As dismayed with all the nerfs to both science and torpedo builds, there is one thing that has been bugging me for a long, long time, and that is Go Down Fighting's ability to affect ALL Damage and not just the ships primary energy weapons/torpedos along with related skills.
I don't really care if tactical captain's can use it when 'dead' and invicible, or how much of a boost it gives them, they are tactical and should have a good skill in that field. However... it should not allow them to out science a science player which it allows them to do easily.
I've not played on my engineer in quite some time, so I don't know how anything for them has changed, but I do know they need some loving in their captain skills.
Twilight, Particle Physicist that stole the ship.
Original Signup date: August 4, 2008
LTS since Pre-Order
This sucks, I was really looking forward to using Deflector Overcharge and ditching the garbage useless Sub Nuke. Unfortunately, my science characters will maintain their status as dilihtium slaves.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
How about a bit more civility in here, eh? All of the insults and vitriol aren't going to make your voices heard any louder on the very divisive subjects we're dealing with. If you would like to share feedback that offers helpful information that can be used to inform our future decisions, we're more than willing to listen.
We're working on putting together a more thorough explanation for why some of these changes have recently been rolled back, and would ask for a little bit of patience. We know that a lot of the passion behind these posts comes from a position of caring deeply for the experiences you have in Star Trek Online, and you have to believe we care just as deeply.
Perhaps more, considering it's how we pay rent!
When the solutions you have crafted don't end up solving the problem, or create too many unacceptable new problems, it's not a weakness to admit the mistake and start again, so long as something was learned.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
I know I've said it numerous other times over the years on the forums, and it's still relevant now.
Complaints over GDF or Attack Pattern Alpha are symptoms of the underlying problem, rather than the problem itself.
The problem, as it exists, and has always existed is that game combat has been developed as an arcade shooter, where performance and efficiency has been tied to DPS. Death is the ultimate debuff. Killing things as quickly as possible is what gets you through content in order to acquire your rewards. Regardless of whether or not you want to measure your DPS e-peen, the reality is that killing things faster leads to faster rewards. That's just how it is in STO, whether or not we agree with the concept.
Since that is how the game works, then we need to look at game mechanics from that perspective.
Escalation appears to be trying to address this problem in a more appropriate way, by creating new systems to place success in a "Best-in-class" composition, rather than "Best-in-damage" which is how it currently works.
However, until the game itself is overhauled on every conceivable level to reflect this "Best-in-class" gameplay (which is a daunting task, I know), then we're still faced with the reality that game mechanics which increase damage will be perceived as the best choice one can make.
While Deflector Overcharge did not directly address this problem, it was a step in the right direction, especially if the game wants to move in the direction of qualifying players on "Best-in-class", where its benefits would clearly allow a support role to shine at opportune moments.
GDF and APA on the other hand are powerful enough in their own right, and have a number of additional game mechanics that allow them to outperform and outclass both Engineers and Science Officers, because the game itself still decides performance and efficiency based on "Best-in-damage".
It would be nice in the future if we could compare Tactical to Tactical and Engineering to Engineering and Science to Science, but STO has unfortunately fallen into the success trap of their gameplay model by comparing both Engineering and Science to Tactical, and while these new balance changes were at first a welcome addition (to me anyway), I can't help but wonder if these rollbacks and reversions are based upon feedback from players who aren't aware of the underlying problem that game combat has, and Cryptic is too willing to cede to their demands to treat the symptoms instead of the problem.
With DO removed, could we see restoring damage of sci exotic abilities back to what they were? Some of the temporals were overperforming, agreed, but sci didn't need that nerf.
Changes to GDF are good, despite what some vocal whiners are saying here. You shouldn't make an ability work in a way that makes some stuff (namely slotting Temporal Operative specialization) totally undesirable for entire class.
Also, probably unpopular opinion, but with all the "reverting nerfs" moves, can we see *slight* buffs to Plasma Exploders any time soon? So they'd be at least a viable option to slot? Right now I hardly know anyone who even is thinking of having them on their ship.
With DO removed, could we see restoring damage of sci exotic abilities back to what they were?
My main issue to the loss of DO is that Science captains will become the least effective class when it comes to Exotic damage builds. Tacs will have GDF and APA while Engs will buff Exotics via Aux overcap. Rolling back some of the Sci skill nerfs won't fix that.
IMO while the return of SubNuc to Sci captains was a welcome change, this patch was a step backwards when it comes to class balance.
DO should be returned as a Sci-exclusive ability. It can be through a Captain trait (less effective since it would be passive, possibly replacing Photonic Capacitor) or rolled into Science Fleet (though the one-player cast at a time in PVE might hurt this).
We've been pointing out disparities and issues with things like projectiles for ages now. Only when people finally get angry are responses given, even though it's only a response to their attitude rather than the problems they're calling attention to.
Take the Kinetics meta for example:
They take no weapon energy, so it's understandable that they'd have some sort of drawback versus energy. However:
1) At high weapon energy levels, the energy weapons hit harder. Okay that's probably the compromise.
2) Kinetics lose an additional 75% of their non-bleedthrough damage against shields. Why? They already do a bit less damage if you optimize the energy weapons, wasn't that balanced?
