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Implied Balance-what is the real objection people have to BFAW?
patrickngo
Member Posts: 9,963 Arc User
okay, in most traditionally structured wargames, you have three kinds of ranged damage:
Accurate
High damage
AOE.
Accurate damage is your sniper rifle, or a cruise missile, it's single-target-single-point damage. firing a machinegun at ONE target, for instance, isn't 'accurate'. Using a sniper to pink a mob heavy in hte head, bypassing his armor, is. generally in most games, an "accurate" or Precision unit has a longer range, but weaker damage, it's an exploit attack in the sense of exploiting a weakness in the opponent's defense.
High Damage: This is a machinegun on a single target. you're sacrificing multiple possible targets to engage to apply heavy damage to one target, often also sacrificing range. (The shotgun in HALO.)
AOE: this is engaging lots of targets, usually with either a reduced chance to hit any of them (grenades), or reduced range (Shotgun, sub-machine-gun) The wider your engagement envelope with an AOE weapon, the more dispersed, and thus the lower, your damage to enemies is. This is good for softening enemies, weakening them, creating weakness for the Accurate and High Damage members of your team to step in to finish them off.
That's MOST games.
Now...STO.
"Accurate" really doesn't exist in the space game-the game aims for you and you're stuck with random numbers. (a bit like Battletech), so we'll drop that for a moment.
High Damage: This is what Beam Overload, Torpedo High Yeild, and Cannon Rapid Fire is supposed to be.
AOE: Torp Spread, BFAW, CRF.
In STO, the AOE abilities exceed the High Damage abilities in...doing damage, not only taht, but BFAW (in particular) allows an AOE build with a 360 degree engagement of AOE, with more and higher critting (not just confined to those Embassy consoles-it's a simple law of averages thing-the more chances you have to crit the more likely you are to crit. BFAW has a higher rate of those checks than other powers...)
It even has this against single targets. It also does not suffer from the range drop-off that cannons do, since Beams don't suffer the range drop-off to damage that cannons do, and there's no travel time, and little to no reduction of damage via shielding (compared to Torpedoes or cannons).
There is no content in the game, where BFAW is not the most useful thing you can take (well, in PvE anyway). None. it outshines the auto-crit from Beam Overload, outranges and out-procs cannon rapid fire, and cannon scatter volley.
this is the problem. It is an AOE and it out performs and out ranges the nominally precision and high damage abilities, thus outperforming them while having no drawbacks beyond the demand that you mount the ideal weapons to use it.
tell me why I'm wrong.
Accurate
High damage
AOE.
Accurate damage is your sniper rifle, or a cruise missile, it's single-target-single-point damage. firing a machinegun at ONE target, for instance, isn't 'accurate'. Using a sniper to pink a mob heavy in hte head, bypassing his armor, is. generally in most games, an "accurate" or Precision unit has a longer range, but weaker damage, it's an exploit attack in the sense of exploiting a weakness in the opponent's defense.
High Damage: This is a machinegun on a single target. you're sacrificing multiple possible targets to engage to apply heavy damage to one target, often also sacrificing range. (The shotgun in HALO.)
AOE: this is engaging lots of targets, usually with either a reduced chance to hit any of them (grenades), or reduced range (Shotgun, sub-machine-gun) The wider your engagement envelope with an AOE weapon, the more dispersed, and thus the lower, your damage to enemies is. This is good for softening enemies, weakening them, creating weakness for the Accurate and High Damage members of your team to step in to finish them off.
That's MOST games.
Now...STO.
"Accurate" really doesn't exist in the space game-the game aims for you and you're stuck with random numbers. (a bit like Battletech), so we'll drop that for a moment.
High Damage: This is what Beam Overload, Torpedo High Yeild, and Cannon Rapid Fire is supposed to be.
AOE: Torp Spread, BFAW, CRF.
In STO, the AOE abilities exceed the High Damage abilities in...doing damage, not only taht, but BFAW (in particular) allows an AOE build with a 360 degree engagement of AOE, with more and higher critting (not just confined to those Embassy consoles-it's a simple law of averages thing-the more chances you have to crit the more likely you are to crit. BFAW has a higher rate of those checks than other powers...)
