I would definitely nerf EC generation from drops, tour the galaxy, admiralty and any other sources that create EC out of thin air. EC farmers are creating inflation that damages the game economy for everyone else. This is especially damaging for honest traders who earn their EC the right way instead of, essentially, printing money.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
1. Fleet Embassy "plasma exploder" consoles: These consoles are now unique/one-per-ship. Excess consoles may be returned to the vendor to refund the fleet credits/dilithium originally spent on them.
Why: Because number of science console slots being such a dominant factor in where a ship places for DPS potential as a directed energy damage build is silly, unintuitive, and pretty much lorebreaking. Reputation consoles are limited to one-per-ship. These should have been too.
2. Beam: Fire at Will: Each additional hit on the same target during a firing cycle receives a cumulative -20% damage penalty (i.e. second hit does 80% damage, third does 60%, fourth does 40%, etc.). Attacks with B:FAW suffer -20% accuracy against fighters and destructible torpedoes.
Why: Having one skill be a best or near-best go to option in 99% of the content renders a huge number of other options inferior. It saps the game of variety. In particular it squats over and takes a dump on Beam Overload, which should be a superior choice for single enemy encounters and isn't. This one skill has massively warped the play space and it is the pointed end of the spear for power creep when there's so many other skills you can say "well this needs a buff because it so under performs compared to BFAW..." The second half of my proposed nerf addresses the fact that not only is BFAW an overwhelmingly great tool for damage, it also provides a huge defensive benefit shooting down incoming projectiles and clearing effects like the Tholian energy ball. BFAW should stay the premier weapon boost for target rich environments, but it needs to be less useful against 1-2 targets and it needs to not be so strong defensively.
Agreed on the first. Not so much on the second since it's removing something the game needs, an AoE clear. While it does need a significant nerf, making it totally useless just removes one more skill into the pile of others that no one ever uses. The point should be to make it still useful, but not a one sized fits all skill that overshadows everything else.
BFAW should be useful for things like fighters and torps, the AOE messes and such that you need a large angle of damage to deal with. Things like being able to clear out Rom D'D NPC torp spam is one of the things it should still be good at and a static -Acc nerf would limit that. Instead have it locked to dealing scaling damage based on the total number of targets PER salvo, so if there's only one it would deal significantly less damage than just attacking with your beams as normal. (This would also allow it to change dynamically so if there's 3 targets, and you kill 1 then it's going to be doing less overall damage to the remaining 2) In addition provide a cap to the amount of CrtD that can apply to each shot, something realistic that people can reach like 120%. Just remove the whole ACC increase entirely and have it use native ACC you have for normal beam shots.
This way it's a skill to use in groups but can only deal a realistic amount to each enemy. Since it's a damage loss to use it on single target, they could then buff Beam Overload to deal more single target damage, but also give it a CrtD cap that's higher than BFAW (Something around 170ish?) but not so high that people can instantly nuke something from 100 to 0. Now we have multiple useful skills. An AoE to clear out groups but limited so it's not a ridiculous nuke to everything and anything in front of you and have a single target skill that's actually useful to use.
I would definitely nerf EC generation from drops, tour the galaxy, admiralty and any other sources that create EC out of thin air. EC farmers are creating inflation that damages the game economy for everyone else. This is especially damaging for honest traders who earn their EC the right way instead of, essentially, printing money.
Drops have already been nerfed to something like 30% of what they were in the past. Better to introduce EC sinks. An example would be to actually charge EC to repair ship damage; say something like 25k EC for each minor damaged system, 50k EC for each moderately damaged system, 100k EC for each severely damaged system and 250k EC for system that has been rendered inoperable.
1. Fleet Embassy "plasma exploder" consoles: These consoles are now unique/one-per-ship. Excess consoles may be returned to the vendor to refund the fleet credits/dilithium originally spent on them.
Why: Because number of science console slots being such a dominant factor in where a ship places for DPS potential as a directed energy damage build is silly, unintuitive, and pretty much lorebreaking. Reputation consoles are limited to one-per-ship. These should have been too.
2. Beam: Fire at Will: Each additional hit on the same target during a firing cycle receives a cumulative -20% damage penalty (i.e. second hit does 80% damage, third does 60%, fourth does 40%, etc.). Attacks with B:FAW suffer -20% accuracy against fighters and destructible torpedoes.
Why: Having one skill be a best or near-best go to option in 99% of the content renders a huge number of other options inferior. It saps the game of variety. In particular it squats over and takes a dump on Beam Overload, which should be a superior choice for single enemy encounters and isn't. This one skill has massively warped the play space and it is the pointed end of the spear for power creep when there's so many other skills you can say "well this needs a buff because it so under performs compared to BFAW..." The second half of my proposed nerf addresses the fact that not only is BFAW an overwhelmingly great tool for damage, it also provides a huge defensive benefit shooting down incoming projectiles and clearing effects like the Tholian energy ball. BFAW should stay the premier weapon boost for target rich environments, but it needs to be less useful against 1-2 targets and it needs to not be so strong defensively.
