I still argue that the Devs need to re-work APA - buffing all damage by 50% is just plain silly. It is an innate Tac Captain ability - should be changed to buff weapon damage for 50% - zero logical reason for it to buff all damage - like how does an attack pattern buff a deflector ability? does not make sense to me. I just wonder if recoding it is too hard or too complicated for the Devs?? I would hope that they could find a work around.
Also is deflector overcharge only available to science captains? Or can any captain pick it up? That will be crazy stupid if a Tac captain can stack APA and DO, they will be even more OP in a science ship then they currently are. Moving subnuke to a boffs ability and why even roll a science captain?
I must also be another to say I would like to keep my subnuke, DO NOT make it a boff power, that is a terrible idea. Would by far prefer to just do away with scattering field and keep subnuke. I almost never used scattering field, and it feels rather redundant now.
Subnuke as a captain power should also be AOE just like sensor scan is, then it would truly become meaningful then!
Subnucleonic Beam - It should really work more like subnucleonic carrier wave and only remove a certain amount of buffs. A Lieutenant Commander bridge officer power that can strip all buffs will cause even more issues for PvP, while being overkill for PvE (since most NPCs at most seem to use two buffs).
It was fine when it was limited to sci-captain, but allowing a tactical captain to strip all buffs is going to make PvP "escorts-online" again (though escorts with Lt Cmdr sci stations). All the other balance changes look to make PvP more fun and diverse, except this one.
Perhaps have rank 1 remove 2 buffs, rank 2 removes 3 and rank 3 removes 5.
Beam overload - Beam Overload 3 feels like it's outperforming Surgical Strike 3 (a commander rank ability), in part due to having a much faster firing rate. My suggestion is to either adjust Surgical Strike's firing rate debuff from 50% to 20% or decrease the Beam Overload damage and Crit Severity buff from 30/40/50 to 10/15/20.
Overall a good change, just don't want it to make Surgical Strike worthless.
My problem here is that Subnucleonic Carrier Wave is an AOE debuff, and SNB is single target debuff. To be worth Lt.Cmdr, it really must have something being more powerful than SCW. As Lt.Cmdr, it's competing with pretty much all the useful damage Science powers, and that will cost you something. Though for PvP I could see the point that at Lt.Cmdr, it beats the utility of any other Lt.Cmdr Science power. Gravity Well I will not have as strong an effect on a player character than SNB.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Thought I'd repost this in the feedback thread where it has a good chance of being seen.
Honestly, rather than this irresponsible approach of killing plasmonic leech outright by making it a flat buff they should have adjust the DrainX scaling or the number of stacks. That would have been the responsible thing to do, as it would not just instantly devalue and make peoples DrainX gear COMPLETELY WORTHLESS!
Because it is now unless you are specifically building a drainboat build. All my science consoles and my deflector and DrainX universal consoles on my Command Warbird are now just vendor trash, as they no longer serve any kind of function whatsoever in my build.
As such the way they have nerfed the Leech directly violates their goals.
- It completely destroys some builds completely and tells people that "their fun is wrong".
- It completely destroys the investments of zen, dilithium, energy credits and fleet credits of A LOT of players.
- It removes the choice of certain DrainX dedicated builds completely from the game.
To add, I think that if you really want to prevent it from being a core element of every build imaginable, it should be made to be completely dependant on DrainX.
Give it a very very low starting point and have it scale aggressively with higher amounts of DrainX. That way you don't completely invalidate all the zen, dilithium, energy credits and fleet credits that people have invested in their DrainX gear for the Leech, while potentially making the Plasmonic Leech a much less attractive choice for conventional energy weapon builds.
Because if people dedicate that much console space to get high DrainX levels they quite frankly deserve the power levels that come with it, since for any non-drain build it means making a "choice" and forsaking potentially more useful equipment.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
Say, can I have my Grav well's pull back please? I have 200+ control skill and I'm watching Negh'vars in Starbase 24 crawl into my grav well, which in and of itself is fine, until said pull is outperformed by a DUTY OFFICER.
