To be fair, traits that grant immunity and invincibility for whatever period of time should have a heavy penalty in PvP only. It should have over a minute lockout because it negates the lack or existence of skill for player or opponent. It should also count as a double kill for the opponent of the person equipped with those traits as abilities.
Allowing a hugely powerful ability like GDF to work with such abilities without even being below 50% is quite frankly absurd.
Any and all abilities or traits must have counters or grant penalties if they grant the player a significant advantage over players of other factions and especially those of the same class because it stops any measure of skill and competition. Even abilities like SNB, one of the most powerful of not most powerful captain abilities, has a hard counter. Science Team 1.
Also it be possible to make torpedoes faster too? Compared to ships now they are so slow. Another option would be to slow ships at high end down a bit to stop them outrunning torps. It's a bit difficult to time a torpedo hit with the fraction of a second that shields are down for now. Used to be we'd get 2-3 seconds at most of a shield facing being down, which made alphastrikes tricky and skillfull whereas now they're either never down or the torpedo is being easily outrun... or invincibility is up... or some other stupid gimmick that makes it impossible to bring a player down despite it being a 4v1 against said gimmick wielding, skill-less, hamfisted, spacebar mashing 14 year old min-maxer living in his mother's basement...
I think this fellow has really hit the nail on the head in terms of what is the only proper solution, as unpopular amongst the exploiters as it will be.
A Good Day to Die, Invincible, and Continuity should just be straight-up disabled in PVP. Whether you have them equipped or not, be it entering a Queue PVP match or entering a war zone like Ker'rat, the system just nullifies their effect.
PVP is competitive play. As such, digital doping should have no place there.
You bought the stuff via Buying/selling keys, winning a lockbox prize, or saving energy credits? Cool, you still have it. It still works in PVE. But PVP is a different scenario, different rules.
I paid to get Invincible, I have access to (but never use) Continuity, and I'd GLADLY have the ability to use them be taken away in PVP so it's actually a competitive game of skill rather than a game of who bought the most cheats.
I'm fine with Cryptic making money on selling power creep. But Invincible and Good Day to Die isn't Pay to Win, it's far worse: it's Pay to Never Lose.
What about the other side of Pay to Never Lose? The side where you can insta-kill anyone without them being able to do anything? I know people don't like it when they can't kill someone, and that's why they're complaining about invincible, continuity, etc. I know that's also why no one wants to talk about the fact that you can make builds that kill anyone in PvP despite how tough their build is in 2 seconds. Both issues need to be addressed: immunities and being able to do way to much damage in a short period of time.
Experience requirements from levels 50-60 have been significantly lowered.
Because I tested it and it seems pretty much the same...
The Rising of the Delta is the best expansion ever, and people love it to death because it is a good day to die in the endless struggle for supremacy of your own conviction. (A spin off of the Delta Rising is the best expansion ever and all the players love it.)
What about the other side of Pay to Never Lose? The side where you can insta-kill anyone without them being able to do anything? I know people don't like it when they can't kill someone, and that's why they're complaining about invincible, continuity, etc. I know that's also why no one wants to talk about the fact that you can make builds that kill anyone in PvP despite how tough their build is in 2 seconds. Both issues need to be addressed: immunities and being able to do way to much damage in a short period of time.
The big thing you need to keep in mind is that without a clear separation between pvp and pve, changes made for the sake of pvp will effect pve and vice versa. If they're not careful they'll run into a situation like World of Warcraft has had for a long time. The WoW devs refuse to separate the 2 aspects for whatever reason. To guarantee they're not going to see spillover they would need to code it something like this "Is target a player, if no then we do Z instead of X." It's more annoying that way but they'll have to do it that way.
The problem with Continuity and Invincible is that on the pve side of things they can be cheesed to do massive amounts of damage that should not be possible at all. By allowing the immunities like Continuity and Invincible to be stripped they take care of a big bit of power creep.
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations
@kyle223cat I understand how you feel that has happened since players like @thissler learnt to alphastrike. Back then and even up to season 8.5 you could counter it by cycling a drake build (cycling 2 EPtX abilities i.e.: EPtS1 with EPtS2), cycling 2 copies of tactical team while always maintaining full throttle. Full throttle would give you defence. Cycling a drake build even outside of battle would boost not only your defence (meaning your opponent needs high accuracy to hit you thanks to EPtE1 andyour shields would be more resistant to damage thanks EPtS). Cycling 2 copies of TT1 would mean that any player decloaking on you to fire HY torps and a BO2/3 to take down your facing shield would be unsuccessful because TT would redistribute the shields to block the torpedoes, while your shield resistance and defence are already high. Once you're in a PvP environment it's better to always assume you're about to be attacked so always cycle buffs that give you defence, dmg and control resistance (A2ID, PH). That way it'll be extremely difficult to land a solid hit on you. While capturing zones flying in a circle or figure of 8 is also useful because cloakers like to attack from front or behind, so they can make you panic into flying away from them. That way they can do as little effort to aim their ship at you. So always fly towards the target to get behind them.
