I hate SNB its OPed and IMO most would agree. So the simple fix is everyone roll a Sci guy. I have started one and I encourage everyone. Cryptic has dragged its feet on this way to long (they obviously play Science guys since they wont fix it). Thete are already more and more Science guys comming into PvP so its only going to get worse. Perhaps when matches come down to SNB vs SNB Cryptic will actually do something (bessides having their power and skill team look into the matter).
Wasnt there a fix already in the works?
making it a buff remover?
Making it a buff remover means it is still the most OP captain skill in game.
Locking offensive dispells to one captain type is as dumb a move as you get for game balance.
At least while tactical and engineer captains dont have anything as game breaking. You would have to give them either a defensive dispell or a castable partial/total immunity to come close to balancing the power of an offensive dispell.
Now they can't design encounters around buffs as you could trivialise them by bringing an all science captain team.
PvP is ****ed because defensive buffs are now either super effective when no science captains are around or completely worthless if they are around.
It needs to be removed completely from the Klingon side as it is the MOST DISHONORABLE way to fight.
And the FEDs shall have it?
Actually there are way more science-captains on the fed side than Klingons at the moment. But I understand your argument of nerfing things that cripple you, but leave them to cripple your enemies.
And I actually like the change of SNB, no I don't use it myself. The recharge time is very long, and it will provide the ship the ability to once dispel every now and then. The only guys that will really suffer are RSP-stackers in my opinion and that is good.
I'm going by IP fluff and the fact that the weakest starter BoP has a real good chance of ganking an RA 5 ship in the right hands.
Klingon ships are ridiculously overpowered compared to their Fed counterparts.
I feel this is very fluffy. I can see the Klingons triumphing honorably with superior ships.
I can't see them tolerating geeks long enough to learn skills from them.
I play a Klingon as main and now rolled a FED escort - because it is stronger than a BoP in the right hands. I usually have a 8-1 kill/death ratio and lay waste. There are plenty of skills (level III) out you can only find on the FED side, because the Klingon exchange for purple BOs is nonexistant. You can't battlecloak out anymore in T5, dmg is too high, so it just grants you the first strike.
A T1 BoP will never have a chance against a T5 ship. That is ridiculous.
The real difference between Klingons and FEDs, and, like I mentioned, I played a Klingon to BG5, now a Escort to Ra5 and a Cruiser (fed) to Cmdr 7, is that FEDs have NO teamwork. NO communication, NO focus fire and little experience. (I leveled my FEd toons all over PvP, so I saw a lot of games)
Here a recent screenshot of FvF PvP, so I had to fly a FED ship vs FEDs, where you clearly see that player skill and experience makes the difference between Klingon captains and FEDs, not only their ships. My name is Oida in my escort. http://i640.photobucket.com/albums/uu129/finkiboy/61-0fed.png
I can only relate my experiences. I am RA 5/ L7 K.
I feel I am an accomplshed Captain. I kill a lot of my opponants, but they keep coming back and jumping me because they now know I'm a threat.
I have a bunch of ships, but am speced for an Assault Cruiser or Fleet escort. Not sure which is more fun yet.
I prefer to SOLO, you know, like most of the shows: One ship and it's crew against all odds.
As opposed to "Gang Trek!" where somehow there are so many Captains that they can buddy together with their ships like teens at the mall with their cars because Starfleet doesn't care what they do with their resources. ("Because that's how MMO's are dammit!")
I prefer to SOLO, you know, like most of the shows: One ship and it's crew against all odds.
As opposed to "Gang Trek!" where somehow there are so many Captains that they can buddy together with their ships like teens at the mall with their cars because Starfleet doesn't care what they do with their resources. ("Because that's how MMO's are dammit!")
The Federation went to war, and you usually don't fight alone in such situations. Just watch the whole DS9 ending, with dozens of ships battling each other. You can perform special operations alone maybe, like you do in episodic content, but in open battles numbers will always be important.
If you and most of the FED players would play to win as a team and realize that sticking together, helping each other (even my escort heals allies more than the average federation player in their cruisers and science ships), focus firing and regrouping is important you will win easily. In games where I manage to coordinate our group (and I am a guy that invite-spams everyone from the start for a team) we win 90% of the time. If I get in, get 2 team invite-declines, 3 guys full impulsing off in different directions and a DS9-shuttle the odds are not in our favour so much.