Since this is the feedback thread, and the GDF changes are kind of... odd, especially that on top of the alpha nerf, I propose to tweak the nerf a little. Instead of making the availability of Invincible and Continuity put a lock on GDF, and therefore make the Temp spec tree a bad choice sometimes and A good day to die trait entirely useless, why don't you just make the activation of those abilities remove the buff and put a lockout on it, say I go below 50% health, use the ability. Then it will give me the buff I want, where I would usually die and lose the buff, I instead get immunity or saved from death by the temporal god and get the buff removed, too. If I did not use it before invincible/continuity triggered, put a 20 sec lockout on it instead. I mean how does my crew know that some magic will protect it from blowing up, and not still give it's best when my ship bursts out in flames. This would preserve the functionality of GDF and not make investments, that are supposedly going to be still valid in vain, such as the "A good day to die" trait.
50% damage decrease around the board. Not cool. A lot of the stuff I spent real money on to get or upgrade is now trash. I have 10 sets of EPG plasma consoles, (5 amplifying, 5 neutralizing) now all useless because of the shot to cycle change. If you wanted to nerf the damage, okay...but now they don't do hardly any damage at all and if you look at Youtube, you'll see they're being removed by everyone who does a stream for this game. These consoles are useless as they are currently on Tribble.
Plasmonic Leech nerf and power level nerf. Don't understand it. I had to pay for a ship I didn't even want to get that console and now it's useless. More power = less effect doesn't make logical sense.
Every single tactical captain ability nerfed. Yeah, that's fun for tactical captains, I can tell you that. That is heavy handed. I know we were powerful, but reducing the damage to weapons only would have helped without removing damage to everything.
Changes to GDF invalidate Invincible, which we paid money for, as well as making 'It's a Good Day to Die' virtually useless (which we paid EC or Zen for lockbox keys for). You either drop traits you paid money for and Temp Op spec which we spent time grinding points for, or you can't use GDF.
Beam Overload doesn't affect anything but basic beam attacks, so if you happen to get it off and then FAW, it won't affect FAW. There is no real strategy to our attacks anymore and that is boring.
Why he heck did you guys nerf the damage resistance for the fleet combat buff? That wasn't an issue at all.
Uh.... EPS Power Transfer 3...that Eng captain Power.... is that even working right? It is crazy good. LOL!
Also: constantly seeing "no significant damage detected" in "Damage History" in the respawn window. I know it was a Romulan Plasma Torp. I watched it.
As for those torps, I've been hit by them dozens of times over and EVERY TIME No Significant Damage was there. 90% of the time when my ship blows up for NO REASON WHAT SO EVER, No Significant Damage. I could still destroy ALL the enemies on a map, come out of Red Alert (WITHOUT DEBUFFS) and my ship just suddenly explodes with No Significant Damage. As I move the camera around, there is a small ship 15km away that somehow destroyed mine. So unless the enemies have gotten ahold of stealth Plasma torps, EVERY weapon or ability needs to be counted for.
For those of you complaining about the changes to Leech and Plasma Explosion consoles, I have to say this:
1) Leech was absolutely insanely powerful for its slot. You could either slot in a console that gave +5 directly to a subsystem (the normal junk dropped items), or about that to 2 subsystems (some Reputation craftable items), or you could EASILY get +15-20 to ALL subsystems by just shooting at people. AT LEAST. The amount of power you gained by Leech was absolutely insane and it's frankly nuts it took Cryptic this long to fix it.
2) Plasma Explosion consoles were just as insanely overpowered. In a game that involves you shooting at things with weapons, these consoles did more damage overall to targets than items that were ACTUALLY DESIGNED to boost your weapon damage (anything that goes into your ship's Tactical slots). The 'meta' was to get ships with more Science consoles than Tactical ones, just so you could slot in more Plasma Explosion consoles! Yet another thing that has been broken for absolutely ages and once again it's nuts it took Cryptic this long to adjust things.
