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The fundamental issue of class balance: Multiplication with no upper limit
sophlogimo
Member Posts: 6,507 Arc User
Everybody who plays STO for a while knows or at least has the diffuse feeling that Tactical captains are far superior to the other classes for most applications. Science captains come second, and Engineer captains last.
The reason is rather simple: Tactical captains have several powers that multiply their ship's damage. Attack Pattern Alpha, Go Down Fighting, Fire On My Mark, Tactical Fleet, they all add a percentage to the ship's (or team's) damage. The Science class has one ability that does a similar thing, Sensor Scan, plus an ability that can possibly be enourmously helpful if used at the right time (the Subnuclear Beam debuff), and engineers have nothing of the sort, although Nadion Inversion can be abused for increasing pressure energy damage for a short time (that does not look as if it was how the ability was originally intended, though, and in today's evironment it is pointless anyway, because of the speed at which combat takes place).
You may now say that Scattering Field or Rotiate Shield Frequency do something similar on the defensive side, as they increase resistance, in other words, effectively multiply the ship's hit points. However, this is not as useful as increasing damage: The attacker wil always have the choice when to acticate his ability, while defensive abilites, by nature, are purely reactive. In essence, this means that if the attacker fails to choose the best point in time to attack, he does not score the kill (yet), but is not really punished for it directly. The defender, however, can at best hope not to explode if he does not make a mistake.
Of course, the tactical captain might pay for that with generally higher vulnerability. But that is no longer the case with everything on top of the basic classes: Reputation traits, ship traits, specilizations, equipment and set bonuses, all potentially add to the defensive value of a ship, to the point that even a tactical captain can become invincible to the damage of a science or engineer captain, even one buffed by attack-supporting traits, equipment and abilities. What's worse, any attack-supporting, damage-increasing traits, equipment and stuff help a tactical captain even more than they help an engineer or science captain, because everything is mulitplied. In effect, not only can the tac outlast any attack the "lesser" classes can dish out, he will also outdamage even the buffed durabilities of the other two because another +20% for him are a lot more than just +20%, because there are other multipliers that add on top of that new bonus, too.
Moreover, resistances have a cap (with shields) or a diminishing return (with hull damage resistance), after which they no longer increase or no longer increase significantly. For reasons alien to me, no one sees it as a problem that total damage bonus does not know any such hard cap, except in very rare circumstances (The Scimitar's thalaron wepaon comes to mind).
If anyone wanted to fix this fundamental issue, the answer would have to be that the damage-increasing powers would have to be changed in some way from a multiplier to a flat increase in damage, such as "10.000 points of damage every two minutes" (this is an example, which means the exact number would yet have to be determined), maybe as a seperate attack ability that replaces Attack Pattern Alpha, for instance. Alternatively, there could be a cap for damage per second. Or finally, all the healing and resistance powers could become multiplicative, too, with no cap or diminishing returns.
Of course, this issue has been in STO since before launch, and most likely the devs won't even ackowledge its existence because that is the most economic way to handle the problem and has worked quite well for them over the years.
But it's a pity.
The reason is rather simple: Tactical captains have several powers that multiply their ship's damage. Attack Pattern Alpha, Go Down Fighting, Fire On My Mark, Tactical Fleet, they all add a percentage to the ship's (or team's) damage. The Science class has one ability that does a similar thing, Sensor Scan, plus an ability that can possibly be enourmously helpful if used at the right time (the Subnuclear Beam debuff), and engineers have nothing of the sort, although Nadion Inversion can be abused for increasing pressure energy damage for a short time (that does not look as if it was how the ability was originally intended, though, and in today's evironment it is pointless anyway, because of the speed at which combat takes place).
You may now say that Scattering Field or Rotiate Shield Frequency do something similar on the defensive side, as they increase resistance, in other words, effectively multiply the ship's hit points. However, this is not as useful as increasing damage: The attacker wil always have the choice when to acticate his ability, while defensive abilites, by nature, are purely reactive. In essence, this means that if the attacker fails to choose the best point in time to attack, he does not score the kill (yet), but is not really punished for it directly. The defender, however, can at best hope not to explode if he does not make a mistake.
