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Torpedoes, traits, and Bugs
nativejoe
Member Posts: 40 Arc User
Torpedoes: Anyone notice that Torpedoes are not regarded as viable? Why?
Answer: They don't do nearly as much damage as anything else does. Here's why...
Most notably Because +beam consols Stack with Fleet Flow or particle gen consoles they add a incredible plasma burn boost that can't be comparable with ANYTHING torps, and cannons can do. I've seen dps from this synergy in surplus of 22k dps just from the plasma proc.
1.5 second global cool down. Cannons fire together, beams fire together, torpedoes Don't, They don't even work on auto fire, autofire when switching from forward to aft weapons will lock up and not fire, Sometimes they'll lock up just because projectile duty officers proc, Or a long cool down weapon fires, To add to the frustration if you try to spam space bar to counter act the lock up you won't fire ANYTHING at all, commonly making you overshoot your goal and further reducing the damage your dealing.
Omega kinetic shearing isn't as powerful as it should be or I just don't understand it's mechanics.
A 12k damage torpedo smashing into a shielded target will sometimes Trigger a Dot of 40 damage, 5.5k damage per tick, or sometimes NO Dot at all even tho damage is inflicted.It doesn't seem to stack to well, some torpedoes seem to never trigger it, and it should collectively make up prolly about 20% at least of a Pure torpedo boats damage. In reality on my Combatlog reader it makes up about 6%.
Our secondary Detonations on many torpedoes seem weaker then they should be.
Mines and projectiles should be grouped into 1 catagory for consols... Who is stacking Mine consols? Honestly? They can ONLY be equipped in the aft slot. I'd understand it more if you could make a "Mine boat" but they need to be Combined into 1 Consol. So We can Dps like everyone else. Cannons arn't split , there's no such thing as turret consols, Double beam banks, beam arrays, and omni beams all function off The same consols. Projectile specialists have to Make a choice to ignore their Mine counter parts at this point
which is a shame since there are a few cool choices.
Lack of Duty officer love... We got reduced cool down, and.... Pretty much thats it for our choices since theres 2 choices for Projectile people. To High yield, or to Not High Yield. in which case you Select Torpedo Spread. There are no interesting Combinations, Interesting effects to exploit, and any other flavor then hardboiled egg.
Intel tree looks like it would benefit Projectiles but in reality the benefits to torpedoes are about as noticeable as Tachyon beam on a 400,000 shielded target. None at all.
Besides Mine chasing distance modifiers and torpedoes have a 10% chance to confuse targets for 3 seconds there are no direct Benefits to torpedoes that are in anyway exclusive. we don't have anything Like fluidic caccoon which adds 25% more damage or the other insanities out there for beams and cannons.
Lack of Consol love: We don't get insane shield heals from valadores consols, Steal tons of power with plasmonic Leech, Or get things like integrity leech which heals when u fire energy weapons... Pretty much insert X here and we don't get it.
To combat this most projectile officers Try to offset these weaknesses by coupling the Projectile build with something else. Be it a spark of Science exotic damage, or Draining, and pets.
Pets have been Nerfed to the ground: My elite Frigates Barley do 500 dps a piece.
Science: I thought the Science trait would be alot more powerful then it is, But a 1000 damage gravity well still does 1000 damage as a crit. I don't know if this was intentional, but there is no crit severity to the damage so Science abilities that don't work off consols Get nothing at all. Tachyon beam doesn't scale up and is completely useless except in CCA and thats just to remove a buff. The only useful abilities are Gravity well, Tykens rift, Energy siphon and Feed back pulse. And they're not primarily useful for damage delt, but the other effects they inflict. (excluding feedback pulse) And the consols and abilities outside of that have 1-3 minute cool downs which is insanity since the "dps" that entire console is contributing is reduced to nearly nothing.
Draining is viable...however, The heavy investment in console slots you need to drain shield power down is Way higher then the pay out. infact when I tried it , I ended up breaking even on my damage from No drain at all. However a Drain with fleet flow cap consoles will benefit cannons or beams because of the plasma damage proc thus making going into beams / cannon drain builds much more viable because they'll see a dps increase. A significant one.
So in Short: Torpedoes are in desperate Need of some Buffing, Bug control, traits,abilities, Duty officers, and The mine/torpedo consoles should be merged into one.
Feel Free to Add to this if you have Positive feed back, constructive criticism, etc
Please do not post if your here to take the conversation off topic, or to give short sided advice of " Then don't use torpedoes or mines", as this is a plea to bring them into viability. Not promote Scimtar Online/ disco ball online.
