I was so proud of you all. So this thread took a turn after I posted in it originally, and a lot of folks got heated. I'm going to leave it up for now, but if you're going to continue this debate please remember:
1) The folks on the other side of the conversation are also people
2) You may never *actually* convince the other person that you're right and they're wrong.
Consider taking a deep breath and walking away if it seems like nothing is being accomplished. The seratonin hit of an internet argument is addictive, believe me. When you feel yourself wanting to jump back in because Someone Is Wrong on the Internet, consider how much better of a time you'd have not doing that. Thanks, all.
I disabled a tac cube's shield (the one at the start of Khitomer Vortex) with the Carrier wave shield hacking trait. Fired one high yield of the new torpedo. The tac cube was blown to pieces, I didn't have to do anything else.
It was only on normal difficulty, but still. 'Too much DPS' is never enough, it seems.
It's going to be the 32nd ship commanded by Adm. Tovan Khev, with his bridge crew - Tovan Khev2, Tovan Khev3, Rinna Khev, and the Reman engineer Rinna NotKhev.
Damn... Admiral Tovan been mass producing his clones like crazy, be careful, if you make too many, one might get the crazy idea that they might be the Original Tovan, might even turn into a Clone Saga.
It seems both sides have a point, However the solutions that have been suggested so far, tend to cause problems for players on either side of the fence, is there a way to compromise?
Also I've been very civil by rarely stepping in, when you get too involved in a topic, it usually tends to get heated,
I've been trying to offer viable solutions, some of them weren't as well thought out as I'd liked,
It's going to be the 32nd ship commanded by Adm. Tovan Khev, with his bridge crew - Tovan Khev2, Tovan Khev3, Rinna Khev, and the Reman engineer Rinna NotKhev.
Damn... Admiral Tovan been mass producing his clones like crazy, be careful, if you make too many, one might get the crazy idea that they might be the Original Tovan, might even turn into a Clone Saga.
He's been gathering Khevs from across the multiverse, as (obviously) there's some sort of dimensional nexus in the Azure Nebula. Star Trek: Into the Tovan-Verse!
It's going to be the 32nd ship commanded by Adm. Tovan Khev, with his bridge crew - Tovan Khev2, Tovan Khev3, Rinna Khev, and the Reman engineer Rinna NotKhev.
Damn... Admiral Tovan been mass producing his clones like crazy, be careful, if you make too many, one might get the crazy idea that they might be the Original Tovan, might even turn into a Clone Saga.
He's been gathering Khevs from across the multiverse, as (obviously) there's some sort of dimensional nexus in the Azure Nebula. Star Trek: Into the Tovan-Verse!
Oi! All this Khevetching!
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
[*] Count to ten before starting your full impulse mad rush zerg to obliterate everything in sight
[*] Forego using keybinds
[*] Do not click on Deuterium Surplus
[*] If you see another teammate engaged a target, move on to another target and let them handle it
[/list]
These are just a few very, very, very simple things you can do in your uber DPS ship without needing to change your loadout or any gear at all.
Yes, yes and Yes. there is nothing more frustrating than engaging something and someone swooping in and one-shotting.
you can even take that to points. I go into a voth map, I go to the nearest artillery point. if no one is there, I go for it. if there is, I go to the nearest omega generator, then relay. the point being, I don't poo in another person's sandbox, I don't want to be "that guy" who is messing with the kill X voth endeavor for another player. ditto space an nimbus. in fact, i ALWAYS try to switch to the lowest population map
The respect I would request in return is that you keep your ultra-DPS builds in Advanced and Elite, where you designed them, not down here in my Normal slum. Apparently, however, this is too much to ask.
Yes it is to much to ask for the reasons I gave you before. One of which is its impossible to switch off many of the DPS boosts once they have been unlocked. Even if I went back to my old normal loadout from 10 years ago I would be doing something like triple the DPS I did back when it was created. There is nothing I can do about that.
Not just you. A few years ago, I would struggle in a borg red alert to kill a single cube. now I can kill one of the paired cubes in about a minute, maybe less. back then I would have people bail out when the command ship showed up, and I had the opportunity the engage it solo. I was able to fight it to a draw, until the timer ran out. now, I'm pretty certain I could take it down solo in a few minutes.
The respect I would request in return is that you keep your ultra-DPS builds in Advanced and Elite, where you designed them, not down here in my Normal slum. Apparently, however, this is too much to ask.
Yes it is to much to ask for the reasons I gave you before. One of which is its impossible to switch off many of the DPS boosts once they have been unlocked. Even if I went back to my old normal loadout from 10 years ago I would be doing something like triple the DPS I did back when it was created. There is nothing I can do about that.
Not just you. A few years ago, I would struggle in a borg red alert to kill a single cube. now I can kill one of the paired cubes in about a minute, maybe less. back then I would have people bail out when the command ship showed up, and I had the opportunity the engage it solo. I was able to fight it to a draw, until the timer ran out. now, I'm pretty certain I could take it down solo in a few minutes.
Not just you. Everyone. Just did a Borg RA again, and killed a Cube group is less than 3 seconds. The Borg used to be scary, now they're a joke. At least in the RA (which I presume is set to Normal level).
But regret to say, that's not necessarily you having gotten endlessly better; nor me, for that matter. It was a series of Mark increases, followed by a steep power creep. The 'diamond' ship took less than 5 seconds (in the team). That is why I've been avoiding the Borg RA for the last few years: it's too easy. At least the Tholian ships offer some sort of resistence.
It seems both sides have a point, However the solutions that have been suggested so far, tend to cause problems for players on either side of the fence, is there a way to compromise?
I think the only solution both sides agree on that is only a part solution is to bring back Elite TFO's for events. Either fully back or a limited Elite event for Private groups only. Personally I think the devs are worrying about the wrong thing and forcing us into normal is not only causing more harm then allowing Elite but many players that would enjoy the event are not and finding it ruined by being forced into normal.
Also give us Elite Random TFO's. Its not that different from Advanced.
It seems both sides have a point, However the solutions that have been suggested so far, tend to cause problems for players on either side of the fence, is there a way to compromise?