Leech is still slightly too powerful for its slot (6 to all power levels), but at least it's comparable to other items you can put in there. Yes, Plasma Explosion consoles got utterly nerfed (losing 95% of their damage - and this is NOT CrypticMath levels, either, this is actually 95%), and maybe should be tweaked upwards just so there's actually a point to using them short of +/- Aggro, but it's about time they got fixed.
Why he heck did you guys nerf the damage resistance for the fleet combat buff? That wasn't an issue at all.
It was a bit silly and I use it myself, +40 all res makes res consoles obsolete, although removing it altogether and give us some useless extra hp is not nice, why not just make it to +20 all res instead? And give people the option to use res consoles if they want to go extra tanky.
For those of you complaining about the changes to Leech and Plasma Explosion consoles, I have to say this:
1) Leech was absolutely insanely powerful for its slot. You could either slot in a console that gave +5 directly to a subsystem (the normal junk dropped items), or about that to 2 subsystems (some Reputation craftable items), or you could EASILY get +15-20 to ALL subsystems by just shooting at people. AT LEAST. The amount of power you gained by Leech was absolutely insane and it's frankly nuts it took Cryptic this long to fix it.
2) Plasma Explosion consoles were just as insanely overpowered. In a game that involves you shooting at things with weapons, these consoles did more damage overall to targets than items that were ACTUALLY DESIGNED to boost your weapon damage (anything that goes into your ship's Tactical slots). The 'meta' was to get ships with more Science consoles than Tactical ones, just so you could slot in more Plasma Explosion consoles! Yet another thing that has been broken for absolutely ages and once again it's nuts it took Cryptic this long to adjust things.
Leech is still slightly too powerful for its slot (6 to all power levels), but at least it's comparable to other items you can put in there. Yes, Plasma Explosion consoles got utterly nerfed (losing 95% of their damage - and this is NOT CrypticMath levels, either, this is actually 95%), and maybe should be tweaked upwards just so there's actually a point to using them short of +/- Aggro, but it's about time they got fixed.
1. That is true, yet it's been nerfed to a point where is is not worth slotting anymore. Those power levels I can get anywhere else really.
2. Yes and yes, they were broken, nerf is fine. 97% damage nerf is not, that's just insane, the nerf would have been hard enough if it would just not go through shields. But nerf dmg, proc chance and penetration, that makes it virtually useless and not worth slotting.
Get the pattern? They strictly said in the start that value of investments will be retained, which is false. Investments towards immunities, hundreds of thousands of ec or dozens of dollars, gone. Certain traits that improve abilities such as GDF, useless. Making embassy consoles epic, a waste. Investing into super expensive beam weaponry and a tank build that utilizes Feedback Pulse and Fire at Will, maybe some OSS (Like I did), I spent billions, a waste. An utter waste. The feedback pulse nerf has gone too far, it was op in pvp, parsed too well in PvE. So be logical? Nerf it's damage by like 50% and make it reflect less to players, that nerf it received makes it what? Not worth slotting. People open Phoenix Boxes, spending millions of dilithium to get that Krenim Ship, welp. A waste, almost. The console is still good, let's see for how long. My point being is that many things get nerfed to the point they get useless and not worth slotting in most builds. Many items that are useless remain useless. The damage is being nerfed a good bit but AIs are still dumb. We will still sweep through STFs like nothing...
2) Plasma Explosion consoles were just as insanely overpowered. In a game that involves you shooting at things with weapons, these consoles did more damage overall to targets than items that were ACTUALLY DESIGNED to boost your weapon damage (anything that goes into your ship's Tactical slots). The 'meta' was to get ships with more Science consoles than Tactical ones, just so you could slot in more Plasma Explosion consoles! Yet another thing that has been broken for absolutely ages and once again it's nuts it took Cryptic this long to adjust things.