3) Kinetics cannot fire simultaneously. I get that you're worried about massive bursts, but as a result, multiple energy weapons easily spike far higher in burst damage than a single torpedo launch, so now energy weapons are better at burst damage too
4) Kinetics cannot collectively benefit from weapon-specific bridge officer abilities the way energy weapons do, nor do they benefit for multiple activations the way the energy weapons do.
5) Kinetics don't get haste. Many abilities that improve armor/shield piercing also only do so for energy weapons as well.
So here we have these long cooldown burst-damage weapons, that deal less burst damage than their alternatives, less DPS than their alternatives, can't benefit from bridge officer abilities nearly as much or as often as their alternatives, and suffer a severe penalty against shields that their alternatives do not suffer whether against shields or hull.
They've been playing catch-up this entire time, and what do we see from the balancing? Not balance, but instead, their ability to deliver burst damage further reduced, and one of the few things keeping them relevant in terms of total output reduced to a quarter of its previous effect; a necessary change in regards to traits doing too much or too little, but one completely left unaccompanied by the transfer of this effect to the base weapon stats: the other half of the adjustment that should have been performed.
And we've had numbers upon numbers, and DPS thresholds and builds all over, but none of these problems are ever addressed or even responded to. All we've ever gotten was "hey you're being impolite" when they finally get trampled yet again.
Make the sensor scan, increase the effectiveness of all your abilities with enemies and allies, to allies it should get a increase to incoming heals buff, to enemies drain, damage, control abilities should all work better? Just a idea.
This would make it different then alpha strike and feel different.
Make the sensor scan, increase the effectiveness of all your abilities with enemies and allies, to allies it should get a increase to incoming heals buff, to enemies drain, damage, control abilities should all work better? Just a idea.
This would make it different then alpha strike and feel different.
Not going to be a fan of that to be honest... That would limit you to spike damage on a single group. Once that group is gone, then the buff is as well. I'd prefer it to be included into another ability, or as @ruinthefun suggested in Reddit, added back as an additional ability for Sci, then giving Tacs and Engs their own PVP-centric ability. That would open more options.
How about a bit more civility in here, eh? All of the insults and vitriol aren't going to make your voices heard any louder on the very divisive subjects we're dealing with. If you would like to share feedback that offers helpful information that can be used to inform our future decisions, we're more than willing to listen.
We're working on putting together a more thorough explanation for why some of these changes have recently been rolled back, and would ask for a little bit of patience. We know that a lot of the passion behind these posts comes from a position of caring deeply for the experiences you have in Star Trek Online, and you have to believe we care just as deeply.
Perhaps more, considering it's how we pay rent!
When the solutions you have crafted don't end up solving the problem, or create too many unacceptable new problems, it's not a weakness to admit the mistake and start again, so long as something was learned.
Apologies on behalf of the thread I'll go through the notes and bullet-point my feedback, to provide a post that can hopefully be constructive.
Turning the Kobali zone missions into wrappers is good, since they were already organized much that way.
Dropping patrol requirements is a good thing, since it allows the core story of the DQ arc to show through. Patrols are good flavor-text, but I can still remember my impression of feeling like there were too many right after DR launched
Having Multi-Spectral Particle Generators treated as exotic makes sense, especially with 2 consoles and a warp core needing to be equipped vs. a secondary deflector. The equipment cost is the tradeoff that a non-science ship has to make to get something like a Deteriorating SecDef.
Changes to torpedo special firing modes seem like a good compromise, especially since there were torpedoes whose cooldown was longer than 10s. It achieves the goal of no double-tapping while allowing a volley to be held in reserve for the correct timing. 10s, even with torpedoes having 6 or 8s timings still felt short to me in testing, especially if I was moving fast or had movement impeded.
In theory, it feels odd to allow something named "Go Down Fighting" to be used when you won't really die, and as it stands with the current 1m Holodeck duration, it can get ridiculous. In practice, I have a feeling that a 15s duration along with the somewhat more aggressive scaling with lost health will be a good balance between retaining investment (Invincible/Continuity/GDtD) while curbing the "spike damage masquerading as dps" that the longer duration produces. The only thing that still stands out with GDF is the magnitude of the buff at full health, which is incongruous with the idea of the ability.
Altering the damage of exotic abilities such as GW/SSV as much as has been done in the current Tribble build and removing Overcharge is a fairly significant net change, although not of the same degree as the combined changes to TI/APA/GDF. I can see why the damage was curbed a bit (since it could get a bit boring dropping GW/SSV/DRB and watching things explode with no further effort), but on the other hand, my scientists and engineers in science vessels rely on enough damage to clear enemies before they get killed. The scaling of CtrlX for GW is appreciated, since the anomaly does more damage toward the center and can now get things from a 12km radius there faster.
Edit: In case Bort comes back and sees it, one more thing. I just checked GDF's "reduced" c/d on Tribble, and the base c/d is 45s (not sure about the floor on it). Compared to APA (20s of 50% cat2 buff on a 2min base c/d), 15s every 45s of at least a 37.5% cat2 buff seems a bit too good. The uptime and reliability make it potentially better than the namesake ability of an alpha strike.
Well, with each Tribble patch there seems to be less and less about season 13 to be excited about. I can't imagine why you would reintroduce exploits, immunities and for the most part utterly useless captain abilities. Back to "tactical-captains-excel-in-everything"-online.