Of course, the tactical captain might pay for that with generally higher vulnerability. But that is no longer the case with everything on top of the basic classes: Reputation traits, ship traits, specilizations, equipment and set bonuses, all potentially add to the defensive value of a ship, to the point that even a tactical captain can become invincible to the damage of a science or engineer captain, even one buffed by attack-supporting traits, equipment and abilities. What's worse, any attack-supporting, damage-increasing traits, equipment and stuff help a tactical captain even more than they help an engineer or science captain, because everything is mulitplied. In effect, not only can the tac outlast any attack the "lesser" classes can dish out, he will also outdamage even the buffed durabilities of the other two because another +20% for him are a lot more than just +20%, because there are other multipliers that add on top of that new bonus, too.
Moreover, resistances have a cap (with shields) or a diminishing return (with hull damage resistance), after which they no longer increase or no longer increase significantly. For reasons alien to me, no one sees it as a problem that total damage bonus does not know any such hard cap, except in very rare circumstances (The Scimitar's thalaron wepaon comes to mind).
If anyone wanted to fix this fundamental issue, the answer would have to be that the damage-increasing powers would have to be changed in some way from a multiplier to a flat increase in damage, such as "10.000 points of damage every two minutes" (this is an example, which means the exact number would yet have to be determined), maybe as a seperate attack ability that replaces Attack Pattern Alpha, for instance. Alternatively, there could be a cap for damage per second. Or finally, all the healing and resistance powers could become multiplicative, too, with no cap or diminishing returns.
Of course, this issue has been in STO since before launch, and most likely the devs won't even ackowledge its existence because that is the most economic way to handle the problem and has worked quite well for them over the years.
But it's a pity.
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The classes themselves are fine.
Tactical ones get damage buffs, Engineer gets hull/power level buffs and sci get shield buffs and various debuffs. At least in space, in ground it is all a lot different, but since you obviously were not talking about ground in your post, lets just ignore this.
Yes. Tactical is most useful in space for a long time. But this is not because of the class imbalance. The real cause is power creep. When I joined the game in 2012, I remember 5k DPS would be pretty strong, and 10k would equal your character being Q. But since then we got
- Fleet Gear
- Reputation Gear
- Reputation Passives
- Reputation Actives
- More Fleet Gear
- Specializations
- Crafting Traits
- Starship Traits
- A complete Trait respec
- Upgraded gear
- New mods on gear (Pen for example)
- Gear with "better" mods (CrtDx3 Pen for example) in abundant supply
- More and more sets and desirable gear from Episodes.
What happened? The damage numbers people where throwing around became higher and higher. And tactical, indeed, buffed this more than sci or eng. But once again, this wasn't a problem for years.
Where it went wrong? Delta Rising. Cryptic finally decided to update most, if not all, content to the power creep of past years. And suddenly that ship doing 5k DPS was something you would hate when flying with it. It wasn't good enough anymore. Tactical had the advantage in having a higher damage potential than the other classes, so had to do less to adapt to the new game. Sci and Eng came in second place.
Pulling out a ship that is up to date with the current state of teh game is still doable on each ship with each class. Not a min-maxed ship, but a ship that performs good enough. But Tactical has an easier time doing so, because there is so much more to buff.
To make Sci and Eng as relevant as tactical should not be a nerf to tactical in the form of replacing percentages with flat numbers. It also should not be with rebuilding Eng and Sci abilities to boost damage. It should be done by making debuffers, healers and tanks more desirable in a team composition, or even in solo content for that matter, than they are right now.
And why didn't this happen yet? Because this would require enemies that require large amount of crowd control and do a steady damage that makes a tank/healer necessary, while focussing on a tank. In other words, smarter enemies. A better AI. Instead of making the game harder through AI upgrades, the difficulty got "increased" by adding massive health pools to soak up more damage. AKA mobs live a little longer, because they got more hull that needs to be burned through. And guess what? That means more damage.
And you know the really sad part about this? Even with the new massive health sponges, players have the ability to burn through content faster as before.
In my opinion, the only way to improve class balance in space would be a smarter AI that can hit back harder, not take more damage before dying. But this hasn't happened as of yet, and is not likely to happen in a regular season update. SO the earliest I can see the possibility of this happening would be a new expansion, and I don't think that is likely to happen.
