I disagree. Science ships consistently get the short end of the stick compared to DPS build cruisers and escorts. Also, there is no reciprocity for science so the grav well cooldowns are pretty long compared to being able to chain your BFAW, CSV, SS, etc. almost continuously.
It was nice for the devs to throw science a bone, but tac, intel, command, pilot got the rest of the cow, steaks and all.
Well said and thank you. Sci captains always get punished in this game.
You know what....I have a solution....how about we just nerf energy weapons to make them match what part gens will do according to you guys and give them the 100% shield pen and all ships have fbp3 built in that returns 100% damage irregardless of anything else buffing it. Then we'll see what is op and where and how.
Have Exotic boosted by Aux in the same way Energy Weapons are by Weapon power, eh? Cause most aren't affected by it at all...one set is ~43% and another one is 75%, so even the best one is only half and does so little damage does it matter?
And yeah, with those Tac Consoles providing twice the boost, yeah? So double up the boost from the Sci consoles.
Two skills to boost weapons but only one for Exotic...with the Exotic being T3 while the weapons are T1 and T2.
Even if one were to say that Energy Weapons have to deal with Shields...making Exotic have to deal with Shields while providing the missing boosts and balancing things out...taking into account the CDs and everything...
...heh, yeah, it's kind of a trip how much folks complain about Exotic without looking at just how far behind Energy Weapons it is.
If they were to balance out the boosts, then...then...they might have to take a look at balancing things, lol...but as it is now? Heh, they're always funny discussions to be sure.
* * * * *
Ugh, now I got to try to remember how to put this toon back together again.
This. It's easy to have 10k+ DPS, and up to 30-40K (if you have a scimi). You don't need fancy upgrinded items, or R&D perks. Not even DOFFs. You just need fleet items, rep gear and a bunch of consoles. Pretty sure you can do 10K with 1mil and 5minutes shopping at the exchange. Not going to happen with an exotic build.
On the other hand, do to some meaningful DPS with exotic, you need the R&D trait, a lots of pgen (sacrificing pretty much everything for it), a good secondary deflector, doffs, and usually a good ship. Also, crafted and rep gear, like the r&d torp.
Also, for playing it, I'm taking so much aggro on what is only a sci ship after all (wells t5u), it's difficult to simply stay alive. In fact, it's a lot harder to play than my scimi. A lot.
In the end it's a LOT MORE work than just BFAW everything. I don't see an issue for it to be rewarding. Would you prefer to have exotic damage so much harder to build, and not even rewarding ? We have the cannons to fill that spot already.
I haven't seen the parser, besides mine, but I highly suspect someone with BFAW and the same amount of dedication will perform at least the same, if not better than a proper exotic damage player.
I think one thing we all seem to be forgetting is the effectiveness of exotic damage. Since beams and cannons have to bust down shields to operate at maximum efficiency first whereas tbr doesn't have to....tbr ends up being far more effective.
We get stuck on the numbers cause of the neat little invention of CLR.
As well, though since fbp looks at raw damage dealt then factors a response to it.....in the end fbp becomes more effective damage because its shield pen....though it does do damage to shields too.....it deals the brunt of its damage to hull.
In the end, it's not a new complaint. Hell, it's a complaint that existed long before this game existed.
"Somebody killed me with something...nerf it."
Way to shut the conversation down. Just as well anyway since the postings for keeping sci like it is were all based around numbers anyway crying that there still not enough when truly its about effectiveness concerning particle generators in terms of calculating dps. Something CLR doesn't do as it would be difficult to make such a metric.
You want high numbers from something that is 100% effective at damage dealing and you want to keep pace with tac captains who's damage dealing can be around 60% effective at the best of times....smh.
Yea it's a good time to shut the conversation down cause it was done when the whining sci ships drivers came out saying "keep it like it is./nerf it....no buff it"
You want to run fbp and tbr with maxed out part gens and think its ok...I'm going to show up in my tac captain sci ship with 5 plasma exploders, mk 2 weapons, and 20 weapon power. Nerf that and then I'll just show up in my Faeht and double tap torp bomb you with your fbp up all while running 3 copies of pol hull in both ships. Won't we just have fun.
I think one thing we all seem to be forgetting is the effectiveness of exotic damage. Since beams and cannons have to bust down shields to operate at maximum efficiency first whereas tbr doesn't have to....tbr ends up being far more effective.