Ah... I get to keep my Science Captain's identifying skill.
Now I hope that Cryptic will still think about ways to make SNB more useful in PvE. I still say the simplest thing would be to just cause it a debuff of some sort that only affects NPCs. I know that @crypticspartan#0627 is not a big fan of NPC specific abilities (and I understand why, i was never a big fan originally either), but I think this is a case where it would be warranted, since NPC and player are not equal when it comes to self-buffs. Players have just a lot more of them then NPCs, while NPCs mostly rely on innate attributes.
Since we have so many resistance debuffs already, I was thinking about a shield hardness debuff and a weapon strength debuff.
A subnucleonic beam could perform rapid scans of an enemy ship and could also severely disable it. The subnucleonic beam worked by disrupting a ship's propulsion systems, communications systems, weapons, and its navigational sensors. Once a target ship was disabled, the Hirogen used their tractor beam technology to draw in their prey.
In 2374, the class 2 shuttlecraft Cochrane II was hit by a subnucleonic beam and hunted down by a Hirogen warship. (VOY: "Hunters")
I think such a debuff would still fit the theme the weapon had according to Voyager, though admittedly subsystem disables would fit even better, but they are not so useful against NPCs.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
The new "On" bloom quality setting is much improved: it's much brighter than before. The bad news is that you guys still have graphics bugs. Let's start with the new one.
Invisible characters in the tailor
Player characters and bridge officers are invisible in the tailor if you have "Postprocessing" turned on. See the link below.
Currently, on Tribble, the textures on some plants and hair are rendered incorrectly if both screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) and depth of field (DoF) are turned off. (Turning off post-processing will also do it.) To see this bug, turn off both SSAO and DoF, visit Earth Spacedock or Starfleet Academy, and look at the plants and talk to the NPCs. The bug makes it look as though someone colored in the transparent parts of the textures.
Plant and hair textures are still messed up if you turn off both SSAO and DoF or both SSAO and "Postprocessing". The bug is no longer as severe if you turn off only "Postprocessing", but the hair of the Cardassian tailor on ESD is still not quite right.
The bottles at the bar at Starfleet Academy keep flickering. I tried to fix the issue by changing various graphics settings:
World detail distance
Terrain detail distance
Character detail distance
World texture detail
Character texture detail
Postprocessing
Screen-space ambient occlusion
Cinematic focus (depth of field)
Antialiasing
Reflection quality
Lighting 2.0
Shadows
Max lights per object
Max shadowed lights
Nothing I changed seem to fix it.
The bottles are still flickering, but I have some new information. It appears that this may be an asset bug as well as a graphics bug. On Holodeck, some of the bottles are clear and empty. On Tribble, these bottles have been filled with a red liquid. It's this red part that's flickering.
Did a small clean-up - a friendly reminder to keep it civil, constructive and if possible, friendly; remember, that constructive critism is fine, insults & throwing fits are not.
[10:20] Your Lunge deals 4798 (2580) Physical Damage(Critical) to Tosk of Borg.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator "bIghojchugh DaneH, Dumev pagh. bIghojqangbe'chugh, DuQaHlaH pagh." "Learn lots. Don't judge. Laugh for no reason. Be nice. Seek happiness."~Day[9] "Your fun isn't wrong."~LaughingTrendy
I don't get how people can be so upset about this.
So some things will be a little bit easier or harder than before, it isn't the end of the world you'll be able to deal with if you have a try.
Upset isn't the right word. Disappointed is more like it. I was really looking forward to deflector overcharge and how it would give science captains the upper hand when it comes to dealing exotic damage. Subnuc is useless in pve. Surely you can understand how replacing a science alpha strike with a not-so-useful ability might frustrate some people.
"Go Down Fighting can once again be used while continuity or invincible are available to save you from dying"
@crypticspartan#0627, As a wise doctor once asked: "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?". In PVP, this is pretty much the most broken mechanic in desperate need of a serious fix to guarantee some semblance of balance. The abuse of GDF w/ LDE, Continuity & Invincible, as well as the near constant uptime granted by Attrition Warfare makes even the most mediocre Tac captain virtually unkillable while in a Battle Cloak-equipped ship.
This was fixed. Please do not unfix this.
This rebalanceing has turned into a F'ing joke train wrek with a capital F. Some things are more skewed than they ever were on holodeck making holodeck more balanced in a lot of regards. You can't even run a torp build anymore.
Drain Infection's damage has been increased relative to its current Tribble state.
[...]
The Bridge Officer Abilities Torpedo High Yield and Torpedo Spread can no longer be activated while the player has a Torpedo High Yield or Spread available to fire, or if the player has fired a torpedo as a High Yield or Spread within the last 5 seconds.
The Bridge Officer Abilities Torpedo High Yield and Torpedo Spread once again upgrade your next attack within 30 seconds.
[...]
Go Down Fighting can once again be used while continuity or invincible are available to save you from dying
Go Down Fighting now only lasts 15 seconds once activated, but has a much shorter cooldown
Drain Infection:
Ok not that much of an increase at all. Pretty much not that good. Basically it was decent how it was on holodeck (maybe around 5k-7k dps highly buffed/debuffed)
Torpedos:
Good to be able to precast at least one ability again and maybe shoot 2 in a 5 second window. Defnitly not a nerf again, its a buff
How does this activation lockout interact with concentrate firepower high yield, the additional high yield from the shiptrait, the additional torp spread from the weapon modifier? Are they lock out the BO activation?
