I'd like the devs to de-nerf tricobalts

bertiewooster · February 2013

There's been a lot of muttering in isolated posts about this, so I thought I'd collect what I've been reading (and been feeling myself) in one comprehensive post for all too see. After the last update tricobalt weapons are kinda lame. Sure, the cooldown is 30 seconds but their damage doesn't it make them worth using anymore. I used (and I imagine many others did) tricobalts for when I really needed to bash something's skull in--so the 60 second cooldown was fine because I used them very selectively. Now they're not really worth equipping because I can still only deploy 3 mines max or 1 torpedo which can't even finish off a group of frigates. Bio-neural warheads are kinda useless too, I use to be able to take down Plesh Brek frigates (I haven't checked the numbers but they seem to be the weakest frigates in the game) in one shot with them, now it barely penetrates the shields.

TL;DR: the latest update killed the art of tric-bombing. Even giving us back 25% damage would be great, and returning the cooldown to 60 seconds would be wonderful. Tricobalts are not about DPS, they're about dealing the final blow to an enemy you've worn down some already. Heck, I can't even take out borg probes with tric mines anymore.

P.S.
I don't want to come off as a malcontent, because I really do love this game and respect the devs' ability. I just feel that the update to trics, while well intended, was miscalculated and is messing up player's builds/strategies.

elandarksky · February 2013

Personally i'm happy with the change, tric bombing " strategies" (using the word VERY loosely) was overpowered,

Being able to destroy cubes with one dispersal of mines is overpowered, regardless of the 1 minute cooldown.

Plus im overjoyed that we've pretty much seen the end of pvp tric bombers.

Each to the own i guess ^^

bertiewooster · February 2013

Oops, bad choice of title. Thanks bran for fixing it.

picardtheiii · February 2013

The problem is tricks were effective and they need to water down the effective strategies to drive you to lockbox toys and such.

bertiewooster · February 2013

True, in PVP it was too much, which is why I was proposing not to fully restore damage. It's hard to manage the tone of what you say online, so don't take my previous post as being really crabby/ticked off/mad at everything because they took away my precious tricobalts. If they don't do anything I wouldn't be too bent out of shape, but at the same time I feel like a 50% damage cut is a bit much. They need to at least fix the cooldown on bio-neural warheads, though.

cmdrskyfaller · February 2013

The tric 'bombing' was a strategy using a very difficult to position and deploy weapon. Only ships that did not bother to equip aoe attacks or repulsors died to them. The mines move at 1/6th impulse and trigger only @ 1km range.

Seriously how can anyone whine they died to such weapons? You can even OUTRUN them.

The REAL problem is the design of Kerrat where everyone spawns in one place. STUPID design by any stretch of the imagination.

PVE the tricobalts were not a threat to anything but mindless, non-shooting ships. You drop a mine cluster in an actively firing npc and its every-10-seconds AOE attack would shoot down all the mines guaranteed.

The only real reason the tricobalts were changed was so they could benefit the federation escorts. Now they can dump high damage mines in timers matching their guns and torpedoes. KDF ships are screwed of that ability since their only high speed & mobile ships use cloak...and dumping mines and using cloak does not go well unless it is a spike damage mine...which the trics no longer are.

Go fed dev bias! Ruining the game one patch at a time.

Season 9 might be a Federation civil war. No one else will be flying anything but fed escorts by then.

picardtheiii · February 2013

cmdrskyfaller wrote: »

The REAL problem is the design of Kerrat where everyone spawns in one place. STUPID design by any stretch of the imagination.

yes that design defies the imagination.

rather than any meaningful changes tho we get this... lol

wolfpacknz · February 2013

/signed...

I'll sign anything against nerfing...

bertiewooster · February 2013

After having played with it some, I take back some of what I said. Tric mines are working OK. The real problem is the fact that the bio-neural warhead had its damaged halved but not its cooldown.

monkeybone13 · February 2013

No. Don't denerf it.

Example of why: A couple weeks ago I was in cure space normal STF. I was at the middle cube taking out ships heading toward the Kang and another on the team was at the left cube. After destroying the ships and just as I looked toward the left cube, BOOOOM, the cube was destroyed. Not a single nanite under the cube was touched. I asked the player how he did it and he said "my mines lol".

I'm guessing now what type of mines he used to 1 shot the cube without destroying the nanintes under it first.

So no. Don't denerf it. That STF is suppose to be completed a certain way and doing something like that is just not right.

ursusmorologus · February 2013

just remove the crit, and they'll be fine with original damage/cooldown but without being outrageous six-digit damage monsters

snoggymack22 · February 2013

I want the devs to de-nerf Viral Matrix. That happened almost 8 seasons ago. Get in line.

alopen · February 2013

KDF paid for bio-neural. They've already admitted the oops on the TDD, but are mum on the bio-neural. This weapon is so all powerful that before the patch you could sell the console Fed side for 150K on exchange. Hardly the stuff of legend. Completely undeserving of the nerf. Now its useless. Regular Trico torps were weak before, now they're garbage. The torps and mines are separate issues and should have been dealt with as such.

verlaine11 · February 2013

alopen wrote: »

KDF paid for bio-neural. They've already admitted the oops on the TDD, but are mum on the bio-neural. This weapon is so all powerful that before the patch you could sell the console Fed side for 150K on exchange. Hardly the stuff of legend. Completely undeserving of the nerf. Now its useless. Regular Trico torps were weak before, now they're garbage. The torps and mines are separate issues and should have been dealt with as such.

