Feedback pulse is completely ridiculous (PVE)

mciann

Let me just ask one question. Setting PvP aside for a moment (I don't participate unless forced to by endeavor, and I don't know anyone who does), should directed energy builds be viable in the endgame for Star Trek Online? Because they aren't. Here's why:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz32gIsXhPM

It's because if you have anything more than about 50k DPS in DEW firepower, NPC FBP cannot be countered. It cannot be detected. It cannot be stopped. It's aggravating. It's absurd. It's instantaneous, certain death when going up against opponents who have it. Unless of course, you're running torp builds or space magic, which I contend are some of the biggest drivers for the preponderance of those build types.

I can almost understand it when going up against something like the Borg Queen. Almost. In that case, it's predictable. You usually get a warning prompt. You usually don't have time to do anything about it, but at least you can understand what the hell happened when you go from full health to a spinning, dead wreck in less than a second. It's possible to use teamwork to ensure that someone has put down subnuke against the queen to suppress FBP. It's still unbalanced. There's nothing, to my knowledge, the queen can do to instantaneously kill players who happen to use torpedoes or EPG, so the reason for DEW builds to get special treatment here escapes me. But I can almost understand it as a predictable element at certain points of time in TFOs. What I cannot understand is random mobs of stupid little Terran science ships popping out of a dimensional portal and instantaneously wiping you out without warning or opportunity to counter the power in any way.

So what can be done about this?

1. "Just cease firing, jeez." It may surprise torp/sci captains to realize this, but DEW firing cycles are 5 seconds long. That's your window of opportunity to cease fire. Assuming, of course, you haven't selected auto-target and auto-fire so that your firing command doesn't clog up the input queue with the 84 other things you have to constantly click to keep up with ongoing power creep. In order for this to work, you have to be able to survive up to 5 seconds of FBP. Watch the video I linked above again. There was one second between the first cannon shots and DEATH. Are you telling me that's enough time to recognize that FBP is happening, react to it, and for the fickle gods of input queueing to recognize the command to cease fire? I'll give you a hint. It's not.
2. "But muh PvP" - Fine. Whatever. Do FBP in PvP all you want. Knock yourself out, whoever you are. What I would suggest is that 1 - the strength of NPC based FBP be looked at for balance reasons to allow for the meaningful employment of directed energy builds in PVE content or that 2 - it not be a feature of random little mobs of stupid Terran ships in TFOs. Make it special and rare - as with the queen (if you absolutely insist that being insta-killed is a vital and inescapable component of fun STO gameplay)

protoneous

When using a cannon build I try to be cognizant of which enemies use FBP and then, instead blazing away with scatter volley fully buffed, just tickle enemies in the group to see if one of them is going to use it. If FBP is present I switch to cannon rapid fire, apply buffs, and target the other ships.

davefenestrator

Sudden death? In an escort or raider I can see that, especially if you have a glass cannon build like using all the engineering console slots for universal consoles to buff damage.

In a cruiser and/or with some resists, I'd expect to survive at least one salvo against a FBP enemy.

mciann

davefenestrator wrote: »

Sudden death? In an escort or raider I can see that, especially if you have a glass cannon build like using all the engineering console slots for universal consoles to buff damage.

In a cruiser and/or with some resists, I'd expect to survive at least one salvo against a FBP enemy.

I ran my Styx tank (90% dmg in on ISE runs) in an HSA and turned broadside to the queen while she FBP-ed my FAW. I lasted 4 seconds. I'm not sure what you mean by "salvo", but 4 seconds is less than 1 firing cycle. I think it's reasonable to expect an elite tank to do better. My DPS cruisers on an ENG toon with tons of heals, hull image refractors, honored dead, etc. did just about as well as the ship shown in the video above.

mciann

Here's the results of an HSE run with the Styx tank mentioned above.



That's 205,383 damage *after* a hull resist of 63%. I have 13319 shielding and around 100k of hull. That is simply not survivable. Even if I were to do something insane like replace all my eng consoles with MK XV gold tetraburnium armor, it still wouldn't be enough.

protoneous

davefenestrator wrote: »

Sudden death? In an escort or raider I can see that, especially if you have a glass cannon build like using all the engineering console slots for universal consoles to buff damage.