It even has this against single targets. It also does not suffer from the range drop-off that cannons do, since Beams don't suffer the range drop-off to damage that cannons do, and there's no travel time, and little to no reduction of damage via shielding (compared to Torpedoes or cannons).
There is no content in the game, where BFAW is not the most useful thing you can take (well, in PvE anyway). None. it outshines the auto-crit from Beam Overload, outranges and out-procs cannon rapid fire, and cannon scatter volley.
this is the problem. It is an AOE and it out performs and out ranges the nominally precision and high damage abilities, thus outperforming them while having no drawbacks beyond the demand that you mount the ideal weapons to use it.
tell me why I'm wrong.
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What dawns on me, as I go back to playing Path of Exile due to a shockingly high number of bad mmo releases/updates as of late, STO shares more in common with games like this (ARPGs) than it does with other MMO's. In all ARPG's you have a "Face roll" skill, or you can left/right mouse button your way to victory. No one complains that the aoe skills dominate single targets, because that's just the way all games of this type have always worked. If you look at STO as an ARPG rather than an MMO, FAW starts to make sense, from a design standpoint. It's the faceroll button, but we pretend it involves some rather cryptic knowledge to dps with, and some amazing pilot skill to utilize properly.
There's so much wrong with FAW since the last update passes so long ago that the skill needs to literally be deleted from the game and reworked from the ground up. From a mechanics sense, the skill is atrocious, nothing in any other game compares to the level of lazy/bad design FAW has become, unless cryptic wants to classify STO as an ARPG, then it makes perfect sense. From a cannon sense, every time you hear the order to "fire at will", Worf can't hit the broad side of a barn that happens to be sitting still in front of the Enterprise. The skill is sadly flawed at every level, and at this point, I don't think it's ever going to change as it allows a "lowest common denominator" to cater PvE content development around.
Damage attacks good at all three can be balanced around cooldowns (measured against the opportunity cost of other abilities in that slot) or risk (ie. if BFAW did something negative to ship movement and defense).
It's spammable. It's got great uptime. You do high damage, multi-target, has zero performance drop on fewer enemies. And it's spammable.
Like when we had "escorts online," it was the general skewed perception of things that made people think beams were worthless, and now it is just the opposite, people think cannons are worthless, yet they aren't. They still kill things faster and do more on target damage, provided you aren't dealing with terrible range falloff, which is usually your fault.
This is until you get so much damage from unrestratined power creep that you can destroy those random targets behind you with BFAW. But power creep is a different issue.
Of course there are exceptions to that, notably the absurdly stupid Herald design that spams all kinds of garbage at you that makes it very difficult to do anything with a cannon boat without continuous gravity wells.
But I think BFAW should be redesigned to A) have a limited arc, say 120* at most for beam arrays (DBBs wouldn't change of course), and B ) only apply the infinite accuracy to fighters/torpedos and such. Accuracy should be important for beams. Cannons should also get perfect accuracy to dealing with fighters/torpedoes when under CSV. This would give them a closer parity, and force BFAW ships to actually have to do a little more with positioning. This actually can end up being a bit of a buff, because rather than waste damage on targets behind you, BFAW would apply more focused damage on targets in the arc so the DPS applied is more likely to stick rather than just get healed by passive regeneration.
The advantage to BFAW, and the reason many people including myself really like it on beam boats, is that it's *lazy*. With cannon builds, you have to still keep your nose on target and match their speed so you don't pass them (while still having enough speed to evade attacks). You're constantly maneuvering and making rapid adjustments. With BFAW, all you need to do is turn your side to a group of enemies, and hit spacebar and let it do it's thing. This makes it much easier to focus on shield and hull healing and planning out your next move as you can mostly unfocus from the battle going on around you, a luxury cannon ships do not have.
Of course, there is one danger to BFAW, and that's threat. If you are flying a fragile ship and don't have the skills equipped to take hits, BFAW will get you blown out of the sky really quickly, especially if you're the first person to jump into battle. This is why escorts are always better off as cannon ships that focus fire on specific especially dangerous targets while the big beam boat strikes everything randomly.
