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Enoughs Enough Sci Skills Need A looking At!!!
kamipoi
Member Posts: 365 Arc User
As stated Science skills need a looking at and i will keep posting along this line weekly from this point until cryptic actually does something for the science community here.
Our skills MUST return to exotic damage no choice however exotic damage should be resisted by kinetic resists! sounds fair to me.
Reason for this change is tact buffing our damage has caused you cryptic to nerf that damage so that when super buffed by tacts it was the same damage as previously the skill would do without said buffs
due to this now even most tacts have tossed our skills aside for more conventional ways of killing things. leaving sci with few choices of what to use in all our slots for science.
and on another note shield drain abilities were lowered in effectiveness and at the same time resistance to them increased while yes shield drain needed resists it did NOT need its effectiveness lowered by doing so these skills have also been tossed aside as they simply do not work.
jamming skills for the most part are working as intended scramble may need a slight looking at for pvp use but overall are fine.
viral matrix is also working just fine and does not need to be touched now that its counter has been fixed(thank you!)
please cryptic give us some solitude and restore a bit of dignity to science as a class!
Our skills MUST return to exotic damage no choice however exotic damage should be resisted by kinetic resists! sounds fair to me.
Reason for this change is tact buffing our damage has caused you cryptic to nerf that damage so that when super buffed by tacts it was the same damage as previously the skill would do without said buffs
due to this now even most tacts have tossed our skills aside for more conventional ways of killing things. leaving sci with few choices of what to use in all our slots for science.
and on another note shield drain abilities were lowered in effectiveness and at the same time resistance to them increased while yes shield drain needed resists it did NOT need its effectiveness lowered by doing so these skills have also been tossed aside as they simply do not work.
jamming skills for the most part are working as intended scramble may need a slight looking at for pvp use but overall are fine.
viral matrix is also working just fine and does not need to be touched now that its counter has been fixed(thank you!)
please cryptic give us some solitude and restore a bit of dignity to science as a class!
Andy@andy30
Post edited by kamipoi on
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thus the imbalance here should not stand pre free to play our skills used exotic damage and thus did not run into this issue and frankly i can't think of a logical reason they changed this other than to be lazy round about to giving resistances against the damage because previously in the old skill tree one did exist against exotic damage.
Sci/sci was capable of doing a fair amount of damage and shield drain before the great nerf bowl last year.and now what you think is good is only 1/3rd what it should be doing stand strong against this don't let us slide even further behind because cryptic had a time of great misjudgment of their choices!
Would give Sci ships some much needed abilities back and make sure that Tac officer can't abuse them like they did before.
Mine Trap Supporter
the lowering of the damage on our skills to keep tacts from abusing them was a knee jerk short sighted quick fix to an oversight in judgment!
and as such fix it please cryptic I'm not asking for your first born son I'm asking for your compassion!
It does keep you from being able to effectively clear it though. ET or Red Matter will just clear the one which is down at the moment you trigger it. Then something else just shuts down.
I also agree with the OP. Years ago this game used to ruled by SCI then prior to F2P became TACT centric and all SCI powers were nerfed in favor of Tacts to sell a bunch of "cute" ships to newbies which made sense at that time. However, it would be so much better to balance careers in STO. Not trying to start a SCI vs TACT war...just stating that the game needs to be balanced to represent what really a career should be (TACT/ENG and SCI)....after years of being nerfed please give some love back to SCI
What does a captain do? They have attack patterns and that's about it for their skills. After that your boosting weapon damage WHICH WE ALL NEED TO DEAL MORE DAMAGE!!
It also comes as a basic lt rank and costs very little to max. Maybe those boxes that increase space weapon damage should be removed and changed to boost tactical skills like torp spread/high yield. One that affects beam skills and one that affects cannon skills. Moving them up on the table might be a moot point too.
This would not be a nerf, just a rework so tacticals will have to spend points in their skill tree to be good at what they do like science and cruiser captains have to/should do.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Decently, if not for the fact that it's on a 10 minute cooldown so this reputation trick only works basically once per engagement...
Even then, with it only working for 8 seconds I haven't seen exactly how much damage my GW, tractor beam, or CPB boosts for that 8 second span, I'm usually spending those scant seconds making sure I survive and/or am doing maximum damage in that timeframe...