Just for your idea: my main is a tank, I mostly fly tanks and carriers, with some cannon ships for fun and only one char designed around DPS. And even an alt char for that.
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1. PVP and PVE should be looked at seperately. Quite often people argue that class xyz is strong in PVP and that justifies it being sucky in PVE. Almost the entire star trek online game revolves around pve. Pretty much everyone claims that PVP is broken and thus it should not under any circumstances be used as any sort of reference towards balance. On top of that, just because 1 class performs good in a very small and broken segment of the game does not justify it sucking everywhere else. That's not balance.
2. Ground and Space need to be looked at on their own. Just because some class performs good in one part, it shouldn't be allowed to be flat out bad in the other. That's not balance either.
3. Nerfing the strongest class is not an option. The current content is pretty much adjusted towards the strongest class and nerfing that class so its "in line" with the others will just suck the fun out of it for those that used to enjoy that class. Nerfing out of spite is bad.
4. Adjusting the AI to perform closer to what people would (like in pvp) is not an option. The work required to adjust all PVE content like that is more than Cryptic can handle. It is just not feasible to upgrade everything - that doesn't mean that slightly better AI for newer content is out of the question.
The current meta game revolves around DPS. There is pretty much nothing that can't be solved with DPS. If something doesn't work - like an elite STF - just throw more DPS at it. Still doesn't cut it? Well, get into gear and up your DPS some more until it works.
Naturally the tactical class performs best in that capacity. Yes, some players might push their sci or eng to high levels, but they will never touch what a tac can do in regards to dps.
It is however important to remember that you can make all classes work and that all classes can be fun. One of the major issues lately seems to be though, that whatever you choose to do, there is one class that does it better and that one class is the very same class no matter what you try to achieve. And that's a problem.
I agree with you on the mismatch, however I would not touch the tac in any way.
The other two classes do need help though. Each class should be stronger than the others in their respective field and their field of expertise should be meaningful. That is currently not the case.
I firmly believe that a sci char should have an ability that buffs their sci abilities to a point where it reaches parity with the tac class. Some people suggested debuffs but those won't do it.
Here's an example of what happens when sci characters debuff:
Character A is a tac and Character B is a sci. They are both playing CCE. They do both the exact same damage and fly the same ship. B uses Sensor scan and debuffs the entity. A laughs and pushes Attack pattern alpha and enjoys the debuff B put on the entity. At the end of the match, A has done significantly more damage and gets 1st place, even though B did the same base damage and even debuffed the entity to do more damage. Same ship, same damage, both used their class specific ability. A benefits more than B.
I would add a flat 20% boost to all sci abilites to sensor scan. If it gets used, it flat out boosts damage, drain, healing etc by 20% as long as its attached to a sci ability. That would make sci characters the primary choice for sci related activity as it should. This is just as multiplicative as what the tacs have.
For engineers i would vastly boost their survivability. Even more than they have now. Pretty much to the point where it is absurd so they can chose to stop using boff, ship or console abilities that would increase survivability. That would give them a certain freedom to select science and tactical abilities for their ships and give them more flexibility. Reducing the cooldown on miracle worker a little, add some overcapping to their EPS ability and some damage absorbtion to nadion inversion should do the trick. It won't get them to do top dps but it will make them a lot more flexible. I am however not sure how close to a fair balance it would get them. Engs might still end up a little short.
So boosting science class characters field of expertise might get them parity with tacs. Engineers however, even if they get boosted in a multiplicative manner, might end up short because their field of expertise isn't really something that shines in the current meta.
Sadly, i don't think we will see a meaningful discussion about it. The majority of players are tac. The current status quo favors them. Given how toxic the forum community is, any change to the other classes will be seen as a nerf to the supremacy of team red and will be met with trolling, whining and complaining.
The flaw is that there is basically no point where you can say: "Now we got enough DPS people, we need some Crowd Control, a Healer or a Tank."
There just isn't. Everyone is highly self-sufficient in healing, and sure - crowd control is great in many missions, but if you bring more DPS instead, you can make that unnecessary, too.