Leech is still slightly too powerful for its slot (6 to all power levels), but at least it's comparable to other items you can put in there. Yes, Plasma Explosion consoles got utterly nerfed (losing 95% of their damage - and this is NOT CrypticMath levels, either, this is actually 95%), and maybe should be tweaked upwards just so there's actually a point to using them short of +/- Aggro, but it's about time they got fixed.
Hence why I suggested the damage nerf. By nerfing the proc to per weapon cycle, it is virtually useless. It is better now to use Particle Field Exciters and EPS Flow Regulators.
I still argue that the Devs need to re-work APA - buffing all damage by 50% is just plain silly. It is an innate Tac Captain ability - should be changed to buff weapon damage for 50% - zero logical reason for it to buff all damage - like how does an attack pattern buff a deflector ability? does not make sense to me. I just wonder if recoding it is too hard or too complicated for the Devs?? I would hope that they could find a work around.
Same way Tactical Team buffs your science damage when it is active, by improving strategy and tactical communication. Where is the best place to aim the deflector ability for maximum damage, etc. It's what 'tactical' means.
2) Plasma Explosion consoles were just as insanely overpowered. In a game that involves you shooting at things with weapons, these consoles did more damage overall to targets than items that were ACTUALLY DESIGNED to boost your weapon damage (anything that goes into your ship's Tactical slots). The 'meta' was to get ships with more Science consoles than Tactical ones, just so you could slot in more Plasma Explosion consoles! Yet another thing that has been broken for absolutely ages and once again it's nuts it took Cryptic this long to adjust things.
Leech is still slightly too powerful for its slot (6 to all power levels), but at least it's comparable to other items you can put in there. Yes, Plasma Explosion consoles got utterly nerfed (losing 95% of their damage - and this is NOT CrypticMath levels, either, this is actually 95%), and maybe should be tweaked upwards just so there's actually a point to using them short of +/- Aggro, but it's about time they got fixed.
Hence why I suggested the damage nerf. By nerfing the proc to per weapon cycle, it is virtually useless. It is better now to use Particle Field Exciters and EPS Flow Regulators.
It kinda makes more sense to me to keep the proc to per weapon cycle, but give it some damage back. But in the end, the thing you want is it dealing more damage then it does currently on Tribble, how they get there should be not that important.
However, I always found it problematic that a science console was better for buffing your damage with shooting guns then a tactical console.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
It is obvious that with the changes, being as they are now, render the embassy consoles useless from a DPS point of view. Resulting in people en-mass discarding these consoles and stack up on other damage increasing consoles like universals.
So if these embassy consoles should not, and are not intended to be, DPS increasing tools, perhaps it would be fitting to adjust there actually intend? These consoles after all are based around -threat and +threat mechanics, perhaps it is an idea to buff the consoles in that regard, to up the -th and +th modifier numbers as a compensation? That way these consoles will be, more so then they are now, still valid tools for certain builds.
With the current changes, tanks for example will see there damage output decreased significantly, but in order to be able to tank [grabbing and holding threat] they still need those +th consoles, and extra heals for the extra incoming damage, giving them a double dip in comparison to pure DPS builds. Giving those consoles a higher +th modifiers would compensate for the changes and gives them a niche usage.
[since threat is tied into damage, grabbing the threat might prove difficult since the teammates do not have to hamper themselves by using such consoles, resulting in much higher DPS → higher threat]
Just a thought from a tanking captain [I know, very biased]
Also... get your filthy hands off my Subnucleonic Beam!!! It might not be the best ability but I actually use it!
Start designing PvE content where it is actually desirable instead of just arbitrarily taking it away from Sci Captains!
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
It is obvious that with the changes, being as they are now, render the embassy consoles useless from a DPS point of view. Resulting in people en-mass discarding these consoles and stack up on other damage increasing consoles like universals.
