I figured it might be interesting to keep a log of people's reactions to the patch, and how views evolve (or don't) over time. People are welcome to respond or log their own notes, but if you're writing a fresh opinion, remember to note the date.
And no, I don't expect this to be taken seriously. It's more of a loose social journaling experiment than anything, and I reserve the right to be amused.
Patch 1.2, Day 1 (June 3, 2010):
Finally got to play a full night of 5v5 and Capture and Hold under the new rules. The Tacs in my fleet and friends list (and apparently a lot of public channels) are taking this change very hard. It doesn't help that some of them are very set in their ways - they believe that focused damage needs to beat out focused healing over time, which most certainly does not happen in the current build.
We ran a 5-man fleet group (pseudo-premade, as it wasn't exactly balanced) and various fragmented combinations of fleet and PUG groupings afterwards. PUGs are still PUGs. Healing changes or no, the average Fed player hasn't changed a bit, and probably never will. They still don't heal, don't use any of the new abilities available to them, and generally run in and die one at a time like bad kung fu ninjas. These fights are still boring and a waste of everybody's time; they remind me of trash mob pulls in PvE.
Fights against premades, on the other hand, are much more interesting and involved, but also extremely slow. I attribute some of this to the learning curve: dps players are used to conjuring up huge amounts of burst damage and keeping a target in their sights come hell or high water. This is a fool's strategy with the current ability balance. A single healer, fully specced and burning cooldowns, can hold off the entire other team's damage for an extremely long time. This is made even worse when the healer is the actual target of the attack, as most healers are Engineers, and the Engineering self-preservation abilities border on obscene when stacked with standard heals and resist abilities.
The last match of the night, for example, was a 5v5 partial premade match against The Tribble Tribunal. We had 3 players from our fleet, including a DPS BoP, a healing BC, and my hybrid carrier. A PUG Battlecruiser and DPS filled in the roster. While we eventually prevailed, the game definitely took somewhere in excess of 30 minutes, and most of the kills came from 20-30k rams (usually in conjunction with a SNB'ed RSP). The final score, as you can see
here, showed both teams running 2.5 healer setups, nearly all kills scored against escorts and science vessels, and a ridiculous 1.5 million hull damage healed on the Fed side alone.
While some of this can likely be improved with better offensive coordination, I definitely question whether the game's reliance on SNB and ramming is healthy.
My build for tonight is a healing/disabling hybrid beamboat carrier with a slight bias toward hull healing. I'm still trying to use Beam Target Shields III, but my technique needs a lot of refinement in the new world of engineering team spam. Specifically, I need to stop accidentally hitting the focus target with it, because it's virtually impossible to get it to stick on the guy who's getting heal spammed.
On a final note, RSP is a pain in the butt again. It's generally safe to assume that people equip themselves to maximize its uptime, and with an active duration of 15 seconds vs. only a 45 second global ability cooldown, this thing is pretty much everywhere. A 30 second window used to be fine for killing somebody with focus fire, but the new heals make that far less realistic.
So, to wrap up... as of 6/3/10:
I think the game needs:
- More time to evolve and reach solid conclusions
I feel like:
- RSP needs to be adjusted - 15 seconds of invulnerability for a Lieutenant-level skill is too much. I think duration scaling would be the most appropriate answer (RSP I = 5 sec, RSP II = 10 sec, RSP III = 15 sec), possibly with additional modifications from shield subsystem power. I realize this screws with snix's Category system, where abilities are balanced around uptime%, but I think we all know that RSP is an anomaly in the system to begin with.
- Tactical captains need to be given more finesse options. They can't have more raw firepower - the 720k damage done by the Tac BoP in our last game is testament to that. But, they need some way to deal with RSP (or RSP needs to be weakened somewhat), and it would be good if the 25th century idea of tactics could somehow amount to more than "Makes us strong." Maybe if Tactical Team became an offensive buff-strip ability, or a half-strip that reduced the duration of the target's buffs by a percent...
- Ramming speed needs to be toned down, but not until weapons fire is actually adequate to get the job done.