Agreed on the first. Not so much on the second since it's removing something the game needs, an AoE clear. While it does need a significant nerf, making it totally useless just removes one more skill into the pile of others that no one ever uses. The point should be to make it still useful, but not a one sized fits all skill that overshadows everything else.
BFAW should be useful for things like fighters and torps, the AOE messes and such that you need a large angle of damage to deal with. Things like being able to clear out Rom D'D NPC torp spam is one of the things it should still be good at and a static -Acc nerf would limit that. Instead have it locked to dealing scaling damage based on the total number of targets PER salvo, so if there's only one it would deal significantly less damage than just attacking with your beams as normal. (This would also allow it to change dynamically so if there's 3 targets, and you kill 1 then it's going to be doing less overall damage to the remaining 2) In addition provide a cap to the amount of CrtD that can apply to each shot, something realistic that people can reach like 120%. Just remove the whole ACC increase entirely and have it use native ACC you have for normal beam shots.
This way it's a skill to use in groups but can only deal a realistic amount to each enemy. Since it's a damage loss to use it on single target, they could then buff Beam Overload to deal more single target damage, but also give it a CrtD cap that's higher than BFAW (Something around 170ish?) but not so high that people can instantly nuke something from 100 to 0. Now we have multiple useful skills. An AoE to clear out groups but limited so it's not a ridiculous nuke to everything and anything in front of you and have a single target skill that's actually useful to use.
I think a better answer would be to just scale it based on how many targets there are in a 10km radius around your ship, 1 target should give you a very slight bonus over normal weapons fire, but only a fraction of what BO would do, 5 targets should get you to the current output, and anything beyond 5 would get a slight buff over current performance.
Another idea for the embassy plasma consoles is to give each console a 10 second cooldown. So if you had 5 consoles, and one triggered, it wouldn't be able to trigger for 10 seconds but the other 4 would still be able to. I've always wondered why this wasn't the case. The hull and shield repairing embassy consoles have a 10 second GLOBAL cooldown, so using 5 hull repair or 5 shield repair consoles is currently useless. I would like to see the 10 second cooldown per console implemented for all embassy consoles: boosting the hull/shield repair consoles and reducing how OP the plasma consoles are to the point where they is not as much of a gap between their usefulness.
I would definitely nerf EC generation from drops, tour the galaxy, admiralty and any other sources that create EC out of thin air. EC farmers are creating inflation that damages the game economy for everyone else. This is especially damaging for honest traders who earn their EC the right way instead of, essentially, printing money.
???
Am I reading this right? "Earning EC" by playing the game is damaging while "Earning EC" by playing the market is not?
I'll say this - in a "fixed money" world (ie, there's only 500 trillion EC available to the entire playerbase), and there's "greed" involved, there will eventually be 500 trillionares and the entire rest of the playerbase will be cut out of the economy altogether unless they "cave into the demands" of the Trillionares and supply them with what they want (at whatever prices the trillionares dictate)...
Neither economy is "preferable", so as jaguarskx puts it:
[Better to introduce EC sinks. An example would be to actually charge EC to repair ship damage; say something like 25k EC for each minor damaged system, 50k EC for each moderately damaged system, 100k EC for each severely damaged system and 250k EC for system that has been rendered inoperable.
This creates a bit of a system in which there's still "infinite EC generation" so that there's EC available for everyone, and simultaneously creates an "illusion of fixed availability" because the sinks are pulling the EC out of the market. However, the best sinks are aimed at the rich - so that the newbies and not-focused-on-EC-creation aren't finding themselves sunk right into "poverty", but still do the job...
Detecting big-time "anti-old-school" bias here. NX? Lobi. TOS/TMP Connie? Super-promotion-box. (aka the two hardest ways to get ships) Excelsior & all 3 TNG "big hero" ships? C-Store. Please Equalize...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Another idea for the embassy plasma consoles is to give each console a 10 second cooldown. So if you had 5 consoles, and one triggered, it wouldn't be able to trigger for 10 seconds but the other 4 would still be able to. I've always wondered why this wasn't the case. The hull and shield repairing embassy consoles have a 10 second GLOBAL cooldown, so using 5 hull repair or 5 shield repair consoles is currently useless. I would like to see the 10 second cooldown per console implemented for all embassy consoles: boosting the hull/shield repair consoles and reducing how OP the plasma consoles are to the point where they is not as much of a gap between their usefulness.
That might put them in line with the shield refrequencers..As those appear to go off 1 at a time..