Maybe there will come 1v1 PvP, I personally doubt it, because it leaves too much options for exploiting this system, but until then you should either stick to your team and fight with them, like the majority of Klingons do it, or don't whine about how unfair it is that your single FED ship is not able to kill 5 Klingons at once while you paint your fingernails and answer a phonecall as you open the postman at the door. :rolleyes:
DS9 helped ruin the franchise precicely because it became a group effort (too many characters) as opposed to a brave captain and his crew. Can't blame it all on DS9 though, Next Gen did major damage with meetings and tea and TRIBBLE.
Don't even get me started on Voyager with Janeway asking everyone's advise in the middle of a battle.
Enterprise... UG! Next time we need a cross dresser for a captain, please keep him in the closet.
The Federation went to war:
They don't have enough ships or resources to represent Saturday night at the mall with your buddies.
At least make the effort to pretend to honor the IP.
True that they maybe had no resources to give all the players ships and they didn't need thousands of rear admirals too I am sure.
But in your instance you have 5-10 FED captains and that is possible. If you stay in that world everything should be fine. See it as a little taskforce, because you won't send out a single ship into enemy territory or a battlefield. If you don't like anything from Voy onwards compare it to TNG, where they fought the Borg cube at Wolf whatevernumber. The ships, that never fought together before, had to coordinate and focus fire to bring the enemy down.
The problem is not SNB itself.... the problem is...
SNB + VM = I win combo.
If an enemy fires off an SNB before a VM hits the ship, one is screwed big time.
It is a combination that is 100% impossible to counter, since the SNB knocks out any of your abilities to throw out an Attack Pattern Omega or Science Team to counter the Viral Matrix.
Problem might even be somewhat solved by just putting SNB and VM on a shared cooldown.
Do away with all the spells, this is Star Trek, not Harry Potter for God's sake.
Live or die using your weapons, engines and shields, not by depending on which spell you have used to counter the other guy's spell, when to VM, Sci Team or whatever.
The speed of light is 300,000 km/sec. Ships should be fighting at some respectable fraction of light speed. Increase the range at which ships can fire from 10km to something believable, something like 500,000 km. Stop the silly maneuvering around like half-baked biplanes. Use the laws of physics.
At least make the effort to pretend to honor the IP.
You don't get to make a post about how every show beyond TOS was garbage and then tell others to honor the IP.
TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise are all part of canon now, whether you personally liked all of those shows or not. You don't get to pick and choose what parts of the Star Trek universe you think are appropriate to this game; Cryptic does, and they have an obligation to their players to recognize that different players (from different generations, literally) may have very different ideas about Star Trek and what that means for their game experience.
TOS and DS9 have almost nothing in common. That doesn't mean that TOS is canon and DS9 should be ignored.
Use the laws of physics.
In Star Trek, really? Physics? Star Trek routinely makes up technology to get around troublesome parts of reality.
Live or die using your weapons, engines and shields, not by depending on which spell you have used to counter the other guy's spell, when to VM, Sci Team or whatever.
The game you want to play is not this game. Sorry. Asking for a complete remake of the combat system is unrealistic and pointless, since there's no way it will happen.
Increase the range at which ships can fire from 10km to something believable, something like 500,000 km
Why? How would that make the game better? More realistic doesn't necessarily equal more fun, and fighting a ship that you can only see as a spec on a sensor board doesn't exactly create engaging gameplay. I don't disagree that the ranges in the game now are silly (there's an episode of DS9 where they say flat-out that Jem'Hadar ships have a weapons range of > 180,000 km), but I also don't see how increasing the numbers leads to a better game.
Personally I think the easiest way to fix the SnB issue, particularly when used in combination with VM is this...
The biggest issue in my mind is the fact that Klingons can fire these skills off directly they decloak, resulting in one or more poor feds being immobilised and unable to do anything (meaning I can't even "L2P" as so many Klingon players keep telling us feds to do).
My suggestion is simple - impose a cooldown on skills upon decloaking. What this would mean is that when a Klingon decloaks he would have only his weapons available for a period of time (5s? 10s? 15s? - not sure really what length of time would be right to ensure the balance doesn't swing back too far the other way). The mix of skills that would be on cooldown would need careful consideration though to make sure the balance wasn't worsened - I know I would like to see the SnB+VM mechanic addressed but I'm not 100% sure exactly which other skills to affect in this way....
