I understand the shortening of the leveling time to cap level, since honestly most players are not as interested in the journey, and more interested in getting to cap to be able to do things with the majority of players in the game. It would be nice to have control of how fast you level thru content, but in the end that is easily done via your own restraint of skipping content as you level further ahead. Also with the fact content largely syncs up with your current level, or syncs you to a predetermined level, the issue is also really a non-issue in that aspect too. I will say that this is abit of why I hope we do not see level cap increases for awhile, since the more you increase the cap the more daunting the journey looks to become for new players.
The level cap change seems a bit late, and it also seemed to me that at least since Admirality was released, it wasn't a problem anymore. Though I think most of the characters since DR were created during recruitment events and bonus skill point events, and as a lifetime subscriber I have an innate XP bonus IIRC.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
What PVE advantage (with Tribble changes) is there to playing a science vessel with a SCI captain vs TAC or ENG? What advantage is there to playing any vessel with a SCI captain in PVE?
Sensor Scan is an AOE hull resistance debuff. That means any AoE attacks after you sensor scanned, of you and your team, are getting stronger. That works great for every ship class that has access to AoE abilities.
I remember that there was once talk about Tholian Carrier "Nanny" ships that used their pets Attack Pattern Beta to buff the damage output of the team and the Tacticals - put Science Captains in these nannies, and they can also add sensor scan as extra damage for the team's Tacticals. (and I suspect that was already part of the "nanny" team set up, but I am no expert on that matter.) Of course, the damage they added to their team mates is probably never traced back to them in the logs.
For the Science Captain's concerns - if he's using Gravity Well, Destabilizing Resonance Beam, Subspace Vortex, Beam Fire At WIll, Torpedo Spread, Cannon Scatter Volley or any other AoE skills I am not remembering right now, Sensor Scan is a big damage enhancer, possibly on the level of Attack Pattern Alpha. (Not sure if anyone ever compared the two powers directly.)
Subnucleonic Beam is basically the Science Vessel Captain's equivalent of Fire on My Mark. It's much more powerful in PvP then FOMM, but much weaker in PvE.
And now the Photonic Fleet is also a lot stronger than it used to be. I am certainly not sure that it was enough, and I would prefer to see some additional PvE related buff to SNB.
If Sensor Scan was a "big damage enhancer, possibly on the level of Attack Pattern Alpha," we would see Science Captains get similar DPS to Tactical Captains.
SS is nice but it's no APA.
Personally I liked the overcharge skill. It not only gave science captains better science skills (lots of cruisers and escorts also have lots of science powers too), but it also gave better defense against science powers because of how drain expertise and control expertise work. Meaning a Science Captain could do well against science powers in any ship, not just science ships.
Also, if everyone had access to sub nuke, Cryptic could buff future NPCs to have more powers and few could complain because any team could handle it. Now, people would just complain they NEED a Science Captain.
Sub Nuc and Deflector Overload got me thinking. They need to make it so when you reach a certain level ... Your specific class of toon has a choice between one power or another. Kind of like specializing within that class.
So for a sci ... they could choose either SN or DO. Tac would have their own choices. Same for ENG.
Do you realize just how much more interesting that would make character building for the players?
That's why I asked a sort of rhetorical question about the Respec since Subnuc was back in. Didn't want to go through all of that if it wasn't necessary.
I am not at all happy with any nerfing of Torpedo abilities. Almost all of my Character builds utilize them in one form or another.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
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.
... and here it is! Much of this has already been astutely noted by a few members of the community, but consider this a "from the horse's mouth" sort of confirmation on those subjects. Here's hoping it clears a few things up...
Now, typically, we don't go out of our way to explain every change we make, but we knew that these particular topics would warrant further discussion. For two primary reasons:
1) The original changes were controversial.
2) Reverting those changes has the potential to erode player confidence that we are making well-informed choices.
In order to try and address the latter, we're going to talk about some of the reasoning behind the changes we made, and why we ended up reverting them.
Go Down Fighting
The problem we were attempting to solve here, is the Risk-vs-Reward element of this particular ability. It has always been intended that gaining a larger damage output bonus from GDF should be restricted to scenarios where the player is very likely to perish. This is actually why the original duration was so long - because it wasn't supposed to matter, since you'd almost-inevitably die long before the duration timed out. With the introduction of Damage Immunities and Death Prevention triggers, it became far too easy to gain maximum benefit from this ability without having to factor in its risk factors.
The initial change was made from the perspective of "If there are no risk factors at play (because you are Unkillable) then you should not reap any rewards."
We ended up reverting this change for a few very important reasons:
1) For Tactical Captains, it severely diminished (or, some could say eliminated) the invested value of two highly desirable and enjoyable gameplay modifying talents: Temporal Operative's "Continuity" and the "Invincible" Starship Trait.
2) It effectively removed the "Good Day To Die" Personal Trait from being a valid gameplay choice, if you chose to run either of the passives mentioned in the above point.
Ultimately, the above factors led us to realize that modifying the availability of GDF in this manner was more of a band-aid than a true solution, and caused some major issues that we hadn't intended. So, after re-examining the reasons that GDF remained a concern, we decided to try out a different change, which would not *remove* the players' ability to mitigate the risk of using the ability, but would instead *limit* how much of that risk could be removed. This led us to the changes you see in the most recent patch. Now that GDF has a shorter up-time, and will be used more frequently, players attempting to get the most out of this ability will have to be absorbing more near-death risk on a regularly-recurring basis.
It probably goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway!) that we're still watching this closely, to make sure we aren't creating any unanticipated issues this time around. And to see whether or not sufficient risk has been re-introduced to the ability's performance status, to warrant the significant benefits it still offers.
Subnucleonic Beam / Deflector Overcharge
This is a bit of a difficult situation. We have been attempting to address a couple of what we consider to be fairly significant gameplay issues:
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- Science Captains lack competitive performance output increases, compared to Tactical and Engineering captains.
We tried to fix two birds with one stone here, by replacing the underperforming ability with something that we hoped would narrow a performance gap. And within those specific parameters, we still consider the original solution to have been a good one that successfully met our design goals.
However, as with the GDF changes, this replacement presented a number of new issues that we didn't think were worth what was gained.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
2) Making Subnucleonic Beam into a Bridge Officer Ability didn't fix the ability's problems, but only changed its associated choice space. And now all players had the opportunity to see how problematic the ability is in PvE... nothing was solved. All we did was increase the exposure of its shortcomings.
3) Changing Subnucleonic Beam to a Boff power inadvertently diminished Science Captain viability in PvP, while simultaneously increasing the relative effectiveness of non-Science builds that suddenly had the ability to add a powerful PvP tool to their arsenals.
With this change reverted, and SNB back on Science Captains as it previously was, we're back to examining the original issues once more. This is definitely not a done deal, and we are discussing additional options that we might explore, to potentially solve the original problems we were facing. Reverting the change at this point was just a matter of knowing that the consequences of this particular design decision were not acceptable, in terms of collateral damage. I'd expect to see another change to SNB before Season 13 launches (or perhaps shortly thereafter) but we're not yet prepared to discuss what form that change may take.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
What PVE advantage (with Tribble changes) is there to playing a science vessel with a SCI captain vs TAC or ENG? What advantage is there to playing any vessel with a SCI captain in PVE?