Now though the amount of cheese makes it impossible to defend. Something the balance changes must fix before the PvEvP queue is released.
I'd say it's become impossible to say the changes have anything to do with balance except if to say they're eliminating it utterly.
Unless energy weapons are being cut to at MOST a quarter of what they do on holodeck so as to follow, say, the change to science powers, the science and projectile changes are no less than a declaration by the developer team that anybody not tactical with beams no longer deserves to play this game.
To be fair, traits that grant immunity and invincibility for whatever period of time should have a heavy penalty in PvP only. It should have over a minute lockout because it negates the lack or existence of skill for player or opponent. It should also count as a double kill for the opponent of the person equipped with those traits as abilities.
Allowing a hugely powerful ability like GDF to work with such abilities without even being below 50% is quite frankly absurd.
Any and all abilities or traits must have counters or grant penalties if they grant the player a significant advantage over players of other factions and especially those of the same class because it stops any measure of skill and competition. Even abilities like SNB, one of the most powerful of not most powerful captain abilities, has a hard counter. Science Team 1.
Also it be possible to make torpedoes faster too? Compared to ships now they are so slow. Another option would be to slow ships at high end down a bit to stop them outrunning torps. It's a bit difficult to time a torpedo hit with the fraction of a second that shields are down for now. Used to be we'd get 2-3 seconds at most of a shield facing being down, which made alphastrikes tricky and skillfull whereas now they're either never down or the torpedo is being easily outrun... or invincibility is up... or some other stupid gimmick that makes it impossible to bring a player down despite it being a 4v1 against said gimmick wielding, skill-less, hamfisted, spacebar mashing 14 year old min-maxer living in his mother's basement...
I think this fellow has really hit the nail on the head in terms of what is the only proper solution, as unpopular amongst the exploiters as it will be.
A Good Day to Die, Invincible, and Continuity should just be straight-up disabled in PVP. Whether you have them equipped or not, be it entering a Queue PVP match or entering a war zone like Ker'rat, the system just nullifies their effect.
PVP is competitive play. As such, digital doping should have no place there.
You bought the stuff via Buying/selling keys, winning a lockbox prize, or saving energy credits? Cool, you still have it. It still works in PVE. But PVP is a different scenario, different rules.
I paid to get Invincible, I have access to (but never use) Continuity, and I'd GLADLY have the ability to use them be taken away in PVP so it's actually a competitive game of skill rather than a game of who bought the most cheats.
I'm fine with Cryptic making money on selling power creep. But Invincible and Good Day to Die isn't Pay to Win, it's far worse: it's Pay to Never Lose.
What about the other side of Pay to Never Lose? The side where you can insta-kill anyone without them being able to do anything? I know people don't like it when they can't kill someone, and that's why they're complaining about invincible, continuity, etc. I know that's also why no one wants to talk about the fact that you can make builds that kill anyone in PvP despite how tough their build is in 2 seconds. Both issues need to be addressed: immunities and being able to do way to much damage in a short period of time.
You may be very pleased to play the current build on Tribble if you haven't. If you re-read all the build notes, and play these changes yourself, I think you'll find their changes are far more comprehensive and three-dimensional than most people are giving them credit for.
To address what you're referring to, they've reduced APA's intensity and duration. Plasma consoles don't do shield-ignoring damage any longer. Plasmonic Leach still drains against targets so it's still useful for science drain builds, but it doesn't give the user an insanely unreasonable power buff that makes it a must-have. Torpedo abilities have lockouts now so you can't double tap them coming out of cloak (I know I never liked having to cope with a double-tapped Torpedo Spread III from a Neutronic coming from a Romulan Enhanced Battle Cloak. If I wasn't a heavy resistance-leaning engineer with an 80k+ hull that would one-shot me straight to the mirror universe with the build on Holodeck).
If you're an engineer, they've addressed your profession abilities so they're not longer a joke. EPS will stack with and overlap other energy boosts, no other profession has that. Miracle Worker is worthy of it's name now, enormous heal with temporary secondary shields. Nadion Inversion gives an enormous weapon cost/power drain resistance. Engineering Fleet is a "Cat 2", if you will, resistance boost: not a diminishing return, but a straight up +40 to all resists. Pretty much every resistance ability of engineers, as well as resistance consoles, give as much boost to physical damage as well as kinetic so Temporal cheese has been reasonably checked, as well as Temporal abilities now do half damage versus players in PVP scenarios.