Go Down Fighting:
Good to not make continuity/invincible completly useless for tac. Duration change is pretty much good too. Only one thing, PLEASE!! give us numbers when you decrease a cooldown. Maybe something like, cooldown decreased from 3 minutes to 45 seconds. Same would apply to damage changes, please give us numbers! Oh and maybe you forgot to mention that the Damagebonus applied is lower. Now it is 37.5% Bonus All Damge Bonus (correct that typo maybe) instead of 66% with A good Day to Die. Would be nice to mention something like that too In addition, the max bonus is 150% now. This change just make it more difficult for most people to benefit propperly from the ability (and thats one of the main issues we already have).
Science Captain:
A lot of Sci will defnitly love this, especially for pvp and the new pvp based content. The Resistance AoE Field from sci captain might be a good target for changes since its not great at all with all the damage resistance rating around and the diminishing return you're running into.
PLEASE don't stealthnerf things all the time.. just mention them in the notes. If you change something just say it.
Ok cryptic I know you want some sensible feedback. Here's what I think
Go down fighting, as the name suggests and the many TV show moments that used this phrase did, means that you put everything into weapons, making a suicide run and expecting to be dead at the end of it. The changes you've made make this an impossibility because tacs can use this ability whenever they want and whilst they have a trait equipped called invincible, not to mention super heal continuity, the recent buff to last ditch effort and all the other heals from sets like undiscovered lockbox that significantly boost performance more so than captain abilities like dynamic redistribute console.
The issue people are having is that a superpowered buff suggests you're going to die by its name. In my opinion, the name of this buff is the problem and should be changed to one that doesn't mean a player dies from this.
Or maybe the changes you're implementing in this post undermines the very nature of tactical captains, which are supposed to deal monstrous dmg at the expense of not having decent survivability.
People now think you're giving tactical everything and again further lengthens the gap between their class and the rest. On this point all I could suggest is significantly increasing the Cooldown time on invincible and continuity, nerfing them in someway. Or restricting certain universal consoles and starship traits to the ships and groups of ships they came from in order to prevent many of these inappropriately interacting with other already extremely powerful buffs.
Personally, even without talking about gdf, my engineer captains heals feel redundant in light of the kind of more powerful heals that any player can use. I feel that tactical captains can get the captain ability dps boosts ontop of all these extra non captain heals which significantly improves their performance of balancing survivability with huge amounts of dps. No other class has this kind of balance.
No single class should be able to have such a huge survivability and huge dps as this puts it into a class of its own, effectively mixing tactical captain and engineering captain abilities together.
I think that to mitigate that extra monstrous tac captain ability damage ontop of super heals, there should be either stacking penalties to damage buffs or a relative decrease to heals and resistances as tac captain dmg buffs increase in order to make a fair compromise.
My conclusion is that if I can survive so well as a tac captain, meaning that I complete content with great speed whilst feeling like I have engineer like heals, then I won't even bother investing in the other inferior non tactical classes.
I think it is worth noting that this is probably the reason why GDF is now allowed to be used with Invincibility and Continuity again. Borticus seemed to confirm the same. In any case, allowing GDF to be used under the safety of immunities isn't as big a deal as some may state here, given that it now has a lower duration, lower damage boost and lower uptime.
That change is reasonable when put into that light.
Drag whoever's doing these changes out here. They're obviously unrelated to the game, and I think all of us need to have some "words" with them.
This is bloody unacceptable. I haven't seen flipflopping changes this hostile to what some random decided was "all the wrong ways to play" since a certain head of a certain other cryptic game declared blasters should be outdamaged, out-mezzed and outranged by everyone "because ranged damage is their defense".
^^^ This. Ignore the vocal minority who complains that their unfair advantages have been taken away. There are three classes in this game, not just Tactical. Level the playing field so that skill rules, not the class that one picks on the starting screen.
Yes Eng as support and Sci as debuffers as intended, not as dpsers
I know I've said it numerous other times over the years on the forums, and it's still relevant now.
Complaints over GDF or Attack Pattern Alpha are symptoms of the underlying problem, rather than the problem itself.
The problem, as it exists, and has always existed is that game combat has been developed as an arcade shooter, where performance and efficiency has been tied to DPS. Death is the ultimate debuff. Killing things as quickly as possible is what gets you through content in order to acquire your rewards. Regardless of whether or not you want to measure your DPS e-peen, the reality is that killing things faster leads to faster rewards. That's just how it is in STO, whether or not we agree with the concept.
Since that is how the game works, then we need to look at game mechanics from that perspective.
Escalation appears to be trying to address this problem in a more appropriate way, by creating new systems to place success in a "Best-in-class" composition, rather than "Best-in-damage" which is how it currently works.
However, until the game itself is overhauled on every conceivable level to reflect this "Best-in-class" gameplay (which is a daunting task, I know), then we're still faced with the reality that game mechanics which increase damage will be perceived as the best choice one can make.
While Deflector Overcharge did not directly address this problem, it was a step in the right direction, especially if the game wants to move in the direction of qualifying players on "Best-in-class", where its benefits would clearly allow a support role to shine at opportune moments.