The result? Klingons would have two options in attack strategy open to them. Use cloak to obtain an advantageous position and the element of surprise, but sacrifice many of their skills for a short period of time (especially the so-called CC skills) - or they could approach and attack from an uncloaked state (which would result in an even fight).
Not necessarily the best solution out there, and might be flawed for all I know, but might be worth thinking about....
Do away with all the spells, this is Star Trek, not Harry Potter for God's sake.
Live or die using your weapons, engines and shields, not by depending on which spell you have used to counter the other guy's spell, when to VM, Sci Team or whatever.
Wow..it is like reading myself here.. I agree very much
I am not that fond of very high distances on the other hand for combat...I do not want to be fighting Red X's like in EVE...I like the close ranged combat and Weapons exchange.
That being said, I think combat in STO could be good up to 20km Radius it may only require that the travel speed of Torps is raised), everything else should work...
Now on the Topic...in addition to the changes to SNB and VM as expressed here:
As the OP posted snp is over powered, but its not. It just a hold in space you can still fly and move. So nerfing it would be like taking away the dps away from the tactial officers. And remember Snb is on the forward arc of the ship. So if crying nerf is the only way fix something you hate from a science officer, is not the way togo.
Making it a buff remover means it is still the most OP captain skill in game.
Locking offensive dispells to one captain type is as dumb a move as you get for game balance.
At least while tactical and engineer captains dont have anything as game breaking. You would have to give them either a defensive dispell or a castable partial/total immunity to come close to balancing the power of an offensive dispell.
Now they can't design encounters around buffs as you could trivialise them by bringing an all science captain team.
PvP is ****ed because defensive buffs are now either super effective when no science captains are around or completely worthless if they are around.
Tactical = target subsystem 3, drop shields kill you in 15 seconds , or can just power up and stack skills and kill 3 enemies in a span of 15 seconds if u last that long.
Engineer = shields all day long , 1 vs 1 u never kill a engineer ,why ? because you cant , you have to play smart.
I hate SNB its OPed and IMO most would agree. So the simple fix is everyone roll a Sci guy. I have started one and I encourage everyone. Cryptic has dragged its feet on this way to long (they obviously play Science guys since they wont fix it). Thete are already more and more Science guys comming into PvP so its only going to get worse. Perhaps when matches come down to SNB vs SNB Cryptic will actually do something (bessides having their power and skill team look into the matter).
i'd prefer if they made the engineer abilities more viable, of the 3 classes, the engineers ability has probably the longest coold down.
The cryptic peeps, probably thought since, Science players will get "sub nuc" ability that science bo's should get VM, to round everything out for "balance", this way players/npcs, cannot counter in anyway if the counter skill worked "removed something else" or did not work. Probably was "AWESOME" to lock down a player/npc ship with a BO skill "VM", then sub nuc to reset all skills, so they cannot be utilized...wowzers! WTFPWNURAZZ IIDIDIDIDID. w/ a big cheezy grin.
And with the changes in the next patch to balance things out...it'll remain the same, just in a different manner.
I just discovered their BoP's have "universal BO slots" This means you can mount any arrangement of BO's you need. Like 3 Tactical Officers or 3 Science or Engineering Officers, whatever you like.
I just discovered their BoP's have "universal BO slots" This means you can mount any arrangement of BO's you need. Like 3 Tactical Officers or 3 Science or Engineering Officers, whatever you like.
oh? This is what the Star Fleet players have been stating for some time as an OP ship....or unfair advantage, coupled with having the first initial strike due to cloak. But theres less and less of that now of those whines on the board, must have ran out of cheese.
Comments
making it a buff remover?
Making it a buff remover means it is still the most OP captain skill in game.
Locking offensive dispells to one captain type is as dumb a move as you get for game balance.
At least while tactical and engineer captains dont have anything as game breaking. You would have to give them either a defensive dispell or a castable partial/total immunity to come close to balancing the power of an offensive dispell.
Now they can't design encounters around buffs as you could trivialise them by bringing an all science captain team.
PvP is ****ed because defensive buffs are now either super effective when no science captains are around or completely worthless if they are around.
And the FEDs shall have it?
Actually there are way more science-captains on the fed side than Klingons at the moment. But I understand your argument of nerfing things that cripple you, but leave them to cripple your enemies.