I don't think the problem here is the multiplication. It's that self-sufficiency in terms of healing (and actually even CC, a single Lt.Cmdr Science slot probably can take of pretty much all CC needs you would need) is too good.
When i created my main sci i don't know anything about STO meta... after some time i discovered that tac can use sciboff skills more effectively... it was like WHAT??????
It's like some Archer in fantasy mmo can use mage staff and deal more magic damage than Mage... + can shot deadly arrows and firebolt spell at the same time. I never see this kind bs, even in "cheap" mmo...
A hard cap gives still absolutely no reason to play something else but DPS. It just means that you settle for a lower top DPS and put in more heals or crowd control instead - but that still doesn't mean it's sensible to make a dedicated healer or a dedicated crowd controller.
You only achieve meaningful roles if it becomes useful to sacrifice DPS for something else.
Or alternative, declade that everyone has the role of DPS, and make the role be a style choice - whether you want to be a broadsiding cruiser that carefully optimizes energy levels and his flight path, or an escort that tries to stay in the enemies rear arc to otpimize his DPS, or a science vessel that uses CC to use his most damaging abilities on the largest amount of enemy he can catch with it.
Even though I agree that something needs to be done, I would like to add that my Sci/Sci captain is my best DPSer by almost double. Of course I'm not a min-maxer and I know the potential (which, after all, is what this is about) for DPS is much higher with tacs than the other classes. Any buffs given to science captains (especially multiplicative) would give a huge boost to my best guy (currently 29K DPS).
Please don't make claims that I don't read the posts to which I reply. I always read them. And I know you want to have a discussion not some random ranting, so please try not to attack me directly? Please?
Anyway, because you want to have a talk about the multiplicative nature of powers.
For tacticals, this works. You cannot have APA grant +10.000 DPS for 30 seconds. And why? Because a noob with nothing more than a Mk I Mine Launcher would be doing at least 2,5k DPS in total from just spamming APA. Not to talk about other powers. And remember that GDF once already got nerfed to be a below 50% hull ability, it was available always back in the good ol days.
Healing powers can't have this miltiplicative ability. Say, we rework Miracle Worker to provide +50% hull healing on each ability that heals hulls. There are 2 problems in this.
1) Healing powers are more-or-less panic buttons. When you press them they need to work. Right there and then. Pressing MW and then having to press, say, Engineering team, could be the end of your brave little ship.
2) You are not always healing, where you are always shooting. Damage buffs help all the time, even if you don't run any offensive abilities, tac/sci/eng/int/cmd/plt. Because you always have the beams/torpedoes/cannons/turrets/mines firing. APA is therefore granting a useful buff at any given time. If an Engineering ability would grant a buff to healing or power level increasing powers, they would only be useful if such powers were equipped, and only then when they are needed. If I want to fly a Cruiser without any heals, I can do that fine as an Engineer right now. Having my Engineering abilities providing buffs to heals would force me into a specific playstyle, namely that of at least a little bit of tanking/healing.
Like I said in my post, the problem is not the powers themselves. The problem is that the state of the game favors using Damage Powers. Rebuilding some missions to make more demand for healing/buffing powers, would do much to remove the class imbalance that is in space. Not changing the nature of Eng/Sci powers to bring them up to the current game meta to have the same usefulness as Tac powers.
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Flashback to a few weeks ago when that bug made 45 second runs in HSE laughably easy. Sure that was a bug that was later fixed, but I'd also call it a preview of STO in a few years time (if it's still around by then).
The creep will only get worse since that is the endgame. Cryptic won't fix the AI because I believe they lack that knowledge. Churning out well presented but shallow content is all they do. And once everyone has played the content to death all there is left is focus on the ships and builds for them.
A few people are always angry or annoyed when the goalpost gets moved back again in some way. I don't understand why myself, it's not like you have anything else to do at that point is it?
There's a few solutions, but they're not without their drawbacks:
1) Reduce the number of captain space abilities across the board so tactical doesn't get a bunch of multipliers to stack up. The side effect of course is that class identity becomes even more blurred in space than it already is.