We get stuck on the numbers cause of the neat little invention of CLR.
As well, though since fbp looks at raw damage dealt then factors a response to it.....in the end fbp becomes more effective damage because its shield pen....though it does do damage to shields too.....it deals the brunt of its damage to hull.
Have we forgotten these concepts?
Umm no...FBP does 50/50...so as long as you have shields its not doing mostly hull damage.
So what are you just a vaper who is upset they have a way to counter you?
FBP doesn't last forever and has a long cooldown...and you can't stack two FBP III...so why don't you watch what you're doing instead of just charge in Cannons and Dual Beam blazing?
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
Remember this for our next 'Waaa! Someone killed me with SS3!' discussion.
Hey, I went through the math on it comparing it to CRF...it looked fine...I was with the look at the Acc group...and I thought they should nerf FAW. Course, I think it's pretty easy to trace almost all discussions in STO back to FAW...it's like that game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. :P
So...you can build a low to mid end part gen ship easy...you want to nerf that...yet you have no problems with ships that can pull 2-4 times the dps of partgen ships easy enough?
The pinnacle of dps is what..someone said 120k? Not many people have broken 100k but it's obviously doable...I haven't heard of anyone even breaking 50k with a partgen ship...
Highest I've heard is the 40k range...so partgens can only reach 1/3rd of what the best fawboat can and yet you want to nerf it?
Obviously FAW also have problems, but this post was about PG, yes?
To answer your question.. Yes, I do have problems with being hit by 40k+ plasma explosions through my shields.. (FAW + Tac + Embassy consoles)
A secondary proc on a weapon should never be able to oneshot me.
Lets look at FAW if PG gets fixed... The maybe, just maybe..
The Devs will look at creating NPCs that are challenging to fight, and not just have 7 digit healthbars.
Imagine if NPCs actively countered your abilities, imagine if they didnt use FBP before your buffs are up, imagine if they had 100% uptime tacteams, cycled EP2S, if they coordinated their attacks.
The problem per se is not OP things like PM, FAW.. The problem is the lazy way of creating challenge by simply increasing HP bars..
Heralds are a step in the right direction with their skillset, but they are still just spamming their holds and disables randomly, and overwhelming people with sheer numbers..
5 cruisers spamming EMP, 5-10 probes disabling systems, frigates ramming you etc.. Its easy to counter if you know what to do, but most people have problems cause they too used to spacebar their way through 99% of all PvE.
Now imagine if they actually used those things intelligently
The only intelligent AI is PvP, that is why we wanted it balanced. With PvP dead at least the DPS players now have effective teammates; the old PvPers.
The only intelligent AI is PvP, that is why we wanted it balanced. With PvP dead at least the DPS players now have effective teammates; the old PvPers.
And because 'we' (= presumably you and the very small PvP community) want it nerfed, every Science PvE player wanting to use their PrtG builds needs to be nerfed along with you, right?! This all sounds frightfully familiar.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
The only intelligent AI is PvP, that is why we wanted it balanced. With PvP dead at least the DPS players now have effective teammates; the old PvPers.
And because 'we' (= presumably you and the very small PvP community) want it nerfed, every Science PvE player wanting to use their PrtG builds needs to be nerfed along with you, right?! This all sounds frightfully familiar.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
Well, standard pvp-noise. If it can kill you, it needs to be nerfed.
Well, standard pvp-noise. If it can kill you, it needs to be nerfed.
Oh no, not this again.
We've already gone over this - a good PvPer will make an excellent (but not top) PvE'er. A good PvE'er is not guaranteed to be a good PvPer. I thought we all agreed on that in another thread? :P
It's not "if it kills you, nerf it", it's "if it kills you too quickly or doesn't give you a chance to adequately defend against it, re-tune it." If FBP had a 1.0 damage reflect, you'd be able to catch yourself and either break off or attempt to heal through it. But with up to a 4.0 reflect, you're taking far more damage than you're both dishing out and can even try to heal through - even if you catch yourself an stop shooting them, you're going to take more than a fistful back, often enough to kill you. TBR is "fire and forget", requiring no skill to use. Hit TBR and you're guaranteed to do massive AoE damage. If there were some skill required, then maybe a argument could be made in it's defense. But instead, hit it, and you're taking massive chunks out of people. People that often can't defend against it, thanks to Viral Torp disabling you, the ease of using 2x TBR to catch a Polarize Hull downtime, or your buffs are gone because Cryptic is a fan of giving free buff strips. Isokinetic Cannon is just... well, look at it and you'll see.