GDF and APA on the other hand are powerful enough in their own right, and have a number of additional game mechanics that allow them to outperform and outclass both Engineers and Science Officers, because the game itself still decides performance and efficiency based on "Best-in-damage".
It would be nice in the future if we could compare Tactical to Tactical and Engineering to Engineering and Science to Science, but STO has unfortunately fallen into the success trap of their gameplay model by comparing both Engineering and Science to Tactical, and while these new balance changes were at first a welcome addition (to me anyway), I can't help but wonder if these rollbacks and reversions are based upon feedback from players who aren't aware of the underlying problem that game combat has, and Cryptic is too willing to cede to their demands to treat the symptoms instead of the problem.
I would urge you to actually try and test on tribble, the buff to miracle worker is significant. It is the gameplay and content themselves. Atm there doesn't seem to be a real need for eng support or sci debuffers, if they can create or make a need then they wi
Ok cryptic I know you want some sensible feedback. Here's what I think
Go down fighting, as the name suggests and the many TV show moments that used this phrase did, means that you put everything into weapons, making a suicide run and expecting to be dead at the end of it. The changes you've made make this an impossibility because tacs can use this ability whenever they want and whilst they have a trait equipped called invincible, not to mention super heal continuity, the recent buff to last ditch effort and all the other heals from sets like undiscovered lockbox that significantly boost performance more so than captain abilities like dynamic redistribute console.
The issue people are having is that a superpowered buff suggests you're going to die by its name. In my opinion, the name of this buff is the problem and should be changed to one that doesn't mean a player dies from this.
Or maybe the changes you're implementing in this post undermines the very nature of tactical captains, which are supposed to deal monstrous dmg at the expense of not having decent survivability.
People now think you're giving tactical everything and again further lengthens the gap between their class and the rest. On this point all I could suggest is significantly increasing the Cooldown time on invincible and continuity, nerfing them in someway. Or restricting certain universal consoles and starship traits to the ships and groups of ships they came from in order to prevent many of these inappropriately interacting with other already extremely powerful buffs.
Personally, even without talking about gdf, my engineer captains heals feel redundant in light of the kind of more powerful heals that any player can use. I feel that tactical captains can get the captain ability dps boosts ontop of all these extra non captain heals which significantly improves their performance of balancing survivability with huge amounts of dps. No other class has this kind of balance.
No single class should be able to have such a huge survivability and huge dps as this puts it into a class of its own, effectively mixing tactical captain and engineering captain abilities together.
I think that to mitigate that extra monstrous tac captain ability damage ontop of super heals, there should be either stacking penalties to damage buffs or a relative decrease to heals and resistances as tac captain dmg buffs increase in order to make a fair compromise.
My conclusion is that if I can survive so well as a tac captain, meaning that I complete content with great speed whilst feeling like I have engineer like heals, then I won't even bother investing in the other inferior non tactical classes.
I don't think you've even tested this on tribble ? this forum is for people testing on tribble. Miracle worker has got a SIGNIFICANT buff on tribble. Also as tac captain in order to obtain silly amounts of healing still means giving up some dps, though I do agree a small nerf to healing is required, but across the board not just tacs
What you said about creating a need for engineering healers is precisely what I was referring to. The game does in effect urge people to play tactical because of the nature of gameplay mechanics ergo, destroying faster and getting rewards for it. I can tell you after tests that my main beef is with endgame universal and ship specific consoles that can all be equipped together to produce a level of healing to such an extent that it completely devalues recent engineering heal increases, in fact all of the engineering captain heals together. Whilst the Starship traits and consoles do require paying for which of course is fair for everyone, tactical captain's always always always have the most to gain from those that would take the place of engineering captain heals. This is because the tac captain abilities stack on top with no diminishing returns but engineer heals and resistances don't.
In fact, you no longer need to give up DPS in order to get insane heals especially with consoles like the dynamic power redistribution console from the prototype Dreadnought, which gives 40% cat 2 dmg, +100 dmg res and 500% hull regen for 20 seconds every 1 minute with the 3 piece. That's more healing and dmg buff than what my modern day concorde battlecruiser is capable of! Sets like these leave no room for engineering captain abilities, yet it stacks 100% with tactical captains abilities. With consoles and traits like these it doesn't matter how big a buff engineers get because they won't need to use the Buffs.
However tacs captain abilityou stacks are always welcome because dmg dealing is the nature of the game.
Yes Eng as support and Sci as debuffers as intended, not as dpsers
But that's a little limiting for STO gameplay and how captain powers have been set up. For example: My favorite ENG setup right now is an exotic damage focused Excelsior class. It complements natural ENG tankiness with the ability to hit back with offensive ENG powers. It's a fun build, supported in some way by all it's ENG powers (healing and power management.) It's not just a support character.
My issue here is that some science captain powers are more disconnected from one another and what Sci captains are typically doing. They can help in a generalized way but how does scatting field factor into control, exotic, or drain builds (the main things)? It seems to be trying to compensate for a perceived weakness of science class vessels (ie. a lower capacity to tank, so buff the damage resistance in case you find yourself drawing too much threat.) Ditto photonic fleet and a 3/3 weapon setup, although that does directly contribute to carrier builds and the idea that sci characters aren't trying to be the center of attention (as the complement to ENG).