In a cruiser and/or with some resists, I'd expect to survive at least one salvo against a FBP enemy.

I think the term "glass cannon" is a bit of a misnomer. There's really no need for a lot of engineering consoles when their only purpose is to prolong a slug-fest that is avoidable in the first place by building for more damage. Using a variety of traits and genetic enhancements, and having boff abilities like reverse shield polarity on global cool down provides more than enough survivability for PvE.

It's totally understandable that players dealing as much damage as the OP get a bit sore when a normal difficulty NPC ship makes their ship pop like a ripe piece of fruit. Engineering consoles won't help this.

palin55

(Trolling comments moderated out. - BMR)

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mciann

(Response to moderated comments removed. - BMR)

live8evil

I have to agree with the OP, since i wrote a similar post, around two years ago. It didn't lead anywhere because of people who downplayed the problem. Well it is a problem, for GOOD DEW builds. And it would not bother me, if other high end builds had some similar nemesis - but that's just not the case. High end torp and sci builds can lay back relaxed, while DEW get their ship blown up. Also even if other builds had a counter, what kind of balance is this? In a sea of WEED npc ships, there is this one special flower of a sci vessel, that can do 100x more damage, than anything else? Change NPC FBP it's BS.

pottsey5g

mciann wrote: »

Here's the results of an HSE run with the Styx tank mentioned above.



That's 205,383 damage *after* a hull resist of 63%. I have 13319 shielding and around 100k of hull. That is simply not survivable. Even if I were to do something insane like replace all my eng consoles with MK XV gold tetraburnium armor, it still wouldn't be enough.

It is plenty survivable and you don't need to do anything crazy like fit all eng consoles. I cannot even remember the last time I died from a FBP on Elite. If you want to play a glass canon with little defence don't blame everyone else when you die. There are any numbers of ways to survive. It simply is survivable.

leemwatson

They already reduced FBP's damage already. If you're still dying from it....that's your fault. I mean it's fine you can obliterate an armada in 10 seconds, but god help that an NPC has an ability to counter, for a limited time, your insane DPS. If you can't pack Hazard Emitters and Reverse Shield Polarity to counter FBP, because you want morepowa, that is not Cryptic's fault.

ussvaliant2

Got to be smart with NPC FBP and watch what abilities they activate because they did make it savage whilst nerfing player FBP to a mere tickle

baddmoonrizin

Let's keep it civil, folks. Thank you.

darkbladejk

Okay so I looked at that video in the original post and a couple of things stuck out to me like a sore thumb. First off, I didn't readily see a single defensive power on that defiant at all save for defensive rep based powers, it was all damage boosters. which if that's how dude wants to build more power to him, however that will come with some downsides. Problem I see with that defiant is it's over-specialized into dps to the point he's made his ship into a glass cannon. Another thing is dude also ran in there trying to scatter volley ships to death knowing full well one of them could end up throwing a FBP at him. That's his own fault for not having situational awareness and leaving his ship vulnerable.

To feedback pulse isn't difficult, it's just that alot of people don't want to slot the necessary abilities to do so or change their tactics. If you're going against feedback pulse, you can pop Reverse Shield Polarity which will maintain your shields while it's active, even against the Borg Queen's upgraded variant. Anything else you stack on top of RSP is gravy. the FBP can also be removed by SubNuc if you have a sci player to throw it. There are also consoles and set bonuses you can cheese to maintain your survival while the ability is active. I'm not going to list every one of them here as there are far too many. You can also stop firing. I know you don't want to hear that but not liking an option doesn't mean the option isn't there in this instance.

Also I pulled that parse you mentioned above and got a look at it. If you're in a Styx and your entire group is over 200k in HSE and you're rolling as the tank as you claim, what on earth are you doing that you're dying to FBP? I do have to ask a couple of questions. When you said you had 63% on that Styx, was that a buffed 63% or resting? As a tank you can get up to 75% static resists, and the highest I've ever seen anyone get was 89% buffed. If you're going into HSE as a tank, how are you not preparing for that ability knowing full well you're going to run into it? Why are you not using a RSP, bringing in additional survival powers, or having a sci player SubNuc it off if you have a sci player present?

