For those who didn't know, when you reach Omega tier 4 reputation, one of your two upgrade choices is "superior shield repair". It's supposed to give you a chunk of shield regen every 6 seconds, effectively stacking with your shield's natural regeneration. But due to a bug, it's being added
every second, making your shields regenerate at a fairly crazy rate. On Mirror Invasion, my entire team bailed out after they killed the Stadi, and I was tanking the 20-ish ships that were left behind without any trouble. I wasn't killing them quickly, but they weren't wiping the floor with me either. "Inevitable" and "relentless" spring to mind.
I know it's a bug.
But.
I have to say that this is really the first time I've had my cruiser feel like a
cruiser. That is, pinning down the center of a formation, shrugging off incoming fire, throwing heals at my allies. If my cruiser were this durable by design, I'd say "Hell yea I'm the tank! All aggro belongs to me! Do your worst puny man" and charge into hordes of enemies like the escort guys want cruiser guys to do.
Thing is, ordinarily, to have a cruiser that survives this well you have to be selfish with your heals. I'm sure there's somebody that is using the ridiculously exploitive thing where you have Reverse Polarity running all the time by using aux2batt and dark magic who is about to say "L2P noob", but that's not how the game is meant to work. Ordinarily I have to keep all my TSS and aux2sif and emergency power for my own benefit, and be rippling through all my stuff to make sure the cooldowns don't get out of sync and stuff. It's keeps me alive through a lot, but it forces me to be selfish.
But with this omega bug, now I can take a huge chunk of attention away from my own survive and focus on how my TEAM is doing, because my own survival doesn't require second by second adjustment and selfishness. In the last few missions I played on that ship, I've probably kept more team mates alive, thrown more support at allies, than I have in the last week combined. My personal DPS is still mediocre-to-terrible but my team's average survival rate has gone up a ton simply because I can be a more effective cruiser for them. I feel USEFUL. I feel like I am being adequately compensated for poor agility and poor tactical options with truly superior tankiness and healing, not the paltry +10% hull and shield strength that usually passes for cruiser durability.
So now I can look forward to this bug being fixed, and realizing that this new ship isn't actually anywhere near as durable as it felt at first, and going back to having to be twitchy to stay alive and being selfish with my heals. But it makes me sad because I really like this new gameplay of being the formation anchor and compensating for my low damage contribution with high support contribution. And it makes me wish that cruisers in general could get some kind of love toward this goal. If they choose to play this way.
Anyway. I like being uber-tank. Gonna miss it.
Comments
Heh, love this line. Yeah its definately not a fair ability, but it sure is fun.
Amen on all of what you said. Having chosen that same exact passive, it is SO nice to have all that shield regen, and truly be tanking. I know it's bugged, but pulling all the aggro and being SO hard to kill is amazing.
I couldn't agree more on loving my cruiser ACTUALLY be a cruiser and taking the hits like it truly is meant to be.
Even when they fix it, it'll still be so nice to have the extra free regen.
If the only thing that's bugged is how often the shield regen ticks, and not the amount -- so it does give us about 1000 shield regen every 6 seconds -- then, even as an Escort pilot, I'd still take the shield regen.
If they nerf the amount of shield regen too, so that it only regens 100 shield every 6 seconds instead of 1000, then I'd switch over to the weapons proc. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they did nerf the amount... it seems like an extremely powerful passive at 1000 shields per 6 seconds.
Use my siglinks as a guide to build a proper Cruiser.
You will feel like a real tank without the need for broken passives.
Anyhow, the passive will still be ridiculously strong even with the bugfix.
I was honestly leaning towards the kinetic proc, at least on my ships meant to DPS. I figured since the numbers on the shield heal looked ludicrous, they'd get nerfed hard and I'd be stuck with a useless of half-useless passive until they forced me to be five respecs for each toon that took it.
I'm still thinking the kinetic proc is a safer bet in terms of "least likely to be nerfed into oblivion", but I'm going to hold out as long as possible before making a call.
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That said I hope they make it an amount per second and not an amount per 6. Personal preference there. Or they may change it to resist X% damage.
Main problem is the kinetic proc just looked like it was gonna go inconsequential amounts of damage.
I have a sneaky suspicion that the "1000" is also a bug and it's meant to be ~250 per facing per tick, which would put it down into the general realm of shield passive regeneration.
I tend to charge into groups of enemies with warp plasma following me already, I don't need other tricks to keep me in one piece (hopefully I'll be even better once I replace the Breen set with something more suitable).
Saying that, it would be nice to free up some heals for team mates.
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If you're in a support cruiser I'm assuming you're using beams. Beams have much less of a penalty in terms of damage reduction at range. Use that to your advantage and stay on the edge of the fight and toss repairs around. If you're targeted withdraw slightly so you're out of the target's range, but can still toss defensive buffs on allies.
Also, distributing shields, adjusting power settings to move to max shield power, turning your ship, using evasives, various doffs (eg hazzards, shield distros, cooldown reducers), batteries, misc p2w consoles, regular resist consoles are all ways to be defensive w/o using boff abilities you can otherwise use on allies.