I think the only solution both sides agree on that is only a part solution is to bring back Elite TFO's for events. Either fully back or a limited Elite event for Private groups only.
Personally, I don't see why they simply can't make Elite versions for all TFO's.
Besides, way I remember it, you actually could choose between doing the event, via the event button, or pick, say, the regular Advanced queue (or Elite, in your case), and still get the event reward. Never understood why they changed that.
Also give us Elite Random TFO's. Its not that different from Advanced.
The less Elite TFO's are available, the more unreasonable it becomes to request that Elite players stay in their own lane, so to speak. So, yeah, Cryptic, do it!
I don't think there will ever be a simple answer to the issues this thread raises.
But here's a few things they could do to get "DPS players" to head over towards harder content.
Allow ALL queues to be run privately without a full team at any difficulty. They unlocked quite a few queues last year. I've been in plenty of situations where my team has 2-4 on and are more than capable of doing a TFO privately, but we "must" bring in a 5th to start it up. There are workarounds to this, but just opening it up would be nice for players like myself that don't always want a full team to do some content.
Clone Infected Space on all difficulties and create a private-only version that has no completion rewards and has no cooldown. People chasing DPS records will spam this when trying to do their runs and gain no dil/marks from it.
Allow the Advanced/Elite versions of TFOs to qualify for events involving those queues.
Increase the rewards for Elite content to incentivize more players to play that content. The R&D materials were a "draw" way back, but have become virtually worthless to most veteran players.
For buffing Elite rewards, is many different ways they could go there. Imagine if there were random elites and you had a chance at lobi from the Random Elite reward boxes, or Cryptic had a rolling event that picked a random Elite queue each week, and gave you lobi for completing it. Would get people to improve their skills and build, and boost engagement metrics with that content.
I will admit, I have not tried parsing things. I used to have a parser on my old PC, but in all honesty, I was never quite sure how to read its results. As a result, all I can tell you is what I SEE in the game. When I see a guy shoot an Iconian Dreadnought in Gateway to Gre'thor, and destroy it in less time than it takes for my Heavy Photon attack to animate... I have to assume his dps is through the roof. That this content is so trivial, when it's SUPPOSED to be the hardest group enemy possible, suggests a problem with the game's balance.
Answering a couple points of your post since you responded to me specifically. I would suggest downloading a parser at some point and leaving a few combat logs running in certain TFOs. There's far more going on that people don't see than they realize. Interactions between buffs, debuffs, abilities comboing together and the like. Sometimes what you think you're seeing isn't really what you're seeing at all. There have been times when I've been playing on certain maps and eyeballing numbers for my builds that I've been seeing and thought "wow this is really great" only to find out once I parsed it that it was junk for what I was trying to do.
My point about changing my build is that I'm more or less REQUIRED to do so. More modern content is almost unplayable for me, even though my ship is perfectly capable of handling all the older content. If I want to fight Voth ships, even on normal, I'm pretty well out of luck, because they've all been so overtuned in order to challenge people with out of control dps. If I make my ship capable of that level of dps, I trivialize the rest of the game. It leaves me in limbo.
What is your issue with the voth? If it's the orange shield reflecting damage back at you, fly to the other side of the ship as their shields are only good on one side of their ship. Nuking their little repair ships is sometimes required to finish them off as well.
Because I have no numbers to offer, I can't say what I would suggest for a maximum DPS. All I can say is that it should get harder and harder to increase damage, the more you do so. For example, in the old City of Heroes games, you could add enhancements to your powers to increase damage. The first enhancement had full effect. The next one had less effect, and the third had even less than that. The more enhancements you added to the power, the less effect they would have. Diminishing returns. I honestly don't know if STO has anything like that going on, but if they don't it might help the problem.
I think the percentages SHOULD change. If that mob has 1m health, it shouldn't be possible for players to get 1m dps... because then they're oneshotting things. If "normal" dps is 10k, then increasing beyond that should become harder and harder, so that no one would ever approach 1m dps. They would still invest as much effort in getting more dps, but the effect of that effort would diminish, the more dps they added. STO is very complex, though, so coming up with a system to do this would be daunting, indeed.
So to answer the bit regarding diminishing returns, yes they do exist in STO in some instances. Damage resists is the prime example. For example, you can only get up to 75% resists without buffs and even then you will never outright hit 100% resistances. I can spike up to 88%, maybe 89% in an emergency situation for a few seconds, but I can never maintain that number. To observe this diminishing return look no further than armor consoles as there is a reason you don't want to stack them. The first one typically will give you face value. If it says you get 25 additional resist, you get that much resist. The second console depending on where you're at gives 50% face value, then 25% for the third, 10% for the fourth, and depending on how close you are to the cap the fifth one will get you either 5% face value or zero. If it gives zero benefit you may as well be running with a blank console space. Assuming one wanted to solve the issue, this isn't going to eliminate it but would just be a band-aid solution and by placing artificial caps that disincentivize any improvement beyond the diminishing return start point. For a time it may deter certain things, but it will only be temporary. There is already a certain point of DPS that gets harder and harder to get past once you get there as it relies on alot of outside factors coming into play perfectly.
Regarding your percentage and 1m DPS examples, it takes quite a bit to even get to 1m DPS and is something the vast majority of the playerbase will never see, myself included, either because of not wanting to go there, or inability to get there for one reason or another.
If you want the percentages to change, they still would need to be defined. To break down your numbers as it sits right now, if you have a 1m HP foe you're going up against and your DPS is 10k per your example, it would take 100 seconds or just over 1.5 minutes to down assuming they maintained at 10k. Now assuming said person decided to save their powers and try to burst the target down, let's assume per previous example I used that person is capable of spiking their damage by about 3x their normal for a few seconds and assume for 10 seconds they can get to 30k DPS. During that 10 seconds they will burn off 300k health of the foe leaving 700k remaining. As DPS starts to taper off from the burst they will have a few seconds where they're not at the 30k but not at the 10k either, so say 5 seconds of being at 20k, which will remove another 100k health leaving 600k remaining. At 10k DPS this will take them 60 seconds to down the foe. Due to saving their powers for an initial burst they've been able to shave around 25 seconds off their time required to down that foe (initial 15 seconds of burst plus 60 seconds to finish off. 100-75=25). Keep in mind these numbers are for one single player where as full TFO teams consist of 5 people.