I'm actually totally satisfied that a lot of out-of-control stuff that non-engineers/bad engineers can't cope with in terms of damage resistance or heals have been taken care of, and engineers are no longer comically gimped compared to the other two professions. I think balance and parity has really largely been addressed with most of these changes. Those insta-kill vape alpha strikes that vaporize all but the best engineers are no longer a thing with the Tribble build. I think torpedos and Omega Kinetic Shearing needs looked at though, that's a valid complaint.
But, the WORST thing in PVP still remains to be fixed: the crazy cheese that Go Down Fighting can interact with and make someone unkillable no matter how much of a clueless soup sandwich they are. A Good Day To Die, Invincible, and Continuity need to be addressed, otherwise all these other otherwise excellent PVP changes are going to be all for naught. I think it's fair to say that if PVP was something that was on their mind in the past, these three nonsense abilities/traits would never have existed. They do, however, and they're the enormous elephants in the room that need to be addressed.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."
Personally don't think it is go down fighting specifically that is the issue, but merely as stated the interaction between it an the trait as well as temporal ability/trait. If you make changes to how those things, maybe even other abilities that cause such effects that weaken the risk to reward value of go down fighting affect it. Like that while they are slotted, or active they reduce the duration it lasts, or even just locks the effective strength of GDF (unless the trait or immunity abilities are on cd or locked out from being used).
One thing I would not mind seeing is a change to how cruiser commands function. The weapon command is quite often always active, but even with three cruises in a group the other commands are not up. It would be nice to see that if a cruiser with a active command comes in range of another cruiser using the same command, than one of them will switch to another command (except the tanking command that should be active by the player's choice.). Though even just abit of a buff to the other commands to make them more appealing, and interesting to be used would be nice, as right now the weapon command is one of the only commands that is seen as worth using.
But, the WORST thing in PVP still remains to be fixed: the crazy cheese that Go Down Fighting can interact with and make someone unkillable no matter how much of a clueless soup sandwich they are. A Good Day To Die, Invincible, and Continuity need to be addressed, otherwise all these other otherwise excellent PVP changes are going to be all for naught. I think it's fair to say that if PVP was something that was on their mind in the past, these three nonsense abilities/traits would never have existed. They do, however, and they're the enormous elephants in the room that need to be addressed.
Maybe Spartan should go into a PvP match incognito and see how much cheese happens when hull gets to zero.
But, the WORST thing in PVP still remains to be fixed: the crazy cheese that Go Down Fighting can interact with and make someone unkillable no matter how much of a clueless soup sandwich they are. A Good Day To Die, Invincible, and Continuity need to be addressed, otherwise all these other otherwise excellent PVP changes are going to be all for naught. I think it's fair to say that if PVP was something that was on their mind in the past, these three nonsense abilities/traits would never have existed. They do, however, and they're the enormous elephants in the room that need to be addressed.
Maybe Spartan should go into a PvP match incognito and see how much cheese happens when hull gets to zero.
That would be nice. =P
The Rising of the Delta is the best expansion ever, and people love it to death because it is a good day to die in the endless struggle for supremacy of your own conviction. (A spin off of the Delta Rising is the best expansion ever and all the players love it.)
Tribble has been updated to: ST.75.20170405a.2
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.
Thank you for listening! Such great news!! Science captains everywhere applaud you! Im loving all of the other changes too!
Shouldn't HY get a boost of some sort too? Spread has become more common in PvP due to the fact it never misses and with some torps does shield penetrating damage. HY should do either more damage or the torpedoes should be faster than they are in spread to make it a viable option again.
Maybe High Yield Torpedo could get the Beam Overload treatment. Buff a single torpedo attack strongly, but then also buff your other torpedo attacks for 10 seconds or so. That would give it a more important role on dedicated torpedo builds at least.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Just to clarify, when I suggested "every race should have some buffs added to their arsenal of behaviors" to give SNB some added value (and to make PvP a better training experience for PvE...) that doesn't mean Every Ship. This was a suggestion for one ship in each wave to be noticeably tougher, with the science captain able to negate that added capacity.