"The damage dealt by Temporal Disruption Device and Bio-Neural Warheads have been restored to their values from before the prior patch. "

From the new patch notes

bertiewooster · February 2013

verlaine11 wrote: »

"The damage dealt by Temporal Disruption Device and Bio-Neural Warheads have been restored to their values from before the prior patch. "

From the new patch notes

Sweet! Thanks Devs!

lancemeszaros · February 2013

A nerf was needed, the problem is that they were nerfed to the point of uselessness. I agree that being able to nuke a Cure cube without touching the probes is insane, but doing a heavy amount of damage against immobile targets is not a bad thing. It's a situational weapon that works best against a select group of enemies, and requires a good degree of skill to pull off against mobile enemies, especially other players. Going about halfway between what it was and what they've turned it into would be a good idea.

monkeybone13 · February 2013

verlaine11 wrote: »

"The damage dealt by Temporal Disruption Device and Bio-Neural Warheads have been restored to their values from before the prior patch. "

From the new patch notes

You forgot to post a link.

New Tribble patch notes: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=558291

picardtheiii · February 2013

lancemeszaros wrote: »

A nerf was needed, the problem is that they were nerfed to the point of uselessness. I agree that being able to nuke a Cure cube without touching the probes is insane, but doing a heavy amount of damage against immobile targets is not a bad thing. It's a situational weapon that works best against a select group of enemies, and requires a good degree of skill to pull off against mobile enemies, especially other players. Going about halfway between what it was and what they've turned it into would be a good idea.

They are not interested in balanced playstyles. You will be and ENG captain in a cruiser beam boat hitting enemy with powerful broadsides while invincible. Any other playstyle will be nerfed into oblivion.

jellico1 · February 2013

Tric Mines still overshadow all other mines making all other mine useless

Either raise all other mines damage to wqual the tric mines or cut the tric mine damage to equal all the other mines

bertiewooster · February 2013

Tric mines are working about pretty well (maybe not quite as punchy but I can live with it) for me now. I'm not sure what was going on when I tested them before--they weren't even penetrating shields in some cases. Not they're taking down probes in ker'rat just fine. And with the latest patch to bio-neural damage, I'm happy.

I don't think tric mines need further nerfing, since I haven't really seen them cause balance issues myself. They're very handy in PVE and mines are useless in PVP anyway so it doesn't really matter in that regard.

haravikk · February 2013

I absolute agree; Tricobalts are worthless now considering they're supposed to be super high yield weapons of immense damage capability that few Federation ships carry, and even fewer are willing to use except in extreme circumstances.

Obviously the full effect seen in the series would be ludicrous, but right now they just feel like bigger Quantum torpedoes that people can shoot down. They felt more like they should before, and the 60 second cool-down felt right for balance.

The problem was partly the way that kinetic damage is applied to shields when they're still up, as your shields should absorb around 10 times their hit-points in damage before any spills over onto your hull (other than bleedthrough) yet it didn't seem to work that way, somehow much more damage passed through than it should, and makes it exploitable.

If they can't change how kinetic damage goes through shields, then they need to at least tweak how dispersal patterns apply to tricobalt mines, as that's where the real problem lay. Either that or give NPCs some rudimentary behaviour for detecting threatening projectiles so that they use fire at will to try to clear them, or at least shoot down some of them before they impact and kill the NPC straight away.

I also agree that the cubes on Cure space shouldn't even be able to sustain damage while the nanite generators are still intact; just slap a 100% damage resist onto their shields until those probes are destroyed, or at least scale it with how many probes remain.

tancrediiv · February 2013

There was no reason for Tric Torpedos to be nerfed. There was no reason for mines to be nerfed either. The base damage and cool down for both weapons was reasonable for their purpose, large one shot spike damage with a destructible device that required precision and a bit of luck to connect with the targets.

The problem is the combinations of buffs which multiply damage while at the same time the numerous way of increasing crit chance and severity. Further, to make trics really work the captain must invest in very specific skills to increase the duration of the disable and damage. If tric were such a problem their interaction with some or many of those buffs at the multiplicative level should have been reduced or excluded. I know many players who are good at math who take great pride in figuring out the right combinations and activation orders for buffs so they can break things. It is those activations that should be reviewed.

As for statement about this being all about Fed Escort drivers, bull! And that sort of mentality is a waste of time and just serves to drive more wedges into the player base [NOT FAcTION BASE] that undermines the kind of player solidarity needed to deal with Cryptics biases and bad decision making.

My KDF characters were all affected much more heavily by this mess, especially my B'rel Refi pilot. That Bioneural I paid real money for doing 930 damage pissed me off. They say its all fixed now, and I haven't been back to test that to see if its true, but I am not seeing the 8k damage I should be seeing as of 2 days ago.

Fix the interactions that break things. Leave base damages alone. Keep yer stinkin' paws off the stuff I paid for. It's pretty simple.

I'd like the devs to de-nerf tricobalts

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