Sensor Scan is an AOE hull resistance debuff. That means any AoE attacks after you sensor scanned, of you and your team, are getting stronger. That works great for every ship class that has access to AoE abilities.
I remember that there was once talk about Tholian Carrier "Nanny" ships that used their pets Attack Pattern Beta to buff the damage output of the team and the Tacticals - put Science Captains in these nannies, and they can also add sensor scan as extra damage for the team's Tacticals. (and I suspect that was already part of the "nanny" team set up, but I am no expert on that matter.) Of course, the damage they added to their team mates is probably never traced back to them in the logs.
For the Science Captain's concerns - if he's using Gravity Well, Destabilizing Resonance Beam, Subspace Vortex, Beam Fire At WIll, Torpedo Spread, Cannon Scatter Volley or any other AoE skills I am not remembering right now, Sensor Scan is a big damage enhancer, possibly on the level of Attack Pattern Alpha. (Not sure if anyone ever compared the two powers directly.)
Subnucleonic Beam is basically the Science Vessel Captain's equivalent of Fire on My Mark. It's much more powerful in PvP then FOMM, but much weaker in PvE.
And now the Photonic Fleet is also a lot stronger than it used to be. I am certainly not sure that it was enough, and I would prefer to see some additional PvE related buff to SNB.
If you think anything you've listed is an advantage over both of the other two careers, you're mistaken. The numbers (even on Holodeck) contradict your claims.
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.
... and here it is! Much of this has already been astutely noted by a few members of the community, but consider this a "from the horse's mouth" sort of confirmation on those subjects. Here's hoping it clears a few things up...
Now, typically, we don't go out of our way to explain every change we make, but we knew that these particular topics would warrant further discussion. For two primary reasons:
1) The original changes were controversial.
2) Reverting those changes has the potential to erode player confidence that we are making well-informed choices.
In order to try and address the latter, we're going to talk about some of the reasoning behind the changes we made, and why we ended up reverting them.
Go Down Fighting
The problem we were attempting to solve here, is the Risk-vs-Reward element of this particular ability. It has always been intended that gaining a larger damage output bonus from GDF should be restricted to scenarios where the player is very likely to perish. This is actually why the original duration was so long - because it wasn't supposed to matter, since you'd almost-inevitably die long before the duration timed out. With the introduction of Damage Immunities and Death Prevention triggers, it became far too easy to gain maximum benefit from this ability without having to factor in its risk factors.
The initial change was made from the perspective of "If there are no risk factors at play (because you are Unkillable) then you should not reap any rewards."
We ended up reverting this change for a few very important reasons:
1) For Tactical Captains, it severely diminished (or, some could say eliminated) the invested value of two highly desirable and enjoyable gameplay modifying talents: Temporal Operative's "Continuity" and the "Invincible" Starship Trait.
2) It effectively removed the "Good Day To Die" Personal Trait from being a valid gameplay choice, if you chose to run either of the passives mentioned in the above point.
Ultimately, the above factors led us to realize that modifying the availability of GDF in this manner was more of a band-aid than a true solution, and caused some major issues that we hadn't intended. So, after re-examining the reasons that GDF remained a concern, we decided to try out a different change, which would not *remove* the players' ability to mitigate the risk of using the ability, but would instead *limit* how much of that risk could be removed. This led us to the changes you see in the most recent patch. Now that GDF has a shorter up-time, and will be used more frequently, players attempting to get the most out of this ability will have to be absorbing more near-death risk on a regularly-recurring basis.
It probably goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway!) that we're still watching this closely, to make sure we aren't creating any unanticipated issues this time around. And to see whether or not sufficient risk has been re-introduced to the ability's performance status, to warrant the significant benefits it still offers.
Subnucleonic Beam / Deflector Overcharge
This is a bit of a difficult situation. We have been attempting to address a couple of what we consider to be fairly significant gameplay issues:
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- Science Captains lack competitive performance output increases, compared to Tactical and Engineering captains.
We tried to fix two birds with one stone here, by replacing the underperforming ability with something that we hoped would narrow a performance gap. And within those specific parameters, we still consider the original solution to have been a good one that successfully met our design goals.
However, as with the GDF changes, this replacement presented a number of new issues that we didn't think were worth what was gained.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
2) Making Subnucleonic Beam into a Bridge Officer Ability didn't fix the ability's problems, but only changed its associated choice space. And now all players had the opportunity to see how problematic the ability is in PvE... nothing was solved. All we did was increase the exposure of its shortcomings.
3) Changing Subnucleonic Beam to a Boff power inadvertently diminished Science Captain viability in PvP, while simultaneously increasing the relative effectiveness of non-Science builds that suddenly had the ability to add a powerful PvP tool to their arsenals.
With this change reverted, and SNB back on Science Captains as it previously was, we're back to examining the original issues once more. This is definitely not a done deal, and we are discussing additional options that we might explore, to potentially solve the original problems we were facing. Reverting the change at this point was just a matter of knowing that the consequences of this particular design decision were not acceptable, in terms of collateral damage. I'd expect to see another change to SNB before Season 13 launches (or perhaps shortly thereafter) but we're not yet prepared to discuss what form that change may take.
I really do disagree with reverting back the changes to GDF interacting with Invincibility and Continuity.
Instead of balancing the classes, which I thought was the whole reason for these changes, you have just made Tactical the only viable class to play again.
Thanks to reverting, Tacticals can now still enjoy out tanking and surviving longer than Engineer players, while also putting out the most DPS.
Tacticals can still enjoy doing more exotic damage than Science players, thanks to them not having their career buffs being striped of them affecting all damage, instead of just affecting weapon damage like they should have been.
If you really want to balance the classes, and not just make Science and Engineers irrelevant like they have been since beta, is there any chance the Science characters get some kind of exotic damage bonus that increases based on lowered health?
Same goes for Engineers, the lower their health goes, they get tougher and tougher in all damage resistance?
Just thinking outside the box, as right now I cannot see a reason to keep Science and Engineering careers in the game...
Kurland finally made an appearance after a 7 month hiatus from the forums. Well, at least now I know he is still in charge of the changes, although Spartan is more inclined to make changes for science's sake.
2) Reverting those changes has the potential to erode player confidence that we are making well-informed choices.
Yes to both...
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- Science Captains lack competitive performance output increases, compared to Tactical and Engineering captains.
Yes.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
Why is that bad?
I think most people choose Science specifically for this reason. And because they wanted to do something different. I mean if people wanted to just do standard torpedo/beam dps they would roll a Tactical character. I don't see why it's bad that Science want to, or should be encouraged to fly Science ships. And on top of that Deflector overcharge boosted things other than exotic including healing which is useful to every ship type.
I feel like everything about these Science changes was WAY over thought. All that needed to be done was reduce Tractor Beam Repulsors and Feedback Pulse and you could have called it a day.
And my final though about this entire balance pass is that your making all these complicated changes to facilitate basically one update that will come and go.
I can understand that people have for a long time asked for PVP balance. But I can not see this casual game where only a small fraction of players engage in PVP ever making a drastic switch to a PVP game. And if it does make this change I feel like your going to push out the vast majority of players who really have no interest in PVP.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
Why is that bad?
I think most people choose Science specifically for this reason. And because they wanted to do something different. I mean if people wanted to just do standard torpedo/beam dps they would roll a Tactical character. I don't see why it's bad that Science want to, or should be encouraged to fly Science ships. And on top of that Deflector overcharge boosted things other than exotic including healing which is useful to every ship type.