Second, HELL NO I wasn't suggesting the already cotton candy victims waiting to happen NPC ships be made even easier so that after applying buff they're back up to their oh-so-intimidating DUCKS IN A SHOOTING GALLERY status. This was a suggestion for straight up making enemies mores distinctive and more dangerous. Because some tangible risk is the only thing that's going to shift the all-DPS-all-the-time meta and bring some value to control and survivability tools...
Given the number of "this effect is halved in PvP" tags we saw in the initial balance pass notes, maybe Invincibility should have its duration cut in half in PvP (and double the cooldown of Invincibility and Continuity both...).
Though, given how ABSURD time-to-kill is in PvP, I'd also be inclined to halve ALL sources of damage in PvP. I'm sorry but the source material says that clashes between starships are NOT the stuff of twitch shooters. These ships of the line, not armed shuttles. Four to five hard salvos -- minimum -- so a bridge officer has long enough to say "shields at 50%, captain" and everyone can look grim for the camera.
I'm still hopping we see a re-curving of rank XIII and XIV weapons and the [Acc/Damg] mod. That was just rampant damage creep when it was introduced and that bird has come home to roost.
Shouldn't HY get a boost of some sort too? Spread has become more common in PvP due to the fact it never misses and with some torps does shield penetrating damage. HY should do either more damage or the torpedoes should be faster than they are in spread to make it a viable option again
If you ask me it should apply to all torpedo launches for 10s, so your idea would be a grudging compromise. I don't... disagree with it though.
Can't help but notice that BFAW doesn't lock out other beam skills including itself for 5s when you fire it, though. How odd they'd feel the need to add that to torpedo skills.
Why not slow down ships then so that they are slower than torpedoes? Some players fly nearly as fast cannon fire which is worrying. It'd also help to rein in that powercreep because ships don't have to be super-fast because then you're spending most of the time trying to keep the ship in the general vicinity of the target instead of firing your weapons which will probably miss.
Shouldn't HY get a boost of some sort too? Spread has become more common in PvP due to the fact it never misses and with some torps does shield penetrating damage. HY should do either more damage or the torpedoes should be faster than they are in spread to make it a viable option again.
What does everybody else think?
I can agree that it could use some sort of boost, ranging from a speed boost in some cases to maybe a lingering shield pen debuff in others. Just an overall travel time buff would be nice for torpedoes either base-line, or based on the speed/throttle of your ship when fired. One idea I suggested in the thread earlier was to give High-yield a secondary effect applied to the torpedo it is used on based on the type of torpedo it is, while you could add a travel speed buff to the use of the ability, een as a lingering buff after the use of high-yield that affects all other launchers for duration. Though the idea of a buff that affects torpedoes after using high-yield would need to have a longer duration than beam overload since the cooldown between firing torpedoes unless you are using multiple launchers is quite a bit longer than beams.
I wonder if they could have torpedo high-yield function in more of a charge system, kinda like the Romulan experimental torpedo. Maybe have it give you three high-yield charges at rank one, while than giving you maybe between 6-9 charges at rank three. Though such a system would also allow high-yield would be able to work with multiple torpedoe launchers on your ship as the each could use the charges, and would make high-yield on a ship using multiple launchers would do much more spike damage compared to a ship with a single launcher that would do more constant damage over the duration of the ability.
Maybe High Yield Torpedo could get the Beam Overload treatment. Buff a single torpedo attack strongly, but then also buff your other torpedo attacks for 10 seconds or so. That would give it a more important role on dedicated torpedo builds at least.
As much as I like the idea, I can see something like that getting out of hand very quickly, especially if other torpedo bugs get fixed.
Shouldn't HY get a boost of some sort too? Spread has become more common in PvP due to the fact it never misses and with some torps does shield penetrating damage. HY should do either more damage or the torpedoes should be faster than they are in spread to make it a viable option again.
What does everybody else think?
I think fixing ACC issues w/ HY and some toprs, in combination w/ bug fixes AND fix the travel speed issue would alleviate the majority of torpedo problems, and, by extension, torps fired under HY.
@kyle223cat I understand how you feel that has happened since players like @thissler learnt to alphastrike. Back then and even up to season 8.5 you could counter it by cycling a drake build (cycling 2 EPtX abilities i.e.: EPtS1 with EPtS2), cycling 2 copies of tactical team while always maintaining full throttle.
Full throttle would give you defence. Cycling a drake build even outside of battle would boost not only your defence (meaning your opponent needs high accuracy to hit you thanks to EPtE1 andyour shields would be more resistant to damage thanks EPtS).
Cycling 2 copies of TT1 would mean that any player decloaking on you to fire HY torps and a BO2/3 to take down your facing shield would be unsuccessful because TT would redistribute the shields to block the torpedoes, while your shield resistance and defence are already high.
