Has Leadership Stacking Worked Too Well?

cha0s1428 · February 2013

Sorry for the long post.

This isn't a post about nerfing anyone or buffing my ship or anything like that, just to get it out of the way. This is about the BOFF human trait Leadership. Now we all know it was broken and it has recently been fixed. However I don't know if it is working as intended right now because I feel it may be a bit out of whack.

My friend and I dual quite often to either test new ships, builds, abilities, etc. I usually have a cruiser and he?s in an escort. Here is the scoop of the latest fight since Leadership was fixed.

I have a set of fleet phasers, and a set of acc x3 phasers that I change between, usually six with a couple of torps front and back. I ran with both the fleet Excelsior cruiser, and the assault cruiser refit, both set up for just pure tanking.

Both of us are running an all human crew

Me - Engineer captain

The majority of my build is as follows:

Com Eng EPtS1, EPtW2, AtSIF2, AtSIF3
Lt Eng -EptS1, RSP1
Lt Science (or universal for Assault cruiser) - HE1, TSS2
Lt Com Tac, -TT1, BO2, HY3

Doffs make Tactical team CD to 15 seconds so no need for second tac team. Usually put torp spread of BFAW 1 or something.

Now, my friend normally just ran the fleet defiant as a tac captain running a typical cannon rapid fire 2 build with omega 3, but as far as his engineer boffs he had

Lt Eng- EPtS1, RSP1
Or
Lt Eng- EPtS1, EPtS2

This fight would usually last about 5 - 10 minutes with me being able to out tank his damage and eventually killing him. So he bought a Patrol Escort and went for doubling up attack pattern omega, with only 2 cannon rapid fire 1's.

Now he runs
Lt Eng - EPtS1, RSP1
Ens Eng - EPtS1

Now it is a completely different fight. The fight will go on for about 5 minutes, and he gets me down to about 50% hull, but RSP or Miracle worker is usually up by then and the fight starts all over again. However I can't get his shields to drop. They are completely red most of the time, but they won't go down. If I manage to finally get a half second when they are, his leadership stacking completely negates any and all damage I do. Bleed through damage is healed the second it's applied.

After 30 minutes of fighting, we both just called it a draw. Looking at the scores at the end of our run is where something seemed off.

After 30 minutes, we both had done (roughly) -
Damage - Him = 1,770,000
Damage - Me = 1,410,000
Healed - Him = 759,000
Healed - Me = 2,000,000

We had relatively close damage, but I massively outhealed him, which is expected, but during the fight, his hull never took any damage. Even when I managed to get his shields down for a second, he never went below 90%. 90% to 100% took roughly 2 seconds.
Now, your natural hull regen doesn't count towards your healing numbers, so this tells me that something is very wrong here.

Again, this is not crying because X ship is under/overpowered, nerf/buff this or that. I'm not looking for ship build critiques or play style advice.

All I am wondering is if this sounds right. Should Leadership be this powerful? I mean it isn't overpowered really, but it does completely nullify any bleedthrough damage with beams, which does kind of change the nature of ship to ship fighting I think. I can't think of any reason (for me) to play in a cruiser anymore since my plan was to go for survivability first, and the damage. Now it seems I can be just as effective a tank WITH DPS to boot in a patrol escort.

Has anyone else noticed a huge difference since they fixed BOFF Leadership?

romuzarii · February 2013

You won't be anywhere as near effective tanking in an escort without ENG abilities. You'll just die alot and be worthless to the group waiting on respawn timers.

Leadership isn't the problem here, especially when it is entirely dependent on your crew not being dead. It often is in STFs so you must sacrifice gear for crew resist gear if you want to take advantage of the leadership perk. Even when it's in full force it's just 3% per tick and frankly I damn well welcome it for PvE because I have spent many of STFs running under 50% HP because my heals suck and no one wants to play as a team and save their heals for themselves(not everyone but might as well be "everyone")

I'm not really sure if there is a problem. You had a draw. If that's not balanced gameplay then I don't know what is. Remember that this was a 1v1 match up. When things are balanced, fatigue decides the victor. But it does pose problems for fed vs kdf, and I have already offered a fix for that. It's called giving klingons a version of leadership where you inspire your crew to work harder for honor and victory, which roughly translates to increased DPS. An increase that's just as considerable as 5 human BOs stacking leadership.