It bad because it limit science of variety. If you want to limit science to a science ship then limit tactical to a escort and limit engineer to a crusier. Science captain also like to have some variety in game play. Science captain also want to fly other type of ship besides science ship.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
Why is that bad?
I think most people choose Science specifically for this reason. And because they wanted to do something different. I mean if people wanted to just do standard torpedo/beam dps they would roll a Tactical character. I don't see why it's bad that Science want to, or should be encouraged to fly Science ships. And on top of that Deflector overcharge boosted things other than exotic including healing which is useful to every ship type.
It's a problem because it pretty much invalidates the idea of anything that isn't sci/sci. Sci/scorts, especially in PvP can be very effective, in fact, it's possible for a sci/scort in PvP to be more potent than an sci/sci, this is mostly due to SNB, although it is true that if you ran an escort with LTC sci or LTC uni you could make decent use of DO the number of escorts that have this option without sacrificing too much of something else is far too low to make it worth it.
I can understand that people have for a long time asked for PVP balance. But I can not see this casual game where only a small fraction of players engage in PVP ever making a drastic switch to a PVP game. And if it does make this change I feel like your going to push out the vast majority of players who really have no interest in PVP.
Actually, arranging some sort of balance that fits both PvE and PvP can only be good for STO. STO is the only game that provides ST in a large scale PvP capable setting, this gives it a huge capacity to pull in ST fans who like PvP and are willing to spend considerable amounts of money.
Thusfar this potential has been completely ignored, so it's nice to see that some attention is being given to the potential of PvP in STO and these "War games" are actually a really good way to extend the olive branch.
I just wish the devs would exchange ideas with us more during this process.
If they refuse to separate PVE mechanichs from PVP ones, then I am super glad they reverted the changes to Go Down Fighting, and PVP be damned. Balance the game all you want, BUT do NOT let changes intended for that most UN-Star Trek like activity you call PVP affect our PVE enjoyment. I've said this many times, PVP is a waste of my time, and if I wanted to put up with the childish drama it generates in the community I would go and play World of Tanks. STO IS NOT AND SHOULD NEVER BE A silly MOBA.
Make STO great again.
Deflector Overcharge has been removed from the game.
Boo. I was hoping this would allow sci captains to out exotic tacs. If you are going to get rid of this, you should make apa and gdf not effect exotic damage.
This has been suggested for years...especially since Sci has been nerfed numerous times because of Tac specifically...but they wont do it...have to keep Tac at the top of the food chain no matter what.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
If they refuse to separate PVE mechanichs from PVP ones, then I am super glad they reverted the changes to Go Down Fighting, and PVP be damned. Balance the game all you want, BUT do NOT let changes intended for that most UN-Star Trek like activity you call PVP affect our PVE enjoyment. I've said this many times, PVP is a waste of my time, and if I wanted to put up with the childish drama it generates in the community I would go and play World of Tanks. STO IS NOT AND SHOULD NEVER BE A silly MOBA.
Make STO great again.
Do you even watch Star Trek beyond that pew pew JJTrek TRIBBLE? Starfleet practices wargames...which is pretty much what PvP is since the Federation and Empire aren't at war.
What does PvP have to do with being a Moba? Obvious PvP hater is obvious...just because you hate PvP (Or aren't good enough to compete without broken mechanics) doesn't mean everyone hates PvP.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
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.
... and here it is! Much of this has already been astutely noted by a few members of the community, but consider this a "from the horse's mouth" sort of confirmation on those subjects. Here's hoping it clears a few things up...
Now, typically, we don't go out of our way to explain every change we make, but we knew that these particular topics would warrant further discussion. For two primary reasons:
1) The original changes were controversial.
2) Reverting those changes has the potential to erode player confidence that we are making well-informed choices.
In order to try and address the latter, we're going to talk about some of the reasoning behind the changes we made, and why we ended up reverting them.
Go Down Fighting
The problem we were attempting to solve here, is the Risk-vs-Reward element of this particular ability. It has always been intended that gaining a larger damage output bonus from GDF should be restricted to scenarios where the player is very likely to perish. This is actually why the original duration was so long - because it wasn't supposed to matter, since you'd almost-inevitably die long before the duration timed out. With the introduction of Damage Immunities and Death Prevention triggers, it became far too easy to gain maximum benefit from this ability without having to factor in its risk factors.
The initial change was made from the perspective of "If there are no risk factors at play (because you are Unkillable) then you should not reap any rewards."
We ended up reverting this change for a few very important reasons:
1) For Tactical Captains, it severely diminished (or, some could say eliminated) the invested value of two highly desirable and enjoyable gameplay modifying talents: Temporal Operative's "Continuity" and the "Invincible" Starship Trait.
2) It effectively removed the "Good Day To Die" Personal Trait from being a valid gameplay choice, if you chose to run either of the passives mentioned in the above point.
Ultimately, the above factors led us to realize that modifying the availability of GDF in this manner was more of a band-aid than a true solution, and caused some major issues that we hadn't intended. So, after re-examining the reasons that GDF remained a concern, we decided to try out a different change, which would not *remove* the players' ability to mitigate the risk of using the ability, but would instead *limit* how much of that risk could be removed. This led us to the changes you see in the most recent patch. Now that GDF has a shorter up-time, and will be used more frequently, players attempting to get the most out of this ability will have to be absorbing more near-death risk on a regularly-recurring basis.
It probably goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway!) that we're still watching this closely, to make sure we aren't creating any unanticipated issues this time around. And to see whether or not sufficient risk has been re-introduced to the ability's performance status, to warrant the significant benefits it still offers.
Without trying to state the obvious that hindsight is 20/20, it does kind of seem odd that these extra game mechanics (specifically Continuity, Invincible, and A Good Day To Die) were able to pass inspection when they were introduced at the time. Given just how popular the Tactical Career is, I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where somebody didn't bring up these problems when using Go Down Fighting.
This isn't intended to come across as some kind of "Woulda, coulda, shoulda" criticism, since you've mentioned you're learning from mistakes and I agree that there's absolutely no problem with going back to the drawing board if you've discovered your intended solution isn't solving the problem, and it's something I respect.
I'm really more concerned over how much influence "the new normal" has over these sorts of design decisions. Certain games have a tendency to let things go for months (or even years) before going back to adjust them (not just STO) to bring them more in line with their intended function. Some developers prefer to rip off the band-aid quickly, enduring the brief backlash at the cost of the overall health of the system, while others seem more wary of making changes once "the new normal" has been established, and even find themselves painted into a corner when things like "the current meta" (in whatever form it ends up taking) are on the chopping block.
Subnucleonic Beam / Deflector Overcharge
This is a bit of a difficult situation. We have been attempting to address a couple of what we consider to be fairly significant gameplay issues:
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- Science Captains lack competitive performance output increases, compared to Tactical and Engineering captains.
We tried to fix two birds with one stone here, by replacing the underperforming ability with something that we hoped would narrow a performance gap. And within those specific parameters, we still consider the original solution to have been a good one that successfully met our design goals.
However, as with the GDF changes, this replacement presented a number of new issues that we didn't think were worth what was gained.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
2) Making Subnucleonic Beam into a Bridge Officer Ability didn't fix the ability's problems, but only changed its associated choice space. And now all players had the opportunity to see how problematic the ability is in PvE... nothing was solved. All we did was increase the exposure of its shortcomings.