If we do the numbers for 5 people, that's a combined DPS of 50k assuming each person is doing the 10k. It would take that team 20 seconds to down that foe who has 1m HP. Assuming that team of 5 did as our first example and spiked their damage up to 30k for 10 seconds, that becomes a combined DPS of 150k. Now by saving their powers for a coordinated team burst, they can down that foe in 7 seconds (6.6 to be exact) and still have 3 seconds of burst left over. If someone doesn't have a parser to observe the actual numbers at play, it can give the illusion that there is an uber DPS in the run when what folks are seeing is the combined might of their team.
Now assuming you wanted the fight to last longer than 7 seconds, there's 3 ways you can approach it. One, outright nerf the DPS being applied. Two, increase the HP of the mob thus the time needed to kill it. Three, add mechanics that need to be adhered to that prevent constant bombardment. The first option would go over like a lead balloon as it would trash investments made into builds and should only be a last resort. The second option would work, but would also negatively effect those not at the 10k threshold as well. The third effects everyone equally without destroying investment in higher DPS builds. The third option is part of why in many games you will have adds come out that have to be dealt with before returning to the boss itself. This extends the fight out somewhat. Adding in additional mechanics on top of adds also extends the fight further.
To close this out, I will point to an example of balance from Space Engineers that I had to take into account when developing my armor system as part of my era mod. I hated how easily it was to break the large grid heavy armor over there along with simultaneously how weak certain weapons were on the large and small grids, so I created my own stuff. For the armor I had to figure out how durable I wanted it to be. I could've said I wanted it to be balanced around a ship carrying 10 weapons. But then I would've had certain people saying "why didn't you balance it around 5 weapons" and some people saying "why didn't you balance it around 15" and the like. The solution was to balance the armor around what a single weapon of each type can do on their own. In this instance I balanced the armor around being able to take 7 hits from a single large grid railgun before it breaks, which then gave me numbers to work with for the other weapons. From there it was shipped off to the players. If folks wanted to get through the armor faster, they could use more weapons. If they wanted it to last longer, they could stack the armor and/or have repair systems to patch holes as they crop up or repair it before it breaks.
Likewise the only way I could ever see any kind of balance the way some people are indicating they want is for Cryptic to sit down and decide how long they want each mob to be able to withstand damage from a single person, then multiply the stats required by 5 to account for a full team. Which makes it harder for the individual teammates to compete if something goes wrong.
"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
I don't think there will ever be a simple answer to the issues this thread raises.
But here's a few things they could do to get "DPS players" to head over towards harder content.
Allow ALL queues to be run privately without a full team at any difficulty. They unlocked quite a few queues last year. I've been in plenty of situations where my team has 2-4 on and are more than capable of doing a TFO privately, but we "must" bring in a 5th to start it up. There are workarounds to this, but just opening it up would be nice for players like myself that don't always want a full team to do some content.
Clone Infected Space on all difficulties and create a private-only version that has no completion rewards and has no cooldown. People chasing DPS records will spam this when trying to do their runs and gain no dil/marks from it.
Allow the Advanced/Elite versions of TFOs to qualify for events involving those queues.
Increase the rewards for Elite content to incentivize more players to play that content. The R&D materials were a "draw" way back, but have become virtually worthless to most veteran players.
For buffing Elite rewards, is many different ways they could go there. Imagine if there were random elites and you had a chance at lobi from the Random Elite reward boxes, or Cryptic had a rolling event that picked a random Elite queue each week, and gave you lobi for completing it. Would get people to improve their skills and build, and boost engagement metrics with that content.
I would love these ideas to come into fruition honestly. Especially the cloned map with no cooldown. Makes for possible bug test map as well.
"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
For example, in the old City of Heroes games, you could add enhancements to your powers to increase damage. The first enhancement had full effect. The next one had less effect, and the third had even less than that. The more enhancements you added to the power, the less effect they would have. Diminishing returns. I honestly don't know if STO has anything like that going on, but if they don't it might help the problem.
As I recall, STO does have a system of diminishing returns. I believe there are specific caps on how much damage resistance you can hit, similar to CoH where you had caps on overall defense and resistance. I do not know if the same applies to tactical consoles here that boost damage, although I assume there is.
There is kind of, but actually when you do the math on resistances, it's actually semi-linear with armor. The game just throws you off by showing the % damage removed to resistances, but NOT what that really does for you.
Every point of armor increases your overall durability by 1% over whatever your hull is. The "Diminishing returns" amounts to that. At 100 armor you have 50% damage resistance, so your taking half damage so your lifespan is doubled. At 200 armor you have only 66% damage resistance, but now your at triple survivability. At 300 armor your at the cap for normal armor of 75% damage resistance. Beyond that, you need bonus armor points to push that further.
I think the reason this system is done this way(which is taken from champions online) is due in part to how City of heroes damage resistances worked. When you look at damage resistance in a LINEAR sense of flat % damage reduction, every single % means more than the last. At 10% damage reduction your taking 90%. At 20% of course, your taking 80 so, your only marginally tougher right? Proportionally? No.
When you compare the 80% damage taken to 90% damage taken, your taking in reality 88% of the damage someone with 90% would have taken in comparison. Not a lot now, but already your taking 12% less damage than someone with 90% resistance.
Lets up the numbers further. 50% as the base, 60% as the improved. Your looking at 83% damage taken with 60% compared to the 50%, still not huge, but it's gonna get bigger much, much more quickly now.
60 to 70 you've removed 25% of the damage with the increase.
70 to 80 removes 33%
80 to 90 removes 50%
In short, every % actually has more effect than the last. It's not noticable at first but it grows exponentially past the 50% mark.
This happened very easily in city of heroes. Simply, every single % increase was much more powerful than the last. This happened in elder scrolls oblivion to. And happens in skyrim. So many games avoid linear resistance values in favor of attack rating vs defense rating systems.