Answer: They don't do nearly as much damage as anything else does. Here's why...
Most notably Because +beam consols Stack with Fleet Flow or particle gen consoles they add a incredible plasma burn boost that can't be comparable with ANYTHING torps, and cannons can do. I've seen dps from this synergy in surplus of 22k dps just from the plasma proc.
1.5 second global cool down. Cannons fire together, beams fire together, torpedoes Don't, They don't even work on auto fire, autofire when switching from forward to aft weapons will lock up and not fire, Sometimes they'll lock up just because projectile duty officers proc, Or a long cool down weapon fires, To add to the frustration if you try to spam space bar to counter act the lock up you won't fire ANYTHING at all, commonly making you overshoot your goal and further reducing the damage your dealing.
Omega kinetic shearing isn't as powerful as it should be or I just don't understand it's mechanics.
A 12k damage torpedo smashing into a shielded target will sometimes Trigger a Dot of 40 damage, 5.5k damage per tick, or sometimes NO Dot at all even tho damage is inflicted.It doesn't seem to stack to well, some torpedoes seem to never trigger it, and it should collectively make up prolly about 20% at least of a Pure torpedo boats damage. In reality on my Combatlog reader it makes up about 6%.
Our secondary Detonations on many torpedoes seem weaker then they should be.
Mines and projectiles should be grouped into 1 catagory for consols... Who is stacking Mine consols? Honestly? They can ONLY be equipped in the aft slot. I'd understand it more if you could make a "Mine boat" but they need to be Combined into 1 Consol. So We can Dps like everyone else. Cannons arn't split , there's no such thing as turret consols, Double beam banks, beam arrays, and omni beams all function off The same consols. Projectile specialists have to Make a choice to ignore their Mine counter parts at this point
which is a shame since there are a few cool choices.Lack of Duty officer love... We got reduced cool down, and.... Pretty much thats it for our choices since theres 2 choices for Projectile people. To High yield, or to Not High Yield. in which case you Select Torpedo Spread. There are no interesting Combinations, Interesting effects to exploit, and any other flavor then hardboiled egg.
Intel tree looks like it would benefit Projectiles but in reality the benefits to torpedoes are about as noticeable as Tachyon beam on a 400,000 shielded target. None at all.
Besides Mine chasing distance modifiers and torpedoes have a 10% chance to confuse targets for 3 seconds there are no direct Benefits to torpedoes that are in anyway exclusive. we don't have anything Like fluidic caccoon which adds 25% more damage or the other insanities out there for beams and cannons.
Lack of Consol love: We don't get insane shield heals from valadores consols, Steal tons of power with plasmonic Leech, Or get things like integrity leech which heals when u fire energy weapons... Pretty much insert X here and we don't get it.
To combat this most projectile officers Try to offset these weaknesses by coupling the Projectile build with something else. Be it a spark of Science exotic damage, or Draining, and pets.
Pets have been Nerfed to the ground: My elite Frigates Barley do 500 dps a piece.
Science: I thought the Science trait would be alot more powerful then it is, But a 1000 damage gravity well still does 1000 damage as a crit. I don't know if this was intentional, but there is no crit severity to the damage so Science abilities that don't work off consols Get nothing at all. Tachyon beam doesn't scale up and is completely useless except in CCA and thats just to remove a buff. The only useful abilities are Gravity well, Tykens rift, Energy siphon and Feed back pulse. And they're not primarily useful for damage delt, but the other effects they inflict. (excluding feedback pulse) And the consols and abilities outside of that have 1-3 minute cool downs which is insanity since the "dps" that entire console is contributing is reduced to nearly nothing.
Draining is viable...however, The heavy investment in console slots you need to drain shield power down is Way higher then the pay out. infact when I tried it , I ended up breaking even on my damage from No drain at all. However a Drain with fleet flow cap consoles will benefit cannons or beams because of the plasma damage proc thus making going into beams / cannon drain builds much more viable because they'll see a dps increase. A significant one.
So in Short: Torpedoes are in desperate Need of some Buffing, Bug control, traits,abilities, Duty officers, and The mine/torpedo consoles should be merged into one.
Feel Free to Add to this if you have Positive feed back, constructive criticism, etc
Please do not post if your here to take the conversation off topic, or to give short sided advice of " Then don't use torpedoes or mines", as this is a plea to bring them into viability. Not promote Scimtar Online/ disco ball online.
Post edited by nativejoe on
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Many of us are here playing because of the TV shows, and in them torpedoes are very useful. A proper starship in the Trek universe is supposed to be using torps. A photon torpedo salvo is supposed to be the icing on the Cake of Death!