3) Changing Subnucleonic Beam to a Boff power inadvertently diminished Science Captain viability in PvP, while simultaneously increasing the relative effectiveness of non-Science builds that suddenly had the ability to add a powerful PvP tool to their arsenals.
With this change reverted, and SNB back on Science Captains as it previously was, we're back to examining the original issues once more. This is definitely not a done deal, and we are discussing additional options that we might explore, to potentially solve the original problems we were facing. Reverting the change at this point was just a matter of knowing that the consequences of this particular design decision were not acceptable, in terms of collateral damage. I'd expect to see another change to SNB before Season 13 launches (or perhaps shortly thereafter) but we're not yet prepared to discuss what form that change may take.
I honestly do not envy you or Spartan (or anyone involved in development) on this particular issue. I'm not even going to pretend to have some sort of silver bullet solution to the issue of Subnucleonic Beam, because it's been in the game since 2010 and has been relatively untouched. To say it's "the new normal" would be wrong, because it's always been normal. Any sort of change with SNB is going to be controversial. You're either going to make a lot of people happy, or you're going to pull the rug out from others who have used this particular lemon to make lemonade (usually in PvP).
I was not married to the idea of Deflector Overcharge, per se. Just the idea of having an ability that I could happily use on my science captains as often as I use APA or EPS Power Transfer regardless of what content I was playing. That's what I'm mostly disappointed over. But I've been stuck with SNB on my science captains since 2010, so I'm pretty confidant I can continue to deal with it until you decide on a viable solution.
I'd rather have you solve these gameplay changes correctly rather than just solving them quickly, and I'd like to think many others would also prefer that.
I could probably suggest some ideas for SNB, but outside of turning it into some kind of overpowered Exotic damage Lance weapon (that you can therefore use on any type of ship you fly), I'm not even sure what purpose it has in the game anymore. Science started out as support, a jack of all trades but a master of none, and with the increasing attention paid to Exotic Damage, now they're space wizards. I know it's simply fantastic for PvP, and that's about it.
But staying the course and depending on Science to continue to chase the DPS dragon in the wake of Tactical Captains isn't really viable long-term, either. You just end up kicking the can further down the road.
That being said, I understand not wanting to pigeonhole Science into Science Ships as a matter of game design. At the same time, the idea of Tactical Captains doing better in Science ships than Science captains should be equally undesirable.
It's been mentioned multiple times before, but things like APA or GDF should only affect outgoing weapon damage (energy weapons and torps). You could maybe give it another buff in regards to Subsystem Targeting, thus making Tactical Officers in Science ships useful, but you'd be able to reign in their ability to outperform Science captains who should really be able to make the most out of Exotic damage dealing as part of their career, not just space traits (like Conservation of Energy, Particle Manipulator, Positive Feedback Loop, etc.)
Honestly I can understand the mindset behind reverting the changes, and starting over after finding that the end result would make other issues. An it is nice to see the thought process of the team for doing those changes both the initial an reverting changes being laid out for us.
I am personally still thinking that maybe keeping the power transfer bonus of eps power transfer in place, but maybe instead of it giving a boost to the sub-system power systems as well it might have some other effect that could make engineers more competitive. The idea of having it that during the duration the engineer would gain a set of buffs that are based on each fo the sub-systems, and the potency of that buff would be based on the power level of the sub-system (weapon power could be for weapon damage/rate of fire, shields could be shield capacity/regen/resistance, engine would be turn rate/speed, and then aux could be drain/control/exotic). This would be quite close to being equal to apa in effect, but also feels quite like something an engineer would do, and also quite versatile giving it use in all ship types an builds. It would also make power management even more interesting at least from a standpoint of the engineer career.
This might sound weird, but is there a way for you/devs could make it that while a player has things like Invincible or Continuity slotted it would actually affect how powerful the buff gained from GDF is? Like that if you have temporal spec (if you are down far enough in the tree at least), or the Invincible trait slotted that it would either reduce the damage of GDF, or reduce the length of the duration to reflect that fact of the reduced risk to reward factor of the ability being altered. I believe you have done changes that made some abilities not affected by other abilities, but this might be too far outside that concept to be implemented though,yet could be something to think an see if it could be.
[*] Subnucleonic Beam is no longer a bridge officer power, and is once again a Science Captain Power.
[*] Deflector Overcharge has been removed from the game.
No responses whatsoever on the kinetic/energy imbalance?
I think what we need from @borticuscryptic and the other developers are some answers as to what role(s) do they want the conventional weapons to play, especially with new weapon types like Heavy Weapons making an entrance into the game.
1. Fundamental question: What role(s) do torpedoes and mines serve from the game's lore perspective, and from the Developers' perspectives (for salvo, Targetable, and special varieties)?
2. On Targetable (Heavy/Destructible) Torpedoes: The speed changes do not solve the prime problem of said torpedoes being easily shot down. Are there any other solutions that you and your colleagues plan to address this (or if it's even on your radar)?
3. With the change to Gravimetric photon torpedo under TSx (Torpedo Spread + rank value), every Reputation/Reward/Crafted torpedo that has a proc has a chance or a guarantee to proc one of its abilities to all eligible targets except for two; Neutronic and Quantum Phase. Will those return to having their procs work on secondary targets again?
4. With these changes, what is the mindset(s) that you and your colleagues are working with? Some thoughts that were being discussed include making more build ideas and concepts realistic options for all levels of play (more 'Canon Builds'), to solving the "lack of challenging content" issue, to making room for more powerCreep (3.0). What's YOUR take on it all?
5. Is there a consideration for decoupling Attack Pattern Alpha from buffing non-weapon abilities (aka Engineering and Science abilities)?
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
In PvE, science captains flying an escort or cruiser would be able to deal the exact same amount of damage as they were before. But Deflector Overcharge would give them a boost to healing. That's still better than a useless ability like SB. If people only ever went for the highest damage potential everybody would play as a tactical captain anyways. You had the opportunity to break this monopoly.
2) Turning Subnucleonic Beam into a bridge officer ability didn't fix the ability's problems, but only changed its associated choice space. And now all players had the opportunity to see how problematic the ability is in PvE... nothing was solved. All we did was increase the exposure of its shortcomings.
I'm not quite sure what the issue is here. People would have been able to swap Subnuc for some other ability when they play PvE. There are many abilities, procs and consoles in the game that are only useful in PvE.
3) Changing Subnucleonic Beam to a Boff power inadvertently diminished Science Captain viability in PvP, while simultaneously increasing the relative effectiveness of non-Science builds that suddenly had the ability to add a powerful PvP tool to their arsenals.
True. But Deflector Overcharge is something that would have been useful in any situation, 100% of the time. Subnuc is only useful in PvP and absolutely useless in PvE. I'm pretty sure no more than 1% of people plays PvP on a regular basis right now. And even with the new balance patch, player qualification system and season it would come as a great surprise if this number ever went above 5%.
I hope you will reconsider or at least buff Subnuc to some degree to make it useful in PvE.
Probably the best solution to subnucleonic beam is to go through and give every enemy race/type some sort of buff skill that they use that makes stripping buffs a worthwhile activity in PvE. Player mechanics don't exist in a vacuum (even in deep space ). What we do is only half of the equation, with NPC behavior/content the complementary half. Create some value to cleansing in PvE and that button's desirability will rise.