Another idea for the embassy plasma consoles is to give each console a 10 second cooldown. So if you had 5 consoles, and one triggered, it wouldn't be able to trigger for 10 seconds but the other 4 would still be able to. I've always wondered why this wasn't the case. The hull and shield repairing embassy consoles have a 10 second GLOBAL cooldown, so using 5 hull repair or 5 shield repair consoles is currently useless. I would like to see the 10 second cooldown per console implemented for all embassy consoles: boosting the hull/shield repair consoles and reducing how OP the plasma consoles are to the point where they is not as much of a gap between their usefulness.
That might put them in line with the shield refrequencers..As those appear to go off 1 at a time..
It's even worse than you might think. The shield and hull embassy consoles go off one at a time, in theory. The problem is the 10 second cooldown listed in the tooltip applies globally to all hull or shield embassy consoles you might equip.
Basically it looks like this:
1. Let's say you have 4 hull repairing weapon signature amplifier consoles equipped, called consoles 1-4.
2. You take fire, and the hull repair effect triggers for console 1.
3. The 10 sec cooldown triggers for console 1.
4. At the same time, the 10 second cooldown triggers for consoles 2-4 as well.
5. All the consoles are on cooldown, even though only one console healed you.
With plasma explosion consoles it looks like this:
1. The first console triggers and doesn't go on cooldown because it doesn't have one.
2. None of the other plasma consoles you have equipped go on cooldown either.
3. All of the consoles still are able to proc.
Another idea for the embassy plasma consoles is to give each console a 10 second cooldown. So if you had 5 consoles, and one triggered, it wouldn't be able to trigger for 10 seconds but the other 4 would still be able to. I've always wondered why this wasn't the case. The hull and shield repairing embassy consoles have a 10 second GLOBAL cooldown, so using 5 hull repair or 5 shield repair consoles is currently useless. I would like to see the 10 second cooldown per console implemented for all embassy consoles: boosting the hull/shield repair consoles and reducing how OP the plasma consoles are to the point where they is not as much of a gap between their usefulness.
That might put them in line with the shield refrequencers..As those appear to go off 1 at a time..
It's even worse than you might think. The shield and hull embassy consoles go off one at a time, in theory. The problem is the 10 second cooldown listed in the tooltip applies globally to all hull or shield embassy consoles you might equip.
Basically it looks like this:
1. Let's say you have 4 hull repairing weapon signature amplifier consoles equipped, called consoles 1-4.
2. You take fire, and the hull repair effect triggers for console 1.
3. The 10 sec cooldown triggers for console 1.
4. At the same time, the 10 second cooldown triggers for consoles 2-4 as well.
5. All the consoles are on cooldown, even though only one console healed you.
With plasma explosion consoles it looks like this:
1. The first console triggers and doesn't go on cooldown because it doesn't have one.
2. None of the other plasma consoles you have equipped go on cooldown either.
3. All of the consoles still are able to proc.
It's funny cause when they changed how the plasma explosion consoles worked awhile back at first everyone was complaining about them being "nerfed into the ground" ... lol
[Better to introduce EC sinks. An example would be to actually charge EC to repair ship damage; say something like 25k EC for each minor damaged system, 50k EC for each moderately damaged system, 100k EC for each severely damaged system and 250k EC for system that has been rendered inoperable.
This creates a bit of a system in which there's still "infinite EC generation" so that there's EC available for everyone, and simultaneously creates an "illusion of fixed availability" because the sinks are pulling the EC out of the market. However, the best sinks are aimed at the rich - so that the newbies and not-focused-on-EC-creation aren't finding themselves sunk right into "poverty", but still do the job...
There has to some sort of "infinite EC generation" in the game. How else are new players going to earn EC to begin with.
Introducing EC sinks can help offset new EC flowing into the economy. They will not stop, but they can curtail inflation. The cost to repair damage will only affect those who plays story mission above normal difficulty or plays the Advanced / Elite queue missions. Not all players who are able to do "Advanced missions" are "rich", but the R&D boxes could be sold if necessary to get EC for repairs. I would assume players who can afford to upgrade gear for "Elite missions" will be rich enough to pay for repairs.
Another EC sink would be the reputation system. Simply increase the required EC for each project. Rep gear is not a requirement for the game.
Introduce a nominal transaction fee to list items for sale on the Exchange. The fee is deducted when the item is listed regardless if the item sells or not. This may help mitigate high price item speculation in the Exchange. If players can potentially loose EC from listing items that are simply priced too high for players to buy, then that may force players to sell items at a bit more reasonable price. Otherwise, the item simply gets de-listed from the Exchange and returned to the player after a period of time. At that point the item can be relisted on the Exchange, but that would incur another transaction fee.
I think a 0.2% fee of the selling price (rounded down to the nearest whole EC) on anything listed above 500k EC is reasonable. That means listing something for 500,001 EC will incur a 1k EC listing fee while a ship listed for 500m EC will result in a 1m EC listing fee. Items listed for 500k EC or less incurs no list fee.