So if these embassy consoles should not, and are not intended to be, DPS increasing tools, perhaps it would be fitting to adjust there actually intend? These consoles after all are based around -threat and +threat mechanics, perhaps it is an idea to buff the consoles in that regard, to up the -th and +th modifier numbers as a compensation? That way these consoles will be, more so then they are now, still valid tools for certain builds.
With the current changes, tanks for example will see there damage output decreased significantly, but in order to be able to tank [grabbing and holding threat] they still need those +th consoles, and extra heals for the extra incoming damage, giving them a double dip in comparison to pure DPS builds. Giving those consoles a higher +th modifiers would compensate for the changes and gives them a niche usage.
[since threat is tied into damage, grabbing the threat might prove difficult since the teammates do not have to hamper themselves by using such consoles, resulting in much higher DPS → higher threat]
Just a thought from a tanking captain [I know, very biased]
Just a note, there is more than one type of embassy console. The plasma ones, the hull heal ones, and the shield heal ones. The hull and shield healing ones got buffed significantly with the tribble patch to the point where it's actually worth slotting them now.
They reduced the proc chance for the hull/shield healing to 1% but at least they do not lock eachother out anymore, [note: proc chance on incomming not outgoing hits] some quick tribble testing shows that 4 consoles net a 450 hps [total] for hul heals, that is basicly less then an engineering team 1 on global. its nice, but does not really compare to any universal console, does it?
Main selling point, expecially after the 'balance', is the -th and +th modifier, imo
You have to have some hull/shield capability to make these consoles viable. You can't just slot them and expect them to work miracles. Just like how you can't slot the plasma ones with no damage boosts and expect them to be viable. I've tested them in ker'rat using 4 hull Heal variants and have gotten almost 7k hps out of them from having a bunch of borg shoot at me. That's on a healer. So they're definitely worth it if you have the healing capability and/or are going to be under heavy fire.
Interesting, I just did some quick [tribble] testing in a few ISA runs, just to get an impression, perhaps I should do some more testing on them. Still it kinda underlines my argument.
In order to make the most out of the healing variant, you need threat, basically it is the old 'turtle vs tank' principle discussion.
They are worth it; if you are under fire, in order to get into that state you need threat, in order to get threat you need to do damage. But by having a lot of these consoles one actually loses out on DPS potential [a lot]. Resulting in DPS players getting the threat, even when you are running the +th variants. Hench the thought to improve the +th modifier to compensate.
Besides, it was just a thought on a possible way to give the consoles [all variants] a bit of a boost, more viability, after them being nerfed into oblivion.
Since Gravity Well and Subspace Vortex are still overperforming on Tribble compared to what was intended, I tested a Science Vessel build based on Destabilizing Resonance Beam III, Photonic Shockwave I and Charged Particle Burst I and Recursive Shearing and I and Causal Reversion I. That character has access to starship matery traits buffing PSW and CPB (at least one of the traits is from a lockbox ship, so not something everyone has access to).
I only ran regular patrols on normal difficulty. The build still seemed effective (but not as impressive as previous GW buidls I used on Holodeck), but I noticed a few things:
The different ranges of Photonic Shockwave and Charged Particle Burst really suck. it's not neccessarily a question of power, but more of "quality of life". You have to track the range of multiple targets, targets that might overlap each other making it harder to read the exact distance, or targets that are not even in your field of view. It would be a lot easier if there was at least just one number range to look for to get these powers going. It's okay if any secondary procs that cause PSWs still retain a 3km range.
Destabilizing Resonance Beam was not all that impressive. Part of the reason is certainly that I didn't have a Gravity Well to keep my targets together. Maybe this could be compensated by lowering the duration but increasing the damage per tick? It definitely needs to deal more damage then Gravity Well when everything is resolved.