This is a bit of a difficult situation. We have been attempting to address a couple of what we consider to be fairly significant gameplay issues:
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- Science Captains lack competitive performance output increases, compared to Tactical and Engineering captains.
We tried to fix two birds with one stone here, by replacing the underperforming ability with something that we hoped would narrow a performance gap. And within those specific parameters, we still consider the original solution to have been a good one that successfully met our design goals.
The two birds begging for one stone are still:
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- EPS Corruption is unloved and nearly unlovable with the massive investment into yellow tree choices.
EPS corruption needs to be even MORE decisive the probability manipulation or frenzy. Instead its worse than either of the other ultimates AND gated behind a path loaded with things that are largely needless in the content we have now. Add in that weapon power got nerfed making all the yellow skill effects boosting ship power just that much less relevant to strong builds.
That being said, I understand not wanting to pigeonhole Science into Science Ships as a matter of game design. At the same time, the idea of Tactical Captains doing better in Science ships than Science captains should be equally undesirable.
The problem is not that Tactical Captains are better than Science Captains in Science Vessel. The problem is that they are better at every ship class. The only expection is pvP, where Science Captains and Tactical Captains are possibly equally valid choices (in any ship), because SNB is so important there.
Since the Engineer was buffed pretty much universally now, it seems they are erring more towards buffing the weak classes rather than weakening the strong ones, so they'll probably have to keep working on the Science Captain.
One of the simplest ideas for me would be to have SNB to also apply NPC only debuffs. In my estimation, Science doesn't need any buffs that help it in PVP (though maybe some of the current active PvPers have better insight here), but it does need them for PVE. I also don't think that PVP can afford to see major changes to SNB. Without the ability to strip buffs as effective as with SNB, I think PvP would get more problematic. That's kinda unfortunate, but also very hard to fix, since a lot of that is way more in the fundamental of the game's endgame then individual powers.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
2) Reverting those changes has the potential to erode player confidence that we are making well-informed choices.
In order to try and address the latter, we're going to talk about some of the reasoning behind the changes we made, and why we ended up reverting them.
First, thanks for actually giving us some of the thought process you guys were using @borticuscryptic . It's very much appreciated when dealing with these things. When dealing with any sort of balance changes there's always going to be some bit of controversy to it. The only type of balancing I've ever had to deal with were small time mods to older games and as much of a headache as that could be, I don't envy you guys at the corporate end of the spectrum since you guys deal with it on a much more massive scale. Now that we can actually see some of the thought processes I believe in return we can now give you guys better feedback. Bearing in mind the thought processes you've given us here I will attempt to do just that based off what you've given us.
The problem we were attempting to solve here, is the Risk-vs-Reward element of this particular ability. It has always been intended that gaining a larger damage output bonus from GDF should be restricted to scenarios where the player is very likely to perish. This is actually why the original duration was so long - because it wasn't supposed to matter, since you'd almost-inevitably die long before the duration timed out. With the introduction of Damage Immunities and Death Prevention triggers, it became far too easy to gain maximum benefit from this ability without having to factor in its risk factors.
The initial change was made from the perspective of "If there are no risk factors at play (because you are Unkillable) then you should not reap any rewards."
I absolutely believe that until the introduction of certain other abilities you guys nailed the GDF ability on the head. If you wanted to benefit from the ability there was some major risk involved as you had to be below 50% hull to use it. As a tactical player you had to ask yourself, do I wait on hitting my hull to keep benefiting from GDF and risk dying, or do I hit it now and not take the risk. There was always some risk involved in the ability. Do you try to manage your abilities to keep yourself at a low enough state to make decent benefit from the ability, or do you forgo the benefit of GDF and not take the risk. Point being I agree the risk was there before certain abilities and mechanics were introduced.
Bearing in mind what you've stated on the original intent to GDF, by again allowing GDF to be used under the effects of Continuity and Invincible this removes all risk from using the ability at all. I don't believe the changes made to GDF are going to have the desired effect you're after.
We ended up reverting this change for a few very important reasons:
1) For Tactical Captains, it severely diminished (or, some could say eliminated) the invested value of two highly desirable and enjoyable gameplay modifying talents: Temporal Operative's "Continuity" and the "Invincible" Starship Trait.
2) It effectively removed the "Good Day To Die" Personal Trait from being a valid gameplay choice, if you chose to run either of the passives mentioned in the above point.
Ultimately, the above factors led us to realize that modifying the availability of GDF in this manner was more of a band-aid than a true solution, and caused some major issues that we hadn't intended. So, after re-examining the reasons that GDF remained a concern, we decided to try out a different change, which would not *remove* the players' ability to mitigate the risk of using the ability, but would instead *limit* how much of that risk could be removed. This led us to the changes you see in the most recent patch. Now that GDF has a shorter up-time, and will be used more frequently, players attempting to get the most out of this ability will have to be absorbing more near-death risk on a regularly-recurring basis.
It probably goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway!) that we're still watching this closely, to make sure we aren't creating any unanticipated issues this time around. And to see whether or not sufficient risk has been re-introduced to the ability's performance status, to warrant the significant benefits it still offers.
For the 2 reasons you named I must respectfully ask, if the objective was to guarantee some type of risk to GDF, how was it a bad thing that tac couldn't use all of those abilities together at once? All of those abilities still had value but you now had to make a choice that you didn't have to make before. It basically boiled down to, do I take one or both of the survival abilities and pass up on that low hp GDF, or do I not use the survival abilities and take a chance so I can pick up some more damage? Continuity and Invincible still had value before the reversion as they were still very powerful death prevention abilities and not something to sneeze at. Good Day To Die also had value because it allowed you the use of a GDF on demand. That alone guarantees that GDTD will always have some value. The death prevention potential of Continuity and Invincible guarantee they will always have value. I see no reason why certain captain careers can't be allowed to have more of an edge with certain abilities/items than their counterparts. In fact in some cases I would argue it should be encouraged.
If the objective is to give some risk to GDF again, then I still hold the opinion that the changes made after the reversion run counter to that plan. In fact with the current state of cooldown reduction and available in game, when you combine some of that with GDF as well as Invincible and Continuity, you actually make it easier to cheese and make power creep even more insane. Even with the reduced duration, 15 seconds is still a long time and can make or break someone in a high intensity mission. Through testing myself and some of my crew have observed GDF having a cooldown as low as 41-42 seconds. Assuming an average mission time of about 2:15 seconds for some of the more played missions, you're looking at 3 activations of GDF if you activate it the moment you start the run. You're guaranteed at least one 0% GDF through Invincible in that time frame. With proper management of abilities, Continuity can guarantee a second extremely low hp GDF. If I manage my abilities properly then I can squeeze out a 3rd which is difficult to do but can be done.
I will always hold the view a 0% GDF doesn't need to be a thing as that's way too overpowered and in my opinion is a slap in the face to the original intent of GDF per your statements. Now I wouldn't just state these things without offering you guys some possible solutions you might could draw ideas from and I have indeed thought of a few.