Comments
It feels like nothing has changed for cruisers and carriers. DPS is the same. Tanking ability is not very different either. A single escort cannot punch through a carrier's shields in 2 seconds anymore; it takes longer but escort DPS is still very high. The lack of +60% shield resistance from science team 3 is a very big change for tanking. If anything, my carrier actually feels like it's just a tiny bit, slightly worst at tanking than before the patch.
Being a science class, I personally haven't had any problems with enemies using RSP. I guess that's a Science luxury though.. being able to rip off someone's RSP with a tap of a button.
Also, that match in you screen shot looked like a fun one. I like playing against that -TTT- team (and even had a chance to join them for a few runs a couple of days ago).
Overall, my thoughts kind of line up with what it was like with my Tribble experiences, however I don't think the metagame has shifted fully to the new patch on Live yet. Our fleet was doing better than pre-1.2 last night, but I think it was less a reflection of us and more that not everyone has adjusted for 1.2 yet. I'd spent a lot of time on Tribble before 1.2, so my build was ready to go when 1.2 launched, and I think that may be why my healing is Ok out of the box.
I think that how we perform this week may be partially a fluke until folks adjust to the patch and evolve. It's like how after the VM+SNB change came in, folks shifted more to BTSS powers and debuff stacking, and so on. Folks will evolve new tactics, and I don't think we've seen the new metagme yet. Last night the players I saw doing well were ones like Edgecase who were on the test server a lot testing this stuff out.
Match length is definitely higher, and the pace of combat is slower; pre-1.2, I figure we would have lost that match against Edgecase's team in more like 5-10 minutes. Sometimes you can actually make it back into a battle after a death to keep it going, versus the usual "Don't go back in, you can't save him. Regroup over here instead" that you'd see in arena matches pre-1.2. Now, if a cruiser is the last ship left behind, he might be able to tank the enemy long enough to get reinforcements in. That was a comment that snix had made that one night in /zone; he was trying to make it a little easier to reform mid-combat as part of the combat pace changes.
That being said, I do see some folks can put out some hefty damage in combat, but as Edgecase mentioned: "Lo, and didst Sulu come down from Starbase 01 and spake, 'Let there be Ramming Speed. A Lot.'" I honestly think ramming speed should have kept the old Live timers, or the calculation being updated to reflect the mass/velocity aspect more so in the damage. It's basically the primary spike damage on Live now. Beyond that though, I've seen that buffing up and focus firing is still pretty nasty, and possibly faster than you can out-heal.
Healing wise, I find my match heal scores to be equal to or higher than before 1.2, but again the match length is a big factor in that. I did kind of get the feeling that some cruisers hadn't switched powers and skills yet for 1.2, and were still adjusting to the power changes. Those that really spec for it can do some impressive/annoying healing though. As in "Stop shooting the tanks" in ventrillo heh.
II like the healing changes, but I wonder if Hazard Emitters may get rebalanced a little. Pumping up my aux to 100, with +58 to Hazard Systems and points in emitters and deflectors, HE II is hitting for 18k, over 1k every second. That's with 3 Halons (one a grandfathered one with +18 vs the usual Mk X +15) and a [HS] deflector. Grandfathered consoles I think should be fixed though; those could really ramp up HE even further to an insane level. Frankly, I was surprised +58 hadn't really hit a measurable diminishing returns ceiling, so maybe they need to look into the diminishing returns as well.
Regarding RSP, I actually dropped one of my two copies, and I honestly triggered it a lot less than I expected to. It's just there for true emergency situations, and I've been considering dropping it for EPtS II or something else, maybe another Aux To SIF. My resists/heals, APD, RSF, and heals seemed to give me decent survivability without RSP, however there were times when I needed to pop it. Just not as frequently pre-1.2 . I don't miss the 2nd copy though; that would have been a wasted power post-1.2.
I had a chat with a person who kept on complaining that he could never kill this one target. When I asked him how many people were shooting at the target heres the conversation
him: one.
me: Wait... one?
H: Ya thats how it worked prepatch and now we're nerfed. Its stupid that a bird can't kill a cruiser anymore.
m: Why didn't you call for a spike.
H: Because we don't need to.
M: But you couldn't kill him with one person, so get another person to point at him.
H: Look, we don't need to call spikes.
M: so... you're saying that you don't need tactics?
H: Ya, thats not how our fleet rolls. We just didn't have our top DPS players.