Don't forget they come in various of colors, and are useful for spamming. :P
My understanding of Omega Kinetic Shearing is that it takes the Damage To Hull, lops off a percentage of that and then applies the remainder as a DoT. This means that OKS is severely impeded by Shield Kinetic Resistance. It also means that OKS works better with Transphasic Projectiles when bombarding through Shields.
The best way to confirm this interpretation is, ironically enough ... Nukara Web Mines. That's because Web Mines do zero impact damage, thus they do not trigger OKS at all. Indeed, Web Mines do their entire damage as a DoT, rather than on impact, and OKS keys its DoT off the impact damage to Hull. No impact damage, no OKS DoT follow through.
Or it could be that OKS is just horrifically bugged beyond all explanation ... :rolleyes:
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
Standard Torpedo hits a NPC. NPCs have Standard Shields (not Resilient), and thus there is 10% Bleedthrough. So 10% of the Standard Torpedo's Damage is applied to the Hull. NPCs have 0% Damage Resistance, outside of Debuffs or the rare NPC that uses a Buff.
Shearing does 40% of that Bleedthrough Damage as Damage-Over-Time for 6 seconds.
So when hitting a Shielded NPC, ((Torp Damage * 0.1) * 0.4) / 6 = Shearing DoT Damage, per tick with 6 ticks.
Against a not-Shielded NPC, (Torp Damage * 0.4) / 6 = Shearing DoT Damage, pert tick with 6 ticks.
There are various ways to increase the amount of Bleedthrough (Kinetic Precision, Intelligence Fleet, EWO BO Penetration DOFFs, various Projectiles have their own increased Shield Penetration), and this will increase the amount of Bleedthrough Damage to the Hull and thus increase the DoT Damage.
A basic example of the simpler scenario...
A 10,000 Damage Torpedo hits a Shielded NPC without Buffs or Debuffs.
1,000 Damage is applied to the Hull.
400 Damage is applied as a Shearing DoT.
Each tick will be around 66.7 Damage.
A 4,000 Damage Torpedo hits a Shielded NPC without Buffs or Debuffs.
400 Damage is applied to the Hull.
160 Damage is applied as a Shearing DoT.
Each tick will be around 26.7 Damage.
That's just my understanding of the process.
I am here to jump on the torpedo bandwagon. Torpedoes used to be pretty awesome early in this game. Sometimes they're still impressive, but it's very infrequently. Beams and cannons do a lot more damage a lot more of the time, and it's not just because of torpedo firing arcs. Hell, DHCs have half the firing arc and no choice of a rear-firing arc.
Torps need to do more damage against shields than they do now. Shields absorb too much of a regular torpedo attack, forcing you to rely on, usually a lot of, energy weapons to drain shields in order to get any torpedo damage through at all.
I understand that relationship with energy weapons/torpedoes and shields/hull is a basic concept of the way the combat works in game, and I'm on board with it. It needs some retuning in favor of the torpedo boat concept.
Also, I support combining the mine and torpedo consoles. Mines are not that versatile because they're already forced into a rear-only weapon and to use some of the better mine Tac abilities you have to sacrifice some other rather appealing attack patterns or cannon/beam/torp abilities. So, I support the idea of "energy weapon" consoles (beams and cannons) and "kinetic" consoles (torps and mines).
I seriously doubt that someone can deal 22k dps from energy weapon plasma burn. never even seen it above 2k.
About the science consoles, at XIV gold they should add arround 400 DoT, so, extra 400 dps. Since chance for this extra dps is 2,5% chance, it behaves like a constant extra 10 dps for every weapon cycle. a ship with 8 weapons get extra 80 dps per firing cycle for each equipped console.
The kinectic shearing uses kinectic damage dealt on a shot to apply its DoT, i'm not sure if it also counts the damage dealt to shields or only target's hull, either way, 40% will be inflicted again over 6 seconds. once again, your numbers are off (5,5k damage per tick? over the 6 secs durations, thats 33k dmg. a 12k shot will cause 0,8k per tick, for a total of 4,8k damage).
As for difference from expected to real damage boost, can be caused by target's damage resistance or parser's not registerign it.
Mentioned before in by someone in a previous post, the shearing may work better on transphasic weaponry, as these ignore more shields and that way will deal more damage. For best performance, just use the torpedos as torpedos and fire on an unshielded facing for best damage and best shearing damage.