Someone else brought it up in another thread: Particle Manipulator is a really potent trait for exotic damage. It uses a skill that you already max out if you want to deal exotic damage, too ,and helps you deal more damage. I suppose it has to compete with a power like the +10 % shield penetration for torpedoes, so maybe it is at a reasonable level. But maybe it would be better if PM was reduced in effectiveness, and the damage of the bridge officer powers it buffed would not be reduced as much.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Not seeing Hangar pet AI improvement. They're still very slow, can't keep up with a full impulse ship, take several seconds, almost a minute to dock with the ship and still have a nasty habit of hugging the bottom of the ship. Have these changes not been made yet? Or is this really your final image of how these should behave?
The nerfs/buffs summary for power drains. Ignore the Neut torpedo. Realized too late it was the same, and I wasn't going to start again the copy/paste pain.
Left is Tribble, right is Holodeck. Tgt subsystems and plasmonic leech drain got hit with the nerf hammer, and Tykens got a buff.
Target subsystems = Nerfed about 68.5% accorss the board on the drain front. Disable chance and disable duration both knocked down to flat values.
Plasmonic leech = Drain cut down 50% supposedly matching current performance. Boost knocked down to extremely low flat value. For me it's a 90% decrease which sucks.
Tyken's Rift = Improved 200% on the drain front. My guess to make up for the severe cutbacks above, specially the target subsystems one. I've heard the damage boost is not supposed to be that. It should stay that way for something whose AoE is fixed and people can get away easily. At least for GW you can increase the radius of the pull.
Comments
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
Also is deflector overcharge only available to science captains? Or can any captain pick it up? That will be crazy stupid if a Tac captain can stack APA and DO, they will be even more OP in a science ship then they currently are. Moving subnuke to a boffs ability and why even roll a science captain?
Subnuke as a captain power should also be AOE just like sensor scan is, then it would truly become meaningful then!
My problem here is that Subnucleonic Carrier Wave is an AOE debuff, and SNB is single target debuff. To be worth Lt.Cmdr, it really must have something being more powerful than SCW. As Lt.Cmdr, it's competing with pretty much all the useful damage Science powers, and that will cost you something. Though for PvP I could see the point that at Lt.Cmdr, it beats the utility of any other Lt.Cmdr Science power. Gravity Well I will not have as strong an effect on a player character than SNB.
To add, I think that if you really want to prevent it from being a core element of every build imaginable, it should be made to be completely dependant on DrainX.
Give it a very very low starting point and have it scale aggressively with higher amounts of DrainX. That way you don't completely invalidate all the zen, dilithium, energy credits and fleet credits that people have invested in their DrainX gear for the Leech, while potentially making the Plasmonic Leech a much less attractive choice for conventional energy weapon builds.
Because if people dedicate that much console space to get high DrainX levels they quite frankly deserve the power levels that come with it, since for any non-drain build it means making a "choice" and forsaking potentially more useful equipment.
Also: constantly seeing "no significant damage detected" in "Damage History" in the respawn window. I know it was a Romulan Plasma Torp. I watched it.
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
Plasmonic Leech nerf and power level nerf. Don't understand it. I had to pay for a ship I didn't even want to get that console and now it's useless. More power = less effect doesn't make logical sense.
Every single tactical captain ability nerfed. Yeah, that's fun for tactical captains, I can tell you that. That is heavy handed. I know we were powerful, but reducing the damage to weapons only would have helped without removing damage to everything.
Changes to GDF invalidate Invincible, which we paid money for, as well as making 'It's a Good Day to Die' virtually useless (which we paid EC or Zen for lockbox keys for). You either drop traits you paid money for and Temp Op spec which we spent time grinding points for, or you can't use GDF.
Beam Overload doesn't affect anything but basic beam attacks, so if you happen to get it off and then FAW, it won't affect FAW. There is no real strategy to our attacks anymore and that is boring.
Why he heck did you guys nerf the damage resistance for the fleet combat buff? That wasn't an issue at all.