Particle Generators have a similar* situation to Surgical Strikes - it's good against NPCs and provides a break from your standard FAWsmash. But against players, it's overpowered; TBR hits for around 10% of your hull per pulse, Isokinetic Cannon smashes you to death through full shields and hull, Feedback Pulse does 4x damage reflect.
All OK in PvE, but poorly scaled in PvP. It's a result of the poor planning on Cryptic's part, to have NPC numbers scale ridiculously high while players got a fraction of that increase.
*I say similar (not the same) because while we don't know this about Particle Generators, we do know for a fact that Surgical Strikes was performing well beyond it's design intentions.
I am on vacation and was trying to stay out of conversations but this one drew me in, damn you all. First partgens in and of themselves are not op, it's the buffs to them, and the biggest problem child of them all is the tac buffs. No science captain will ever be able to match the dps output on any partgen ability that a tac can do. Second no partgen skill even remotely equals what faw can do. Third, putting faw on a sci ship is like putting lipstick on a pig. Sure it'll make it look nice, but with only 6 weapon slots and 2 or 3 tac console slots, you won't be getting much out of it. Finally to pvp abd fbp, yes fbp is the perfect counter to vape builds. The issue is, other then countering vape builds its kind of good but not great. It has too long of a cool down and is too easily to counter using torp builds and mines, or simply waiting it out, or healing through it. Don't get me wrong it's a good skill, but all you need to do is adapt, which currently I am thinking is the downfall of pvp. No one wants to adapt.
I guess this needs to be highlighted, to ensure any nerfs are directed at the wrong place.
That said... Escort level damage doesn't go down just because a Science Captain subnukes defensive buffs away, so I think one has to be careful here. If my Science Captains abilities fully help my Escort build, then Tac abilities need to fully help Science Vessel builds.
But maybe it points out that tac buffs in general are too strong? If a Science Captain has less impact in a Science vessel than a Tactical Captain, than somethnig isn't right - if a Science Captain in an Escort has less impact than a Tactical Captain in an Escort, we may have a problem with the Tactical Captain itself. If not... Then it gets complicated.
The only intelligent AI is PvP, that is why we wanted it balanced. With PvP dead at least the DPS players now have effective teammates; the old PvPers.
That means that all the intelligent AI is now playing Star Conflict. So why are you still here?
Science builds still struggle to deliver the same DPS as a well-built tac or even an engineer.
Sure, my sci characters are great and I don't have problems in missions or PVE, but if you're just talking about "DPS" then sci characters are still the underdogs.
Rather than focus on changing science abilities, I wish the devs would offer more "sci-exclusive" aux weapons. The same way that the aux cannons on the Vesta draw power from aux instead of weapons, all science characters should be able to mount a variety of ship weapons that ONLY draw power from aux instead of weapons.
That way ALL sci players can min/max their power levels to cut weapon power and crack up aux for both weapons and sci powers.
After playing this game for all these years I can't think of any other solution to help "level the field" in terms of DPS. Anyone about to freak out about the idea of aux weapons for all science characters needs to take a deep breath. The Vesta isn't the hands-down best ship in the game just because it can mount three aux cannons up front. Aux weapons haven't made sci toons the DPS masters, and adding more aux weapons won't either.
The only thing that aux weapons (exclusive for science characters) are going to do is help boost the pathetic DPS potential of science players.
In the immortal words of Captain Sisko: "It may not be what you believe, but that doesn't make it wrong."
Don't believe the lies in this forum. I am NOT an ARC user. I play STO on Steam or not at all.
I disagree. Science ships consistently get the short end of the stick compared to DPS build cruisers and escorts. Also, there is no reciprocity for science so the grav well cooldowns are pretty long compared to being able to chain your BFAW, CSV, SS, etc. almost continuously.
It was nice for the devs to throw science a bone, but tac, intel, command, pilot got the rest of the cow, steaks and all.
Have to agree with you there. This dev team has a long history of harming science career it's not something that's pleasant.
DoTs work okay for the most part but I notice it when I switch from my escort tact to my sci that there's a large difference between the dps builds in that the speed of the enemies dying is terribly slow comparatively between even my Rom Engineer and my Sci Fed.