But instead of that awesome sauce we all know what's just going to happen. Cryptic will nerf leadership after taking 3 years to fix it and ruin everything. Just so they don't have to give the klingons something nice to counter. Then leadership will be back to being worthless as **** because this PvE game apparently has to revolve around PvP gameplay for some damn reason. If I wanted to play PvP seriously I would load up a FPS. I damn sure wouldn't expect it to dictate how STO unfolds.

cha0s1428 · February 2013

While I agree with you to an extent, it just seems a bit crazy that after 30 mins, he had healed over 1 million damage JUST from leadership, and that it completely nullifies beam bleedthrough from 6 weapons, even 8 when I tried it for testing sake. That doesn't seem a bit much to you?

cha0s1428 · February 2013

edit for it being moved

kevaldt · February 2013

Hes flying an escort, his heals SHOULD be less seeing as an escort has less hull.

Amazingly you actually healed 1 million more damage than you took, so I actually doubt these numbers are in any way accurate, sorry.

As far as a difference... hell yeah! I can usually tank pretty well in just about any ship, but I have been doing it much better lately. I think I have blown up maybe twice since I switched over to a mostly human boff layout.

romuzarii · February 2013

cha0s1428 wrote: »

Again, this is not crying because X ship is under/overpowered, nerf/buff this or that. I'm not looking for ship build critiques or play style advice.

Well it's suspiciously starting to sound exactly like that if you felt the need to post about it twice. Again:

You won't be anywhere as near effective tanking in an escort without ENG abilities. You'll just die alot and be worthless to the group waiting on respawn timers. Go ahead and try it. See how long you last in a defiant with less hull and no heals against a tac cube that has full attention on you. Leadership ain't so great that you survive a full on tac cube assault.

Leadership isn't the problem here, especially when it is entirely dependent on your crew not being dead. It often is in STFs so you must sacrifice gear for crew resist gear if you want to take advantage of the leadership perk. Even when it's in full force it's just 3% per tick and frankly I welcome it for PvE because I have spent many STFs running under 50% HP because my heals suck and no one wants to play as a team and save their heals for themselves(not everyone but might as well be "everyone")

I'm not really sure if there is a problem. You had a draw. If that's not balanced gameplay then I don't know what is. Remember that this was a 1v1 match up. When things are balanced, fatigue decides the victor. But it does pose problems for fed vs kdf. Either give KDF hull regen too or something to counter it. Or apparently it's not a major problem since the KDF has not been up in arms over it yet. I think they have one discussion topic about it. This is probably because they enjoy the trait working now on their fed characters, and have seen no game breaking effects in fed vs kdf combat.

Again:

I'm not really sure if there is a problem. You had a draw. If that's not balanced gameplay then I don't know what is.

So, you can no longer kill him and now you have a problem with leadership trait. 1v1 combat should be draws. That's a sign of balance. Groups is where it's at in that case, where more than one person focuses fire on a ship. You know, kind of like "real life" Star Trek where the fleet admiral orders the fleet to all fire in the same spot.

What you are sorta proposing is that escorts gets their DPS because they sacrifice survival, and since leadership now works that that isn't fair. Well, it's still just 3% ticks at it's very best. Apparently your friend doesn't pack enough DPS to kill you but you could kill him. Now you can't kill him. SO now there's a problem to be had, of course.

khayuung · February 2013

Thanks to Leadership working I CAN choose to wear other gear in STFs now, so NO THANK YOU.

Especially when in pvp thanks to all the q torps flying around my 50 crew are really really dead all the time. My Admiral just flies the FTER solo like yesterday's...

...yesterdays's...

...hmm I'm forgetting something here.

cha0s1428 · February 2013

romuzarii wrote: »

So, you can no longer kill him and now you have a problem with leadership trait. 1v1 combat should be draws. That's a sign of balance. Groups is where it's at in that case, where more than one person focuses fire on a ship. You know, kind of like "real life" Star Trek where the fleet admiral orders the fleet to all fire in the same spot.

What you are sorta proposing is that escorts gets their DPS because they sacrifice survival, and since leadership now works that that isn't fair. Well, it's still just 3% ticks at it's very best. Apparently your friend doesn't pack enough DPS to kill you but you could kill him. Now you can't kill him. SO now there's a problem to be had, of course.

