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Rebalancing the captains - remove AP Alpha
fovrel
Member Posts: 1,448 Arc User
Rolling three AoY captains, a tac, a science and an engineer. It occurred to me that, a) they are all three fun to play and that b) the tac captain has a truly great space power attack pattern alpha. It is this power that makes him a class on its own and shadows the two other captains the science and the engineer. This in space. On the ground it is pretty even; each captain bring his own gimmick, has its own style of playing and no captain really outclasses another. Remarkable since a tac captain has on the ground a pretty solid damage boost, target optics, fire on my mark, you can one shot enemies. It resembles the space capabillities quite a lot. How come on the ground the tac captain is not a class on its own?
First. It is a matter of game design. On the ground the captain has his class abillities and his kit abillities. You don't have it in space. In space you have your class abillities and boff abillities and they are more integrated. Each captain can have Beam Overload and use it as if it is his abillity. On the ground, you let your boffs run their own skills, which can lead from hilarious to disastrous situations. BTW, you can micromanage your ground boff abillities, just as you do in space.
As I said every captain can have Beam Overload, but especially the tac captain can give his offensive skill a very strong boost, because he has AP Alpha. Since killing stuff fast, hence doing high damage, even if you are not a DPS chaser, is a core element in this game, AP Alpha is the bread and butter in this game.
Suggestion for rebalancing the classes. Remove each captains core abillitie, tac AP alpha, science Sensor Scan, engineer Rotate Shield Frequency. Give each captain a passive that reduces cooldown on his class-boff abillities. A tac reduces cooldown on all tac abillities, science science abillities and engineer engineer abiilties. This mechanism will tigh the captain more to a certain ship, so to still have fun with for instance a science captain in an escort, let each ship, T5/T6, have a universal lt.commander, most already have it.
A further fine tuning could be possible with doffs. A doff that reduces cooldown on class abillities, but do not stack with cooldown reduction of your captain.
First. It is a matter of game design. On the ground the captain has his class abillities and his kit abillities. You don't have it in space. In space you have your class abillities and boff abillities and they are more integrated. Each captain can have Beam Overload and use it as if it is his abillity. On the ground, you let your boffs run their own skills, which can lead from hilarious to disastrous situations. BTW, you can micromanage your ground boff abillities, just as you do in space.
As I said every captain can have Beam Overload, but especially the tac captain can give his offensive skill a very strong boost, because he has AP Alpha. Since killing stuff fast, hence doing high damage, even if you are not a DPS chaser, is a core element in this game, AP Alpha is the bread and butter in this game.
Suggestion for rebalancing the classes. Remove each captains core abillitie, tac AP alpha, science Sensor Scan, engineer Rotate Shield Frequency. Give each captain a passive that reduces cooldown on his class-boff abillities. A tac reduces cooldown on all tac abillities, science science abillities and engineer engineer abiilties. This mechanism will tigh the captain more to a certain ship, so to still have fun with for instance a science captain in an escort, let each ship, T5/T6, have a universal lt.commander, most already have it.
A further fine tuning could be possible with doffs. A doff that reduces cooldown on class abillities, but do not stack with cooldown reduction of your captain.
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Removing AP Alpha would have all TAC captains go mental and rightly so, also the cool down buff would still have everyone running a TAC with the current state of the game as you will be able to use your TAC powers more and they are the only powers theat matter in space.
Not every map is DPS centric. Just the popular ones are.
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To the OP: To reiterate what rahmkota19 posted: Removing AP Alpha will not fix the game or change the meta.
Every career has its perks.
This sounds like a fair suggestion.
But it does beg the question: why should Sensor Scan buff weapon impact then? Why should Engineers get the option to make their energy weapons more efficient through their yellow beam EPS ability (forgot their name).
So it would open up a huge nasty pit of discussions best left covered.
I think I like my APA the way I like my J. Jonah Jameson video. Unchanged since I first saw it.
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Seriously, op removing APA will do more damage, it won't fix anything.
Seriously..? Not only is that integrated since day one, but that would also require the removal of the captain abilities of all the classes...
To be fair, most non-dps centric maps are horrendously annoying designed. Interruptable actions + endless enemy spawn, often with FAW ability which makes "tanking" pointless, dosen't lead to good or fun gameplay....
As for the main topic, APA is seriously OP. Been since the start and now even more since the skill revamp because now we don't even need to invest anything to max it out. Back then we had to max out attack patterns + romulan engine for max effectivity, now it's just ~49% vanilla.
A nerf has been long overdue but that won't happen.
One would think so right ? It's not so, the highest ground DPS players are Tacs. What good is a turret or drone when everything is dead within seconds ?
And no don't remove alpha, but perhaps adjust it to energy weapons/torps only, as it is, it boosts all types of damage which has been driving my sci captain mad for years.
How can a Tac captain use science abilities more effectively and with higher damage outputs than an actually Sci officer captains...It's been boggling my mind for years, and I just don't get why they can't readjust APA.
Whatever though, at this point, I've learned to live with it.
The flaw with APA is that it buffs "everything" on an enormous scale, plasma exploders, kemocite, everything. And this alone creates a massive power gap between Tac and all other classes. Making it only affect weapons would make it a more balanced power and a logical one.
Sensor Scan does not buff weapons, it is a team wide debuff of a target, which is fits perfectly into Science Captains originally intended role, Team Support.
Engineers having a certain energy weapon efficiency is debatable at best with the myriad of ways you can boost power levels in the game today, so that's kind of a moot point.
My sentiments exactly.