So there's alot of work to be done on this.
Part of the problem is many of the skills that would use exotic damage have been turned into kinetic and as you all know kinetic has the disfunction of being negated by 75% if even a sliver of shields still exist on the enemy. So in order to try to offset this you basically have to try to make your ship stack part gen and flow caps at the same time to get the results you want on par with what you experience in escorts that are proprly built.
It's really not that impressive.
Add to the fact as well that skills like FBP and GW are often useless because FBP has been nerfed to the ground, and lag pretty much affects GW negatively all the time especially when fighting the borg.
You might be impressed but those of us who've been playing sci for years have seen all of the iterations of this career path and just like the Queen of England "We are not amused!"
That means that all the intelligent AI is now playing Star Conflict. So why are you still here?
He's not exactly wrong, he's just not right. He's right in that we just can't nerf the hell out of tacs so that the moment they get into a science ship they do nothing, but the status quo right now is way off base. Tac abilities need to apply to weapon damage and only weapon damage. That way even if in a science ship they can boost the weapons on it, but not do anything for the science abilities. Science should be able to buff exotic damage better then any other class, which isn't the case right now.
We need to fix how tacs effect exotic damage, while leaving them to buff weapon damage and only weapon damage.
We need to fix how tacs effect exotic damage, while leaving them to buff weapon damage and only weapon damage.
Two problems with that.
1) People scream "I AM THE DPS CLASS, I SHOULD BE MAKING ALL DAMAGE HIGHER!" when this has been brought up in the past.
2) If there is anything that has a lower chance of getting nerfed that FAW, it's Tacs. Cryptic has consistently boosted Tacs higher and higher, and given them every advantage over the other classes - the point of replicating the Captain abilities of Engs and Scis via traits and rep abilities, while maintaining the 'exclusive' status of Tac abilities and massive damage boosts.
1) People scream "I AM THE DPS CLASS, I SHOULD BE MAKING ALL DAMAGE HIGHER!" when this has been brought up in the past.
2) If there is anything that has a lower chance of getting nerfed that FAW, it's Tacs. Cryptic has consistently boosted Tacs higher and higher, and given them every advantage over the other classes - the point of replicating the Captain abilities of Engs and Scis via traits and rep abilities, while maintaining the 'exclusive' status of Tac abilities and massive damage boosts.
You know honestly at this point people have two choices really. One accept that tacs and faw need a serious balancing pass and accept what may come, or two accept that Cryptic will never nerf tacs and faw, and realize then that balance is dead and shut the heck up about wanting anything buffed or nerfed and just accept the game as is.
This whole conversation about wanting to balance partgens becomes mute is they don't accept that partgens are not the problem, but the fact that Cryptic doesn't care about balance, only dps and tacs.
If your not going to allow Cryptic to fix the root cause, in this case tac buffs, then you can't complain about balance.
And because 'we' (= presumably you and the very small PvP community) want it nerfed, every Science PvE player wanting to use their PrtG builds needs to be nerfed along with you, right?! This all sounds frightfully familiar.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
You should try reading my posts. I do not want part-gens nerfed, I want Tac buffs to not affect them. I want PvP balanced so it is playable, not to affect PvE at all.
Show me an intelligent AI...there is none. No game has achieved that, though some do better than others. Only a human can read, react, and invent new strategies/builds, coordinate, and think.
Knowing the OP, I think I know where his point is coming from, and clearing it up may help with a lot of the animosity in this thread.
Part (the biggest part?) of the "issue" with PartGens is that the damage bypasses shields completely. This isn't too big of an issue in PvE, but in PvP, it's killer.
Shields melt in PvE, so you don't care if they're up or not. In PvP, they're you're first and biggest line of defense; bypassing them with PartGen abilities is far too easy and far too damaging.
What if PartGen/Exotic abilities were resisted by shields? Not too much of a change in PvE, vast improvement in PvP.
You know honestly at this point people have two choices really. One accept that tacs and faw need a serious balancing pass and accept what may come, or two accept that Cryptic will never nerf tacs and faw, and realize then that balance is dead and shut the heck up about wanting anything buffed or nerfed and just accept the game as is.
This whole conversation about wanting to balance partgens becomes mute is they don't accept that partgens are not the problem, but the fact that Cryptic doesn't care about balance, only dps and tacs.