The conversation proceeded to devolve from there. There are a few fleets out there that have just insane amounts of raw talent but only use raw talent. Once that ability to oneshot someone single handedly gets nerfed what happens to the talent? whats there to compensate for it... I think we should already know the answer...
Finally --- killing the escorts first has ALWAYS been how pvp in STO works. They're the most fragile and they produce the most DPS. Cruisers are made to take punishment and produce only moderate at best DPS. Saying that PVP has devolved into "kill the escorts first" isn't the case, because thats how it has been since day one (which is coincidentally why dedicated tanks in pvp fail so badly).
When in my BoP i focus my attack on escort first. I was never in the airforce, but heard that's the usual dog fight.. and though fighters can take down a bomber, I think it took more than one to bring down some of them old' WWII bombers, and them said bombers did thier share of dmg to the fighters.
Does the DPS output of BoPs / Escorts merit the weakness they bring to the team?
For normal PUG battles with fools flying in at full impulse into the jaws of a BoP /escorts Alpha Strike most anything will do, but in more skilled battles would a Tact in a Cruiser be the better choice for Team DPS?
Well up till the day of the patch I assumed things would end up being bop=runabout.
However I am happy to say that thanks to universal BO slots and some rethinking my little bop can outlast all but the best cruisers... and still deliver some great dps. My 2 Tactical BO bop build is out the window... my Tactical LT Commander got escorted off the bridge... and I think tonight my Tactical Commander has a demotion comming.
The bop is still the most powerful ship in the game if you rig it right.
we'll see how it settles biut at the moment escorts seem still to be strongest ships
I have parked my science as I was just getting ganked and with the nerfs and speed changes i couldn't do anything about it , dusted off the escort and joined the rest of the flavour of the month.
On first impressions this patch has just left same if not worse problems.
Logged over to spend some time on my Fed RA5 Sci/Sci. Today has seen a number of "sci sucks" threads, so I figured I'd give it a whirl and see whether there was any truth to them. My thoughts on the matter quickly converged on "no, they don't".
First match was a PUG vs. Fister Sisters. By sheer coincidence, James@Ambience (the -TTT- healing cruiser from last night's entry) was on my team, and between the three healers on our team, the game went pretty much forever. Again, almost all the kills came from rams against overextended dps. The carrier and one of the battlecruisers stayed alive the entire fight. In the end, it was the nature of the PUG itself that undid our team... two of the players evidently got into some heated tells with each other, and the group fell apart while the game was still running. Scorecard here.
Second match was a PUG vs. PUG FvK (I tend to avoid queueing FvF). Our team this time was much more loosely organized, but did at least have one other healer on it. Two healers, it seems, is the magic number for keeping people alive. The match started out with Feds slow to join, and played as a 4v5 for quite a while. Eventually, the teams evened up, and again, most of our kills were against BOPs and Raptors - although this time, there was only very limited healing on the Klingon team, and it would have been straightforward to kill just about anybody. Scorecard.
I then decided to take a break and collect some thoughts.
As of early evening 6/4/10:
I think the game needs:
- More time to stabilize, still...
- Better support for the average player - whether through automation (auto-balance shields feature) or information.
I'm concerned that:Damn that James... 1.4 million heal. We quickly learned to just ignore him.
ITT: James is starting to become famous
I've seen some really powerful science skills, I just don't wanna say them and ruin the surprise for the next FoTM
Thanks heh. I also learned that when you break 1 million the stats display short out and goes blank lol. I was pretty surprised I got that much tonight in healing; my prior record was around 700k last night in the earlier match vs Edgecase. And yeah, having that team break up mid-match was a "what the hell?" moment when I realized I couldn't see their hull values as easily to help them.
The tractor repulsors hits from K'Noru though was a very nice tactic though. Frequently it cost me reaction time, however I will admit I kept my evasive maneuvers around just to get back in after. Having multiple distance heals (ET, TSS, Aux to SIF) definitely helps though. Repulsors before was more dangerous when I only had a single 10k heal.
Joined a 7th Core Premade and ran a number of FvF matches (FvK wasn't popping). Played several matches against PUGs (highly one-sided, as before), but also ran into a couple of premades. The premade vs. premade matches were light years more interesting.