If I were going to "nerf" something the first thing I'd do is make AOE weapons abilities actually care about accuracy. It's not a huge destructive change, and most NPCs have the defense of a brick anyways. As it stands the Acc modifier needs to be made useful somehow (in theory Acc overflow transfers into CritX, but AOE abilities like FAW, TS, and CSV which ignore Acc don't put this into effect).
I hadn't really thought about it, but I can agree that there may be too much EC in the game. With Admiralty alone for example, I can get a couple 100k on one character, and that's without effort. If I start assignments three times a day (for which I have enough ships) and do this on a dozen characters, I could easily earn millions, possibly even per character, a day without actually playing the game.
Questions then of course are
- Does it really matter that there's a huge gap between the billionaires and the rest? Some of those billionaires are the same people who keep the game going. Should they be punished for that?
- If the gap can stay, and a more even distribution is not the goal but rather removing inflation by reducing the influx of EC: would a sink not just be beneficial to those with most of it?
Another idea for the embassy plasma consoles is to give each console a 10 second cooldown. So if you had 5 consoles, and one triggered, it wouldn't be able to trigger for 10 seconds but the other 4 would still be able to. I've always wondered why this wasn't the case. The hull and shield repairing embassy consoles have a 10 second GLOBAL cooldown, so using 5 hull repair or 5 shield repair consoles is currently useless. I would like to see the 10 second cooldown per console implemented for all embassy consoles: boosting the hull/shield repair consoles and reducing how OP the plasma consoles are to the point where they is not as much of a gap between their usefulness.
That might put them in line with the shield refrequencers..As those appear to go off 1 at a time..
It's even worse than you might think. The shield and hull embassy consoles go off one at a time, in theory. The problem is the 10 second cooldown listed in the tooltip applies globally to all hull or shield embassy consoles you might equip.
Basically it looks like this:
1. Let's say you have 4 hull repairing weapon signature amplifier consoles equipped, called consoles 1-4.
2. You take fire, and the hull repair effect triggers for console 1.
3. The 10 sec cooldown triggers for console 1.
4. At the same time, the 10 second cooldown triggers for consoles 2-4 as well.
5. All the consoles are on cooldown, even though only one console healed you.
With plasma explosion consoles it looks like this:
1. The first console triggers and doesn't go on cooldown because it doesn't have one.
2. None of the other plasma consoles you have equipped go on cooldown either.
3. All of the consoles still are able to proc.
It's funny cause when they changed how the plasma explosion consoles worked awhile back at first everyone was complaining about them being "nerfed into the ground" ... lol
I don't ever use the embassy plasma consoles, so I don't really know how much damage they do. I have heard that they do a lot, and that a lot of the high dpsers use them, though. My biggest thing is that they have no cooldown at all and yet the hull and shield heal variants not only have a cooldown, but it's global? That has bothered me for a long time.
I normally see them doing (an average of) 3-4k each on a non-Tac captain. On a Tac captain, it starts getting higher (in excess of 7k each) due to stacking all damage buffs. This is based on ISA.
IMO, people looking to nerf BFAW are barking at the wrong tree. And I say this as a player that hardly uses BFAW.
I normally see them doing (an average of) 3-4k each on a non-Tac captain. On a Tac captain, it starts getting higher (in excess of 7k each) due to stacking all damage buffs. This is based on ISA.
That's what I was thinking, but I didn't want to say that and be completely off the mark. Thanks!
1. Fleet Embassy "plasma exploder" consoles: These consoles are now unique/one-per-ship. Excess consoles may be returned to the vendor to refund the fleet credits/dilithium originally spent on them.
Why: Because number of science console slots being such a dominant factor in where a ship places for DPS potential as a directed energy damage build is silly, unintuitive, and pretty much lorebreaking. Reputation consoles are limited to one-per-ship. These should have been too.
2. Beam: Fire at Will: Each additional hit on the same target during a firing cycle receives a cumulative -20% damage penalty (i.e. second hit does 80% damage, third does 60%, fourth does 40%, etc.). Attacks with B:FAW suffer -20% accuracy against fighters and destructible torpedoes.
Why: Having one skill be a best or near-best go to option in 99% of the content renders a huge number of other options inferior. It saps the game of variety. In particular it squats over and takes a dump on Beam Overload, which should be a superior choice for single enemy encounters and isn't. This one skill has massively warped the play space and it is the pointed end of the spear for power creep when there's so many other skills you can say "well this needs a buff because it so under performs compared to BFAW..." The second half of my proposed nerf addresses the fact that not only is BFAW an overwhelmingly great tool for damage, it also provides a huge defensive benefit shooting down incoming projectiles and clearing effects like the Tholian energy ball. BFAW should stay the premier weapon boost for target rich environments, but it needs to be less useful against 1-2 targets and it needs to not be so strong defensively.