Once you're in a PvP environment it's better to always assume you're about to be attacked so always cycle buffs that give you defence, dmg and control resistance (A2ID, PH). That way it'll be extremely difficult to land a solid hit on you.
While capturing zones flying in a circle or figure of 8 is also useful because cloakers like to attack from front or behind, so they can make you panic into flying away from them.
That way they can do as little effort to aim their ship at you. So always fly towards the target to get behind them.
Now though the amount of cheese makes it impossible to defend. Something the balance changes must fix before the PvEvP queue is released.
To be fair, traits that grant immunity and invincibility for whatever period of time should have a heavy penalty in PvP only. It should have over a minute lockout because it negates the lack or existence of skill for player or opponent. It should also count as a double kill for the opponent of the person equipped with those traits as abilities.
Allowing a hugely powerful ability like GDF to work with such abilities without even being below 50% is quite frankly absurd.
Any and all abilities or traits must have counters or grant penalties if they grant the player a significant advantage over players of other factions and especially those of the same class because it stops any measure of skill and competition. Even abilities like SNB, one of the most powerful of not most powerful captain abilities, has a hard counter. Science Team 1.
Also it be possible to make torpedoes faster too? Compared to ships now they are so slow. Another option would be to slow ships at high end down a bit to stop them outrunning torps. It's a bit difficult to time a torpedo hit with the fraction of a second that shields are down for now. Used to be we'd get 2-3 seconds at most of a shield facing being down, which made alphastrikes tricky and skillfull whereas now they're either never down or the torpedo is being easily outrun... or invincibility is up... or some other stupid gimmick that makes it impossible to bring a player down despite it being a 4v1 against said gimmick wielding, skill-less, hamfisted, spacebar mashing 14 year old min-maxer living in his mother's basement...
I think this fellow has really hit the nail on the head in terms of what is the only proper solution, as unpopular amongst the exploiters as it will be.
A Good Day to Die, Invincible, and Continuity should just be straight-up disabled in PVP. Whether you have them equipped or not, be it entering a Queue PVP match or entering a war zone like Ker'rat, the system just nullifies their effect.
PVP is competitive play. As such, digital doping should have no place there.
You bought the stuff via Buying/selling keys, winning a lockbox prize, or saving energy credits? Cool, you still have it. It still works in PVE. But PVP is a different scenario, different rules.
I paid to get Invincible, I have access to (but never use) Continuity, and I'd GLADLY have the ability to use them be taken away in PVP so it's actually a competitive game of skill rather than a game of who bought the most cheats.
I'm fine with Cryptic making money on selling power creep. But Invincible and Good Day to Die isn't Pay to Win, it's far worse: it's Pay to Never Lose.
What about the other side of Pay to Never Lose? The side where you can insta-kill anyone without them being able to do anything? I know people don't like it when they can't kill someone, and that's why they're complaining about invincible, continuity, etc. I know that's also why no one wants to talk about the fact that you can make builds that kill anyone in PvP despite how tough their build is in 2 seconds. Both issues need to be addressed: immunities and being able to do way to much damage in a short period of time.
You may be very pleased to play the current build on Tribble if you haven't. If you re-read all the build notes, and play these changes yourself, I think you'll find their changes are far more comprehensive and three-dimensional than most people are giving them credit for.
To address what you're referring to, they've reduced APA's intensity and duration. Plasma consoles don't do shield-ignoring damage any longer. Plasmonic Leach still drains against targets so it's still useful for science drain builds, but it doesn't give the user an insanely unreasonable power buff that makes it a must-have. Torpedo abilities have lockouts now so you can't double tap them coming out of cloak (I know I never liked having to cope with a double-tapped Torpedo Spread III from a Neutronic coming from a Romulan Enhanced Battle Cloak. If I wasn't a heavy resistance-leaning engineer with an 80k+ hull that would one-shot me straight to the mirror universe with the build on Holodeck).
If you're an engineer, they've addressed your profession abilities so they're not longer a joke. EPS will stack with and overlap other energy boosts, no other profession has that. Miracle Worker is worthy of it's name now, enormous heal with temporary secondary shields. Nadion Inversion gives an enormous weapon cost/power drain resistance. Engineering Fleet is a "Cat 2", if you will, resistance boost: not a diminishing return, but a straight up +40 to all resists. Pretty much every resistance ability of engineers, as well as resistance consoles, give as much boost to physical damage as well as kinetic so Temporal cheese has been reasonably checked, as well as Temporal abilities now do half damage versus players in PVP scenarios.