And I actually like the change of SNB, no I don't use it myself. The recharge time is very long, and it will provide the ship the ability to once dispel every now and then. The only guys that will really suffer are RSP-stackers in my opinion and that is good.
Klingon ships are ridiculously overpowered compared to their Fed counterparts.
I feel this is very fluffy. I can see the Klingons triumphing honorably with superior ships.
I can't see them tolerating geeks long enough to learn skills from them.
I play a Klingon as main and now rolled a FED escort - because it is stronger than a BoP in the right hands. I usually have a 8-1 kill/death ratio and lay waste. There are plenty of skills (level III) out you can only find on the FED side, because the Klingon exchange for purple BOs is nonexistant. You can't battlecloak out anymore in T5, dmg is too high, so it just grants you the first strike.
A T1 BoP will never have a chance against a T5 ship. That is ridiculous.
The real difference between Klingons and FEDs, and, like I mentioned, I played a Klingon to BG5, now a Escort to Ra5 and a Cruiser (fed) to Cmdr 7, is that FEDs have NO teamwork. NO communication, NO focus fire and little experience. (I leveled my FEd toons all over PvP, so I saw a lot of games)
Here a recent screenshot of FvF PvP, so I had to fly a FED ship vs FEDs, where you clearly see that player skill and experience makes the difference between Klingon captains and FEDs, not only their ships. My name is Oida in my escort.
http://i640.photobucket.com/albums/uu129/finkiboy/61-0fed.png
I feel I am an accomplshed Captain. I kill a lot of my opponants, but they keep coming back and jumping me because they now know I'm a threat.
I have a bunch of ships, but am speced for an Assault Cruiser or Fleet escort. Not sure which is more fun yet.
I prefer to SOLO, you know, like most of the shows: One ship and it's crew against all odds.
As opposed to "Gang Trek!" where somehow there are so many Captains that they can buddy together with their ships like teens at the mall with their cars because Starfleet doesn't care what they do with their resources. ("Because that's how MMO's are dammit!")
The Federation went to war, and you usually don't fight alone in such situations. Just watch the whole DS9 ending, with dozens of ships battling each other. You can perform special operations alone maybe, like you do in episodic content, but in open battles numbers will always be important.
If you and most of the FED players would play to win as a team and realize that sticking together, helping each other (even my escort heals allies more than the average federation player in their cruisers and science ships), focus firing and regrouping is important you will win easily. In games where I manage to coordinate our group (and I am a guy that invite-spams everyone from the start for a team) we win 90% of the time. If I get in, get 2 team invite-declines, 3 guys full impulsing off in different directions and a DS9-shuttle the odds are not in our favour so much.
Maybe there will come 1v1 PvP, I personally doubt it, because it leaves too much options for exploiting this system, but until then you should either stick to your team and fight with them, like the majority of Klingons do it, or don't whine about how unfair it is that your single FED ship is not able to kill 5 Klingons at once while you paint your fingernails and answer a phonecall as you open the postman at the door. :rolleyes:
Don't even get me started on Voyager with Janeway asking everyone's advise in the middle of a battle.
Enterprise... UG! Next time we need a cross dresser for a captain, please keep him in the closet.
The Federation went to war:
They don't have enough ships or resources to represent Saturday night at the mall with your buddies.
At least make the effort to pretend to honor the IP.
But in your instance you have 5-10 FED captains and that is possible. If you stay in that world everything should be fine. See it as a little taskforce, because you won't send out a single ship into enemy territory or a battlefield. If you don't like anything from Voy onwards compare it to TNG, where they fought the Borg cube at Wolf whatevernumber. The ships, that never fought together before, had to coordinate and focus fire to bring the enemy down.
I try to keep the BoP's off the Cruisers backs.
No set group though.
SNB + VM = I win combo.
If an enemy fires off an SNB before a VM hits the ship, one is screwed big time.
It is a combination that is 100% impossible to counter, since the SNB knocks out any of your abilities to throw out an Attack Pattern Omega or Science Team to counter the Viral Matrix.
Problem might even be somewhat solved by just putting SNB and VM on a shared cooldown.
Live or die using your weapons, engines and shields, not by depending on which spell you have used to counter the other guy's spell, when to VM, Sci Team or whatever.