No I can't say you're wrong at all. With BFAW having that much power, Beam Overload, cannons, and torpedoes are jokes at the expense of anyone including myself who uses them. I'm not laughing.
I've gotta call you on this one. Whilst recently messing about with my old T5 armitage class, I stripped all the primary armament off it, and replaced it with accx2 dmgx2 (Before the dmg proc buff btw) turrets and still punched for over 10k in ISA. The biggest draw back to cannons is their damage over distance drop off, and the fact that players sometimes lack the necessary skill and information to make the best use of them. Beam overload I can'y say because aside from my Pythus fighter I don't normally run it. But as for Torpedo's my purpose built torpedo bomber which can be seen here in use in CSE, still hits for over 29K, despite having nothing upgraded.
And remember to further nerf Surgical Strikes and after that all the single target attacks after that so we can't kill anything in the game.
Then we'll all be happy little campers.
"Use Temporal Skills to NERF EVERYTHING before it happened!" -Unknown source.
Its not that AOE needs removed... its that it needs to do what AOE should be doing. AOE should be about controlling enemies... not obliterating them. Consider something like Gravity well... it does what an AOE should do. It controls trash, it doesn't obliterate them alone.
What the game really needs... is a proper rapid fire for beams... and for FAW to operate the way scatter volley does. It should have an arc, and its dmg should be reduced for the number of targets hit. It should be used to pull argo, not dps.
STO has to many aoes anyway... its why the server can't keep up. Kemo / aoe everything... the server has been melting down for a year and Cryptic is to bad to really understand why calculating 100s of hits for everything is bad for performance. Lets be honest the fact that I can group up a bunch of spheres in an STF and hit them with 200 individually calculated dmg hits from kemo/dots and direct dmg within a couple seconds = DEAD server. FAW is an offender but not the only one. Cryptic is just a bad developer.
And increase the amount of NPC enemies so we'll have to really play as a team all the time just to kill one of them in 10 minutes. One ISA would take about half a day, but it would be worth it.
Remove all AOE, do it!
"Use Temporal Skills to NERF EVERYTHING before it happened!" -Unknown source.
I can provide a few examples when FAW was used on screen against a single target. First being the Enterprise's encounter with the Borg not sure if it was "Q who" or "Best of both worlds". The second being in "Yesterday's Enterprise" where FaW was used against a single K'Vort class battle cruiser culminating in what appears to be a beam overload, and thirdly we see a Galaxy class starship firing multiple arrays against an orbital weapons platform, during the battle to take the Chin'toka system from the Dominion.
See for yourselves with this link
Further more Cannon type weapons were only ever seen being directed at a single target when used on both Bird of Prey's and the defiant class of star ships. The closest they every got to scatter volley was when O'Brien tried to modify them to vaporise an asteroid that was threatening to destroy the wormhole near DS9. So from a "cannon" perceptive it can be argued that FAW is in fact working as intend and that Scatter volley is the odd one out.
I believe the problem to the complaint is the basis of BFAW awesomeness is normal/advance queues particularly ISA wherein every possible requirement to complete it is very low.
Now, if you are talking only of PvP perspective this thread should be in PvP discussion rather than the general discussion and should be transferred.
I assume that PvP players, particularly all those who posted before me including the OP, are suppose to be better than normal/PuG/advance PvE players. What is the fuss on focusing on normal and advance wherein BFAW is positioned to be all roses. Unless PvP players, those who posted before me, belong at normal skill PvE levels and only play at normal and those very easy advance queues.
Sadly, all too often this seems to be Cryptic's reaction to such issues. I reference the latest Embassy Console 'Fix'.
I agree with the OP. FAW should be useful to clear up fighters, HY Torps, the occasional turret, or to attract aggro to the FAW ship, allowing the heavy hitters to close in and clean up.
All too often I use FAW to take down large numbers of shields so my team can clean house. I shouldn't be able to double the number of attacks per firing against triple the targets without penalty. There should be a severe power drain on my weapons system, thus reducing the severity of any single attack. Additionally, the proc rate should be reduced while using FAW to compensate for the much larger number of opportunities to proc.