Especially since science captains have an exclusive trait who's explicit purpose is to buff "exotic damage"!!!
Salt in the wound.
As someone that prefers Science Captains and likes to fly Science Vessels, I disagree with that idea on a conceptual level. If we did this, we would aso have to forbid Sensor Scan from affecting weapon damage, or Subnucleonic Beam nly removing debuffs that effect science powers.
If Attack Pattern Alpha is stronger than other captain abilities, nerf it. If you don't want to nerf it, buff the other captain abilities in some way.
The Cryptic backhand way via traits:
New Starship Mastery Trait Ideas:
Career Officer
You have mastered your career's special ability.
- Attack Pattern Alpha: When activating Attack pattern Alpha, you gain an additional +20 % defense bonus.
- Subnucleonic Beam: The target of your subnucleonic beam suffers -20 shield resists and suffers a -50 % penalty to incoming shield heals
- EPS Transfer: The target of your EPS Transfer gains a +25 % fire cycle haste buff and raises his maximum power levels by 10. (Maximum power level buffs do not stack.)
The APA buff is minor, the SNB and EPS Transfer buffs are very useful.
Alternate ideas for power buffs:
- Fire on my Mark: When activating fire on my mark, the target also suffers a -20 % penalty to defense.
- Sensor Scan: When activating Sensor Scan, you and your allies within 5 km cleanse all confuses and placates, and gain a +25 % accuracy bonus and a +50 % bonus to incoming hull heals for the next 15 seconds.
- Miracle Worker: When activating Miracle Worker, you also gain a +50 % bonus to all outgoing heals and a +10 bonus to maximum power levels for 15 seconds.
Since this is the Engineering captain ability, perhaps the increase to Maximum power level could stack with the next highest increase to Max power? Getting +10 over the other Captains in any particular situation seems appropriate to me, for an Engineer.
No we don't.
Like I have said, Sensor Scan is exactly what it should be, its a debuff that is intented to benefit the "entire team" which is a fundamental part of the role of a Science captain, just like Subnuke.
Tactical Captains aren't supposed to do science better than science captains, which as mentioned have their own trait explicitly for helping along science damage.
And let me also point out, that 90% of the non-weapons sources of damage didn't even come along until years later, and thus APA was never balanced around them in the first place.
Back when legacy of Romulus released, I made my Romulan a science captain beefier l because it was the one profession I had never leveled. I definitely regretted it - science abilities are just unremarkable and boring, both on the ground and in space. The only ability I really liked was photonic fleet.
I would definitely like some improvements to engineer space abilities too, ground is fun with all the "pets" (turrets, mortars, mines, drones, generators, shields, etc), but they get nothing "cool" or really fun to use in space.
The power set each Captain has available to himself needs to be equally viable regardless of ship choice. If APA was becoming weaker on Science vessels then, then another Tactical Captain ability would need to become more useful on a science vessel. I am not seeing that.
EDIT: Caveat. Ther eis one difference between weapons and exotic damage soruces that I tend to forget - they might have a different size of modifiers to the damage. It's possible that APA adds comparitively less to weapon damage then it does to exotic damage, simply because there are arleady more modifiers boosting weapon damage and the way stacking works in STO. If that's the case, then one could argue for a lower damage strength modifier on exotic damage then on weapon damage. That might be reasonable, IMO.
Limiting APA to weapons damage still makes it perfectly and more than equally viable for any ship type, or do you think that science ships don't use any weapons?
The problem with the Subnuc Debuff is that it is cleared by one of the main shield heals in the game. Science Team.
That would probably make people target each other with Sensor Scan.
Also... Engie has Rotate Shield Harmomics, which is pretty sweet too.
If I may, it could be argued that APA is actually more powerful on science ships than on any other ship type due to the balance of conventional and unconventional damage sources, for example on an escort APA is just buffing conventional damage, and maybe things such as DEM if you choose to slot them. On my science ship build however, it would buff my conventional weapons and my unconventional weapons simultaneously, when I combine that with damage resist reductions from various sources the APA becomes even more effective again.
With that in mind, I support the idea of limiting APA to conventional damage sources, I might stretch it's scope to damage dealt via conventional damage sources (So DEM, various weapon based DOTs, Kemocite (when attached to weapons)) but outside of traits and specs it would put Tac and Sci on a much more level playing field in a science ship.
That wasn't the original suggestion in the OP:
Compensation for gutting the captain abilities:
No information given on how this replacement would interact with the skill tree which already offers that capability at the end of the tree for each specific career with the readiness levels.
But this explanation was given:
Not sure what is meant by tie a captain to a certain ship, but then stating that a science captain can do well in an escort? That seems to be the opposite of tying a captain to a ship? Also, the suggeston that most T5/T6 ships already have a universal Lt. Commander is debatable.
And finally:
Since a lot of builds already utilize DOFFs that offer cooldown reduction, this seems more punitive toward builds than anything else. Especially since step one removes from the game captain abilities that many people would want to reduce the cooldown for in the first place and only replaces that with a cooldown ability.
Keeping all that in mind ... how would you reflect this suggestion in a poll?
Why do people not like good things?
I'd say if an individual doesnt want good gadgets and wants things to be harder then dont use it, take it off your tray, increase your difficultly level, try switching into a lower tier ship.
If someone wants a beast mode let them enjoy it.
Because some of us can see the bigger picture beyond our own personal gratification.
Overall a properly balanced game is a hundred times more enjoyable than a proverbial I-win button. Not to mention that extremely overpowered powers actually ruins the enjoyment of the game for others, and in absolute worst cases even penalizes them outright.