Agreed on the first. Not so much on the second since it's removing something the game needs, an AoE clear.
No, it doesn't remove BFAW's functionality as an AoE clear. The first hit on each individual target is at full strength which means in an environment with 4 or more targets (where you'd want an AoE clear) it's almost completely unaffected from its current functionality. "As good as it is now - in the situation it is supposed to be good" is pretty much the opposite of making it totally useless. This is a very targeted nerf, designed to leave BFAW the king of its niche and get it out of the other two niches it's trampling .
BFAW should be useful for things like fighters and torps...
That's what point defense consoles, the point defense protocol trait, and the Precise trait are all for (which incidentally more than counteracts the accuracy penalty I'm proposing ). Auto-turrets too. Plus several of the space magic skills. And volatile plating. The list goes on and on. All those things do their job without simultaneously giving you overwhelming offensive advantage. There's a case to be made that auto-turrets and other point defense tools need to be more accessible, but that's not an excuse to preserve the BFAW-uber-alles situation that's running amok in the game now.
IMO, people looking to nerf BFAW are barking at the wrong tree. And I say this as a player that hardly uses BFAW.
As I see it there are three, maybe four trees... Grotesque over-rewarding of the last steps of weapon upgrading and giving a minor shave to Tac Captain ability magnitudes being the other two. Fortunately I have dogs enough to set them on that whole stand of trees if need be. But I prefer to make the smallest adjustments possible that bring about the desired effect .
IMO, people looking to nerf BFAW are barking at the wrong tree. And I say this as a player that hardly uses BFAW.
As I see it there are three, maybe four trees... Grotesque over-rewarding of the last steps of weapon upgrading and giving a minor shave to Tac Captain ability magnitudes being the other two. Fortunately I have dogs enough to set them on that whole stand of trees if need be. But I prefer to make the smallest adjustments possible that bring about the desired effect .
Even those "over-rewarding" weapon upgrade tiers have little effect. There was a thread in Reddit of a guy doing well over 100k with Mk1 weapons.
Nerfing would probably be the worst option at this point because of all the anger players will bring upon Cryptic. Delta Rising technically acted like a nerf towards player damage output (with higher HP mobs), and we all know how that ended up.
IMO the best course now would be:
Buff Engineering and Science professions so that they aren't magnitudes behind Tactical captains
Introduce the missing Elites for older content.
Create new content that has less emphasis on damage output while also refraining from using timegates (the Tzenkethi missions are steps in the right direction).
Another idea for the embassy plasma consoles is to give each console a 10 second cooldown. So if you had 5 consoles, and one triggered, it wouldn't be able to trigger for 10 seconds but the other 4 would still be able to. I've always wondered why this wasn't the case. The hull and shield repairing embassy consoles have a 10 second GLOBAL cooldown, so using 5 hull repair or 5 shield repair consoles is currently useless. I would like to see the 10 second cooldown per console implemented for all embassy consoles: boosting the hull/shield repair consoles and reducing how OP the plasma consoles are to the point where they is not as much of a gap between their usefulness.
Yup. Another solid solution to the WTH?!? happening as a result of the Plasma consoles. Probably better than mine as it doesn't need to offer a buy-back plan .
No, it doesn't remove BFAW's functionality as an AoE clear. The first hit on each individual target is at full strength which means in an environment with 4 or more targets (where you'd want an AoE clear) it's almost completely unaffected from its current functionality. "As good as it is now - in the situation it is supposed to be good" is pretty much the opposite of making it totally useless. This is a very targeted nerf, designed to leave BFAW the king of its niche and get it out of the other two niches it's trampling .
Except...your suggested nerf does lower the usefulness into the ground for taking those specific things out. Things like fighters and torps have inherent defense bonuses. It's why if you just spam spacebar at the ones shot out by borg and rom's you'll end up missing quite a bit and usually getting hit, since no one stacks Acc anymore, versus hitting BFAW and clearing them completely out. Tossing a massive 1/5 accuracy penalty JUST on fighters and torps and letting it slide for everything else goes far beyond "keeping it in its niche" and outright removes it in favor of nothing. If you want to suggest something at least think about what you're writing and don't just slap something on to make it sound like you're doing an across the board nerf. It needs the accuracy for things with increased def like Fighters and Torps, regular NPC's don't and an accuracy nerf THERE would be warranted.
That's what point defense consoles, the point defense protocol trait, and the Precise trait are all for (which incidentally more than counteracts the accuracy penalty I'm proposing ). Auto-turrets too. Plus several of the space magic skills. And volatile plating. The list goes on and on. All those things do their job without simultaneously giving you overwhelming offensive advantage. There's a case to be made that auto-turrets and other point defense tools need to be more accessible, but that's not an excuse to preserve the BFAW-uber-alles situation that's running amok in the game now.