If your not going to allow Cryptic to fix the root cause, in this case tac buffs, then you can't complain about balance.
Unless something has changed, Praxi5 is a Science captain like me.
Knowing the OP, I think I know where his point is coming from, and clearing it up may help with a lot of the animosity in this thread.
Part (the biggest part?) of the "issue" with PartGens is that the damage bypasses shields completely. This isn't too big of an issue in PvE, but in PvP, it's killer.
Shields melt in PvE, so you don't care if they're up or not. In PvP, they're you're first and biggest line of defense; bypassing them with PartGen abilities is far too easy and far too damaging.
What if PartGen/Exotic abilities were resisted by shields? Not too much of a change in PvE, vast improvement in PvP.
The reason a number or partgen skills have shield penetration is because a number of weapons also have shield penetration. I will gladly give up partgen shield pen when all weapon systems also give up every and all shield penetration abilities they have as well. Either we have zero shield penetratinv abilities, or we can have them. None of this partgens can't have it but my weapon systems can
I refuse to get into the "Cryptic listen to PvP players above all else" nonsense. Nonetheless, I am of the opinion that nerfing something that is popular, and useful, in PvE based on what the minority (PvP) want would be a HUGE mistake.
And I don't care if I sound like a broken record either:
From what I saw on the league table earlier, the top PvE DPS numbers are in the 140k range now. Granted, there are only a few players who can manage that - but it does go to show what can be done with energy weapons/BFAW builds.
And there is simply NO way that a partigen based PvE build will ever come even remotely close to that.
Well said, my friend! It was actually you I was thinking about when I wrote that. You deserve to have fun in this game too. In a world that caters almost exclusively to BFAW-ers, there should be room for a Science Captain too, like your own self, doing PrtG. And as long as a PrtG builds can't do a third of the DPS a straightforward BFAW-boat can do, peeps should stop feeling so threatened by the non-existent Science boogie man.
Obviously FAW also have problems, but this post was about PG, yes?
To answer your question.. Yes, I do have problems with being hit by 40k+ plasma explosions through my shields.. (FAW + Tac + Embassy consoles)
A secondary proc on a weapon should never be able to oneshot me.
Lets look at FAW if PG gets fixed... The maybe, just maybe..
The Devs will look at creating NPCs that are challenging to fight, and not just have 7 digit healthbars.
Imagine if NPCs actively countered your abilities, imagine if they didnt use FBP before your buffs are up, imagine if they had 100% uptime tacteams, cycled EP2S, if they coordinated their attacks.
The problem per se is not OP things like PM, FAW.. The problem is the lazy way of creating challenge by simply increasing HP bars..
Heralds are a step in the right direction with their skillset, but they are still just spamming their holds and disables randomly, and overwhelming people with sheer numbers..
5 cruisers spamming EMP, 5-10 probes disabling systems, frigates ramming you etc.. Its easy to counter if you know what to do, but most people have problems cause they too used to spacebar their way through 99% of all PvE.
Now imagine if they actually used those things intelligently
So...what your saying...is lets nerf something that has you butthurt before we even bother with something OP?
That's rich...
I'm in here to defend partgens...and my defense which is clearly justified is that there are other things out there much more powerful and it just sounds like you're vindictive and out to get partgens.
Well you know what...in PvE FaW is far more superior and in PvP a good vaper is as or more effective...and depending on which faction you're playing...much harder to counter. Cloak makes a vaper sneakier and trickier...but you can't cloak FBP.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
Exotic damage powers like TBR in particular are still limited by per-second damage pulses, and that can never be changed.
Weapons on the other hand can lay down an unrelenting barrage of bleed damage that is multiplied by the number of weapons being fired.
We have Energy weapons with procs for 100% shield penetration, we have any number of traits and powers that add additional bleed damage to weapons and we have doffs that can give up to 35% bleed damage from all your weapons.
We also have high yield torpedoes that can deal damage in excess of 200k, thats 70k bleed damage right there if you time it right with a doffed BO.
Honestly, the bleed damage from exotic damage powers pale in comparison to the sheer amount of bleed that can be brought to bear from "weapons".
And thats of course assuming you even need all that, given that high end vapers can just punch through shields like tissue paper anyway, negating any need for actual bleed damage. :rolleyes:
So...what your saying...is lets nerf something that has you butthurt before we even bother with something OP?