Our initial team consisted of two tac/escorts and three sci/sci. While entertaining, I would not recommend this particular configuration for general use. We played a La Familia premade composed of 2 escorts and 3 cruisers once with this setup (score). Escorts led the deaths on the opposing team once again, as our group made a concerted effort to target them. Their cruisers, however, did very little healing overall, suggesting that cruisers focusing on damage at the expense of healing do not perform well in premade matches.
We then changed up our roster, going to a configuration with 2 tac/escorts, 1 eng/cruiser, and 2 sci/science vessels. The queue happened to give us a rematch against La Familia, which ended with similar results - lots of kills against their escorts, and similarly low healing numbers.
The third premade match was by far the most interesting, as we came up against The Tribble Tribunal's 5-man group: two healing cruisers, a dps cruiser, a science vessel, and an escort. The match on Cracked Planetoid took place in close quarters above the planet, and saw a great deal of focus fire, target switching, and - crucially - crowd control abilities used to disrupt healing.
Starting with split dps by our two escorts and a whole bunch of head-on collisions (and a strategically placed Tyken's Rift), it's clear that a good combination of damage and disruption is still capable of making a mess in a hurry. In fact, the other team's healing cruiser is the first to go down in the initial volley. And yes, I did miss my opening ram.
As of late night 6/4/10...
I wonder about a team of say, 2 Healer cruisers, 2 DPS cruisers, and a Sci cruiser. Say it's a fair premade with ok cross supporting skills and flew together marginally well. How would it perform? By your own accounting in these matches BoP / Escorts lead in deaths. By taking out the weakness of the easy kill ships to focus on would 5 cruisers be more viable then a team with even 1 Escort / BoP?
It looks like escorts get the short end of the stick because everybody targets them first. If we succeed in applying pressure, their damage output will also look low because they're forced into a defensive posture. The numbers definitely don't tell the whole story, however.
I think the video that I'm currently rendering of our match against -TTT- will show some places where assault cruisers simply wouldn't have gotten the job done. They put up good numbers, but I think there's some definite doubt as to whether a team relying on cruiser DPS would be able to bring the burst when and where it's needed.
I have no personal experience flying a tac/escort in a T5 premade, though, and there's no substitute for experience... so, I asked some of the escort pilots who were in that match whether they think they could have gotten the job done in a cruiser. Some said maybe, some said no. More specifically, one said he could have done the damage for sure, but he wouldn't have the damage spikes that turn his damage into kills.
just a repost...
You are very happy with the game and it seems to fit your desired play style well, happy days for you I am sure. Grat's to you. But my question is a valid one after this "patch" so if you have info or experience with a pure cruiser setup please share it in depth like Edge has so far. If you do not then please leave out the useless comments.
your not going to want to play with a bunch of tactical/cruiser set ups. They simply don't have the burst or dps ability that escorts do. I just played DOB/some other fleet, we had 3 escorts (I was playing an escort) 2 cruisers, they had 3 cruisers, 1 science, 1 escort. They could only score a kill when 4 of their team members focus fired on someone, including their escort, and while they produced alot of coordinated spikes they simply couldn't do it without the escort. At least, not enough against a 2 healer backbone.
the lower a persons health, the easier it is to burst them down. That said, damage against cruisers tends to stick better than damage against escorts. Simply because cruisers have a higher intrensic resistance to spikes. However that higher intrensic survivability doesn't mean much when the cruisers aren't interweaving heals.
So tl;dr, no. teams without escorts are not viable. They have to coordinate significantly more for offensive, which makes defense much harder, and gain little in terms of surivability.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3NSUfwrvPs
EDIT:
Everything will be based on matches against premades since Fed PUG teams still hold little chance against even Klingon PUGs, it mostly degrades to a damage contest among us, moreso than prepatch. My current main captain (Anshak), is a klingon Tactical officer in a BoP.
I love the changes and how they've impacted pvp sofar. The increase in match time makes for more involved tactics on both sides and has evened out class specialization within both factoins. Pre-patch DPS was king and healing/tank mattered little when targets would pop within seconds but now even with focus fire a quality tank can survive focus fire to a point.