I've been in HSE many times and never had an issue with the FBP unless I screwed something up. So what exactly are you doing and what are you running on that Styx that you're having those issues? For the record my hull and shields are generally around those 13k shields and 100k hull areas and I don't have issues. If you're not willing to bring in powers to counter said FBP or alter your tactics knowing what you're doing isn't working, you can't blame the FBP.

If you're willing to post your build I can look over it and see what we can do to better fortify against it. Otherwise to be perfectly blunt I don't see this as FBP being a problem, but user error and/or bad tactics.

legendarylycan

Change FBP to deal a fixed % of hull damage per reflected shot (not volley, SHOT), around 1/2/4%, scalable by EPG like...0.001% per point, for rank 1/2/3 - that way, it can't ever kill instantly (unless the user has a really high level of EPG, at which point someone making that investment should be allowed to have single-volley revenge kills) because it's impossible to fire that many shots in a single attack but it can still deal significant damage to the unaware...with the side benefit it'll actually become usable against NPCs instead of being the hot trash it currently is - even Aceton beam is a better skill against NPCs than any rank of FBP is.

There, problem solved.​​

live8evil

People stubbornly ignoring the fact, that DEW is not the only high end capable configuration, yet it's the only one with a really strong counter. And one of them is even a mod. What?

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mciann

Those of you who are pontificating about "no defensive capabilities".... did you read the part about soaking 90% of the damage in an ISE run? Do you understand what I'm talking about there?

"Just use reverse shield polarity" (paraphrased, summarized)

2 problems with this. Firstly, RSP has 33% uptime, and that's if your cooldown reduction is perfect and if you burned a commander boff slot to get it. While it may be reasonable to time this with the queen's FBP, it isn't reasonable to expect to be able to counter randomly appearing mobs in a Terran TFO with it. Secondly, FBP ignores 50% of your shields. (This is a popular tack-on to many powers, which makes shields useless in STO, but that's a different conversation) So even if you have timed it perfectly, you've extended your life from 1 second to 2, after which point you will again be a spinning dead wreck. With full shields. And that's assuming RSP Even works against FBP. I've tried it before and haven't noticed an effect. If someone wants to post a video and combat log surviving the queen's FBP with RSP (and something other than 8 pea shooters slotted), I'd love to have a look at it.

"gg scrub, lol" (paraphrased, summarized)

Ok, fine. Let's say this is a desirable and warranted gameplay effect in STO. Where is the power that insta kills you for using torps or EPG? I would have added "equivalent DPS" as a qualifier there, but the reality is that DEW builds can rarely compete with high end EPG or torp builds, which makes the trolling about hyper tuned DPS monsters getting what they deserve even more bizarre and unjustified.

I play DEW builds because that is what Star Trek is when I watch the source media. Lots of phasers and disruptors, the occasional cannon, and a torp here and there. I play DEW builds because I've never seen Janeway use Voyager's deflector dish to create a black hole in the middle of a mob of Kazon or Riker fire 4 different types of torpedoes at a target illuminated by a giant CF proc visual effect which then vanishes in a ball of isolytic tears. I play DEW builds because I shouldn't have to spend 100s of $$ on Ceaseless Momentum and/or Subspatial warheads to work around what is very clearly a glaring balance issue with DEW.

The only effective counter to FBP I have seen in my experience is for a science team member to save their subnuke for the final sequence in hive onslaught or borg disconnected and suppress FBP with it. The subnucleonic carrier wave intel boff ability can also work, but that is a crapshoot because it only affects one active buff. For reasons which I trust are obvious even to the "gg scrub" trolls, neither of these solutions is practical in Terran content.

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baddmoonrizin

If people don't stop sniping each other and making off topic comments, I will close this thread.

pottsey5g

mciann wrote: »

Those of you who are pontificating about "no defensive capabilities".... did you read the part about soaking 90% of the damage in an ISE run? Do you understand what I'm talking about there?