That's rich...
I'm in here to defend partgens...and my defense which is clearly justified is that there are other things out there much more powerful and it just sounds like you're vindictive and out to get partgens.
Well you know what...in PvE FaW is far more superior and in PvP a good vaper is as or more effective...and depending on which faction you're playing...much harder to counter. Cloak makes a vaper sneakier and trickier...but you can't cloak FBP.
The problem lies in that huge pool of mediocre pvpers who think they are awesome, and yet simply do not think. It's easier to say "partgens are too op" because they counter your super dps no resistance vape build then to say"I lost because of this, how do I counter it and make myself a better pvper." You get the same thing in pve as well.
Basically it's the fact that a huge epeen can blind you to the fact that you aren't the greatest out thereand that the problem may lie with you and not the system.
Comments
Well said and thank you. Sci captains always get punished in this game.
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On the other hand, do to some meaningful DPS with exotic, you need the R&D trait, a lots of pgen (sacrificing pretty much everything for it), a good secondary deflector, doffs, and usually a good ship. Also, crafted and rep gear, like the r&d torp.
Also, for playing it, I'm taking so much aggro on what is only a sci ship after all (wells t5u), it's difficult to simply stay alive. In fact, it's a lot harder to play than my scimi. A lot.
In the end it's a LOT MORE work than just BFAW everything. I don't see an issue for it to be rewarding. Would you prefer to have exotic damage so much harder to build, and not even rewarding ? We have the cannons to fill that spot already.
I haven't seen the parser, besides mine, but I highly suspect someone with BFAW and the same amount of dedication will perform at least the same, if not better than a proper exotic damage player.
We get stuck on the numbers cause of the neat little invention of CLR.
As well, though since fbp looks at raw damage dealt then factors a response to it.....in the end fbp becomes more effective damage because its shield pen....though it does do damage to shields too.....it deals the brunt of its damage to hull.
Have we forgotten these concepts?
"Somebody killed me with something...nerf it."
Way to shut the conversation down. Just as well anyway since the postings for keeping sci like it is were all based around numbers anyway crying that there still not enough when truly its about effectiveness concerning particle generators in terms of calculating dps. Something CLR doesn't do as it would be difficult to make such a metric.
You want high numbers from something that is 100% effective at damage dealing and you want to keep pace with tac captains who's damage dealing can be around 60% effective at the best of times....smh.
Yea it's a good time to shut the conversation down cause it was done when the whining sci ships drivers came out saying "keep it like it is./nerf it....no buff it"
You want to run fbp and tbr with maxed out part gens and think its ok...I'm going to show up in my tac captain sci ship with 5 plasma exploders, mk 2 weapons, and 20 weapon power. Nerf that and then I'll just show up in my Faeht and double tap torp bomb you with your fbp up all while running 3 copies of pol hull in both ships. Won't we just have fun.
Umm no...FBP does 50/50...so as long as you have shields its not doing mostly hull damage.
So what are you just a vaper who is upset they have a way to counter you?
FBP doesn't last forever and has a long cooldown...and you can't stack two FBP III...so why don't you watch what you're doing instead of just charge in Cannons and Dual Beam blazing?
Remember this for our next 'Waaa! Someone killed me with SS3!' discussion.
Hey, I went through the math on it comparing it to CRF...it looked fine...I was with the look at the Acc group...and I thought they should nerf FAW. Course, I think it's pretty easy to trace almost all discussions in STO back to FAW...it's like that game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. :P
Obviously FAW also have problems, but this post was about PG, yes?
To answer your question.. Yes, I do have problems with being hit by 40k+ plasma explosions through my shields.. (FAW + Tac + Embassy consoles)
A secondary proc on a weapon should never be able to oneshot me.
Lets look at FAW if PG gets fixed... The maybe, just maybe..
The Devs will look at creating NPCs that are challenging to fight, and not just have 7 digit healthbars.
Imagine if NPCs actively countered your abilities, imagine if they didnt use FBP before your buffs are up, imagine if they had 100% uptime tacteams, cycled EP2S, if they coordinated their attacks.
The problem per se is not OP things like PM, FAW.. The problem is the lazy way of creating challenge by simply increasing HP bars..
Heralds are a step in the right direction with their skillset, but they are still just spamming their holds and disables randomly, and overwhelming people with sheer numbers..