I'm actually totally satisfied that a lot of out-of-control stuff that non-engineers/bad engineers can't cope with in terms of damage resistance or heals have been taken care of, and engineers are no longer comically gimped compared to the other two professions. I think balance and parity has really largely been addressed with most of these changes. Those insta-kill vape alpha strikes that vaporize all but the best engineers are no longer a thing with the Tribble build. I think torpedos and Omega Kinetic Shearing needs looked at though, that's a valid complaint.
But, the WORST thing in PVP still remains to be fixed: the crazy cheese that Go Down Fighting can interact with and make someone unkillable no matter how much of a clueless soup sandwich they are. A Good Day To Die, Invincible, and Continuity need to be addressed, otherwise all these other otherwise excellent PVP changes are going to be all for naught. I think it's fair to say that if PVP was something that was on their mind in the past, these three nonsense abilities/traits would never have existed. They do, however, and they're the enormous elephants in the room that need to be addressed.
I think what was insta-killing me was a combination of entropic abilities, 100% shield penetrating torpedo spreads, and 100% shield penetrating torpedo high yields which were timed to hit me all at once. Even with 100k+ hull and high resistances, no one can survive that. Luckily they've significantly toned down entropic ability damage. Also, as you mentioned they've added a bunch of boosts to resistances in general, most notably with neutroniums upgraded to all damage resistance (includes physical now). That along with the changes to how torpedo abilities work (to prevent double taping) and the numerous other changes should make it much easier to survive in PvP (and hopefully without invincible).
I honestly am pleased with the changes that are on tribble. What's on holodeck is currently unplayable for me so I welcome the incoming change and am super excited for season 13.
Shouldn't HY get a boost of some sort too? Spread has become more common in PvP due to the fact it never misses and with some torps does shield penetrating damage. HY should do either more damage or the torpedoes should be faster than they are in spread to make it a viable option again
If you ask me it should apply to all torpedo launches for 10s, so your idea would be a grudging compromise. I don't... disagree with it though.
Can't help but notice that BFAW doesn't lock out other beam skills including itself for 5s when you fire it, though. How odd they'd feel the need to add that to torpedo skills.
BFAW isn't a spike damage ability, it actually needs you firing for its entire duration to reach its full potential. HYT and TS boost a single attack, so a single second is all it takes to deliver its full potential.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I have to agree with many, the change to GDF should NOT have been reverted. By making players choose between stacking invincible/continuity and using a cooldown, you had made a good and positive change to the game to allow more variation in builds, and play. The same with DO. Those two changes, have effectively made your 'rebalancing' unbalanced and imo a very poor move.
Though never quite perfect matches due to oft-differing suffixes (who has how many [dmg] vs other things) a Photon Torpedo launcher (the highest DPS type of torpedo) is roughly equivalent to an 85~90 energy Dual Heavy Cannon. At 100 energy the DHCs are better, but Dual Beams only overtake the PhoTorp at roughly 115~120 for the Advanced Lukari Piezotorp.
This is, however, uniquely against pure hull.
Against shielded targets, those same torpedoes fall to about 3/4 the output of a dual-beam-bank at 50 energy. 50. Not 100. 50. The Undiscovered Country torpedo battle this is not (those full hull blowthroughs was with shields up if you'll recall!)
As for beam overload, an HY volley (photorps) of same level will only marginally outmatch the overload over 10s IF, and that's a very big if, you have NO other beam weapons other than the single weapon that will get the main overload. By 3 arrays even the spike damage over 2s is higher than the torpedo's.
Experience requirements from levels 50-60 have been significantly lowered.
Because I tested it and it seems pretty much the same...
What testing was that?
New level 60 is at 1,007,420 xp. Which you get as a float up message first time login' a char in that isn't yet on the new value.
I leave it to you to figure out what the holodeck values are. Hint: You can check that with 'one' mouseclick.
On that note, the values in the level and rank indicator haven't been adjusted on tribble, they are still displaying holodeck values.
Comments
What about the other side of Pay to Never Lose? The side where you can insta-kill anyone without them being able to do anything? I know people don't like it when they can't kill someone, and that's why they're complaining about invincible, continuity, etc. I know that's also why no one wants to talk about the fact that you can make builds that kill anyone in PvP despite how tough their build is in 2 seconds. Both issues need to be addressed: immunities and being able to do way to much damage in a short period of time.
Because I tested it and it seems pretty much the same...