Generally, armor consoles still generally aren't stacked, I think the only armor consoles I equip are the ones from the disco rep, and typically only 1 of each of the energy and kinetic resists. Then I go for resistances from traits. Traits actually give a LOT of resistances. Consequently it's actually very easy to hit 40-50% without much investment in armor through consoles.
Thinking of ideas from lots of games for, dunno how long now.
Thank you at @drunkflux#5679 . Appreciate the details and so glad we have players like you around to share this kind of knowledge. Do the Tactical consoles that increase weapon damage work along a similar fashion here?
There are no diminishing returns as such or cap for damage. The oversimplified way to look at armour is anything that says armour resistance has a cap of 75% and diminishing returns. Anything that says bonus armour has no cap and no diminishing returns. Hence 10 bonus armour resistance is massively better then 10 armour resistance. Same goes for shields.
Its similar for damage, while there is no cap or diminishing returns there are different types of damage bonus. Like armour a 30% bonus damage buff is massively better then a 30% damage buff.
There is a 3rd type of buff which is sort of half way between Cat2 and Cat1 it seems as though if something is plus skill it adds all the skill together then applies that buff once. Lets say we have something that effectively adds enough skill for 5% resistance per item. 3 items of +skill that would add together to 15%. Then the 15% resistance is applied. That would give you a bigger buff then applying a 5%, then applying a 5% and then finally applying a last 5%. The full formula is rather complicated and messy. 90% of the time just stick to thinking about Cat1 and Cat 2 or look for the word bonus. The reason I bring this up is Xenotech Engineering Consoles that add to shield hardness skill which turns into shield Resistance. That makes Xenotech Engineering Consoles really great for maxing out both armour and shield resistance together.
I think there are a handful a weird things that are neither Cat2 or Cat1. Its not always as simple as cat2 is better a theoretical 500% Cat1 bonus might depending on the rest of the build beat a 1% bonus damage cat 2. Generally speaking go Cat2 buffs over Cat1 boosts for damage, armour and shields.
EDIT: As far as I am aware none of this about bonus damage/resitance is explained in game. But what really baffles me with resistance being a core mechanic why is there nothing about shield resistance in game under the ship profile or ground profile. Not just nothing about how it works with the different boosts but we have no UI showing us the current shield resistance figure. I would expect under shield regen, shield cap there to be a shield resistance the same an amour. Is there some technical reason why this hasn't been done as it seems like a major oversight.
The lack of info makes using shields really hard as you have to get a spreadsheet out or deep dive into combat logs to try to work out your shield resistance. How can players use and build an effective shield tank when they cannot even see the resistance stats? This could be one of the many reasons players do not use shields much compared to armour.
To slightly add to what Potsey said above as I didn't see it mentioned, or missed it if he did. Category 1 buffs only your base values where as Category 2 buffs everything so to speak.
If for example you take 2 generic tactical consoles, one applying a +30% Phaser Damage buff, and another applying a +30% Bonus Phaser Damage buff, the one giving the bonus phaser will be the superior buff because category 1 buffs only effect your base values.
Picture, you have a phaser beam array doing 1000 points of damage at its base to keep the numbers simple.
If you apply the category 1 bonus to it, then you would pick up an additional 300 damage for 1300 as the new value. If you applied a second copy of the category 1 bonus, you would only get an additional 300 damage vs 390 points you might expect for stacking the damage bonuses. Assuming you have 5 tactical consoles on a ship, this would mean your total value for 5 category one consoles would be 2500 as the new value for that phaser's damage.
Now if you had a single copy of the cat 2 bonus, that would give you 300 points for the first copy of the bonus, which would give you 300 points. So assuming only the tactical consoles in play, they would be equal in that instance. However if you had 2 copies of the +30% bonus phaser damage, your value would be 1690 damage vs the 1600. Now if you stacked 5 copies of the cat 2, your final value would be 3713 phaser damage (3712.83 to be exact).
Essentially a cat1 looks at your base values and adds whatever percentage of the base value its assigned. A cat2 just looks at where you're at and says "here have x percentage more". Generally cat2 will be superior in most cases. However depending on the size of the cat2 buff, there can be times where a cat1 is actually superior. There are also times when you can become so loaded down with cat2 buffs that mixing in some cat1 to increase your base values will actually be more beneficial, but that gets into some very murky math that is more of a pain than anything else.
"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
I usually play advanced myself, that nice happy medium.
While it is annoying that advanced and elite are blocked for event queues, it's something I can live with.
Normal is no challenge at all, it's quite boring really and stupidly easy.
Now I do hold back on damage in event queues by not using half my abilities as to give others a fair chance.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
What is your issue with the voth? If it's the orange shield reflecting damage back at you, fly to the other side of the ship as their shields are only good on one side of their ship. Nuking their little repair ships is sometimes required to finish them off as well.
Sorry, I misspoke (mistyped?). I meant the Tzenkethi. A single frigate can take me AGES to kill, and I might never be able to kill a cruiser (which also wouldn't be able to kill me). Battleships are completely off the table, because even on normal, they'll nearly oneshot me with one of those orange circle volley things (that will wipe out any shield I have and do around 3/4 of my total hull in damage. Combine that with the usual gang of support ships, and they're just not possible to fight.
I just did Gravity Kills again tonight (GOD, how I utterly LOATHE that mission), and my phasers (which routinely hit things for around 1200 damage), were doing between 1- 3 damage. That's right, single digits... and that's against the FRIGATES.
They've been so overtuned that my ship, with fairly decent gear and skills, is entirely unable to affect them. Meanwhile, in the same mission, there was a guy flying around at a billion miles per hour, spamming a host of gigantic purple clouds, yellow clouds, giant blue eyeball things, gigantic red circle things, massive lightning storms and so forth, that obliterated whole spawns of these guys (ie. 4 - 5 or so battleships, plus the other 30 or so ships around them) in 4-5 seconds.
I was actually glad he was there, the rest of us would NEVER have finished the mission... and THAT is the problem with overtuning enemies to accommodate inappropriate levels of dps. I would expect to be in this situation playing Elite... perhaps even Advanced... but NORMAL?