As for those torps, I've been hit by them dozens of times over and EVERY TIME No Significant Damage was there. 90% of the time when my ship blows up for NO REASON WHAT SO EVER, No Significant Damage. I could still destroy ALL the enemies on a map, come out of Red Alert (WITHOUT DEBUFFS) and my ship just suddenly explodes with No Significant Damage. As I move the camera around, there is a small ship 15km away that somehow destroyed mine. So unless the enemies have gotten ahold of stealth Plasma torps, EVERY weapon or ability needs to be counted for.
1) Leech was absolutely insanely powerful for its slot. You could either slot in a console that gave +5 directly to a subsystem (the normal junk dropped items), or about that to 2 subsystems (some Reputation craftable items), or you could EASILY get +15-20 to ALL subsystems by just shooting at people. AT LEAST. The amount of power you gained by Leech was absolutely insane and it's frankly nuts it took Cryptic this long to fix it.
2) Plasma Explosion consoles were just as insanely overpowered. In a game that involves you shooting at things with weapons, these consoles did more damage overall to targets than items that were ACTUALLY DESIGNED to boost your weapon damage (anything that goes into your ship's Tactical slots). The 'meta' was to get ships with more Science consoles than Tactical ones, just so you could slot in more Plasma Explosion consoles! Yet another thing that has been broken for absolutely ages and once again it's nuts it took Cryptic this long to adjust things.
Leech is still slightly too powerful for its slot (6 to all power levels), but at least it's comparable to other items you can put in there. Yes, Plasma Explosion consoles got utterly nerfed (losing 95% of their damage - and this is NOT CrypticMath levels, either, this is actually 95%), and maybe should be tweaked upwards just so there's actually a point to using them short of +/- Aggro, but it's about time they got fixed.
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It was a bit silly and I use it myself, +40 all res makes res consoles obsolete, although removing it altogether and give us some useless extra hp is not nice, why not just make it to +20 all res instead? And give people the option to use res consoles if they want to go extra tanky.
1. That is true, yet it's been nerfed to a point where is is not worth slotting anymore. Those power levels I can get anywhere else really.
2. Yes and yes, they were broken, nerf is fine. 97% damage nerf is not, that's just insane, the nerf would have been hard enough if it would just not go through shields. But nerf dmg, proc chance and penetration, that makes it virtually useless and not worth slotting.
Get the pattern? They strictly said in the start that value of investments will be retained, which is false. Investments towards immunities, hundreds of thousands of ec or dozens of dollars, gone. Certain traits that improve abilities such as GDF, useless. Making embassy consoles epic, a waste. Investing into super expensive beam weaponry and a tank build that utilizes Feedback Pulse and Fire at Will, maybe some OSS (Like I did), I spent billions, a waste. An utter waste. The feedback pulse nerf has gone too far, it was op in pvp, parsed too well in PvE. So be logical? Nerf it's damage by like 50% and make it reflect less to players, that nerf it received makes it what? Not worth slotting. People open Phoenix Boxes, spending millions of dilithium to get that Krenim Ship, welp. A waste, almost. The console is still good, let's see for how long. My point being is that many things get nerfed to the point they get useless and not worth slotting in most builds. Many items that are useless remain useless. The damage is being nerfed a good bit but AIs are still dumb. We will still sweep through STFs like nothing...
Hence why I suggested the damage nerf. By nerfing the proc to per weapon cycle, it is virtually useless. It is better now to use Particle Field Exciters and EPS Flow Regulators.
Same way Tactical Team buffs your science damage when it is active, by improving strategy and tactical communication. Where is the best place to aim the deflector ability for maximum damage, etc. It's what 'tactical' means.
It kinda makes more sense to me to keep the proc to per weapon cycle, but give it some damage back. But in the end, the thing you want is it dealing more damage then it does currently on Tribble, how they get there should be not that important.
However, I always found it problematic that a science console was better for buffing your damage with shooting guns then a tactical console.