1: Remove the ability to use GDF while under the effects of Continuity or Invincible, unless someone has the Good Day To Die trait. This would require some investment to be able to pull off as one would have be able to make use of all 3, you must invest time and resources to get 2 traits, and nearly max out a specialization. This can help reduce some power creep as not everyone will be able or willing to make the investment and won't be possible with GDTD. This solution is not ideal as it still gives all the benefit with no risk, only at a greater investment to pull off. It also still allows for a 0% GDF which I absolutely oppose being a possibility.
2: Keep GDF as it is now, but stop scaling the buff up at 5% hull or perhaps even 10%. This will allow folks to still utilize the Invincibility and Continuity powers to save themselves from death while removing the possibility of a 0% GDF. Since the GDF buff would stop scaling up at 5% hull, this gives folks an incentive to save their Invincibility and Continuity for later use. The value of Invincibility, Continuity, and Good Day To Die will still be protected, but a major component of power creep in the 0% GDF is removed. There is still some risk involved because if you use all of your abilities in one go you won't have them for later use.
That's just 2 possible solutions I can think of right off. In either case there is still some risk and investment to be made but both imo preserve the original spirit of the GDF ability. It's also past 5am in the morning as I type this so I will address my concerns about the science changes in a separate post as I believe it deserves its own post and would help break things up better so I don't slam you guys with too large of a text wall.
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Comments
If Sensor Scan was a "big damage enhancer, possibly on the level of Attack Pattern Alpha," we would see Science Captains get similar DPS to Tactical Captains.
SS is nice but it's no APA.
Personally I liked the overcharge skill. It not only gave science captains better science skills (lots of cruisers and escorts also have lots of science powers too), but it also gave better defense against science powers because of how drain expertise and control expertise work. Meaning a Science Captain could do well against science powers in any ship, not just science ships.
Also, if everyone had access to sub nuke, Cryptic could buff future NPCs to have more powers and few could complain because any team could handle it. Now, people would just complain they NEED a Science Captain.
So for a sci ... they could choose either SN or DO. Tac would have their own choices. Same for ENG.
Do you realize just how much more interesting that would make character building for the players?
U.S.S. Maelstrom, NCC-71417 (Constitution III-class/flagship) --- Fleet Admiral Hauk' --|-- Dahar Master Hauk --- I.K.S. qu'In 'an bortaS (D7-class / flagship)
I am not at all happy with any nerfing of Torpedo abilities. Almost all of my Character builds utilize them in one form or another.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
... and here it is! Much of this has already been astutely noted by a few members of the community, but consider this a "from the horse's mouth" sort of confirmation on those subjects. Here's hoping it clears a few things up...
Now, typically, we don't go out of our way to explain every change we make, but we knew that these particular topics would warrant further discussion. For two primary reasons:
1) The original changes were controversial.
2) Reverting those changes has the potential to erode player confidence that we are making well-informed choices.
In order to try and address the latter, we're going to talk about some of the reasoning behind the changes we made, and why we ended up reverting them.
Go Down Fighting
The problem we were attempting to solve here, is the Risk-vs-Reward element of this particular ability. It has always been intended that gaining a larger damage output bonus from GDF should be restricted to scenarios where the player is very likely to perish. This is actually why the original duration was so long - because it wasn't supposed to matter, since you'd almost-inevitably die long before the duration timed out. With the introduction of Damage Immunities and Death Prevention triggers, it became far too easy to gain maximum benefit from this ability without having to factor in its risk factors.
The initial change was made from the perspective of "If there are no risk factors at play (because you are Unkillable) then you should not reap any rewards."
We ended up reverting this change for a few very important reasons:
1) For Tactical Captains, it severely diminished (or, some could say eliminated) the invested value of two highly desirable and enjoyable gameplay modifying talents: Temporal Operative's "Continuity" and the "Invincible" Starship Trait.
2) It effectively removed the "Good Day To Die" Personal Trait from being a valid gameplay choice, if you chose to run either of the passives mentioned in the above point.
Ultimately, the above factors led us to realize that modifying the availability of GDF in this manner was more of a band-aid than a true solution, and caused some major issues that we hadn't intended. So, after re-examining the reasons that GDF remained a concern, we decided to try out a different change, which would not *remove* the players' ability to mitigate the risk of using the ability, but would instead *limit* how much of that risk could be removed. This led us to the changes you see in the most recent patch. Now that GDF has a shorter up-time, and will be used more frequently, players attempting to get the most out of this ability will have to be absorbing more near-death risk on a regularly-recurring basis.
It probably goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway!) that we're still watching this closely, to make sure we aren't creating any unanticipated issues this time around. And to see whether or not sufficient risk has been re-introduced to the ability's performance status, to warrant the significant benefits it still offers.
Subnucleonic Beam / Deflector Overcharge
This is a bit of a difficult situation. We have been attempting to address a couple of what we consider to be fairly significant gameplay issues:
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- Science Captains lack competitive performance output increases, compared to Tactical and Engineering captains.
We tried to fix two birds with one stone here, by replacing the underperforming ability with something that we hoped would narrow a performance gap. And within those specific parameters, we still consider the original solution to have been a good one that successfully met our design goals.
However, as with the GDF changes, this replacement presented a number of new issues that we didn't think were worth what was gained.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
2) Making Subnucleonic Beam into a Bridge Officer Ability didn't fix the ability's problems, but only changed its associated choice space. And now all players had the opportunity to see how problematic the ability is in PvE... nothing was solved. All we did was increase the exposure of its shortcomings.
3) Changing Subnucleonic Beam to a Boff power inadvertently diminished Science Captain viability in PvP, while simultaneously increasing the relative effectiveness of non-Science builds that suddenly had the ability to add a powerful PvP tool to their arsenals.
With this change reverted, and SNB back on Science Captains as it previously was, we're back to examining the original issues once more. This is definitely not a done deal, and we are discussing additional options that we might explore, to potentially solve the original problems we were facing. Reverting the change at this point was just a matter of knowing that the consequences of this particular design decision were not acceptable, in terms of collateral damage. I'd expect to see another change to SNB before Season 13 launches (or perhaps shortly thereafter) but we're not yet prepared to discuss what form that change may take.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
If you think anything you've listed is an advantage over both of the other two careers, you're mistaken. The numbers (even on Holodeck) contradict your claims.
It's worse on Tribble.
I really do disagree with reverting back the changes to GDF interacting with Invincibility and Continuity.
Instead of balancing the classes, which I thought was the whole reason for these changes, you have just made Tactical the only viable class to play again.
Thanks to reverting, Tacticals can now still enjoy out tanking and surviving longer than Engineer players, while also putting out the most DPS.
Tacticals can still enjoy doing more exotic damage than Science players, thanks to them not having their career buffs being striped of them affecting all damage, instead of just affecting weapon damage like they should have been.
If you really want to balance the classes, and not just make Science and Engineers irrelevant like they have been since beta, is there any chance the Science characters get some kind of exotic damage bonus that increases based on lowered health?
Same goes for Engineers, the lower their health goes, they get tougher and tougher in all damage resistance?
Just thinking outside the box, as right now I cannot see a reason to keep Science and Engineering careers in the game...
2) Reverting those changes has the potential to erode player confidence that we are making well-informed choices.
Yes to both...
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- Science Captains lack competitive performance output increases, compared to Tactical and Engineering captains.
Yes.
1) Science Captains became too-heavily incentivized to fly only starships that could make heavy use of Exotic Damage abilities. Since this list of ships is relatively small, and since we don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a Class to a Ship Type, this was an immediate problem.