I don't necessarily have a problem with it, just wondering if was intended to replace tanking abilities. If it is, then fine, if not, then I was pointing it out. He has plenty of DPS, I just have a tanking build set up entirely to heal myself and nobody else.

cha0s1428 · February 2013

kevaldt wrote: »

Hes flying an escort, his heals SHOULD be less seeing as an escort has less hull.

Amazingly you actually healed 1 million more damage than you took, so I actually doubt these numbers are in any way accurate, sorry.

As far as a difference... hell yeah! I can usually tank pretty well in just about any ship, but I have been doing it much better lately. I think I have blown up maybe twice since I switched over to a mostly human boff layout.

Cripes yer right about the healing numbers, thank you, that should just be 2, not 2.7. Uhg typo. It is usually the case that I heal more damage than I receive though. I suspect that there is some damage that is being done that isn't counted towards the score. I think it may be the borg cutting beam, or that omega rep kinetic damage thing.

eminencegrise · February 2013

It looks like BOFF's with leadership are providing (in addition to whatever other bonus they provide) a +40 bonus to hull healing.

For comparison, a Mk XII common level SIF console only provides +17.5 Hull Repair skill, which is about 12.6 hull repair (if it also works on all other hull healing skills). The second tier Omega reputation ability adds +10. So one human BOFF is about as good as 2 consoles, plus the Omega ability. And you can equip 4 more of them. They stack without diminishing returns.

While the rate of hull repair drops significantly during combat, getting +200 hull repair for using 5 BOFF's with leadership seems rather out of proportion to other sources of hull healing.

joshmaaaaaaans · February 2013

I dont notice any difference with 5 human or 5 random boffs. Derp.

dalnar83 · February 2013

There is a "huge difference" and I like it this way. My steamrunner heals 3% of hull per second in combat.

seekerkorhil · February 2013

The reason the Boffs provide such a huge bonus is because they arn't adding their 20% properly.

When you enter combat your passive hull regen drops to a % of its normal value. I think its something like 15%.

However this 15% is being calculated BEFORE the extra 20% from the Boffs instead of after it. Meaning if you had 200% hull regen out of combat (100% base + 100% from 5 Boffs) you get 115% in combat instead of 30%.

This erroneous calculation is why Humans are being way more effective than they should be. Eventually they might get around to fixing this and when they do Humans will be useless again.

mneinth · February 2013

Wish my kdf had access to a boff that would heal my ship for me........

skyranger1414 · February 2013

mneinth wrote: »

Wish my kdf had access to a boff that would heal my ship for me........

You have access to better toy consoles and better cruisers. Also, don;t forget you get to do more damage groundside.

captainbailey · February 2013

If you hull always needs repair then your probably already dead. Keep those sheilds up and it wont matter because your hull will always be high.

legendarylycan · February 2013

skyranger1414 wrote: »

Also, don;t forget you get to do more damage groundside.

eh? how do you figure that?

cmdrskyfaller · February 2013

make sure he didnt pick up the faction passive ability that heals hull as well as the leadership stacked traits.

organicmanfred · February 2013

Hi,

ok, Human Leadership boosts Hull Repair. So far so good. But does it also affect the Shield Regenerate?

Anyway, my Hull Regen. says 220%
my Shield Regen. says

is that normal?

I put 5 Humans into the Boff slots, my Heads of Department are different species.
Or do I have to make my HoDs also Human?

maddog0000doom · February 2013

they have to make it easier for feds they are the bang for buck for cryptic.

frtoaster · February 2013

seekerkorhil wrote: »

The reason the Boffs provide such a huge bonus is because they arn't adding their 20% properly.

When you enter combat your passive hull regen drops to a % of its normal value. I think its something like 15%.

However this 15% is being calculated BEFORE the extra 20% from the Boffs instead of after it. Meaning if you had 200% hull regen out of combat (100% base + 100% from 5 Boffs) you get 115% in combat instead of 30%.

This erroneous calculation is why Humans are being way more effective than they should be. Eventually they might get around to fixing this and when they do Humans will be useless again.