Tzenkethi in Gravity Kills mutually reinforce each other. Hence, they need to be scattered first. DOC leaps to mind.* People rarely come prepared for it, though, and just pew-pew.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Love it when people do that, I always found that makes them easier to deal with. Its when people scatter them I get frustrated as it makes them harder to deal with for my builds. In fact scatter anything is a pain, nothing worse then being in a TFO and someone hits tractor beam repulsons and scatters all the NPC is every which direction as I fly big slow ships like Dreadnought Carriers.
Love it when people do that, I always found that makes them easier to deal with. Its when people scatter them I get frustrated as it makes them harder to deal with for my builds. In fact scatter anything is a pain, nothing worse then being in a TFO and someone hits tractor beam repulsons and scatters all the NPC is every which direction as I fly big slow ships like Dreadnought Carriers.
On a regular map, scattering is indeed annoying. In Gravity Kills, however, you simply need to prevent them from healing each other. Maybe nor for an Elite player like you, but as many ppl can tell you, regular players can't kill em fast enough without doing it 'properly.' The fact that Elite players can break thru the game mechanic regardlesss, only show that Advanced content was not made for them.
There is 1 exception, which is the aforementioned Delayed Overload Cascade. With a heftily EPG-supported GW 3, followed by a timely DOC 3, the blast will be so brutal, you can often overcome the scatter-only tactic.
I'm pretty sure the Tzenkethi boost their damage while close to each other so if you don't have the damage to melt them in seconds, grouping them up is a Bad idea with a capital "b".
Using Gravity Well in Gravity Kills can be beneficial IF you have crossed the damage threshold to overcome their increased healing. Recently i noticed my better set up characters can pull it off with ease, but my less developed characters struggle with bunched up Tzenketti.
Overall it may be for the best to observe a bit before deciding if the random team is mature enough to make use of GW when facing Tzenketti.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Love it when people do that, I always found that makes them easier to deal with. Its when people scatter them I get frustrated as it makes them harder to deal with for my builds. In fact scatter anything is a pain, nothing worse then being in a TFO and someone hits tractor beam repulsons and scatters all the NPC is every which direction as I fly big slow ships like Dreadnought Carriers.
On a regular map, scattering is indeed annoying. In Gravity Kills, however, you simply need to prevent them from healing each other. Maybe nor for an Elite player like you, but as many ppl can tell you, regular players can't kill em fast enough without doing it 'properly.' The fact that Elite players can break thru the game mechanic regardlesss, only show that Advanced content was not made for them.
There is 1 exception, which is the aforementioned Delayed Overload Cascade. With a heftily EPG-supported GW 3, followed by a timely DOC 3, the blast will be so brutal, you can often overcome the scatter-only tactic.
Not sure spreading them out is "properly" its just a different way. My build is AoE mines and hangar pets so if they are grouped up my damage multiples up to match the extra healing while if they are spread about my damage plummets. In can even be the other way around where I can defeat them grouped up but spread them around and make it massively harder and will struggle a lot more. Its not breaking a mechanic to do it that way and kill them grouped up.
Its no different then a Sci ship going in doing an AoE disable to stop the group healing them killing them. Spreading them around is one method but its not the "proper" way to deal with them, it just a one of many valid methods.
Thanks to all for the math behind it all. I'm baffled by the notion that defenses would have diminishing returns and damage WOULDN'T, but clearly it's more complicated than just that statement.
Oh, and I downloaded a parser, but I have no idea how to use it. There's no instructions, installation or otherwise. Combat Log Reader, if anyone can tell me what to do with it.
I'm glad you specified it was the Tzenkethi and not the Voth.
Damage by virtue of it's nature in game essentially forces a decent balance between cat1 buffs, cat 2 buffs, as well as crit chance and severity for alot of builds. If you don't have enough cat 1 buffs, then your base values will be underwhelming. Not enough cat 2 then overall values underwhelming. If you have a ton of chance but no severity then you'll crit more often sure, but it won't amount to much. If you have a ton of severity but no chance, you'll have some nasty hits when you crit but you won't be critting much. Damage potential is also heavily influenced by what debuffs are present on targets you're after. Debuffing can push resistances down really far and potentially into the negative in a few instances depending on how much is present. How aggressively you pilot, such as how often you activate powers against NPCs can also have an impact. Such as if you rarely touch your powers vs people who keep them on cooldown.
There can also be side effects to building for certain bits of damage or tank setups as well. Due to how my tank is setup, I went for a balance between tank and DPS for what I like to do. I prefer to be in the middle of that spectrum vs too far to one side or the other. On the better runs I can sustain 150k DPS with the tank build. Now for the side effect, although I've not been going for it, I have around 270-325 control expertise on the build from some of the consoles and traits I've used for other effects. While it didn't make my gravity well quite as strong as dedicated science builds, it did give me a gravity well pull that's stronger than alot of other non-sci builds.
In order to use the parser you need a combat log for it to read. To start a combat log you need to enter "/combatlog 1" into the chat box to start the log and "/combatlog 0" to stop it. Certain maps will be better at parsing than others. I would also recommend using the "-NoAutoRotateLogs" in the command line of your launcher or you'll have a ton of individual logs vs one concise one. From there point your parser towards the combat log file once you've generated one. Then you can have it tell you what the numbers were for the respective TFO. Some will be more consistent than others will, especially if you're too far away to accurately record the numbers of your team, such as can happen in a khitomer vortex as a hypothetical. In the Analysis Report you can see what individual powers did, what pets did and similar.
For the installation you just need to let the exe install it wherever you find convenient.
"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
funny, when I megawell them in the battlezone, they die fairly well
We Want Vic Fontaine
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,442Community Moderator
The Tzenkethi buff each other in close proximity. I think the frigates actually shield larger ships. Also Tzenkethi shields are really strong except from the forward arc, but then you gotta deal with their Tetryon weapons.
They're basically the Doom Turtles of STO. Really durable on the flanks, and pack a punch up front.
Crowd Control abilities that work on everyone else are not advisable with the Tzenkethi.