Maybe SNB wasn't the best target for a power swap, but I felt that DO was a good fit for SCI (with an acceptable compromise that also made SNB available to more characters, which some in PVP were looking forward to.) It was very direct but so is APA and MW. I hope Cryptic doesn't abandon the idea of making some kind of substitution in future.
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
"Go Down Fighting can once again be used while continuity or invincible are available to save you from dying"
Why?
Surely this is OP and an exploit that needed fixing, so why unfix it?
To be honest. Continuity is pretty OP as is anyway (as it's basically a free revive for slotting an already good spec), but because all the DPS crowd use it AND invincibility, they effectively never die even if their ship is glassy.
Maybe make it so Continuity and Invincible share the same cooldown, with say Invincible taking priority, so that they cannot be spammed together to make a ship, that is otherwise quite fragile, unkillable.
Nerfing GDF's duration is good though, as it makes less spammable in the long run.
If you can't solve it logically, solve it like a moron.
51 + 1 Foundry Character Slots is NOT enough. Some of us love our characters. If I want to buy more character slots, why can't I? I couldn't experience the entire Delta Recruitment event without deleting a character.
The Iconians themselves can't time travel because their memories revert, but there is nothing to say an Iconian couldn't write everything she needed to do on a PADD, pin it to herself, travel back, read the PADD, do the tasks and return. Or just get one of her Non-Herald underlings to go back in time for her.
Oh yeah, I do Foundry missions for both KDFs and Feds. Just search KSTF (Short for Kinas Special Task Force, where Kinas is the name of the Admiral you will be serving under). The earlier ones are less story based and more combat based, while the later ones have a much heavier story element, but keep the large battles.
With the damage reductions to exotic damage abilities, Science captains will be the worst class to create a science build. I'm honestly not sure what role is intended for them, since with all of the changes, SCI is basically the worst at everything.
Torpedo changes, multiple target energy weapon changes, exotic changes, drain changes. power changes, and 2 of the 3 classes have tools to assist in decreasing the impact, yet SCI captains simply eat all of the nerfs. Will this be addressed?
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I don't really care if tactical captain's can use it when 'dead' and invicible, or how much of a boost it gives them, they are tactical and should have a good skill in that field. However... it should not allow them to out science a science player which it allows them to do easily.
I've not played on my engineer in quite some time, so I don't know how anything for them has changed, but I do know they need some loving in their captain skills.
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Complaints over GDF or Attack Pattern Alpha are symptoms of the underlying problem, rather than the problem itself.
The problem, as it exists, and has always existed is that game combat has been developed as an arcade shooter, where performance and efficiency has been tied to DPS. Death is the ultimate debuff. Killing things as quickly as possible is what gets you through content in order to acquire your rewards. Regardless of whether or not you want to measure your DPS e-peen, the reality is that killing things faster leads to faster rewards. That's just how it is in STO, whether or not we agree with the concept.
Since that is how the game works, then we need to look at game mechanics from that perspective.
Escalation appears to be trying to address this problem in a more appropriate way, by creating new systems to place success in a "Best-in-class" composition, rather than "Best-in-damage" which is how it currently works.
However, until the game itself is overhauled on every conceivable level to reflect this "Best-in-class" gameplay (which is a daunting task, I know), then we're still faced with the reality that game mechanics which increase damage will be perceived as the best choice one can make.
While Deflector Overcharge did not directly address this problem, it was a step in the right direction, especially if the game wants to move in the direction of qualifying players on "Best-in-class", where its benefits would clearly allow a support role to shine at opportune moments.
GDF and APA on the other hand are powerful enough in their own right, and have a number of additional game mechanics that allow them to outperform and outclass both Engineers and Science Officers, because the game itself still decides performance and efficiency based on "Best-in-damage".
It would be nice in the future if we could compare Tactical to Tactical and Engineering to Engineering and Science to Science, but STO has unfortunately fallen into the success trap of their gameplay model by comparing both Engineering and Science to Tactical, and while these new balance changes were at first a welcome addition (to me anyway), I can't help but wonder if these rollbacks and reversions are based upon feedback from players who aren't aware of the underlying problem that game combat has, and Cryptic is too willing to cede to their demands to treat the symptoms instead of the problem.
Changes to GDF are good, despite what some vocal whiners are saying here. You shouldn't make an ability work in a way that makes some stuff (namely slotting Temporal Operative specialization) totally undesirable for entire class.
Also, probably unpopular opinion, but with all the "reverting nerfs" moves, can we see *slight* buffs to Plasma Exploders any time soon? So they'd be at least a viable option to slot? Right now I hardly know anyone who even is thinking of having them on their ship.
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My main issue to the loss of DO is that Science captains will become the least effective class when it comes to Exotic damage builds. Tacs will have GDF and APA while Engs will buff Exotics via Aux overcap. Rolling back some of the Sci skill nerfs won't fix that.
IMO while the return of SubNuc to Sci captains was a welcome change, this patch was a step backwards when it comes to class balance.
DO should be returned as a Sci-exclusive ability. It can be through a Captain trait (less effective since it would be passive, possibly replacing Photonic Capacitor) or rolled into Science Fleet (though the one-player cast at a time in PVE might hurt this).