Yes, I believe this may be a bug. I created a thread about this issue here:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=8351891

For a detailed analysis of hull repair rates, see the following post:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=8340431&postcount=3

maxvitor · February 2013

I had a ship with an all ET crew and found it was hurting pretty badly, replaced one boff with a human and the difference was like night and day, now I don't know if the abilities stack or have diminishing returns but I hope that they don't TRIBBLE with a trait that is finally working in a desirable manner.

firescorpion1 · February 2013

it's cries like these that are gona end up ruining any chance a escort has against the cruisers , for one if u tweak then hull regen any lower on the escorts even with the hull regen off hum boffs , it will end up popping at every shot thats given to it ,

and for another cruisers have way more crew , so there fore when ur crew dies off ur not gona get them back as fast as a escort will ,and u will not see a change in ur hull healin from the crew like the escorts simply because of the smaller crew takes less for the crew to heal escpecially if u run 2 or 3 of them crew recovery consoles,, u might as well give up on the crew healing a cruiser , but heres the thing cruisers have way more eng boff slots to take the space of the crew heal, so therefore its even , if he simply can outstand u its because he has learnt your play pattern and saves a skill for when u simply use whatever was finishing him off ,1 vs 1 really test's nothing pvp not crew hull heal there , and any kind of healing ability is needed there , so if u take the crew heal down is just gona make alot of people that hate playing cruisers simply stop playing altogether, u cant just espect them to make escorts have great fire power and simply get blown to bits , that doesnt make any kind of sence to me , but is what really im understanding that this whole thing was posted about, stop posting anything that might cause them to nerf what we do have now, post something that will help , like ideas all im saying is that ive played all kinds of online games and these kinda comments ,,post ,etc cause the developers to nerf the TRIBBLE out of stuff i mean use ur head dude

darkjeff · February 2013

firescorpion1 wrote: »

but heres the thing cruisers have way more eng boff slots to take the space of the crew heal, so therefore its even

Ok, and how does the cruiser make up for our (to paraphrase you) way more tac boff slots that crank up our damage?

theanothername · March 2013

I do think 1 human boff is working as intended; I not think more than that are. Unless its in the devs intention an all human ship crew is the most desiarable setup for each ship. I don't know how it compares to the romulan embassy boff yet; but the saurian/store borg efficient trait is a bad joke compared to leadership.

Add dimishings and more important add some interesting, diverse space-skills for the other races at the same time.

aspartan1 · March 2013

No doubt. There are far to many ground traits and precious few space ones. I wish Cryptic would created a trait selection option - it could be RPed as a transporter malfunction and it could allow you to pick say one trait from a couple pools divided up between ground and space. Then the "transporter" would randomly select four traits from the pools with preference given to the ones you selected and when your BO rematerialized it would have them. It could be a one time thing and even cost game currency. Hell they could even add special enhancements to the RNG to improve your chances if one chose to use FM or lobi or other similar currency or have a small chance the BO would be beamed across space and lose it forever!

cha0s1428 · March 2013

firescorpion1 wrote: »

if he simply can outstand u its because he has learnt your play pattern and saves a skill for when u simply use whatever was finishing him off ,1 vs 1 really test's nothing pvp not crew hull heal there , and any kind of healing ability is needed there , so if u take the crew heal down is just gona make alot of people that hate playing cruisers simply stop playing altogether, u cant just espect them to make escorts have great fire power and simply get blown to bits , that doesnt make any kind of sence to me ,

What a surprise than an escort captain loves the change.

What the test eventually devolved into was us sitting 2k apart with my broadside facing him. 4 tac consoles with 6 fleet phasers, and then changing to 6 fleet antiprotons (with the antiproton consoles), and me using EPtW1 and EPS 3.

Not moving, not evading, with him just hitting EPtS1 every 30 seconds. He was out healing my damage without using any hull heals. He didn't have a borg set, omega or maco set, or any set for that matter. He was in fact using the free patrol escort. I would maybe finally get him down to 90-95% inside of 2 minutes and then he just hits RSP and bam, start it over again.

I have given up entirely on cruisers now and fly escorts since there is absolutely no point in flying a cruiser in pvp.

And yes I do expect escorts to do massive damage and simply get blown to bits. They are glass cannons (more so in the Kumari) and that is the way it should be. Have you played any mmo before? Admittedly its harder to establish a holy trinity here, but that is the general rule. You trade off survivability for more damage. Most games have enough classes to have the 3 established points of DPS, Tank, and Healer, plus have enough classes in between that have different trade offs. When you make it so the DPS class has almost the same survivability has the tank without a similar change to the tanks, you have a problem.

It was ridiculous before the change, now its down right pitiful.

What kills cruisers? Escorts
What kills Science ships? Escorts
What kills escorts? Other escorts.

Now that escorts can out tank cruisers, I can find no reason to play anything other than an escort.

Has Leadership Stacking Worked Too Well?

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