With this part i agree, would like to see torpedos fire together, but wouldn't mind if they stay unchanged. I just wonder why they sometimes don't fire when they are supossed to, that i want to see fixed as soon as possible. I think that also happens with energy weapons but not sure.
Both HY and spread allows for an awesome damage spike, superior to any energy weapon can do. Surgical strikes and beam overload increase damage of energy weapons a great amount for a spike, but are no better than a spread, just in different conditions (high shielded enemies).
About sets, most sets that increase energy damage adds less than 10% damage to the energy type. Projectile buffs tend to add 20% - 30% damage.
I think the choice of running projectiles builds as science officers is to suffer less from running at lower weapon damage, or to have the special bonuses found in some of these weapons.
Gravity well's critical should apply normally. It is incorrect to assume they are not getting anything because of a bug. there are also lots of traits that will allow you to deal much more than 1000 exotic damage in a gravity well. A friend of mine hits about 3200 and there are builds out there that teach how deal that much - perhaps even more.
Consoles with such cooldowns are situational, most used to deal spike damage and/or massive debuff. the spatial charges console fire 6 charges of 10k damage each, combined with a gravity well, its an AoE death. The reload is not quick but adds some interesting dps if used right. The subspace infusion circuit (the elachi console known as black hole) deals less damage but greatly debuffs, so might work as a combo.
I also disagree about merging tropedos and mines. They have a relation similar to beam/cannon one. Same damage type (kinectic or energy) but different category.
You should also try torpedos like the perticle emission, the gravimetric and the neutronic, same damage and dps as a normal torpedo with a "special power".
DPS isn't everything. in this game, you can DPS your way to victory, but there are other ways too, and those are often more enjoyable to play. The old tricobalt with 2x damage and 2x cooldown retains the same DPS as current tricobalt, but old version was far better. 20k damage in 1 minute, its 350 dps, but the 20k hit would kill the enemy so was worth much more than a 3500 dps escort.
I'm not a good player and haven't explored much on non-tactical gameplay, so i'd discuss about the torpedos/sci things.
PS. hope i didn't mess up the post with so much quotes
Flying a 15k dps dual cannons hazari destroyer. Let the discussion begin!
Maybe for merging consoles, the torp consoles could get a lesser buff to mines, without the buff being damage-type specific like this: +20% quantum projectile +10% mine damage
That would let us play with mix-and-match, like tractor beam or chroniton mines with plasma torpedoes.
I actually do have several kinetic builds that are just as deadly as energy builds in general play. Aside from a few glaring examples(Chronitons, Tricobalts), I don't know if I believe the hyperbole of torpedos being completely terrible at this point; they're just a more nuanced weapon.
I think a lot of opinions on the matter are skewed by not being specced to get the most out of them. How many people run without points in projectiles and are disappointed that they're not seeing the numbers. Consider the difference in performance between having no points in energy weapons versus the output you see when you do have points. (It's a side tangent, it's kind of surprising we don't have much gear that actually boosts either of these skills.)
The real problem might just be the massive amounts of shield generation we have at the current endgame - players and NPCs alike. Torpedos are brutally effective against a naked hull(something my drain-boat has been heavily schooling me in the past couple days - to the point where I'm almost considering traditional GravWell torpboats to be obsolete), it's just we have a very un-Trek situation where everyone is flying around with near-infinite shields.
But I don't see how this is affecting torps. They were underused even before the plasma burn started to reach so much DPS.
Anyway, I think this is an exploit (not worth a ban, mind you), and should be fixed. Knowing Cryptic, in about 2 years, but still, it should be fixed someday.
I am getting over 3.5k from that shearing and I can further push that to over 5k with a few tweaks. It’s massively powerful. In what way isn’t as powerful as it should be? Why is 3k to 5k not enough? It also gets a boost from the new command tree.
We went over this before. They can be combined into one console when the front and rear damage type match. It works just the same as with energy weapons. The mine consoles are to mix mine types or for when you have front and rear mine launchers. What is your problem? Also mines can be used in the front slots. My mine layer ships has 3 rear mines and 5 front mines.
We went over that before and again you ignored me why? What about all the other stuff like torpedoes boost shield resistance, boost shield regen, disable all ships in 3km , torpedo's confuse target, and everything else torpedoes do? There’s a lot more choice then To High yield, or to Not High Yield.
Look at the new command tree there are some very nice torpedoes boosts and torpedo bridge officer powers.
Some are weak but some are very powerful with some of the secondary Detonations are crazy damage doing over 30,000 damage or over 20k dps. Way more than the Plasma Proc at 20k. Off the top of my head I can think of 4 different torpedoes that can pull out over 20k from secondary Detonations/procs against a group of NPC’s.