"Just use reverse shield polarity" (paraphrased, summarized)

2 problems with this. Firstly, RSP has 33% uptime, and that's if your cooldown reduction is perfect and if you burned a commander boff slot to get it. While it may be reasonable to time this with the queen's FBP, it isn't reasonable to expect to be able to counter randomly appearing mobs in a Terran TFO with it. Secondly, FBP ignores 50% of your shields. (This is a popular tack-on to many powers, which makes shields useless in STO, but that's a different conversation) So even if you have timed it perfectly, you've extended your life from 1 second to 2, after which point you will again be a spinning dead wreck. With full shields. And that's assuming RSP Even works against FBP. I've tried it before and haven't noticed an effect. If someone wants to post a video and combat log surviving the queen's FBP with RSP (and something other than 8 pea shooters slotted), I'd love to have a look at it.

"gg scrub, lol" (paraphrased, summarized)

Ok, fine. Let's say this is a desirable and warranted gameplay effect in STO. Where is the power that insta kills you for using torps or EPG? I would have added "equivalent DPS" as a qualifier there, but the reality is that DEW builds can rarely compete with high end EPG or torp builds, which makes the trolling about hyper tuned DPS monsters getting what they deserve even more bizarre and unjustified.

I play DEW builds because that is what Star Trek is when I watch the source media. Lots of phasers and disruptors, the occasional cannon, and a torp here and there. I play DEW builds because I've never seen Janeway use Voyager's deflector dish to create a black hole in the middle of a mob of Kazon or Riker fire 4 different types of torpedoes at a target illuminated by a giant CF proc visual effect which then vanishes in a ball of isolytic tears. I play DEW builds because I shouldn't have to spend 100s of $$ on Ceaseless Momentum and/or Subspatial warheads to work around what is very clearly a glaring balance issue with DEW.

The only effective counter to FBP I have seen in my experience is for a science team member to save their subnuke for the final sequence in hive onslaught or borg disconnected and suppress FBP with it. The subnucleonic carrier wave intel boff ability can also work, but that is a crapshoot because it only affects one active buff. For reasons which I trust are obvious even to the "gg scrub" trolls, neither of these solutions is practical in Terran content.

What I noticed was in the video the ship went into combat with aprox 15% shields with little hull and no temp hitpoint buffer and no to little defensive traits or powers, no consumable or fleet buffs and a zero shield tank. The video looks like a full on glass cannon that was already down on shields before FBP started. From what I can see a ship with that setup should have blown up like it did. The problem was with the ship build not with the NPC's.

• I didn’t see any defensive powers on the tray so I assume there was low resistance, no dodge, low or no defence.
• Dodge would have lowered the damage by 30% before resistance.
• Défense would have lowered the damage by up to 75% before resistance.
• Good Resistance would have lowered the left over damage some more. 60% is not good resistance for a tank.
• shield power was at a bare minimum making the shields weaker.
• Larger hitpoints and/or Temp hitpoints could have absorbed the entire volley.
• Continuity would have kept you alive as a hard auto counter.
• Invincibly would have kept you alive as a hard auto counter.
• RSP + EPtS both boosted to a 50% ish uptime should have kept you alive on a decent shield tank with 30k shields facing which is low for a shield tank but enough to survive.
• Piloting and situational awareness keeps us alive.
• Secondary shielding keeps us alive.

I get hit by 500k+ hits all the time and stay alive so it can be done.

mciann wrote: »

"If someone wants to post a video and combat log surviving the queen's FBP with RSP (and something other than 8 pea shooters slotted), I'd love to have a look at it. "

That's pretty easy to do just use Continuity or Invincible. You don't even need both. Either will do the job. That's a tiny change to your build and enough to keep you alive for these situations.

protoneous

mciann wrote: »

Those of you who are pontificating about "no defensive capabilities".... did you read the part about soaking 90% of the damage in an ISE run?