Why is that bad?
I think most people choose Science specifically for this reason. And because they wanted to do something different. I mean if people wanted to just do standard torpedo/beam dps they would roll a Tactical character. I don't see why it's bad that Science want to, or should be encouraged to fly Science ships. And on top of that Deflector overcharge boosted things other than exotic including healing which is useful to every ship type.
I feel like everything about these Science changes was WAY over thought. All that needed to be done was reduce Tractor Beam Repulsors and Feedback Pulse and you could have called it a day.
And my final though about this entire balance pass is that your making all these complicated changes to facilitate basically one update that will come and go.
I can understand that people have for a long time asked for PVP balance. But I can not see this casual game where only a small fraction of players engage in PVP ever making a drastic switch to a PVP game. And if it does make this change I feel like your going to push out the vast majority of players who really have no interest in PVP.
It bad because it limit science of variety. If you want to limit science to a science ship then limit tactical to a escort and limit engineer to a crusier. Science captain also like to have some variety in game play. Science captain also want to fly other type of ship besides science ship.
It's a problem because it pretty much invalidates the idea of anything that isn't sci/sci. Sci/scorts, especially in PvP can be very effective, in fact, it's possible for a sci/scort in PvP to be more potent than an sci/sci, this is mostly due to SNB, although it is true that if you ran an escort with LTC sci or LTC uni you could make decent use of DO the number of escorts that have this option without sacrificing too much of something else is far too low to make it worth it.
Actually, arranging some sort of balance that fits both PvE and PvP can only be good for STO. STO is the only game that provides ST in a large scale PvP capable setting, this gives it a huge capacity to pull in ST fans who like PvP and are willing to spend considerable amounts of money.
Thusfar this potential has been completely ignored, so it's nice to see that some attention is being given to the potential of PvP in STO and these "War games" are actually a really good way to extend the olive branch.
I just wish the devs would exchange ideas with us more during this process.
Make STO great again.
They do, but seldom in these forums, they are more into Reddit...
This has been suggested for years...especially since Sci has been nerfed numerous times because of Tac specifically...but they wont do it...have to keep Tac at the top of the food chain no matter what.
Do you even watch Star Trek beyond that pew pew JJTrek TRIBBLE? Starfleet practices wargames...which is pretty much what PvP is since the Federation and Empire aren't at war.
What does PvP have to do with being a Moba? Obvious PvP hater is obvious...just because you hate PvP (Or aren't good enough to compete without broken mechanics) doesn't mean everyone hates PvP.
Without trying to state the obvious that hindsight is 20/20, it does kind of seem odd that these extra game mechanics (specifically Continuity, Invincible, and A Good Day To Die) were able to pass inspection when they were introduced at the time. Given just how popular the Tactical Career is, I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where somebody didn't bring up these problems when using Go Down Fighting.
This isn't intended to come across as some kind of "Woulda, coulda, shoulda" criticism, since you've mentioned you're learning from mistakes and I agree that there's absolutely no problem with going back to the drawing board if you've discovered your intended solution isn't solving the problem, and it's something I respect.
I'm really more concerned over how much influence "the new normal" has over these sorts of design decisions. Certain games have a tendency to let things go for months (or even years) before going back to adjust them (not just STO) to bring them more in line with their intended function. Some developers prefer to rip off the band-aid quickly, enduring the brief backlash at the cost of the overall health of the system, while others seem more wary of making changes once "the new normal" has been established, and even find themselves painted into a corner when things like "the current meta" (in whatever form it ends up taking) are on the chopping block.
I honestly do not envy you or Spartan (or anyone involved in development) on this particular issue. I'm not even going to pretend to have some sort of silver bullet solution to the issue of Subnucleonic Beam, because it's been in the game since 2010 and has been relatively untouched. To say it's "the new normal" would be wrong, because it's always been normal. Any sort of change with SNB is going to be controversial. You're either going to make a lot of people happy, or you're going to pull the rug out from others who have used this particular lemon to make lemonade (usually in PvP).
I was not married to the idea of Deflector Overcharge, per se. Just the idea of having an ability that I could happily use on my science captains as often as I use APA or EPS Power Transfer regardless of what content I was playing. That's what I'm mostly disappointed over. But I've been stuck with SNB on my science captains since 2010, so I'm pretty confidant I can continue to deal with it until you decide on a viable solution.
I'd rather have you solve these gameplay changes correctly rather than just solving them quickly, and I'd like to think many others would also prefer that.
I could probably suggest some ideas for SNB, but outside of turning it into some kind of overpowered Exotic damage Lance weapon (that you can therefore use on any type of ship you fly), I'm not even sure what purpose it has in the game anymore. Science started out as support, a jack of all trades but a master of none, and with the increasing attention paid to Exotic Damage, now they're space wizards. I know it's simply fantastic for PvP, and that's about it.
But staying the course and depending on Science to continue to chase the DPS dragon in the wake of Tactical Captains isn't really viable long-term, either. You just end up kicking the can further down the road.
That being said, I understand not wanting to pigeonhole Science into Science Ships as a matter of game design. At the same time, the idea of Tactical Captains doing better in Science ships than Science captains should be equally undesirable.
It's been mentioned multiple times before, but things like APA or GDF should only affect outgoing weapon damage (energy weapons and torps). You could maybe give it another buff in regards to Subsystem Targeting, thus making Tactical Officers in Science ships useful, but you'd be able to reign in their ability to outperform Science captains who should really be able to make the most out of Exotic damage dealing as part of their career, not just space traits (like Conservation of Energy, Particle Manipulator, Positive Feedback Loop, etc.)
I am personally still thinking that maybe keeping the power transfer bonus of eps power transfer in place, but maybe instead of it giving a boost to the sub-system power systems as well it might have some other effect that could make engineers more competitive. The idea of having it that during the duration the engineer would gain a set of buffs that are based on each fo the sub-systems, and the potency of that buff would be based on the power level of the sub-system (weapon power could be for weapon damage/rate of fire, shields could be shield capacity/regen/resistance, engine would be turn rate/speed, and then aux could be drain/control/exotic). This would be quite close to being equal to apa in effect, but also feels quite like something an engineer would do, and also quite versatile giving it use in all ship types an builds. It would also make power management even more interesting at least from a standpoint of the engineer career.
This might sound weird, but is there a way for you/devs could make it that while a player has things like Invincible or Continuity slotted it would actually affect how powerful the buff gained from GDF is? Like that if you have temporal spec (if you are down far enough in the tree at least), or the Invincible trait slotted that it would either reduce the damage of GDF, or reduce the length of the duration to reflect that fact of the reduced risk to reward factor of the ability being altered. I believe you have done changes that made some abilities not affected by other abilities, but this might be too far outside that concept to be implemented though,yet could be something to think an see if it could be.
I think what we need from @borticuscryptic and the other developers are some answers as to what role(s) do they want the conventional weapons to play, especially with new weapon types like Heavy Weapons making an entrance into the game.
1. Fundamental question: What role(s) do torpedoes and mines serve from the game's lore perspective, and from the Developers' perspectives (for salvo, Targetable, and special varieties)?
2. On Targetable (Heavy/Destructible) Torpedoes: The speed changes do not solve the prime problem of said torpedoes being easily shot down. Are there any other solutions that you and your colleagues plan to address this (or if it's even on your radar)?
