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Shouldn't Torpedos be a bit more affective against shields?
lianthelia
Member Posts: 7,902 Arc User
I mean shouldn't they?
You never heard Picard say lock phasers and hold quantum torpedo's till their shields are down? Janeway definitely would of hoarded every single photon torpedo unless she knew they were going to hit bare hull when they had a limited supply.
I'm definitely not saying they should be as or nearly as affective as a energy weapon or everyone with a decent turn rate would be flying torp/mine boats and that would be just the opposite end of the problem we have now.
There was hardly a ship that didn't have some type of torpedo and heck even some shuttles could be equipped with them.
I'll still use them even if it does hurt me sometimes...but I just wish they were a bit more affective...
You never heard Picard say lock phasers and hold quantum torpedo's till their shields are down? Janeway definitely would of hoarded every single photon torpedo unless she knew they were going to hit bare hull when they had a limited supply.
I'm definitely not saying they should be as or nearly as affective as a energy weapon or everyone with a decent turn rate would be flying torp/mine boats and that would be just the opposite end of the problem we have now.
There was hardly a ship that didn't have some type of torpedo and heck even some shuttles could be equipped with them.
I'll still use them even if it does hurt me sometimes...but I just wish they were a bit more affective...
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
Post edited by lianthelia on
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I agree, They need to have a little more "Umph" Against shields.
But then again, If everything here was exactly how it was in the movies, Battles would last seconds, A single torpedo could destroy a lightly shielded vessel, And there would barely even be any female ferengi traders, And they would mostly (if not all) Be in the nude.
And the issue here being...
that alone is enough of a balancing act for their low damage on shields.
LoL
If they are doing so well then why is it common place for most ships to use nothing but energy weapons?
Quite simply they should remove the fact that 90% of kinetic damage delt to shields disappears altogether and go from there.
If they did that lets think what would happen. Torps would become good cos they would deal their full dps to the target without worrying about weapon drain. They would still be out dpsed by cannon escorts though. However they would remain balanced because of the global cooldown all torp launchers have meaning they would still only fire one every second at most. More with spread / high yield ofc but not unbalancing. 4x photon launchers would still only be 1 torpedo every second and that would STILL be significantly less dps than a beam cruiser.
Let torps do full damage to shields.
Pet peeve out of the way, I'd say maybe a 10% boost to torpedo shield damage, but not much more than that. They are meant to be used in conjunction with energy weapons, not instead of them, after all.
Now, what would be interesting is if energy weapons were to be somewhat less effective against bare hull. That way, the synergy between energy weapons and torpedo's is increased and tactical use of weapons stimulated. Not likely to happen, as it would be perceived as a nerf to escorts, a buff for cruisers and a reduction of gameplay speed, but an interesting thought experiment, nonetheless.
Or it would be an even better idea if torpedo damage was also determined by weapon power and they drained -10 per launcher. Now the launcher would not drain power when it fired but rather it drains power just from being equipped. So a ship with 2 torps equipped would be running at -20 power permanently.
That way the torpedoes could in principle receive a big damage boost from wep power like guns do except that firing them after or with guns means the gun energy drain will lower the torpedo damage.
Aka 50 wep power = the torp damage we have now. 125= +50% dmg bonus. If at 25 wep power the torps would to 1/3rd the damage they do now.
Unless Cryptic implemented an expendable torpedo system where you can run out then the current system works just fine. The only torpedoes that really should be more effective against shields is Transphasic and thats mainly because they give up their damage to do so.
Even if they did consider buffing torpedo damage against shields, I think a 10% boost should be the limit. I think torpedoes are doing fine as they are.
However a damage reduction of energy weapons against hull is something I agree with. In every TV series Federation Starships had both phasers and torpedoes. Using only energy weapons on your ship is popular in STO only because they work equally well against both shields and hull. Giving hull an innate energy damage resistance would make combat more strategic, and would encourage players to use both energy weapons and torps on their ships, which would be more in line with canon.
So I agree I think that's a great idea.
add-on: Though that last idea may be the best, with increase of hull energy resistance thus making torps more practical.
No. One of a torpedo bay's primary bonuses is that it isn't tied to weapon power. You want to tell every cruiser and science vessel captain that their damage is being reduced on one of their few heavy hitters?