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Take the Kinetics meta for example:
They take no weapon energy, so it's understandable that they'd have some sort of drawback versus energy. However:
1) At high weapon energy levels, the energy weapons hit harder. Okay that's probably the compromise.
2) Kinetics lose an additional 75% of their non-bleedthrough damage against shields. Why? They already do a bit less damage if you optimize the energy weapons, wasn't that balanced?
3) Kinetics cannot fire simultaneously. I get that you're worried about massive bursts, but as a result, multiple energy weapons easily spike far higher in burst damage than a single torpedo launch, so now energy weapons are better at burst damage too
4) Kinetics cannot collectively benefit from weapon-specific bridge officer abilities the way energy weapons do, nor do they benefit for multiple activations the way the energy weapons do.
5) Kinetics don't get haste. Many abilities that improve armor/shield piercing also only do so for energy weapons as well.
So here we have these long cooldown burst-damage weapons, that deal less burst damage than their alternatives, less DPS than their alternatives, can't benefit from bridge officer abilities nearly as much or as often as their alternatives, and suffer a severe penalty against shields that their alternatives do not suffer whether against shields or hull.
They've been playing catch-up this entire time, and what do we see from the balancing? Not balance, but instead, their ability to deliver burst damage further reduced, and one of the few things keeping them relevant in terms of total output reduced to a quarter of its previous effect; a necessary change in regards to traits doing too much or too little, but one completely left unaccompanied by the transfer of this effect to the base weapon stats: the other half of the adjustment that should have been performed.
And we've had numbers upon numbers, and DPS thresholds and builds all over, but none of these problems are ever addressed or even responded to. All we've ever gotten was "hey you're being impolite" when they finally get trampled yet again.
This would make it different then alpha strike and feel different.
Not going to be a fan of that to be honest... That would limit you to spike damage on a single group. Once that group is gone, then the buff is as well. I'd prefer it to be included into another ability, or as @ruinthefun suggested in Reddit, added back as an additional ability for Sci, then giving Tacs and Engs their own PVP-centric ability. That would open more options.
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Apologies on behalf of the thread
Edit: In case Bort comes back and sees it, one more thing. I just checked GDF's "reduced" c/d on Tribble, and the base c/d is 45s (not sure about the floor on it). Compared to APA (20s of 50% cat2 buff on a 2min base c/d), 15s every 45s of at least a 37.5% cat2 buff seems a bit too good. The uptime and reliability make it potentially better than the namesake ability of an alpha strike.
Now I hope that Cryptic will still think about ways to make SNB more useful in PvE. I still say the simplest thing would be to just cause it a debuff of some sort that only affects NPCs. I know that @crypticspartan#0627 is not a big fan of NPC specific abilities (and I understand why, i was never a big fan originally either), but I think this is a case where it would be warranted, since NPC and player are not equal when it comes to self-buffs. Players have just a lot more of them then NPCs, while NPCs mostly rely on innate attributes.
Since we have so many resistance debuffs already, I was thinking about a shield hardness debuff and a weapon strength debuff.
I think such a debuff would still fit the theme the weapon had according to Voyager, though admittedly subsystem disables would fit even better, but they are not so useful against NPCs.)
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Upset isn't the right word. Disappointed is more like it. I was really looking forward to deflector overcharge and how it would give science captains the upper hand when it comes to dealing exotic damage. Subnuc is useless in pve. Surely you can understand how replacing a science alpha strike with a not-so-useful ability might frustrate some people.
How do you figure that?
Drain Infection:
Ok not that much of an increase at all. Pretty much not that good. Basically it was decent how it was on holodeck (maybe around 5k-7k dps highly buffed/debuffed)
Torpedos:
Good to be able to precast at least one ability again and maybe shoot 2 in a 5 second window. Defnitly not a nerf again, its a buff
How does this activation lockout interact with concentrate firepower high yield, the additional high yield from the shiptrait, the additional torp spread from the weapon modifier? Are they lock out the BO activation?
Go Down Fighting:
Good to not make continuity/invincible completly useless for tac. Duration change is pretty much good too. Only one thing, PLEASE!! give us numbers when you decrease a cooldown. Maybe something like, cooldown decreased from 3 minutes to 45 seconds. Same would apply to damage changes, please give us numbers!
Oh and maybe you forgot to mention that the Damagebonus applied is lower. Now it is 37.5% Bonus All Damge Bonus (correct that typo maybe) instead of 66% with A good Day to Die. Would be nice to mention something like that too In addition, the max bonus is 150% now. This change just make it more difficult for most people to benefit propperly from the ability (and thats one of the main issues we already have).
Science Captain:
A lot of Sci will defnitly love this, especially for pvp and the new pvp based content. The Resistance AoE Field from sci captain might be a good target for changes since its not great at all with all the damage resistance rating around and the diminishing return you're running into.
PLEASE don't stealthnerf things all the time.. just mention them in the notes. If you change something just say it.
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Go down fighting, as the name suggests and the many TV show moments that used this phrase did, means that you put everything into weapons, making a suicide run and expecting to be dead at the end of it. The changes you've made make this an impossibility because tacs can use this ability whenever they want and whilst they have a trait equipped called invincible, not to mention super heal continuity, the recent buff to last ditch effort and all the other heals from sets like undiscovered lockbox that significantly boost performance more so than captain abilities like dynamic redistribute console.