5 cruisers spamming EMP, 5-10 probes disabling systems, frigates ramming you etc.. Its easy to counter if you know what to do, but most people have problems cause they too used to spacebar their way through 99% of all PvE.
Now imagine if they actually used those things intelligently
And because 'we' (= presumably you and the very small PvP community) want it nerfed, every Science PvE player wanting to use their PrtG builds needs to be nerfed along with you, right?! This all sounds frightfully familiar.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
Rather few pvper make good pve-players.
Well, standard pvp-noise. If it can kill you, it needs to be nerfed.
Oh no, not this again.
We've already gone over this - a good PvPer will make an excellent (but not top) PvE'er. A good PvE'er is not guaranteed to be a good PvPer. I thought we all agreed on that in another thread? :P
It's not "if it kills you, nerf it", it's "if it kills you too quickly or doesn't give you a chance to adequately defend against it, re-tune it." If FBP had a 1.0 damage reflect, you'd be able to catch yourself and either break off or attempt to heal through it. But with up to a 4.0 reflect, you're taking far more damage than you're both dishing out and can even try to heal through - even if you catch yourself an stop shooting them, you're going to take more than a fistful back, often enough to kill you. TBR is "fire and forget", requiring no skill to use. Hit TBR and you're guaranteed to do massive AoE damage. If there were some skill required, then maybe a argument could be made in it's defense. But instead, hit it, and you're taking massive chunks out of people. People that often can't defend against it, thanks to Viral Torp disabling you, the ease of using 2x TBR to catch a Polarize Hull downtime, or your buffs are gone because Cryptic is a fan of giving free buff strips. Isokinetic Cannon is just... well, look at it and you'll see.
Particle Generators have a similar* situation to Surgical Strikes - it's good against NPCs and provides a break from your standard FAWsmash. But against players, it's overpowered; TBR hits for around 10% of your hull per pulse, Isokinetic Cannon smashes you to death through full shields and hull, Feedback Pulse does 4x damage reflect.
All OK in PvE, but poorly scaled in PvP. It's a result of the poor planning on Cryptic's part, to have NPC numbers scale ridiculously high while players got a fraction of that increase.
*I say similar (not the same) because while we don't know this about Particle Generators, we do know for a fact that Surgical Strikes was performing well beyond it's design intentions.
That means that all the intelligent AI is now playing Star Conflict. So why are you still here?
Sure, my sci characters are great and I don't have problems in missions or PVE, but if you're just talking about "DPS" then sci characters are still the underdogs.
Rather than focus on changing science abilities, I wish the devs would offer more "sci-exclusive" aux weapons. The same way that the aux cannons on the Vesta draw power from aux instead of weapons, all science characters should be able to mount a variety of ship weapons that ONLY draw power from aux instead of weapons.
That way ALL sci players can min/max their power levels to cut weapon power and crack up aux for both weapons and sci powers.
After playing this game for all these years I can't think of any other solution to help "level the field" in terms of DPS. Anyone about to freak out about the idea of aux weapons for all science characters needs to take a deep breath. The Vesta isn't the hands-down best ship in the game just because it can mount three aux cannons up front. Aux weapons haven't made sci toons the DPS masters, and adding more aux weapons won't either.
The only thing that aux weapons (exclusive for science characters) are going to do is help boost the pathetic DPS potential of science players.
Don't believe the lies in this forum. I am NOT an ARC user. I play STO on Steam or not at all.
Have to agree with you there. This dev team has a long history of harming science career it's not something that's pleasant.
DoTs work okay for the most part but I notice it when I switch from my escort tact to my sci that there's a large difference between the dps builds in that the speed of the enemies dying is terribly slow comparatively between even my Rom Engineer and my Sci Fed.
So there's alot of work to be done on this.
Part of the problem is many of the skills that would use exotic damage have been turned into kinetic and as you all know kinetic has the disfunction of being negated by 75% if even a sliver of shields still exist on the enemy. So in order to try to offset this you basically have to try to make your ship stack part gen and flow caps at the same time to get the results you want on par with what you experience in escorts that are proprly built.
It's really not that impressive.
Add to the fact as well that skills like FBP and GW are often useless because FBP has been nerfed to the ground, and lag pretty much affects GW negatively all the time especially when fighting the borg.