So your answer to it is a console locked to one type of ship and lockbox/Doff pack traits? I call BS on your entire line of reasoning there. Complete and utter bull TRIBBLE. Something you should have baseline because the NPCs that use them are part of the main storyline shouldn't have the answer in things like that. I shouldn't have to buy and use a single ship JUST for those enemies nor should I have to rely on gambling or hoping they're affordable on the exchange. Whatever logic you're using to suggest that is so beyond the realm of realistic I want whatever you were smoking to come up with it because you're high as hell to even try it. The fact that you have to even put in that line about "these things should be more accessible" should have clued you in to the utter stupidity of suggesting it.
I'll agree that the damage needs to be lowered or metered out over the amount of enemies in play, NOT removing Accuracy for the two types of things you need the Accuracy there for. There's no reason for that other than wanting to remove the skill from use entirely and if that's your goal just say so so we can move on.
The powercreep is systemic, and just nerfing BFAW won't help. You can keep nerfing stuff and players like them (and many others) will still perform well above the rest. The only people you'll really hurt are the majority that can hardly get by an advanced STF.
At this point, I think nerfs would hurt the game more than it would help it.
Like it or not, the current powercreep has allowed for a lot of build diversity (which is good in my opinion). What we really need are proper Elite queues to apply that powercreep to.
I would definitely nerf EC generation from drops, tour the galaxy, admiralty and any other sources that create EC out of thin air. EC farmers are creating inflation that damages the game economy for everyone else. This is especially damaging for honest traders who earn their EC the right way instead of, essentially, printing money.
???
Am I reading this right? "Earning EC" by playing the game is damaging while "Earning EC" by playing the market is not?
That is correct. Buying and selling items DOES NOT introduce new EC into the system and does not cause inflation. Creating new EC out of thin air does.
I'll say this - in a "fixed money" world (ie, there's only 500 trillion EC available to the entire playerbase), and there's "greed" involved, there will eventually be 500 trillionares and the entire rest of the playerbase will be cut out of the economy altogether unless they "cave into the demands" of the Trillionares and supply them with what they want (at whatever prices the trillionares dictate)...
You're taking it a bit too far. I wouldn't suggest removing the ability to create EC from drops, admiralty etc. I suggested a nerf. That's what this thread is about. "What would you nerf?" Not "what would you remove?"
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
Ok, suppose those changes were made. What skill would you be putting on your bar instead?
If BFAW is made entirely garbage at clearing out PVE issues like NPC torps and fighters? Beam Overload in that one slot and apparently eating several rom torps to the face on any character that isn't my main that uses Sci.
Asking what I'll put in that slot doesn't excuse your massive lapse in judgement btw and your reasoning is still stupid.
If BFAW is made entirely garbage at clearing out PVE issues like NPC torps and fighters? Beam Overload in that one slot and apparently eating several rom torps to the face on any character that isn't my main that uses Sci.
Asking what I'll put in that slot doesn't excuse your massive lapse in judgement btw and your reasoning is still stupid.
Well, fortunately you're not the person I need to convince. And if -20% accuracy = entirely garbage in your universe I trust every single captain you have has the Precision trait? Because, my god man, that must be the most powerful trait EVER in your curious parallel universe .
Well, fortunately you're not the person I need to convince. And if -20% accuracy = entirely garbage in your universe I trust every single captain you have has the Precision trait? Because, my god man, that must be the most powerful trait EVER in your curious parallel universe .
I really don't think FAW is the one that needs changing though. The ability itself isn't OP.
BO is pretty much under-powered. It shouldn't be a single shot IMO.
Comments
Lag denied your Heal
What happened to my Halon consoles
Poni?
Agreed on the first. Not so much on the second since it's removing something the game needs, an AoE clear. While it does need a significant nerf, making it totally useless just removes one more skill into the pile of others that no one ever uses. The point should be to make it still useful, but not a one sized fits all skill that overshadows everything else.
BFAW should be useful for things like fighters and torps, the AOE messes and such that you need a large angle of damage to deal with. Things like being able to clear out Rom D'D NPC torp spam is one of the things it should still be good at and a static -Acc nerf would limit that. Instead have it locked to dealing scaling damage based on the total number of targets PER salvo, so if there's only one it would deal significantly less damage than just attacking with your beams as normal. (This would also allow it to change dynamically so if there's 3 targets, and you kill 1 then it's going to be doing less overall damage to the remaining 2) In addition provide a cap to the amount of CrtD that can apply to each shot, something realistic that people can reach like 120%. Just remove the whole ACC increase entirely and have it use native ACC you have for normal beam shots.