The big thing you need to keep in mind is that without a clear separation between pvp and pve, changes made for the sake of pvp will effect pve and vice versa. If they're not careful they'll run into a situation like World of Warcraft has had for a long time. The WoW devs refuse to separate the 2 aspects for whatever reason. To guarantee they're not going to see spillover they would need to code it something like this "Is target a player, if no then we do Z instead of X." It's more annoying that way but they'll have to do it that way.
The problem with Continuity and Invincible is that on the pve side of things they can be cheesed to do massive amounts of damage that should not be possible at all. By allowing the immunities like Continuity and Invincible to be stripped they take care of a big bit of power creep.
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Full throttle would give you defence. Cycling a drake build even outside of battle would boost not only your defence (meaning your opponent needs high accuracy to hit you thanks to EPtE1 andyour shields would be more resistant to damage thanks EPtS).
Cycling 2 copies of TT1 would mean that any player decloaking on you to fire HY torps and a BO2/3 to take down your facing shield would be unsuccessful because TT would redistribute the shields to block the torpedoes, while your shield resistance and defence are already high.
Once you're in a PvP environment it's better to always assume you're about to be attacked so always cycle buffs that give you defence, dmg and control resistance (A2ID, PH). That way it'll be extremely difficult to land a solid hit on you.
While capturing zones flying in a circle or figure of 8 is also useful because cloakers like to attack from front or behind, so they can make you panic into flying away from them.
That way they can do as little effort to aim their ship at you. So always fly towards the target to get behind them.
Now though the amount of cheese makes it impossible to defend. Something the balance changes must fix before the PvEvP queue is released.
https://media.giphy.com/media/BIuuwHRNKs15C/giphy.gif
Unless energy weapons are being cut to at MOST a quarter of what they do on holodeck so as to follow, say, the change to science powers, the science and projectile changes are no less than a declaration by the developer team that anybody not tactical with beams no longer deserves to play this game.
You may be very pleased to play the current build on Tribble if you haven't. If you re-read all the build notes, and play these changes yourself, I think you'll find their changes are far more comprehensive and three-dimensional than most people are giving them credit for.
To address what you're referring to, they've reduced APA's intensity and duration. Plasma consoles don't do shield-ignoring damage any longer. Plasmonic Leach still drains against targets so it's still useful for science drain builds, but it doesn't give the user an insanely unreasonable power buff that makes it a must-have. Torpedo abilities have lockouts now so you can't double tap them coming out of cloak (I know I never liked having to cope with a double-tapped Torpedo Spread III from a Neutronic coming from a Romulan Enhanced Battle Cloak. If I wasn't a heavy resistance-leaning engineer with an 80k+ hull that would one-shot me straight to the mirror universe with the build on Holodeck).
If you're an engineer, they've addressed your profession abilities so they're not longer a joke. EPS will stack with and overlap other energy boosts, no other profession has that. Miracle Worker is worthy of it's name now, enormous heal with temporary secondary shields. Nadion Inversion gives an enormous weapon cost/power drain resistance. Engineering Fleet is a "Cat 2", if you will, resistance boost: not a diminishing return, but a straight up +40 to all resists. Pretty much every resistance ability of engineers, as well as resistance consoles, give as much boost to physical damage as well as kinetic so Temporal cheese has been reasonably checked, as well as Temporal abilities now do half damage versus players in PVP scenarios.
I'm actually totally satisfied that a lot of out-of-control stuff that non-engineers/bad engineers can't cope with in terms of damage resistance or heals have been taken care of, and engineers are no longer comically gimped compared to the other two professions. I think balance and parity has really largely been addressed with most of these changes. Those insta-kill vape alpha strikes that vaporize all but the best engineers are no longer a thing with the Tribble build. I think torpedos and Omega Kinetic Shearing needs looked at though, that's a valid complaint.
But, the WORST thing in PVP still remains to be fixed: the crazy cheese that Go Down Fighting can interact with and make someone unkillable no matter how much of a clueless soup sandwich they are. A Good Day To Die, Invincible, and Continuity need to be addressed, otherwise all these other otherwise excellent PVP changes are going to be all for naught. I think it's fair to say that if PVP was something that was on their mind in the past, these three nonsense abilities/traits would never have existed. They do, however, and they're the enormous elephants in the room that need to be addressed.
One thing I would not mind seeing is a change to how cruiser commands function. The weapon command is quite often always active, but even with three cruises in a group the other commands are not up. It would be nice to see that if a cruiser with a active command comes in range of another cruiser using the same command, than one of them will switch to another command (except the tanking command that should be active by the player's choice.). Though even just abit of a buff to the other commands to make them more appealing, and interesting to be used would be nice, as right now the weapon command is one of the only commands that is seen as worth using.