Pretty sure they're just going by what's seen in the video. Did you make that video or are you just using it as an example?

fleetcaptain5

protoneous wrote: »

When using a cannon build I try to be cognizant of which enemies use FBP and then, instead blazing away with scatter volley fully buffed, just tickle enemies in the group to see if one of them is going to use it. If FBP is present I switch to cannon rapid fire, apply buffs, and target the other ships.

This is a good tactic indeed.

darkbladejk

mciann wrote: »

Those of you who are pontificating about "no defensive capabilities".... did you read the part about soaking 90% of the damage in an ISE run? Do you understand what I'm talking about there?

Threat generation and the amount of attacks you take in is completely irrelevant here and has no bearing on the effectiveness of feedback pulse in the positive or negative. Also whoever that build belongs to had no defensives to speak of which DOES have an effect on your ability to stay alive. You could hypothetically have 500k hull and 500k shields, but if you have no way to keep those levels up and maintain them it's completely useless to you. As you lose health and shields, you need to be able to replace them. If you can't then it does you no good and you will eventually get rolled. This is true whether it's an energy build, torp build or what have you. If you go into a run with little to no defensives and get rolled, that's a you problem not a game problem.

mciann wrote: »

2 problems with this. Firstly, RSP has 33% uptime, and that's if your cooldown reduction is perfect and if you burned a commander boff slot to get it. While it may be reasonable to time this with the queen's FBP, it isn't reasonable to expect to be able to counter randomly appearing mobs in a Terran TFO with it. Secondly, FBP ignores 50% of your shields. (This is a popular tack-on to many powers, which makes shields useless in STO, but that's a different conversation) So even if you have timed it perfectly, you've extended your life from 1 second to 2, after which point you will again be a spinning dead wreck. With full shields. And that's assuming RSP Even works against FBP. I've tried it before and haven't noticed an effect. If someone wants to post a video and combat log surviving the queen's FBP with RSP (and something other than 8 pea shooters slotted), I'd love to have a look at it.

First off, what are you doing that you're hitting RSP that often anyways? It's meant to be an "oh ****" button, not to be spammed every time it's off cooldown like emergency to weapons. In this instance hitting RSP keeps your shields up and by your own logic takes 50% of the damage off you. The other 50% can be soaked up by temporary HP abilities and/or things like the Regenerative Integrity Field since you're firing weapons anyways, the Lukari Dorito console, and a host of other powers. And yes RSP does work against FBP.

Pottsey5g has also pointed out several other things you could do in order to get around the FBP and I see no need to repeat them. Now as for builds that can survive it, that I can provide. Do you want a Miracle Worker Constitution build, a t6 voth bastion, or Sagan? If you're not even willing to use other powers then you can't complain those powers don't work.

mciann wrote: »

Ok, fine. Let's say this is a desirable and warranted gameplay effect in STO. Where is the power that insta kills you for using torps or EPG? I would have added "equivalent DPS" as a qualifier there, but the reality is that DEW builds can rarely compete with high end EPG or torp builds, which makes the trolling about hyper tuned DPS monsters getting what they deserve even more bizarre and unjustified.

I play DEW builds because that is what Star Trek is when I watch the source media. Lots of phasers and disruptors, the occasional cannon, and a torp here and there. I play DEW builds because I've never seen Janeway use Voyager's deflector dish to create a black hole in the middle of a mob of Kazon or Riker fire 4 different types of torpedoes at a target illuminated by a giant CF proc visual effect which then vanishes in a ball of isolytic tears. I play DEW builds because I shouldn't have to spend 100s of $$ on Ceaseless Momentum and/or Subspatial warheads to work around what is very clearly a glaring balance issue with DEW.

The only effective counter to FBP I have seen in my experience is for a science team member to save their subnuke for the final sequence in hive onslaught or borg disconnected and suppress FBP with it. The subnucleonic carrier wave intel boff ability can also work, but that is a crapshoot because it only affects one active buff. For reasons which I trust are obvious even to the "gg scrub" trolls, neither of these solutions is practical in Terran content.

