
I know setting up such triggers would not necessarily be easy, but it could be something worth exploring.
There is a quick fix randomly insert a player into these missions lol. With like a monster commands/skills and make it where you can't tell if its normal AI or a player and it'll drive people nuts when they figure it has to be a player lol. So then you knock out many birds with one stone better AI, pvp, and moar pvp.
Edit: Then again now that I think about it most ppl I've faced in pvp are easier to kill than elite npcs are so I guess there isn't a 100% quick fix unless a player has to meet some criteria where they wouldn't be an instant push over.
The problem is the current critter design makes most sci skills useless versus just pure raw DPS.