Now if only they too were affected by the black hole in Gravity Kills. When they first released that TFO they were, and we saw some very creative tactics develop from it.
Comments
1) The folks on the other side of the conversation are also people
2) You may never *actually* convince the other person that you're right and they're wrong.
Consider taking a deep breath and walking away if it seems like nothing is being accomplished. The seratonin hit of an internet argument is addictive, believe me. When you feel yourself wanting to jump back in because Someone Is Wrong on the Internet, consider how much better of a time you'd have not doing that. Thanks, all.
I disabled a tac cube's shield (the one at the start of Khitomer Vortex) with the Carrier wave shield hacking trait. Fired one high yield of the new torpedo. The tac cube was blown to pieces, I didn't have to do anything else.
It was only on normal difficulty, but still. 'Too much DPS' is never enough, it seems.
(Note: I do like the new torpedo.)
Damn... Admiral Tovan been mass producing his clones like crazy, be careful, if you make too many, one might get the crazy idea that they might be the Original Tovan, might even turn into a Clone Saga.
Also I've been very civil by rarely stepping in, when you get too involved in a topic, it usually tends to get heated,
I've been trying to offer viable solutions, some of them weren't as well thought out as I'd liked,
I also liked how the Mods @baddmoonrizin and @rattler2 kept it orderly for the most part.
Oi! All this Khevetching!
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Yes, yes and Yes. there is nothing more frustrating than engaging something and someone swooping in and one-shotting.
you can even take that to points. I go into a voth map, I go to the nearest artillery point. if no one is there, I go for it. if there is, I go to the nearest omega generator, then relay. the point being, I don't poo in another person's sandbox, I don't want to be "that guy" who is messing with the kill X voth endeavor for another player. ditto space an nimbus. in fact, i ALWAYS try to switch to the lowest population map
Not just you. A few years ago, I would struggle in a borg red alert to kill a single cube. now I can kill one of the paired cubes in about a minute, maybe less. back then I would have people bail out when the command ship showed up, and I had the opportunity the engage it solo. I was able to fight it to a draw, until the timer ran out. now, I'm pretty certain I could take it down solo in a few minutes.
Not just you. Everyone. Just did a Borg RA again, and killed a Cube group is less than 3 seconds. The Borg used to be scary, now they're a joke. At least in the RA (which I presume is set to Normal level).
But regret to say, that's not necessarily you having gotten endlessly better; nor me, for that matter. It was a series of Mark increases, followed by a steep power creep. The 'diamond' ship took less than 5 seconds (in the team). That is why I've been avoiding the Borg RA for the last few years: it's too easy. At least the Tholian ships offer some sort of resistence.
Also give us Elite Random TFO's. Its not that different from Advanced.
Personally, I don't see why they simply can't make Elite versions for all TFO's.
Besides, way I remember it, you actually could choose between doing the event, via the event button, or pick, say, the regular Advanced queue (or Elite, in your case), and still get the event reward. Never understood why they changed that.
The less Elite TFO's are available, the more unreasonable it becomes to request that Elite players stay in their own lane, so to speak. So, yeah, Cryptic, do it!
But here's a few things they could do to get "DPS players" to head over towards harder content.
For buffing Elite rewards, is many different ways they could go there. Imagine if there were random elites and you had a chance at lobi from the Random Elite reward boxes, or Cryptic had a rolling event that picked a random Elite queue each week, and gave you lobi for completing it. Would get people to improve their skills and build, and boost engagement metrics with that content.
Answering a couple points of your post since you responded to me specifically. I would suggest downloading a parser at some point and leaving a few combat logs running in certain TFOs. There's far more going on that people don't see than they realize. Interactions between buffs, debuffs, abilities comboing together and the like. Sometimes what you think you're seeing isn't really what you're seeing at all. There have been times when I've been playing on certain maps and eyeballing numbers for my builds that I've been seeing and thought "wow this is really great" only to find out once I parsed it that it was junk for what I was trying to do.
What is your issue with the voth? If it's the orange shield reflecting damage back at you, fly to the other side of the ship as their shields are only good on one side of their ship. Nuking their little repair ships is sometimes required to finish them off as well.
So to answer the bit regarding diminishing returns, yes they do exist in STO in some instances. Damage resists is the prime example. For example, you can only get up to 75% resists without buffs and even then you will never outright hit 100% resistances. I can spike up to 88%, maybe 89% in an emergency situation for a few seconds, but I can never maintain that number. To observe this diminishing return look no further than armor consoles as there is a reason you don't want to stack them. The first one typically will give you face value. If it says you get 25 additional resist, you get that much resist. The second console depending on where you're at gives 50% face value, then 25% for the third, 10% for the fourth, and depending on how close you are to the cap the fifth one will get you either 5% face value or zero. If it gives zero benefit you may as well be running with a blank console space. Assuming one wanted to solve the issue, this isn't going to eliminate it but would just be a band-aid solution and by placing artificial caps that disincentivize any improvement beyond the diminishing return start point. For a time it may deter certain things, but it will only be temporary. There is already a certain point of DPS that gets harder and harder to get past once you get there as it relies on alot of outside factors coming into play perfectly.
Regarding your percentage and 1m DPS examples, it takes quite a bit to even get to 1m DPS and is something the vast majority of the playerbase will never see, myself included, either because of not wanting to go there, or inability to get there for one reason or another.
If you want the percentages to change, they still would need to be defined. To break down your numbers as it sits right now, if you have a 1m HP foe you're going up against and your DPS is 10k per your example, it would take 100 seconds or just over 1.5 minutes to down assuming they maintained at 10k. Now assuming said person decided to save their powers and try to burst the target down, let's assume per previous example I used that person is capable of spiking their damage by about 3x their normal for a few seconds and assume for 10 seconds they can get to 30k DPS. During that 10 seconds they will burn off 300k health of the foe leaving 700k remaining. As DPS starts to taper off from the burst they will have a few seconds where they're not at the 30k but not at the 10k either, so say 5 seconds of being at 20k, which will remove another 100k health leaving 600k remaining. At 10k DPS this will take them 60 seconds to down the foe. Due to saving their powers for an initial burst they've been able to shave around 25 seconds off their time required to down that foe (initial 15 seconds of burst plus 60 seconds to finish off. 100-75=25). Keep in mind these numbers are for one single player where as full TFO teams consist of 5 people.