My engagements were with a semi-premade team, we hadn't coordinated our ships or even planned on fighting together but I was with a group of some of the more regular klingon pvp'ers and we fly together quite often. We quickly noticed that fed escorts are nowhere near the biggest threat anymore and disabling the team's healers became priority 1. The most effective teams we faced had several healers, not just 1, and despite a much lower DPS the teams were still capable of wearing us down. I won't comment on any of the BO abilities I use (have to maintain some mystery) but the team's tactics definatly changed.
Being able to withstand much more fire allows for dividing targets. Against a team with a single healer it was simply a matter of focus firing that captain then cleaning up the remaining feds but with multiple designated healers it seemed more effective to divide targets and have part of the team take out 1 while the other does the same w/ diff target otherwise we would waste too much time on the primary. SNB and tricobolt's are very effective ways of neutralizing targets. As a BoP its very easy with the shorter cooldowns to cloak outside combat after using RSP and only decloaking with that available again so removing the RSP as an option is one of the better ways to approach engagements.
Ive also noticed that reaction time has become a more significant factor. I can still take out a target in seconds if they cant react accordingly with proper counters, which is how it should be. Pilot skill and team cohesion are far greater factors than pre-patch when certain "i win" BO abilities decided fights. I'll add more specific observations in a few days once the patch has had a little more time for pilot's to adapt to 1.2.
well that sounds amazing
Before the patch, and even worse now, are the ships that I attack and do zero shield or hull damage when i through everything i have at them. I don't mine heal skills but i hate it when i see a ship getting attacked by seven ships and not taking any damage.
As for this patch, i downloaded some other games and play them when i get upset. I have been playing them mostly these last two days.
escorts - you bring these guys because you need the burst to kill targets. They are also the softest targets which means that they are going to be receiving 90% of the attention in combat. low survivability and high damage potential makes them the primary target of opponents. despite claims, escorts are still the most reliable way to score kills.
cruisers - these guys form the backbone of the team. two good healing cruisers breaks the back of most pugs. two excellent healing cruisers breaks the back of most premades. high intrensic survivability and moderate damage potential makes them a bad target to attack. substantially higher hull strength makes spikes against these targets take longer, and more likely to fail.
science - these guys are interesting. Science excels at CC, which gets more important the better the opponents. They can't heal as well as cruisers though (cruisers have more access to the heals) and have only marginally more survivability than escorts. I've seen some particularly nasty science skills that really open up a can of worms on the opponents though
~~from observations~~
the following fleets have adapted or are in the process of adapting:
7th core
DOB
182
TTT
Based on the experience from our fleet (usual premade of 1 tac/esc, 1 sci/sci, 1 eng/star cruiser, 1 eng/assault cruiser, 1 tac/assault cruiser), I think you still need an escort or two to provide the burst damage and high density damage to overcome healing. If we were all cruisers, I'm not sure if they could do enough damage to get past the opponent. It's too evenly distributed over time (low DPS), and too easy for a healer to mitigate.
When I first logged on yesterday to play the new patch, I simply went on and played with my old build. In terms of abilities, nothing much had changed. Here was my Pre 1.2 setup on my BoP:
Tac Cm: Tac Team 1, AP:B1, HYT3, CRF3
Eng LC: EPtS, ET2, RSP2
Sci LT: ST1, JS2
Sci LT: HE1, HE2
Weapons: 3x DHC, 1x Quantum Torp // 2x Turrets
I went on and duly got my TRIBBLE handed to me. Repeatedly. I kept dying without scoring a single kill, and without doing much damage. I figured the problem was that I was dying too much, so I swapped out some an EPS console for a +6 Aux console, swapped my ST1/JS2 for an ST2/JS1, and tried playing with more power in Aux. I went back in (the same Salvage Ops match) with my new set-up, thinking I'd be invincible, and would be able to pump out damage without having to worry much about active heals.
I was wrong. I died just as often, and did FA damage. The problem wasn't insufficient healing, it was a sheer lack of DPS. I thought about adding another Tactical. Looking at my giant list of STO cooldowns, I noticed that I could chain CRF and APB with only 5 seconds of downtime. I also saw that I could chain HYT almost perfectly to ensure a 1 HYT per 2 Quantum Torps. And APO still looked damn tempting....