Maybe Spartan should go into a PvP match incognito and see how much cheese happens when hull gets to zero.
That would be nice. =P
Thank you for listening! Such great news!! Science captains everywhere applaud you! Im loving all of the other changes too!
What does everybody else think?
Second, HELL NO I wasn't suggesting the already cotton candy victims waiting to happen NPC ships be made even easier so that after applying buff they're back up to their oh-so-intimidating DUCKS IN A SHOOTING GALLERY status. This was a suggestion for straight up making enemies mores distinctive and more dangerous. Because some tangible risk is the only thing that's going to shift the all-DPS-all-the-time meta and bring some value to control and survivability tools...
Though, given how ABSURD time-to-kill is in PvP, I'd also be inclined to halve ALL sources of damage in PvP. I'm sorry but the source material says that clashes between starships are NOT the stuff of twitch shooters. These ships of the line, not armed shuttles. Four to five hard salvos -- minimum -- so a bridge officer has long enough to say "shields at 50%, captain" and everyone can look grim for the camera.
I'm still hopping we see a re-curving of rank XIII and XIV weapons and the [Acc/Damg] mod. That was just rampant damage creep when it was introduced and that bird has come home to roost.
If you ask me it should apply to all torpedo launches for 10s, so your idea would be a grudging compromise. I don't... disagree with it though.
Can't help but notice that BFAW doesn't lock out other beam skills including itself for 5s when you fire it, though. How odd they'd feel the need to add that to torpedo skills.
I can agree that it could use some sort of boost, ranging from a speed boost in some cases to maybe a lingering shield pen debuff in others. Just an overall travel time buff would be nice for torpedoes either base-line, or based on the speed/throttle of your ship when fired. One idea I suggested in the thread earlier was to give High-yield a secondary effect applied to the torpedo it is used on based on the type of torpedo it is, while you could add a travel speed buff to the use of the ability, een as a lingering buff after the use of high-yield that affects all other launchers for duration. Though the idea of a buff that affects torpedoes after using high-yield would need to have a longer duration than beam overload since the cooldown between firing torpedoes unless you are using multiple launchers is quite a bit longer than beams.
I wonder if they could have torpedo high-yield function in more of a charge system, kinda like the Romulan experimental torpedo. Maybe have it give you three high-yield charges at rank one, while than giving you maybe between 6-9 charges at rank three. Though such a system would also allow high-yield would be able to work with multiple torpedoe launchers on your ship as the each could use the charges, and would make high-yield on a ship using multiple launchers would do much more spike damage compared to a ship with a single launcher that would do more constant damage over the duration of the ability.
As much as I like the idea, I can see something like that getting out of hand very quickly, especially if other torpedo bugs get fixed.
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.
I think fixing ACC issues w/ HY and some toprs, in combination w/ bug fixes AND fix the travel speed issue would alleviate the majority of torpedo problems, and, by extension, torps fired under HY.
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.
Testet in Kerrat agains Borg
and PVP 1vs1
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Advanced_Piezo-Polaron_Beam_Array/Info
I agree.
I think what was insta-killing me was a combination of entropic abilities, 100% shield penetrating torpedo spreads, and 100% shield penetrating torpedo high yields which were timed to hit me all at once. Even with 100k+ hull and high resistances, no one can survive that. Luckily they've significantly toned down entropic ability damage. Also, as you mentioned they've added a bunch of boosts to resistances in general, most notably with neutroniums upgraded to all damage resistance (includes physical now). That along with the changes to how torpedo abilities work (to prevent double taping) and the numerous other changes should make it much easier to survive in PvP (and hopefully without invincible).
I honestly am pleased with the changes that are on tribble. What's on holodeck is currently unplayable for me so I welcome the incoming change and am super excited for season 13.
This is, however, uniquely against pure hull.
Against shielded targets, those same torpedoes fall to about 3/4 the output of a dual-beam-bank at 50 energy. 50. Not 100. 50. The Undiscovered Country torpedo battle this is not (those full hull blowthroughs was with shields up if you'll recall!)
As for beam overload, an HY volley (photorps) of same level will only marginally outmatch the overload over 10s IF, and that's a very big if, you have NO other beam weapons other than the single weapon that will get the main overload. By 3 arrays even the spike damage over 2s is higher than the torpedo's.
What testing was that?
New level 60 is at 1,007,420 xp. Which you get as a float up message first time login' a char in that isn't yet on the new value.
I leave it to you to figure out what the holodeck values are. Hint: You can check that with 'one' mouseclick.
On that note, the values in the level and rank indicator haven't been adjusted on tribble, they are still displaying holodeck values.