You might be impressed but those of us who've been playing sci for years have seen all of the iterations of this career path and just like the Queen of England "We are not amused!"
He's not exactly wrong, he's just not right. He's right in that we just can't nerf the hell out of tacs so that the moment they get into a science ship they do nothing, but the status quo right now is way off base. Tac abilities need to apply to weapon damage and only weapon damage. That way even if in a science ship they can boost the weapons on it, but not do anything for the science abilities. Science should be able to buff exotic damage better then any other class, which isn't the case right now.
We need to fix how tacs effect exotic damage, while leaving them to buff weapon damage and only weapon damage.
Two problems with that.
1) People scream "I AM THE DPS CLASS, I SHOULD BE MAKING ALL DAMAGE HIGHER!" when this has been brought up in the past.
2) If there is anything that has a lower chance of getting nerfed that FAW, it's Tacs. Cryptic has consistently boosted Tacs higher and higher, and given them every advantage over the other classes - the point of replicating the Captain abilities of Engs and Scis via traits and rep abilities, while maintaining the 'exclusive' status of Tac abilities and massive damage boosts.
You know honestly at this point people have two choices really. One accept that tacs and faw need a serious balancing pass and accept what may come, or two accept that Cryptic will never nerf tacs and faw, and realize then that balance is dead and shut the heck up about wanting anything buffed or nerfed and just accept the game as is.
This whole conversation about wanting to balance partgens becomes mute is they don't accept that partgens are not the problem, but the fact that Cryptic doesn't care about balance, only dps and tacs.
If your not going to allow Cryptic to fix the root cause, in this case tac buffs, then you can't complain about balance.
You should try reading my posts. I do not want part-gens nerfed, I want Tac buffs to not affect them. I want PvP balanced so it is playable, not to affect PvE at all.
Show me an intelligent AI...there is none. No game has achieved that, though some do better than others. Only a human can read, react, and invent new strategies/builds, coordinate, and think.
Part (the biggest part?) of the "issue" with PartGens is that the damage bypasses shields completely. This isn't too big of an issue in PvE, but in PvP, it's killer.
Shields melt in PvE, so you don't care if they're up or not. In PvP, they're you're first and biggest line of defense; bypassing them with PartGen abilities is far too easy and far too damaging.
What if PartGen/Exotic abilities were resisted by shields? Not too much of a change in PvE, vast improvement in PvP.
Unless something has changed, Praxi5 is a Science captain like me.
The reason a number or partgen skills have shield penetration is because a number of weapons also have shield penetration. I will gladly give up partgen shield pen when all weapon systems also give up every and all shield penetration abilities they have as well. Either we have zero shield penetratinv abilities, or we can have them. None of this partgens can't have it but my weapon systems can
Yeah I know as am I. You was less directed to praxis and more to the community you. Poor choice of words on my part.
Well said, my friend!
So...what your saying...is lets nerf something that has you butthurt before we even bother with something OP?
That's rich...
I'm in here to defend partgens...and my defense which is clearly justified is that there are other things out there much more powerful and it just sounds like you're vindictive and out to get partgens.
Well you know what...in PvE FaW is far more superior and in PvP a good vaper is as or more effective...and depending on which faction you're playing...much harder to counter. Cloak makes a vaper sneakier and trickier...but you can't cloak FBP.
Weapons on the other hand can lay down an unrelenting barrage of bleed damage that is multiplied by the number of weapons being fired.
We have Energy weapons with procs for 100% shield penetration, we have any number of traits and powers that add additional bleed damage to weapons and we have doffs that can give up to 35% bleed damage from all your weapons.
We also have high yield torpedoes that can deal damage in excess of 200k, thats 70k bleed damage right there if you time it right with a doffed BO.
Honestly, the bleed damage from exotic damage powers pale in comparison to the sheer amount of bleed that can be brought to bear from "weapons".
And thats of course assuming you even need all that, given that high end vapers can just punch through shields like tissue paper anyway, negating any need for actual bleed damage. :rolleyes:
The problem lies in that huge pool of mediocre pvpers who think they are awesome, and yet simply do not think. It's easier to say "partgens are too op" because they counter your super dps no resistance vape build then to say"I lost because of this, how do I counter it and make myself a better pvper." You get the same thing in pve as well.
Basically it's the fact that a huge epeen can blind you to the fact that you aren't the greatest out thereand that the problem may lie with you and not the system.