3. With the change to Gravimetric photon torpedo under TSx (Torpedo Spread + rank value), every Reputation/Reward/Crafted torpedo that has a proc has a chance or a guarantee to proc one of its abilities to all eligible targets except for two; Neutronic and Quantum Phase. Will those return to having their procs work on secondary targets again?
4. With these changes, what is the mindset(s) that you and your colleagues are working with? Some thoughts that were being discussed include making more build ideas and concepts realistic options for all levels of play (more 'Canon Builds'), to solving the "lack of challenging content" issue, to making room for more powerCreep (3.0). What's YOUR take on it all?
5. Is there a consideration for decoupling Attack Pattern Alpha from buffing non-weapon abilities (aka Engineering and Science abilities)?
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.
In PvE, science captains flying an escort or cruiser would be able to deal the exact same amount of damage as they were before. But Deflector Overcharge would give them a boost to healing. That's still better than a useless ability like SB. If people only ever went for the highest damage potential everybody would play as a tactical captain anyways. You had the opportunity to break this monopoly.
I'm not quite sure what the issue is here. People would have been able to swap Subnuc for some other ability when they play PvE. There are many abilities, procs and consoles in the game that are only useful in PvE.
True. But Deflector Overcharge is something that would have been useful in any situation, 100% of the time. Subnuc is only useful in PvP and absolutely useless in PvE. I'm pretty sure no more than 1% of people plays PvP on a regular basis right now. And even with the new balance patch, player qualification system and season it would come as a great surprise if this number ever went above 5%.
I hope you will reconsider or at least buff Subnuc to some degree to make it useful in PvE.
The two birds begging for one stone are still:
- Subnucleonic Beam is not a strong PvE gameplay choice, on pretty much a universal basis.
- EPS Corruption is unloved and nearly unlovable with the massive investment into yellow tree choices.
EPS corruption needs to be even MORE decisive the probability manipulation or frenzy. Instead its worse than either of the other ultimates AND gated behind a path loaded with things that are largely needless in the content we have now. Add in that weapon power got nerfed making all the yellow skill effects boosting ship power just that much less relevant to strong builds.
Since the Engineer was buffed pretty much universally now, it seems they are erring more towards buffing the weak classes rather than weakening the strong ones, so they'll probably have to keep working on the Science Captain.
One of the simplest ideas for me would be to have SNB to also apply NPC only debuffs. In my estimation, Science doesn't need any buffs that help it in PVP (though maybe some of the current active PvPers have better insight here), but it does need them for PVE. I also don't think that PVP can afford to see major changes to SNB. Without the ability to strip buffs as effective as with SNB, I think PvP would get more problematic. That's kinda unfortunate, but also very hard to fix, since a lot of that is way more in the fundamental of the game's endgame then individual powers.
First, thanks for actually giving us some of the thought process you guys were using @borticuscryptic . It's very much appreciated when dealing with these things. When dealing with any sort of balance changes there's always going to be some bit of controversy to it. The only type of balancing I've ever had to deal with were small time mods to older games and as much of a headache as that could be, I don't envy you guys at the corporate end of the spectrum since you guys deal with it on a much more massive scale. Now that we can actually see some of the thought processes I believe in return we can now give you guys better feedback. Bearing in mind the thought processes you've given us here I will attempt to do just that based off what you've given us.
I absolutely believe that until the introduction of certain other abilities you guys nailed the GDF ability on the head. If you wanted to benefit from the ability there was some major risk involved as you had to be below 50% hull to use it. As a tactical player you had to ask yourself, do I wait on hitting my hull to keep benefiting from GDF and risk dying, or do I hit it now and not take the risk. There was always some risk involved in the ability. Do you try to manage your abilities to keep yourself at a low enough state to make decent benefit from the ability, or do you forgo the benefit of GDF and not take the risk. Point being I agree the risk was there before certain abilities and mechanics were introduced.
Bearing in mind what you've stated on the original intent to GDF, by again allowing GDF to be used under the effects of Continuity and Invincible this removes all risk from using the ability at all. I don't believe the changes made to GDF are going to have the desired effect you're after.
For the 2 reasons you named I must respectfully ask, if the objective was to guarantee some type of risk to GDF, how was it a bad thing that tac couldn't use all of those abilities together at once? All of those abilities still had value but you now had to make a choice that you didn't have to make before. It basically boiled down to, do I take one or both of the survival abilities and pass up on that low hp GDF, or do I not use the survival abilities and take a chance so I can pick up some more damage? Continuity and Invincible still had value before the reversion as they were still very powerful death prevention abilities and not something to sneeze at. Good Day To Die also had value because it allowed you the use of a GDF on demand. That alone guarantees that GDTD will always have some value. The death prevention potential of Continuity and Invincible guarantee they will always have value. I see no reason why certain captain careers can't be allowed to have more of an edge with certain abilities/items than their counterparts. In fact in some cases I would argue it should be encouraged.
If the objective is to give some risk to GDF again, then I still hold the opinion that the changes made after the reversion run counter to that plan. In fact with the current state of cooldown reduction and available in game, when you combine some of that with GDF as well as Invincible and Continuity, you actually make it easier to cheese and make power creep even more insane. Even with the reduced duration, 15 seconds is still a long time and can make or break someone in a high intensity mission. Through testing myself and some of my crew have observed GDF having a cooldown as low as 41-42 seconds. Assuming an average mission time of about 2:15 seconds for some of the more played missions, you're looking at 3 activations of GDF if you activate it the moment you start the run. You're guaranteed at least one 0% GDF through Invincible in that time frame. With proper management of abilities, Continuity can guarantee a second extremely low hp GDF. If I manage my abilities properly then I can squeeze out a 3rd which is difficult to do but can be done.
I will always hold the view a 0% GDF doesn't need to be a thing as that's way too overpowered and in my opinion is a slap in the face to the original intent of GDF per your statements. Now I wouldn't just state these things without offering you guys some possible solutions you might could draw ideas from and I have indeed thought of a few.
1: Remove the ability to use GDF while under the effects of Continuity or Invincible, unless someone has the Good Day To Die trait. This would require some investment to be able to pull off as one would have be able to make use of all 3, you must invest time and resources to get 2 traits, and nearly max out a specialization. This can help reduce some power creep as not everyone will be able or willing to make the investment and won't be possible with GDTD. This solution is not ideal as it still gives all the benefit with no risk, only at a greater investment to pull off. It also still allows for a 0% GDF which I absolutely oppose being a possibility.
2: Keep GDF as it is now, but stop scaling the buff up at 5% hull or perhaps even 10%. This will allow folks to still utilize the Invincibility and Continuity powers to save themselves from death while removing the possibility of a 0% GDF. Since the GDF buff would stop scaling up at 5% hull, this gives folks an incentive to save their Invincibility and Continuity for later use. The value of Invincibility, Continuity, and Good Day To Die will still be protected, but a major component of power creep in the 0% GDF is removed. There is still some risk involved because if you use all of your abilities in one go you won't have them for later use.
That's just 2 possible solutions I can think of right off. In either case there is still some risk and investment to be made but both imo preserve the original spirit of the GDF ability. It's also past 5am in the morning as I type this so I will address my concerns about the science changes in a separate post as I believe it deserves its own post and would help break things up better so I don't slam you guys with too large of a text wall.
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