Again there are other powers that can counter FBP and reduce it's effects to zero or near zero. If you choose not to employ them, it isn't that the powers aren't working but you being stubborn and not wanting to use them. Generally EPG builds don't get hit as hard from FBP because what's doing their damage isn't weapons firing on the target, but anomalies and similar effects. energy builds are perfectly valid as is EPG, Torp and others, but again you will need some defensive powers to keep yourself alive.

You say you want folks to tell you how to survive FBP, yet when we do you throw it back in our faces and say "that doesn't work" even though you're not even willing to try it. So I'm going to ask the question, what do you really want here? Do you want solutions or do you just want complain about the power? If you want solutions we can help you with that. Offer still stands for you to post your build and as someone who specializes as a tank in game I can offer you some ideas to keep you alive.

fleetcaptain5

There are some powers that allow you to strip buffs from enemies. I don't remember which ones, but I believe there are few Doffs and Reputation powers that have this effect.

That should be an effective counter.

valoreah wrote: »

With that said, I have to agree that if you are choosing to build a high DPS ship with little to no defensive abilities, that is not the fault of the game.

Maybe it is though, considering that most of the content in the game promotes exactly that: DPS'ing as much as possible.

While I agree that players also need to use their situational awareness, it's also not surprising that players are taking issue with an ability that effectively renders your entire build useless (and even worse, kills yourself).

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jonsills

fleetcaptain5#1134 wrote: »

Maybe it is though, considering that most of the content in the game promotes exactly that: DPS'ing as much as possible.

No. The game doesn't promote DPS. Some players promote DPS. They even have an organization of sorts for it. Other hand, I've successfully played through the entire storyline on multiple characters without having to chase the DPS dragon. My builds would be considered "useless" by the DPS League (I know this because I've seen similar builds dismissed the same way), yet they are perfectly functional - and not instantly destroyed just because one enemy ship has Feedback Pulse.

davefenestrator

jonsills wrote: »

fleetcaptain5#1134 wrote: »

Maybe it is though, considering that most of the content in the game promotes exactly that: DPS'ing as much as possible.

No. The game doesn't promote DPS. Some players promote DPS. They even have an organization of sorts for it. Other hand, I've successfully played through the entire storyline on multiple characters without having to chase the DPS dragon. My builds would be considered "useless" by the DPS League (I know this because I've seen similar builds dismissed the same way), yet they are perfectly functional - and not instantly destroyed just because one enemy ship has Feedback Pulse.

Agreed. I have 1 character out of ~20 where I've decided to work specifically on space magic DPS for a change of pace, the rest just follow a theme like "Science alien in Tholian ships", "TOS engineer in a TOS Connie", "Klingon Fek'Ihri ship commander with all the flame traits and consoles" etc.

Most players don't consider ISE or DPS the real endgame, it's Space Barbie.

protoneous

Even very casual players have the ability to blow themselves up versus an enemy using feedback pulse but they'd probably have to use a couple of bridge officer abilities for it to happen.

pottsey5g

jonsills wrote: »

fleetcaptain5#1134 wrote: »

Maybe it is though, considering that most of the content in the game promotes exactly that: DPS'ing as much as possible.

No. The game doesn't promote DPS. Some players promote DPS. They even have an organization of sorts for it. Other hand, I've successfully played through the entire storyline on multiple characters without having to chase the DPS dragon. My builds would be considered "useless" by the DPS League (I know this because I've seen similar builds dismissed the same way), yet they are perfectly functional - and not instantly destroyed just because one enemy ship has Feedback Pulse.

Please can we try to avoid this type of negative language. The DPS League does not dismiss functional builds as "useless". The DPS League is there to help people play how they want to play. Every single build type is accepted and welcomed in the DPS League without being dismissed. There are guides on every core type of play style even niche builds as everything is accepted if it works. As with any large group of people there are people who having a bad day but they don't represent the League as a whole. The League is about helping each other and player organization which in turn creates many hours of "extra" content and playtime.

As for the game promoting DPS it does at Elite difficulty, but arguably not so much at normal level difficulty. Many Elite TFOs are built around DPS and promote DPS. There is a minimum level of DPS required to play a lot of the content and the games pushes players to reach those DPS goals or fail the TFO.