2) Redesign the captain space abilities, ideally knocking tactical down a few pegs while lifting up engineers. Drawback of course is that nobody likes nerfs and people would cry about it. A ton. This would probably be the best option, although developerwise, probably the hardest to balance and match up properly with power creep.
3) Add Tactical, Science, and Engineering to the specialization system. You obviously get the one you started out with for free as you level up, but then you have the option of switching to something more desirable instead of feeling like you're "stuck" with a fail class choice until you reroll. Of course, the downside is that everyone in the game becomes a tactical captain, probably with enough sci to unlock sensor scan or whatever other secondary offers the biggest dps bonus.
The Tactical captain's ability to deal large spike damage is their only advantage.
Engineering captains can not only tank in a far superior capacity than the other 2 classes but can also sustain high dps for prolonged periods of time (pressure damage) due to their inate ability to make more use of their warpcore. In PvP you'll often see engineers do far more overall damage than tactical and science.
Science can not only heal but control and debuff far more effectively than the other 2 classes. Not only that but they can also tank better than tactical captains.
Your point is basically invalid because you are suggesting limiting the only one thing a tactical captain can do better than the other 2 classes, the thing it was designed to do, high spike dps.
What you should be fighting for is creating an environment for the other classes to be more relevant by making this game more about something other than obscene dps.
Highest dps value overall is done by tacs. Tanking is, in the current meta, not needed and can be done by tacs as well as scis in a sufficient capacity as well. Heck, if you take a romulan tac captain with a valdore console you don't need any sort of healing abilities apart from some hazard emitters every blue moon.
PVP is irrelevant in this discussion. It is a neglectible small subset of gameplay in an broken environment. Someone doing good in a very small amount of cases doesn't justify that same person doing horrible in all others. That's not balance.
I don't know how science can do better control than tacs or engs. They can do better debuffs but those debuffs benefit all present tacs and engs too so there is that. And tanking is... well, in the current meta, dedicated tanks are like unicorns. You hear they exist and your braggart buddy keeps saying that he saw one but everybody with half a brain knows better.
I actually agree with you - limiting the tac captain doesn't benefit the bad classes. Why nerf them? The currect meta game is pretty much balanced around tacs blasting everything to bits. Nerfing them would break that. There is enough broken stuff already. Leave tacs be. Buff the other two.
In a perfect world (pun intended) that would be a solution. It would require more work than cryptic is able to should though. The most reasonably reachable balance is to push scies and engs to perform better in their niche and do more damage through that.
/done
Asked for this years ago...I don't think they'll do it....
For Sci in PvE, the role it excels at is debuffing. Yes it can do viable DPS but not optimal dps. Just like a tac can debuff but not optimal debuffing. Debuffing is usually used in pushing the Tac to more levels of DPS. This is the current role of the Sci that excels in Pve.
For Eng, the current role is cost effective captain at low end due to not necessarily needing plasmonic leech like items/traits. This means for a starter or cheap build, engs are better than tacs. While excels as a threat tank at the upper echelons. Although tacs and sci can tank, engs are just better due to dual miracle worker just like an eng can DPS but not as good as a tac. This means harder elite stfs which requires survivability need Engs to push the tacs more DPS.
Balance needs to go both ways.
So much this. I remember something along these lines when I noticed this, after starting and playing the game for a bit. Why tac consoles dont have diminishing returns like the eng resist ones have?
But they do have in a way diminishing returns. Tac consoles are Cat 1 buff. You dont get 37% additional damage each tac console.
It is also one of the reasons why DMG mod is better for rom tacs min/maxers since there are too much saturation of cat2 buffs.
You can heal milion hps per use, still you will heal only up to hps pool...
You can get milions of dmg buffs....and....have it all....welcome to dps online
But you also can deal max damage at a certain point. That is why you do 3/2 Split in ISA because you can only do a certain amount of DPS for the whole team. If you dont, there would be DPS cannabalization.
However, if you are basing it from rumors and misinformation, players end up like you. There is also an issue of perspective. You wont be heavily affected by the diminishin returns of damage resistance if your resistance revolves around 1-2%. The same goes with DPS. If you are doing 5-10k DPS, you wont know the max limit DPS per team because thats less than 5% of maximum potential and you have so much space to expand.