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i am on same question what to take now this +dmg, or shild, what is now the way to go how much dmg this skill gives, anyone test it out?
and the shild buff how much it really will give, anyone from cryptic team can say now how the shild buff really will work, i will not make now wrong decision.
there is no way back if you decide wrong right:/
I don't know. I've found that the bugged heal makes the borg nuetralizer completely irrelavent. I get hit with it and the regen is higher than the drain, so now I don't lose my shields to it.
It's nice, but obviously not intented.
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Well right now you have escorts that can tank as well as a skilled and dedicated cruiser. Obviously this a problem.
My point in starting the thread was to point out that since it's a lot easier for a *cruiser* to tank now, you have a lot more attention and abilities to spare on keeping your allies alive. This creates a much stronger sense of "role identity" for cruisers, who are normally required to be extremely selfish and self-centered in order to reach peak survivability.
Also a problem is that in PvP, a lone Cruiser can stand up to multiple escorts. It's really bad for business to have an accessible, passive PvP-breaker in-game when you've just promoted a PvP event...
Cruisers are innately slow, have poor turn rates, easily CC'able and no access to APO, except for maybe a couple of the newer C-store/Lockbox cruisers.
I've seen Defiants, Jem Bugs and Bops easily withstand focussed fire+ SubNukes from 2 or more ships, either by zipping around in circles or just flying away and resetting buffs.
As always, PVPers QQ because they might have to change their strategy to meet a changing battlefield, and everything gets broken in some vain attempt to suit them.
More seriously, though, I strongly dislike when Cryptic decides to fiddle around with things on Holodeck because someone didn't think them through to start with. I can understand, for example, fixing the shield repair so it ticks once every six seconds instead of once a second- like it's supposed to, and like the description says- but just deciding to nerf things just because pisses me off (much like they did with the Danube Runabout tractor beams, and if memory serves that was the PvPers QQing then too.)
Especially when, like the Rep powers, you choose them and then you're stuck with them unless you want to pay to respec. That's ridiculous.
Also, I went with the kinetic passive, mostly because it reminded me of what antiprotons used to be able to do in this game, and because my crit chance + severity is insane. If they were to tweak it, I'd prefer they buff it up just a little bit, 11 additional kinetic isnt anything to scoff at, dont get me wrong, but it would be nice if they touched up that bonus.
Just my 2 cents at least.
The thing is the issue of making these kind of things effective for PvE and PvP w/o being OP or useless in either format was pointed out to them before it went live:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=6483321&postcount=17
I also went on to suggest different feasible solutions. Further, I wasn't the only PvP poster to bring these things up. Also if you read the Dev post I quoted we didn't have any tribble time to test these things.
Instead of blaming other players, speak to Cryptic's Mgt for allowing this.
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Quite frankly I'd rather they actually fix bugs than spend time trying to balance the game for PVP that nobody actually cares about.
Fair enough, out of curiousity did you read the link?
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Well then, I'm not sure where the problem is... they are addressing a bug. I suppose if you're somebody that was enjoying exploiting that bug or somebody that just couldn't play without exploiting that bug... you might have a problem with it.
There's very little, extremely little, attention given to balancing anything for PvP. There are plenty of things - plenty of bugs - that are brought up by the PvP community. The real question that arises from this, imo though, is why is the PvE community so quiet about them...eh?
Oh yeah, I mentioned that in the first paragraph...
I find the PvEers who complain this stuff tend not to read posts which might make them rethink their opinions on the matter. Self denial is a powerful thing.
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In the end, I'm not really sure that it's fair for it even to be a PvE vs. PvP discussion. It's a player discussion. For various things like this, there will be both PvE and PvP players that speak up about problems...and there will be those players that complain that the others were honest about the situation.
To continue being fair, mind you - it's likely that there are oodles of PvE players that simply do not realize it. I'm not talking denial or anything like that - I'm not saying their clueless - nothing derogatory. It's simply a case they do not realize it.
The NPCs are not going to point it out for them if they miss it.
Players on the other hand, being on the receiving end of certain things, will definitely speak up. In a twisted sense, their the voice of the NPCs...eh?
I still say that for such changes, as was mentioned in another thread, that NPCs should be given all the abilities that players are given...
...the PvE players would be more vocal about such issues. Both those that simply did not know as well as those that knew and exploited them for all they could.
I agree it shouldn't be a player vs player contention. But, there are some PvE players who blame PvP players unjustly. In more than 1 thread in more than 1 forum I've linked a forum discussion w/a Dev where a PvP player (me) identified problems w/the types of passives being introduced and gave suggestions when prompted by the Dev. But, it's not the Devs being blamed for lack of forthought and effort. It's the PvP player base.
Further, there are players who don't understand they can play the way they want w/o using the reputation system bonuses and don't realize it. I gave a general brief synopsis here:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=7105491&postcount=13
I can tell by posts that followed some people don't want to believe the suggestions and discount them if they bothered to read them at all. Quite frankly I don't think the majority of people have an issue w/the passives being fixed and even toned down after that. It's the people who refuse to try and get better then blame people for taking away the OP TRIBBLE.
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