The speed of light is 300,000 km/sec. Ships should be fighting at some respectable fraction of light speed. Increase the range at which ships can fire from 10km to something believable, something like 500,000 km. Stop the silly maneuvering around like half-baked biplanes. Use the laws of physics.
TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise are all part of canon now, whether you personally liked all of those shows or not. You don't get to pick and choose what parts of the Star Trek universe you think are appropriate to this game; Cryptic does, and they have an obligation to their players to recognize that different players (from different generations, literally) may have very different ideas about Star Trek and what that means for their game experience.
TOS and DS9 have almost nothing in common. That doesn't mean that TOS is canon and DS9 should be ignored.
In Star Trek, really? Physics? Star Trek routinely makes up technology to get around troublesome parts of reality.
The game you want to play is not this game. Sorry. Asking for a complete remake of the combat system is unrealistic and pointless, since there's no way it will happen.
Why? How would that make the game better? More realistic doesn't necessarily equal more fun, and fighting a ship that you can only see as a spec on a sensor board doesn't exactly create engaging gameplay. I don't disagree that the ranges in the game now are silly (there's an episode of DS9 where they say flat-out that Jem'Hadar ships have a weapons range of > 180,000 km), but I also don't see how increasing the numbers leads to a better game.
All others are pale copies and only loser nerds would dare to question TOS.
The biggest issue in my mind is the fact that Klingons can fire these skills off directly they decloak, resulting in one or more poor feds being immobilised and unable to do anything (meaning I can't even "L2P" as so many Klingon players keep telling us feds to do).
My suggestion is simple - impose a cooldown on skills upon decloaking. What this would mean is that when a Klingon decloaks he would have only his weapons available for a period of time (5s? 10s? 15s? - not sure really what length of time would be right to ensure the balance doesn't swing back too far the other way). The mix of skills that would be on cooldown would need careful consideration though to make sure the balance wasn't worsened - I know I would like to see the SnB+VM mechanic addressed but I'm not 100% sure exactly which other skills to affect in this way....
The result? Klingons would have two options in attack strategy open to them. Use cloak to obtain an advantageous position and the element of surprise, but sacrifice many of their skills for a short period of time (especially the so-called CC skills) - or they could approach and attack from an uncloaked state (which would result in an even fight).
Not necessarily the best solution out there, and might be flawed for all I know, but might be worth thinking about....
Cryptic is notoriously nearsighted when it comes to game problems.
Only way for them to see it is to have a massive drop in Fed players to the point where they go, "Duh! This no work no more! We look for things!"
Wow..it is like reading myself here.. I agree very much
I am not that fond of very high distances on the other hand for combat...I do not want to be fighting Red X's like in EVE...I like the close ranged combat and Weapons exchange.
That being said, I think combat in STO could be good up to 20km Radius it may only require that the travel speed of Torps is raised), everything else should work...
Now on the Topic...in addition to the changes to SNB and VM as expressed here:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=142292
Maybe both should be also made to have a max range of 5km...or...both to require shields to be down.
Or maybe a mixture, SNB require Shields down and VM have a max range of 5km.
Tactical = target subsystem 3, drop shields kill you in 15 seconds , or can just power up and stack skills and kill 3 enemies in a span of 15 seconds if u last that long.
Engineer = shields all day long , 1 vs 1 u never kill a engineer ,why ? because you cant , you have to play smart.
i'd prefer if they made the engineer abilities more viable, of the 3 classes, the engineers ability has probably the longest coold down.
The cryptic peeps, probably thought since, Science players will get "sub nuc" ability that science bo's should get VM, to round everything out for "balance", this way players/npcs, cannot counter in anyway if the counter skill worked "removed something else" or did not work. Probably was "AWESOME" to lock down a player/npc ship with a BO skill "VM", then sub nuc to reset all skills, so they cannot be utilized...wowzers! WTFPWNURAZZ IIDIDIDIDID. w/ a big cheezy grin.
And with the changes in the next patch to balance things out...it'll remain the same, just in a different manner.
I just discovered their BoP's have "universal BO slots" This means you can mount any arrangement of BO's you need. Like 3 Tactical Officers or 3 Science or Engineering Officers, whatever you like.
oh? This is what the Star Fleet players have been stating for some time as an OP ship....or unfair advantage, coupled with having the first initial strike due to cloak. But theres less and less of that now of those whines on the board, must have ran out of cheese.
It is definitely a learning experience playing a Klingon character compared to a Fed one.