FAW is excellent for crowd control, and I'd hate to see it removed or massively nerfed. What I would like to see is for FAW to be brought in line with the other Tac weapons powers as far as usefulness. (Poor, forgotten BO wants to play too.)
>:3
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In all seriousness I just hope they'll upgrade the other AOE attack options available to be nearly as effective as FAW. They won't be as good as FAW even then because of the attack arcs.
If they just go and nerf FAW, nerf it good, nerf it nerf it real good it will make a lot of players angry. They just spent 1 billion ec to get the setup they wanted/needed to win the game and then comes the FU from the developers.
We don't need that.
And about the content. Single target works with everything else but the Iconians. The small TRIBBLE flying around in Iconian STF's and episode missions needs some FAWing to be winnable.
I really hated doing space STF's with a dhc character because there was always something behind me. And for some reason I was always in a group that had either single target or very weak weapons.
Am I being selfish, yes.
But if you want them to "fix" FAW, then just nerf everything to 0 at the same time. Then we'll all be in the same situation. And the people who want balance will have it.
"Use Temporal Skills to NERF EVERYTHING before it happened!" -Unknown source.
1) even when BFAW looses effectiveness, it's still the best
2) this isn't about PvP, it's about good gameplay. Single target attacks need to be better for single targets than AoEs.
If those two points are beyond you, then IDK...
but, if you're trying to make this a PvP vs PvE thread, then you're just trolling.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
I would love it if subsystem attacks were a lot more useful.
I agree %100. @bobs1111 has a great idea with some beam rapid fire power. Reroute Reserves to Weapons pilot power kind of does this but it's locked to pilot ships. I would love to see a normal tac power that did rapid fire with beams.
But it does have draw backs, it has the chance to pull agro from every target it hits. And since some players can't even deal with the enhanced tachyon beam the borg use, how could they possibly deal with all the agro that could come with using faw? And we all know how this will end up, with cryptic nerfing it again, like it does with everything else. It already has a longer CD and shorter up time than anything else.
And why bother with tactics, simple because unless you have a whole bunch of people that can face roll the content, and I speaking from experience running pugs, then there is always some tactics in play, whether it be reducing a number of targets to a particular level of health, or splitting at team into two groups, or even someone breaking combat to go crowd control something. But then again you get the people, that use gravity wells and drag the spheres on to the Transformers in ISA, or persist on using TBR's in Khitomer and end up pushing the probes through the gateway.
Ha! I'd be happy if cannon rapid fire worked well with cannons
Gonna quote this because the problem isn't BFAW it's a massive combination of things which allow for the insane dps.
Blaming this all on BFAW is a huge mistake.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Storm/Quake weren't the best DPS...it was best to use in solo/leveling because it was a perfect storm of awesome...not just because of damage though. They not only had a long duration, respectable damage, and had the chance to stun normal npcs...so they aren't much different now but shorter duration.
But anyways back to the point...yeah FaW is just insane...easy to use and buffs damage in several ways so even using it single target nets more damage.
Part of the trouble with the game is this is the only mmo I've ever played which judges dps on trash...no other game out there judges dps on trash because aoe completely pads the dps meter. But people like showing off their big numbers and because the *bosses* really don't mean a whole lot so people judge it on trash.
A lot of it is FaW...as much as you may want to selfishly protect your easy dps.
FaW takes no skill at all...all you have to do is be there
FaW not only fires a 5th shot...II and III also give beam weapon damage too, so it's great for single target
FaW blows every other weapon skill completely out of the water...even the other AoE ones.
FaW comes at Ens to Lt Cmdr where the other AoE weapon ability is Lt to Cmdr
FaW III can be dual ran where CSV can't
FaW III also leaves you APO or APB III on Escorts
FaW is the only ability Plasma Explosions crit with
FaW is the only true 360 degree AoE ability in the game
A nice little list of reasons on why FaW just blows everything else out of the water...and that was quick off of the top of my head.
As you can see only one major problem was fixed so far...
Well they could buff CSF and I'd be happy :P
I'll remind you I don't have easy dps. Even with Faw I don't do more than 16k at best, which is neccesary to complete today's power creeped elites.
I'm going to call you out right now on being biased on this issue because that response is what happens when someone challenges someone with a vested interest.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."