If we do the numbers for 5 people, that's a combined DPS of 50k assuming each person is doing the 10k. It would take that team 20 seconds to down that foe who has 1m HP. Assuming that team of 5 did as our first example and spiked their damage up to 30k for 10 seconds, that becomes a combined DPS of 150k. Now by saving their powers for a coordinated team burst, they can down that foe in 7 seconds (6.6 to be exact) and still have 3 seconds of burst left over. If someone doesn't have a parser to observe the actual numbers at play, it can give the illusion that there is an uber DPS in the run when what folks are seeing is the combined might of their team.
Now assuming you wanted the fight to last longer than 7 seconds, there's 3 ways you can approach it. One, outright nerf the DPS being applied. Two, increase the HP of the mob thus the time needed to kill it. Three, add mechanics that need to be adhered to that prevent constant bombardment. The first option would go over like a lead balloon as it would trash investments made into builds and should only be a last resort. The second option would work, but would also negatively effect those not at the 10k threshold as well. The third effects everyone equally without destroying investment in higher DPS builds. The third option is part of why in many games you will have adds come out that have to be dealt with before returning to the boss itself. This extends the fight out somewhat. Adding in additional mechanics on top of adds also extends the fight further.
To close this out, I will point to an example of balance from Space Engineers that I had to take into account when developing my armor system as part of my era mod. I hated how easily it was to break the large grid heavy armor over there along with simultaneously how weak certain weapons were on the large and small grids, so I created my own stuff. For the armor I had to figure out how durable I wanted it to be. I could've said I wanted it to be balanced around a ship carrying 10 weapons. But then I would've had certain people saying "why didn't you balance it around 5 weapons" and some people saying "why didn't you balance it around 15" and the like. The solution was to balance the armor around what a single weapon of each type can do on their own. In this instance I balanced the armor around being able to take 7 hits from a single large grid railgun before it breaks, which then gave me numbers to work with for the other weapons. From there it was shipped off to the players. If folks wanted to get through the armor faster, they could use more weapons. If they wanted it to last longer, they could stack the armor and/or have repair systems to patch holes as they crop up or repair it before it breaks.
Likewise the only way I could ever see any kind of balance the way some people are indicating they want is for Cryptic to sit down and decide how long they want each mob to be able to withstand damage from a single person, then multiply the stats required by 5 to account for a full team. Which makes it harder for the individual teammates to compete if something goes wrong.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
I would love these ideas to come into fruition honestly. Especially the cloned map with no cooldown. Makes for possible bug test map as well.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
There is kind of, but actually when you do the math on resistances, it's actually semi-linear with armor. The game just throws you off by showing the % damage removed to resistances, but NOT what that really does for you.
Every point of armor increases your overall durability by 1% over whatever your hull is. The "Diminishing returns" amounts to that. At 100 armor you have 50% damage resistance, so your taking half damage so your lifespan is doubled. At 200 armor you have only 66% damage resistance, but now your at triple survivability. At 300 armor your at the cap for normal armor of 75% damage resistance. Beyond that, you need bonus armor points to push that further.
I think the reason this system is done this way(which is taken from champions online) is due in part to how City of heroes damage resistances worked. When you look at damage resistance in a LINEAR sense of flat % damage reduction, every single % means more than the last. At 10% damage reduction your taking 90%. At 20% of course, your taking 80 so, your only marginally tougher right? Proportionally? No.
When you compare the 80% damage taken to 90% damage taken, your taking in reality 88% of the damage someone with 90% would have taken in comparison. Not a lot now, but already your taking 12% less damage than someone with 90% resistance.
Lets up the numbers further. 50% as the base, 60% as the improved. Your looking at 83% damage taken with 60% compared to the 50%, still not huge, but it's gonna get bigger much, much more quickly now.
60 to 70 you've removed 25% of the damage with the increase.
70 to 80 removes 33%
80 to 90 removes 50%
In short, every % actually has more effect than the last. It's not noticable at first but it grows exponentially past the 50% mark.
This happened very easily in city of heroes. Simply, every single % increase was much more powerful than the last. This happened in elder scrolls oblivion to. And happens in skyrim. So many games avoid linear resistance values in favor of attack rating vs defense rating systems.
Generally, armor consoles still generally aren't stacked, I think the only armor consoles I equip are the ones from the disco rep, and typically only 1 of each of the energy and kinetic resists. Then I go for resistances from traits. Traits actually give a LOT of resistances. Consequently it's actually very easy to hit 40-50% without much investment in armor through consoles.
Thinking of ideas from lots of games for, dunno how long now.
Its similar for damage, while there is no cap or diminishing returns there are different types of damage bonus. Like armour a 30% bonus damage buff is massively better then a 30% damage buff.
"+5% Bonus Damage" - Cat2
"+5% Damage" - Cat1
"+5% Bonus Armour Resistance" - Cat2
"+5% Armour Resistance" - Cat1
"+5% Bonus Shield Resistance" - Cat2
"+5% Shield Resistance" - Cat1
There is a 3rd type of buff which is sort of half way between Cat2 and Cat1 it seems as though if something is plus skill it adds all the skill together then applies that buff once. Lets say we have something that effectively adds enough skill for 5% resistance per item. 3 items of +skill that would add together to 15%. Then the 15% resistance is applied. That would give you a bigger buff then applying a 5%, then applying a 5% and then finally applying a last 5%. The full formula is rather complicated and messy. 90% of the time just stick to thinking about Cat1 and Cat 2 or look for the word bonus. The reason I bring this up is Xenotech Engineering Consoles that add to shield hardness skill which turns into shield Resistance. That makes Xenotech Engineering Consoles really great for maxing out both armour and shield resistance together.
I think there are a handful a weird things that are neither Cat2 or Cat1. Its not always as simple as cat2 is better a theoretical 500% Cat1 bonus might depending on the rest of the build beat a 1% bonus damage cat 2. Generally speaking go Cat2 buffs over Cat1 boosts for damage, armour and shields.