This way it's a skill to use in groups but can only deal a realistic amount to each enemy. Since it's a damage loss to use it on single target, they could then buff Beam Overload to deal more single target damage, but also give it a CrtD cap that's higher than BFAW (Something around 170ish?) but not so high that people can instantly nuke something from 100 to 0. Now we have multiple useful skills. An AoE to clear out groups but limited so it's not a ridiculous nuke to everything and anything in front of you and have a single target skill that's actually useful to use.
Drops have already been nerfed to something like 30% of what they were in the past. Better to introduce EC sinks. An example would be to actually charge EC to repair ship damage; say something like 25k EC for each minor damaged system, 50k EC for each moderately damaged system, 100k EC for each severely damaged system and 250k EC for system that has been rendered inoperable.
I think a better answer would be to just scale it based on how many targets there are in a 10km radius around your ship, 1 target should give you a very slight bonus over normal weapons fire, but only a fraction of what BO would do, 5 targets should get you to the current output, and anything beyond 5 would get a slight buff over current performance.
???
Am I reading this right? "Earning EC" by playing the game is damaging while "Earning EC" by playing the market is not?
I'll say this - in a "fixed money" world (ie, there's only 500 trillion EC available to the entire playerbase), and there's "greed" involved, there will eventually be 500 trillionares and the entire rest of the playerbase will be cut out of the economy altogether unless they "cave into the demands" of the Trillionares and supply them with what they want (at whatever prices the trillionares dictate)...
Neither economy is "preferable", so as jaguarskx puts it:
This creates a bit of a system in which there's still "infinite EC generation" so that there's EC available for everyone, and simultaneously creates an "illusion of fixed availability" because the sinks are pulling the EC out of the market. However, the best sinks are aimed at the rich - so that the newbies and not-focused-on-EC-creation aren't finding themselves sunk right into "poverty", but still do the job...
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It's even worse than you might think. The shield and hull embassy consoles go off one at a time, in theory. The problem is the 10 second cooldown listed in the tooltip applies globally to all hull or shield embassy consoles you might equip.
Basically it looks like this:
1. Let's say you have 4 hull repairing weapon signature amplifier consoles equipped, called consoles 1-4.
2. You take fire, and the hull repair effect triggers for console 1.
3. The 10 sec cooldown triggers for console 1.
4. At the same time, the 10 second cooldown triggers for consoles 2-4 as well.
5. All the consoles are on cooldown, even though only one console healed you.
With plasma explosion consoles it looks like this:
1. The first console triggers and doesn't go on cooldown because it doesn't have one.
2. None of the other plasma consoles you have equipped go on cooldown either.
3. All of the consoles still are able to proc.
It's funny cause when they changed how the plasma explosion consoles worked awhile back at first everyone was complaining about them being "nerfed into the ground" ... lol
There has to some sort of "infinite EC generation" in the game. How else are new players going to earn EC to begin with.
Introducing EC sinks can help offset new EC flowing into the economy. They will not stop, but they can curtail inflation. The cost to repair damage will only affect those who plays story mission above normal difficulty or plays the Advanced / Elite queue missions. Not all players who are able to do "Advanced missions" are "rich", but the R&D boxes could be sold if necessary to get EC for repairs. I would assume players who can afford to upgrade gear for "Elite missions" will be rich enough to pay for repairs.
Another EC sink would be the reputation system. Simply increase the required EC for each project. Rep gear is not a requirement for the game.
Introduce a nominal transaction fee to list items for sale on the Exchange. The fee is deducted when the item is listed regardless if the item sells or not. This may help mitigate high price item speculation in the Exchange. If players can potentially loose EC from listing items that are simply priced too high for players to buy, then that may force players to sell items at a bit more reasonable price. Otherwise, the item simply gets de-listed from the Exchange and returned to the player after a period of time. At that point the item can be relisted on the Exchange, but that would incur another transaction fee.
I think a 0.2% fee of the selling price (rounded down to the nearest whole EC) on anything listed above 500k EC is reasonable. That means listing something for 500,001 EC will incur a 1k EC listing fee while a ship listed for 500m EC will result in a 1m EC listing fee. Items listed for 500k EC or less incurs no list fee.
Questions then of course are
- Does it really matter that there's a huge gap between the billionaires and the rest? Some of those billionaires are the same people who keep the game going. Should they be punished for that?
- If the gap can stay, and a more even distribution is not the goal but rather removing inflation by reducing the influx of EC: would a sink not just be beneficial to those with most of it?
I don't ever use the embassy plasma consoles, so I don't really know how much damage they do. I have heard that they do a lot, and that a lot of the high dpsers use them, though. My biggest thing is that they have no cooldown at all and yet the hull and shield heal variants not only have a cooldown, but it's global? That has bothered me for a long time.