It is obvious that with the changes, being as they are now, render the embassy consoles useless from a DPS point of view. Resulting in people en-mass discarding these consoles and stack up on other damage increasing consoles like universals.
So if these embassy consoles should not, and are not intended to be, DPS increasing tools, perhaps it would be fitting to adjust there actually intend? These consoles after all are based around -threat and +threat mechanics, perhaps it is an idea to buff the consoles in that regard, to up the -th and +th modifier numbers as a compensation? That way these consoles will be, more so then they are now, still valid tools for certain builds.
With the current changes, tanks for example will see there damage output decreased significantly, but in order to be able to tank [grabbing and holding threat] they still need those +th consoles, and extra heals for the extra incoming damage, giving them a double dip in comparison to pure DPS builds. Giving those consoles a higher +th modifiers would compensate for the changes and gives them a niche usage.
[since threat is tied into damage, grabbing the threat might prove difficult since the teammates do not have to hamper themselves by using such consoles, resulting in much higher DPS → higher threat]
Just a thought from a tanking captain [I know, very biased]
Start designing PvE content where it is actually desirable instead of just arbitrarily taking it away from Sci Captains!
Just a note, there is more than one type of embassy console. The plasma ones, the hull heal ones, and the shield heal ones. The hull and shield healing ones got buffed significantly with the tribble patch to the point where it's actually worth slotting them now.
Main selling point, expecially after the 'balance', is the -th and +th modifier, imo
In order to make the most out of the healing variant, you need threat, basically it is the old 'turtle vs tank' principle discussion.
They are worth it; if you are under fire, in order to get into that state you need threat, in order to get threat you need to do damage. But by having a lot of these consoles one actually loses out on DPS potential [a lot]. Resulting in DPS players getting the threat, even when you are running the +th variants. Hench the thought to improve the +th modifier to compensate.
Besides, it was just a thought on a possible way to give the consoles [all variants] a bit of a boost, more viability, after them being nerfed into oblivion.
I only ran regular patrols on normal difficulty. The build still seemed effective (but not as impressive as previous GW buidls I used on Holodeck), but I noticed a few things:
The different ranges of Photonic Shockwave and Charged Particle Burst really suck. it's not neccessarily a question of power, but more of "quality of life". You have to track the range of multiple targets, targets that might overlap each other making it harder to read the exact distance, or targets that are not even in your field of view. It would be a lot easier if there was at least just one number range to look for to get these powers going. It's okay if any secondary procs that cause PSWs still retain a 3km range.
Destabilizing Resonance Beam was not all that impressive. Part of the reason is certainly that I didn't have a Gravity Well to keep my targets together. Maybe this could be compensated by lowering the duration but increasing the damage per tick? It definitely needs to deal more damage then Gravity Well when everything is resolved.
Someone else brought it up in another thread: Particle Manipulator is a really potent trait for exotic damage. It uses a skill that you already max out if you want to deal exotic damage, too ,and helps you deal more damage. I suppose it has to compete with a power like the +10 % shield penetration for torpedoes, so maybe it is at a reasonable level. But maybe it would be better if PM was reduced in effectiveness, and the damage of the bridge officer powers it buffed would not be reduced as much.
Left is Tribble, right is Holodeck. Tgt subsystems and plasmonic leech drain got hit with the nerf hammer, and Tykens got a buff.
Target subsystems = Nerfed about 68.5% accorss the board on the drain front. Disable chance and disable duration both knocked down to flat values.
Plasmonic leech = Drain cut down 50% supposedly matching current performance. Boost knocked down to extremely low flat value. For me it's a 90% decrease which sucks.
Tyken's Rift = Improved 200% on the drain front. My guess to make up for the severe cutbacks above, specially the target subsystems one. I've heard the damage boost is not supposed to be that. It should stay that way for something whose AoE is fixed and people can get away easily. At least for GW you can increase the radius of the pull.