There is a thread in general discussion for more informations. Basically, it involves upgrading the embassy console to epic. On the tooltip the dot is already at 1k+, and that's just a tooltip. Remember, the dot can crit, so the more crit you have the better.
Then, +beam/cannon console will buff the dot further. And applying the dot from 1 console will trigger the other, if you have other embassy consoles.
Then, you use non plasma weapon, and spam BFAW.
Unrelated to Plasma DoT. Just had loads of fun grinding XP with a torp boat during the XP weekend. The popular XP missions are perfect for torp boats due to the large waves of ships at around 10 to 20 NPC ships closely pact together. Was getting around 284k dps against waves, or 6.8million damage in 23 seconds due to splash damage overlap.
The plasma weapon dot is pretty much unchanged, as far as I know. You might have slightly more, but not much.
The target bit doesnt worry me as much as one of the torps doubles the targets hit by torpedo spread. Not many people know that so you can hit 10 targets at once. Alternatively Rom torpedo hits only 5 targets but has a large splash so you can DoT groups of ships. The Emissions torp leaves large Plasma fields for 6 seconds that apply a Dot. So even if its not as good as FAW I believe you can target a fair amount, more so if you add in Plasma Mines with double chase distance. My hope is the 100% proc chance makes up hitting less targets and of course in missions with targets spread far part this will work out much worse then FAW.
But in missions like the popular XP grinding mission you get around 15ships warping in at tight formation. Torpedo spread or single shots from the rom torpedo hit 15ships at once due to splash damage. If the Dot scales up that well it could more deadly then FAW.
I had no trouble at all upgrading my Beam console.
Having said that, has anyone tried the new science command ship with that tachyon console and torpedoes (with command spec tree filled) to see how it performs?
We already have consoles that boost both equally. Why do so many people keep asking for something we already have?
Gravy torps have that gwell proc that can act as crowd control. A week ago I was in japori and I shot one with torp spread 1 and created 3 gwells in front of me. I didn't test that on a shuttle but it probably would have been effective.
A nadeon detonater gives a torp a big secondary explosion allowing it to damage groups. I should have probably tried to test that this weekend too.
Torps are relatively weak in starship fighting, but they can be deadly in shuttle fighting.
If you read the info window of the torp is says that part gens do affect it. Right click on it and select info from the drop down list. (I thinks the word is "info". Something like that.)
beam energy weapons are just equally effective against shields AND hull.
theres the flaw.
why should i take sth, thats not damaging shields at all, when i can use sth, that even when its fired with 20energypower is doing more dps than a torp on hull?
burst. torpedos deliver burst. but if that burst isnt enough to kill it in one burst, DPS kicks in and its bad and no time-saving option at all.
to counter that initial flaw, where energywepaons do sheild+hull dmg, torps got boosted by traits and more traits more and more. and its still only viable if combined with double launching or HYing.
so ...
now we get this new ubertorp, it will be 200% viable, but its killing all balance left for all other kinds of torpedos.
I wonder if the ap torp would be good at getting rid of the foe's shields for the other torps in a 1-2 combo?
I also wonder how the kdf ship trait that boosts the effectiveness of high yield torps will effect the torp?
Considering that it's only boosted by AP consoles, it's classified as energy (AP) damage, and the only torp affects that effect it (so far reported), are HY and TS, I doubt anything else would boost it in the realm of torpedoes.
It's an energy ball that gets to use TS and HY.
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.
Please inform me, what are they?
FYI, Quantum Exploiters still do not increase the damage of Quantum torpedoes.
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.
its taking your basedmg and adds 40% as a bleedthrough dot over 10seconds.
normal torpedo hits for 10k, thats 1k bleedthough
OKS takes 40% of the initial damage, and adds this up as bleedthrough.
10k / 1k +400/sec for 10sec
so you basically get a free overtime transphasic torpedo. thats why using plasma or transphasic basically has become obsolete as soon asthis trait is slotted.
if it works correctly i cannot say.
___
other variant is that only dmg that effectively landed on hull would get 40% plus, can hardly say, from gaming experience it feels like its the first variant, cause i really feel if thta trait is missing.
You are correct about OKS, but forgot one detail: It takes 40% of damage done to hull and spreads it across the duration of the dot.
If it was 40% of damage upon impact to the shield or hull, then it would be stupidly OP for PvP, but fit in just right for the current PvE environment. If only there was a way of flagging it to behave differently vs players.....
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.