I normally see them doing (an average of) 3-4k each on a non-Tac captain. On a Tac captain, it starts getting higher (in excess of 7k each) due to stacking all damage buffs. This is based on ISA.
IMO, people looking to nerf BFAW are barking at the wrong tree. And I say this as a player that hardly uses BFAW.
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That's what I was thinking, but I didn't want to say that and be completely off the mark. Thanks!
No, it doesn't remove BFAW's functionality as an AoE clear. The first hit on each individual target is at full strength which means in an environment with 4 or more targets (where you'd want an AoE clear) it's almost completely unaffected from its current functionality. "As good as it is now - in the situation it is supposed to be good" is pretty much the opposite of making it totally useless. This is a very targeted nerf, designed to leave BFAW the king of its niche and get it out of the other two niches it's trampling
That's what point defense consoles, the point defense protocol trait, and the Precise trait are all for (which incidentally more than counteracts the accuracy penalty I'm proposing
As I see it there are three, maybe four trees... Grotesque over-rewarding of the last steps of weapon upgrading and giving a minor shave to Tac Captain ability magnitudes being the other two. Fortunately I have dogs enough to set them on that whole stand of trees if need be. But I prefer to make the smallest adjustments possible that bring about the desired effect
Even those "over-rewarding" weapon upgrade tiers have little effect. There was a thread in Reddit of a guy doing well over 100k with Mk1 weapons.
Nerfing would probably be the worst option at this point because of all the anger players will bring upon Cryptic. Delta Rising technically acted like a nerf towards player damage output (with higher HP mobs), and we all know how that ended up.
IMO the best course now would be:
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Yup. Another solid solution to the WTH?!? happening as a result of the Plasma consoles. Probably better than mine as it doesn't need to offer a buy-back plan
Except...your suggested nerf does lower the usefulness into the ground for taking those specific things out. Things like fighters and torps have inherent defense bonuses. It's why if you just spam spacebar at the ones shot out by borg and rom's you'll end up missing quite a bit and usually getting hit, since no one stacks Acc anymore, versus hitting BFAW and clearing them completely out. Tossing a massive 1/5 accuracy penalty JUST on fighters and torps and letting it slide for everything else goes far beyond "keeping it in its niche" and outright removes it in favor of nothing. If you want to suggest something at least think about what you're writing and don't just slap something on to make it sound like you're doing an across the board nerf. It needs the accuracy for things with increased def like Fighters and Torps, regular NPC's don't and an accuracy nerf THERE would be warranted.
So your answer to it is a console locked to one type of ship and lockbox/Doff pack traits? I call BS on your entire line of reasoning there. Complete and utter bull TRIBBLE. Something you should have baseline because the NPCs that use them are part of the main storyline shouldn't have the answer in things like that. I shouldn't have to buy and use a single ship JUST for those enemies nor should I have to rely on gambling or hoping they're affordable on the exchange. Whatever logic you're using to suggest that is so beyond the realm of realistic I want whatever you were smoking to come up with it because you're high as hell to even try it. The fact that you have to even put in that line about "these things should be more accessible" should have clued you in to the utter stupidity of suggesting it.
I'll agree that the damage needs to be lowered or metered out over the amount of enemies in play, NOT removing Accuracy for the two types of things you need the Accuracy there for. There's no reason for that other than wanting to remove the skill from use entirely and if that's your goal just say so so we can move on.
On a slow as molasses torpedo Sheshar:
With cannons:
Or even with no weapons:
Or in a build that runs all of the above (cannons, beams, torpedoes, a mine and no plasma consoles) in one ship and still hit over 150k DPS.
The powercreep is systemic, and just nerfing BFAW won't help. You can keep nerfing stuff and players like them (and many others) will still perform well above the rest. The only people you'll really hurt are the majority that can hardly get by an advanced STF.
At this point, I think nerfs would hurt the game more than it would help it.
Like it or not, the current powercreep has allowed for a lot of build diversity (which is good in my opinion). What we really need are proper Elite queues to apply that powercreep to.
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You're taking it a bit too far. I wouldn't suggest removing the ability to create EC from drops, admiralty etc. I suggested a nerf. That's what this thread is about. "What would you nerf?" Not "what would you remove?"
If BFAW is made entirely garbage at clearing out PVE issues like NPC torps and fighters? Beam Overload in that one slot and apparently eating several rom torps to the face on any character that isn't my main that uses Sci.
Asking what I'll put in that slot doesn't excuse your massive lapse in judgement btw and your reasoning is still stupid.
Well, fortunately you're not the person I need to convince. And if -20% accuracy = entirely garbage in your universe I trust every single captain you have has the Precision trait? Because, my god man, that must be the most powerful trait EVER in your curious parallel universe
I really don't think FAW is the one that needs changing though. The ability itself isn't OP.
BO is pretty much under-powered. It shouldn't be a single shot IMO.
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