EDIT: As far as I am aware none of this about bonus damage/resitance is explained in game. But what really baffles me with resistance being a core mechanic why is there nothing about shield resistance in game under the ship profile or ground profile. Not just nothing about how it works with the different boosts but we have no UI showing us the current shield resistance figure. I would expect under shield regen, shield cap there to be a shield resistance the same an amour. Is there some technical reason why this hasn't been done as it seems like a major oversight.
The lack of info makes using shields really hard as you have to get a spreadsheet out or deep dive into combat logs to try to work out your shield resistance. How can players use and build an effective shield tank when they cannot even see the resistance stats? This could be one of the many reasons players do not use shields much compared to armour.
If for example you take 2 generic tactical consoles, one applying a +30% Phaser Damage buff, and another applying a +30% Bonus Phaser Damage buff, the one giving the bonus phaser will be the superior buff because category 1 buffs only effect your base values.
Picture, you have a phaser beam array doing 1000 points of damage at its base to keep the numbers simple.
If you apply the category 1 bonus to it, then you would pick up an additional 300 damage for 1300 as the new value. If you applied a second copy of the category 1 bonus, you would only get an additional 300 damage vs 390 points you might expect for stacking the damage bonuses. Assuming you have 5 tactical consoles on a ship, this would mean your total value for 5 category one consoles would be 2500 as the new value for that phaser's damage.
Now if you had a single copy of the cat 2 bonus, that would give you 300 points for the first copy of the bonus, which would give you 300 points. So assuming only the tactical consoles in play, they would be equal in that instance. However if you had 2 copies of the +30% bonus phaser damage, your value would be 1690 damage vs the 1600. Now if you stacked 5 copies of the cat 2, your final value would be 3713 phaser damage (3712.83 to be exact).
Essentially a cat1 looks at your base values and adds whatever percentage of the base value its assigned. A cat2 just looks at where you're at and says "here have x percentage more". Generally cat2 will be superior in most cases. However depending on the size of the cat2 buff, there can be times where a cat1 is actually superior. There are also times when you can become so loaded down with cat2 buffs that mixing in some cat1 to increase your base values will actually be more beneficial, but that gets into some very murky math that is more of a pain than anything else.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
While it is annoying that advanced and elite are blocked for event queues, it's something I can live with.
Normal is no challenge at all, it's quite boring really and stupidly easy.
Now I do hold back on damage in event queues by not using half my abilities as to give others a fair chance.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Tzenkethi in Gravity Kills mutually reinforce each other. Hence, they need to be scattered first. DOC leaps to mind.*
* Or tractor beam repulsors, of course.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
On a regular map, scattering is indeed annoying. In Gravity Kills, however, you simply need to prevent them from healing each other. Maybe nor for an Elite player like you, but as many ppl can tell you, regular players can't kill em fast enough without doing it 'properly.' The fact that Elite players can break thru the game mechanic regardlesss, only show that Advanced content was not made for them.
There is 1 exception, which is the aforementioned Delayed Overload Cascade. With a heftily EPG-supported GW 3, followed by a timely DOC 3, the blast will be so brutal, you can often overcome the scatter-only tactic.
Overall it may be for the best to observe a bit before deciding if the random team is mature enough to make use of GW when facing Tzenketti.
Its no different then a Sci ship going in doing an AoE disable to stop the group healing them killing them. Spreading them around is one method but its not the "proper" way to deal with them, it just a one of many valid methods.
I'm glad you specified it was the Tzenkethi and not the Voth.
Damage by virtue of it's nature in game essentially forces a decent balance between cat1 buffs, cat 2 buffs, as well as crit chance and severity for alot of builds. If you don't have enough cat 1 buffs, then your base values will be underwhelming. Not enough cat 2 then overall values underwhelming. If you have a ton of chance but no severity then you'll crit more often sure, but it won't amount to much. If you have a ton of severity but no chance, you'll have some nasty hits when you crit but you won't be critting much. Damage potential is also heavily influenced by what debuffs are present on targets you're after. Debuffing can push resistances down really far and potentially into the negative in a few instances depending on how much is present. How aggressively you pilot, such as how often you activate powers against NPCs can also have an impact. Such as if you rarely touch your powers vs people who keep them on cooldown.
There can also be side effects to building for certain bits of damage or tank setups as well. Due to how my tank is setup, I went for a balance between tank and DPS for what I like to do. I prefer to be in the middle of that spectrum vs too far to one side or the other. On the better runs I can sustain 150k DPS with the tank build. Now for the side effect, although I've not been going for it, I have around 270-325 control expertise on the build from some of the consoles and traits I've used for other effects. While it didn't make my gravity well quite as strong as dedicated science builds, it did give me a gravity well pull that's stronger than alot of other non-sci builds.
In order to use the parser you need a combat log for it to read. To start a combat log you need to enter "/combatlog 1" into the chat box to start the log and "/combatlog 0" to stop it. Certain maps will be better at parsing than others. I would also recommend using the "-NoAutoRotateLogs" in the command line of your launcher or you'll have a ton of individual logs vs one concise one. From there point your parser towards the combat log file once you've generated one. Then you can have it tell you what the numbers were for the respective TFO. Some will be more consistent than others will, especially if you're too far away to accurately record the numbers of your team, such as can happen in a khitomer vortex as a hypothetical. In the Analysis Report you can see what individual powers did, what pets did and similar.
For the installation you just need to let the exe install it wherever you find convenient.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
funny, when I megawell them in the battlezone, they die fairly well
They're basically the Doom Turtles of STO. Really durable on the flanks, and pack a punch up front.
Crowd Control abilities that work on everyone else are not advisable with the Tzenkethi.
Now if only they too were affected by the black hole in Gravity Kills. When they first released that TFO they were, and we saw some very creative tactics develop from it.
The exe version can be easier to set up. Think you might have downloaded the java version.
Combat Log Reader (CLR) https://sto-league.com/combatlogreader/
STO Combat Meter (SCM) https://dps.shivtr.com/pages/STOSCM