This is most apparent at lower levels of play, where a well-timed photon torpedo launch can seriously hobble if not outright destroy an enemy ship. Unfortunately, those times pass quickly and most folks tend to linger for months or years at high-level PvE play where the game's inconsistent damage/hull scaling drastically skews things. The way that damage bonuses accumulate tends to favor energy weapons as primary damage dealers with projectile weapons tending to be added in as an afterthought, especially on escorts. At this point they can absolutely feel underwhelming. Your energy weapon's damage output is boosted by well over 125% of their base DPS while your quantums only do a useful amount of damage every 15-30 seconds if you bothered to invest in appropriate torpedo skills at all.
Torpedoes themselves are fine. Maybe they could use a boost to base damage at higher levels but, honestly, the real "fix" for torpedoes will probably come from addressing the damage scaling/resistances at high levels of play.
That could work too. Both of them. If torps get aux power bonuses and hulls get lots more energy resists that would make things quite balanced for all ship classes. an escort would have to assign at least 50 power to aux to get the torp damage they get now for free.
Those aren't bad ideas, actually. I'd really like to see the game's current internal math brought up to snuff first to make sure that overall balance is where it needs to be, but if that's ever enacted, then the additional control mechanic might be interesting.
Here are my ideas:
1) Increase the speed of (non-destructible) torpedos significantly
2) Make shield redistribution less smooth (e.g. 5000 every 5 seconds instead of 1000 every 1
second)
3) Torpedos do full damage against shield facings less than 25%
4) Torpedos do increasing damage the lower the shield facing
Torpedoes are DEVASTATING against hull. They truly truly are. This is how I experience Torpedoes.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAAgaD-zbotq2By_2-8qqIg Landing Torps on Hull isn't overly hard.
Okay for the rest of you. Torpedoes also mess up crew. And crew were SUPPOSED to be really really good to have on a starship. And I think this never really panned out the way the original designers meant it to happen. In short, being pounded on the shields was the equivalant of scrambling an egg inside the shell. Not pleasant for the egg. Very tasty for you.
So what I'm saying is that Torpedoes WERE intended to be KILLERS on hulls, but even on shields they were intended to wreck the crew to the point where repairs and other vital ship functions became problematic. I don't believe that second functionality was ever realized.
Okay. Why do I say this. It's plain that torpedoes kill crew. It's on the tooltip, you can watch them die. Do you EVER use biofunction or emergency force fields? No. Why? Because even at zero crew your ship works just dandy. So that's the basis for my argument there.
And if you ONLY use energy weps that's ok. There's no solid reason to do so beyond an inablility to time your attacks, so if you practice you can change that. Changing one DHC for a torpedo is a HUGE increase in burst damage. So practice and you'll get it.
Not only would it make a little more sense see starship have septate systems for each, it would encourage better use then spamming them. In addition you could get away with something like tricobolt mega hits (seeing no one seems to want to nerf the skills that let them hit for 40-80K a hit) because you could only have two or three of them total.
Them having a 360 firing arc would also be nice. (Maybe a variable range or their range calculated from a point in front or behind the ship.)
They are independently seeking mutations. They shouldn't have be aim at a target. They should have to be told what to seek, and set loose.
I see no good reason to change that. It is all about strategy and choices.
For instance, you can use phasers, wait until the proc disables shields, and then blow a buffed quantum torpedo straight into the hull. That is a lot more interesting in terms of possible strategy than simply having phasers and quantums do equal damage to shields and hull.
If you equip your ship with only torpedoes, a considerabley deal of your damage potential is wasted. So I suggested a torpedo, a tachyon torpedo, that damage shields and nothing more. I must say that I never thought about the crew killing aspect of torpedoes. I don't know if that is an important factor for your combat abillity.
It gives me something obscure to specialize in, and that's a type of gameplay I treasure. When I joined STO, all the tactical pros advised cannon builds... instead, I slapped 3 fore/3 aft Quantum torps on a fleet tac escort retrofit along with a single fore dual beam bank. Now I'm pretty regularly the top DPSer in elite Hive Onslaught (all that delicious Borg hull to bust up) and hold my own in PVP against klinks who don't realize that battle-cloaking with a bunch of quantums on your tail is suicide. With 3 purple projectile doffs, I fire one a second - the game limit for projectiles - which gives me *significantly* higher DPS than photons fired at the same rate.