The issue people are having is that a superpowered buff suggests you're going to die by its name. In my opinion, the name of this buff is the problem and should be changed to one that doesn't mean a player dies from this.
Or maybe the changes you're implementing in this post undermines the very nature of tactical captains, which are supposed to deal monstrous dmg at the expense of not having decent survivability.
People now think you're giving tactical everything and again further lengthens the gap between their class and the rest. On this point all I could suggest is significantly increasing the Cooldown time on invincible and continuity, nerfing them in someway. Or restricting certain universal consoles and starship traits to the ships and groups of ships they came from in order to prevent many of these inappropriately interacting with other already extremely powerful buffs.
Personally, even without talking about gdf, my engineer captains heals feel redundant in light of the kind of more powerful heals that any player can use. I feel that tactical captains can get the captain ability dps boosts ontop of all these extra non captain heals which significantly improves their performance of balancing survivability with huge amounts of dps. No other class has this kind of balance.
No single class should be able to have such a huge survivability and huge dps as this puts it into a class of its own, effectively mixing tactical captain and engineering captain abilities together.
I think that to mitigate that extra monstrous tac captain ability damage ontop of super heals, there should be either stacking penalties to damage buffs or a relative decrease to heals and resistances as tac captain dmg buffs increase in order to make a fair compromise.
My conclusion is that if I can survive so well as a tac captain, meaning that I complete content with great speed whilst feeling like I have engineer like heals, then I won't even bother investing in the other inferior non tactical classes.
That change is reasonable when put into that light.
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I'm guessing he's upset by the nerf to OKS. Personally my torp build is still functioning fine and the temp spec offsets the nerf somewhat.
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Yes Eng as support and Sci as debuffers as intended, not as dpsers
I would urge you to actually try and test on tribble, the buff to miracle worker is significant. It is the gameplay and content themselves. Atm there doesn't seem to be a real need for eng support or sci debuffers, if they can create or make a need then they wi
I don't think you've even tested this on tribble ? this forum is for people testing on tribble. Miracle worker has got a SIGNIFICANT buff on tribble. Also as tac captain in order to obtain silly amounts of healing still means giving up some dps, though I do agree a small nerf to healing is required, but across the board not just tacs
What you said about creating a need for engineering healers is precisely what I was referring to. The game does in effect urge people to play tactical because of the nature of gameplay mechanics ergo, destroying faster and getting rewards for it. I can tell you after tests that my main beef is with endgame universal and ship specific consoles that can all be equipped together to produce a level of healing to such an extent that it completely devalues recent engineering heal increases, in fact all of the engineering captain heals together. Whilst the Starship traits and consoles do require paying for which of course is fair for everyone, tactical captain's always always always have the most to gain from those that would take the place of engineering captain heals. This is because the tac captain abilities stack on top with no diminishing returns but engineer heals and resistances don't.
In fact, you no longer need to give up DPS in order to get insane heals especially with consoles like the dynamic power redistribution console from the prototype Dreadnought, which gives 40% cat 2 dmg, +100 dmg res and 500% hull regen for 20 seconds every 1 minute with the 3 piece. That's more healing and dmg buff than what my modern day concorde battlecruiser is capable of! Sets like these leave no room for engineering captain abilities, yet it stacks 100% with tactical captains abilities. With consoles and traits like these it doesn't matter how big a buff engineers get because they won't need to use the Buffs.
However tacs captain abilityou stacks are always welcome because dmg dealing is the nature of the game.
But that's a little limiting for STO gameplay and how captain powers have been set up. For example: My favorite ENG setup right now is an exotic damage focused Excelsior class. It complements natural ENG tankiness with the ability to hit back with offensive ENG powers. It's a fun build, supported in some way by all it's ENG powers (healing and power management.) It's not just a support character.
My issue here is that some science captain powers are more disconnected from one another and what Sci captains are typically doing. They can help in a generalized way but how does scatting field factor into control, exotic, or drain builds (the main things)? It seems to be trying to compensate for a perceived weakness of science class vessels (ie. a lower capacity to tank, so buff the damage resistance in case you find yourself drawing too much threat.) Ditto photonic fleet and a 3/3 weapon setup, although that does directly contribute to carrier builds and the idea that sci characters aren't trying to be the center of attention (as the complement to ENG).
Maybe SNB wasn't the best target for a power swap, but I felt that DO was a good fit for SCI (with an acceptable compromise that also made SNB available to more characters, which some in PVP were looking forward to.) It was very direct but so is APA and MW. I hope Cryptic doesn't abandon the idea of making some kind of substitution in future.
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To be honest. Continuity is pretty OP as is anyway (as it's basically a free revive for slotting an already good spec), but because all the DPS crowd use it AND invincibility, they effectively never die even if their ship is glassy.
Maybe make it so Continuity and Invincible share the same cooldown, with say Invincible taking priority, so that they cannot be spammed together to make a ship, that is otherwise quite fragile, unkillable.
Nerfing GDF's duration is good though, as it makes less spammable in the long run.
Torpedo changes, multiple target energy weapon changes, exotic changes, drain changes. power changes, and 2 of the 3 classes have tools to assist in decreasing the impact, yet SCI captains simply eat all of the nerfs. Will this be addressed?
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