So I rocked down to Qo'nos and bought myself a Raptor. I stripped the BoP and stuck everything roughly as-is into the Raptor, with 1 fewer +hazard sci console, 1 more +cannon console, and a Mk IX green phaser array in the back, just so I have something to use with my Ensign Tac station...
Raptor set-up #1:
Tac CM: TT1, AP:B1, HYT3, APO3
Tac LC: HYT1, CRF1, CRF2
Eng LT: EPtS1, ET2
Sci LT: ST1, JS2/HE2 (couldn't decide on which to use)
Tac En: BO1 (useless tac slot to go with the useless weapon slot)
Raptor set-up #2:
Tac CM: TT1, AP:B1, HYT3, APO3
Tac LC: HYT1, AP:B1, CRF2
Eng LT: EPtS1, ET2
Sci LT: ST1, JS2/HE2
Tac En: BO1
Raptor set-up #3:
Tac CM: TT1, AP:B1, HYT3, CRF3
Tac LC: HYT1, AP:B1, CRF2
Eng LT: EPtS1, ET2
Sci LT: ST1, JS2/HE2
Tac En: BO1
None of these seemed much better than any other, but I damned well wished I had a Fed Escort... The extra Eng or Sci Ensign station would have been awesome, because I could have chained EPtX or used both HE and JS... But alas, we Klinks get a crappy useless Tac slot...
Anyway, those three set-ups worked fairly well. In this new paradigm, I was putting out a lot of DPS, and still having some burst in the form of HYT, just in case their shields decided to drop.
But it was utterly tedious. The turn rate was dire, and not having a battle cloak made it much more difficult to run away when things got too hot. I decided to try the same set-up on my BoP (less the useless Tactical Ensign and Phaser array).
I can't say there's a whole lot of difference between the BoP and the Raptor. The extra Tac Console on the Raptor adds about 6% DPS to each cannon, but judicious selection of Sci and Eng consoles gives the BoP about the same effective hull (via extra resistance), the same weapon power, and the slightly more healing. So in the end, I swap 6% extra DPS for 13% extra healing + resistance on HE compared to the Raptor.
The biggest difference wasn't on paper though. It was in the turn rate. Being able to turn faster meant being able to DPS more. As we must all know by now, it now takes 3 or 7 passes just to kill an escort. This means that turning around and shooting front on quickly again is very important. In the BoP, I found myself able to do that much better than in the Raptor. So I think that overall, the BoP wins by a hair's breadth.
But anyway, here is my overall verdict:
1) Fights are ridiculously long and frustrating. Getting the enemy to 5%, only to see him heal up to 100% in 2 seconds makes you want to go Angry German Kid on the keyboard. I don't enjoy mashing buttons endlessly for 15-20 minutes at a time, I enjoy devising an attack plan, like a cheetah, or a chess grandmaster, that corners my opponent into executing a sequence of actions that result in his death. Me and him are in a faceoff. I get the jump; I use JS, he uses ST, I use HE, he uses JS, I use ST, he goes boom, I don't. The new patch has turned that game of chess into a game of uno.
2) RSP is ****ing ridiculous. Nerf it, increase the bleedthrough to 33%, or put the cooldown back to 3 minutes. I don't give a flying **** about your ****ing categories, Snix -- RSP needs to ****ing die. NOW.
3) The game has become much more boring, much less dependent on individual skill, and much more dependent on whether your team decides to heal you or not. For the vast majority of us who aren't in PvP fleets, and who just PUG, the game's been made much, much worse.
3x DHC, 1x Quantum, 2x Turrets rear
Tac Cdr:
CRF III
HYT III
APB I
Tac Team I
Eng Lt Cdr:
Aux to SIF II
EPtS II
ET I
Eng Lt:
RSP I
ET I
Sci Lt:
Hazard Emitters II
Transfer Shield Strength I (or Sci Team)
I use a slight modification of this Fed build for my Assault Cruiser: http://tinyurl.com/39jayb3 - you can replace all ground skills ofc, it's meant for more than space pvp.
The lack of TSS3 hurts, but it works out quite well in Cap and Hold at least.
Still thinking about a skill to replace one Engineering Team I. Maybe EP to Weapons. A 2nd RSP would also be nice.
P.S. Would go CRF III and take APO: I on your third Raptor setup, Mise.