Though usually my Vesta has no problem grabbing aggro with GW/TB/Danubes/Deflector lance/aux cannons at 125/sensor scan and the rep power. Which is why I usually need to focus on survival, unless I tac team & EPtS, I'm lunchmeat for the tac cube/gateway that's eating all this science love...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Mine Trap Supporter
If an average of all escorts now do 100 damage, and tank around the 70 level, which is probably about right, they have about 170 points of use.
A cruiser right now is sitting around 60 damage and about 100 tanking ability, they are slightly below par. They can trade of damage for some control ability, but its not a popular option. 160 points of use, a 17% increase in damage would give them 170 points, easily accomplished by reducing beam array drain
A science ship is a mess.
If the ship does traditional high weapons power and shield power it loses it aux strength. With 6 weapons it would do 45 damage, it can shield tank very well but has hull problems, probably around a 80-85 tanking ability. We are still 45 points short.
That would mean a sci ship needs 45 points of sci "damage" at low aux power to compete. It doesn't have that.
The trick is how do you define and control that?
How much is a disable or hold worth in terms of points? How much is crowd control worth? Even on the mostly damage related abilities balance is problematic.
If you scale sci damage with power, then do you set their sci damage at 80ish with minimal weapons power? That can be abused.
You could scale it with skill points, but you'll have some skills doing nothing at all with no skill and absolutely lethal with a ship loaded with consoles and skilled right. But that is a huge sacrifice in defense value, so do you compensate even more?
The Vesta is a step in the right direction, though the weapons feel like a band aid to a larger problem.
Power is an issue, can't have the mandatory shield, weapons and aux power all going at once.
Science ships also need beams for their sub-system targetting. Their ability to turn puts dual beams as their best weapon, but with only 3 they have 3 useless rear weapons. 3 BAs? garbage combination, 3 turrets? You can drop that damage down from even the low value of 45 to much lower. They need beam based turrets.
The other issue is if nobody can damage like a tac captain, and nobody can heal/tank like an eng captain, then can what can nobody do like a science captain? The answer isn't science, because tac and eng both do it better than sci.
There is no easy science fix, its a long process that needs careful planning to prevent major misuse of powers (which will get them nerfed just like before)
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I recently restarted my sci toon (got seriously bored of the game so I redid my least developed character) and between the bad performance of beam arrays and the terrible performance of science skills (thanks Tac buffs...) it really is my lowest performing character though extremely powerful in certain (very rare) situations.
A good start would be removing tacticals ability to buff these things, that is afterall what put us in this position in the first place, I don't mind engineers doing so, science captains are equally capable of relocating power to aux systems. This needs to be followed up by a change to the percent bonuses given by the skill tree, weapon skills give upto 101.2% boost to weapon damage and if sci skills do the same (which I have not yet tested) then sci skills need a major damage boost (75%+) to make them viable for use, grav well also needs a hold boost and ALL drains need to be made more effective (Flow caps vs Insulators needs rebalancing as well as a drain amount boost)
These would be enough to put science is a better position. Then some of the "playing with your enemy" powers need some real looking at, most can be shrugged off or tanked through by a shuttle for goodness sake... They should be a matter of "Oh **** WTH just happened to my ship?" not "Oh, well that happened, we'll just carry on regardless"
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Frustrating. Depressing.
They only pay attention to the needs for more tac ships to be buffed for PVP..
2. Science abilities should be on par with other abilities. Take gravity well for instance. If a ship is hit directly with that ability, it should not be able to escape without an equivalent amount of resources. For instance, if the gravity well was generated with 125 Aux power and multiple buffs such as graviton generators and skillpoints, then a ship should need 125 engine power and buffs to escape. The fact that most ships can simply move away at quarter impulse power without any real problems when hit directly by a gravity well is absurd.
3. The same thing goes for energy drain powers. A Tyken's rift or energy drain III should be draining a serious amount of power from all the ships nearby, enough to render their weapons power low enough that an energy drain or similar effect is good enough for a science vessel to escape destruction of its shields by an escort. Instead, it is just a minor annoyance.
4. Tactical Team needs to be balanced with science team and engineering team. These abilities share a cooldown but tactical team's shield distribution buff is so clearly superior that it gives ships with a lot of tactical slots a huge advantage. My suggestion is to either boost the damage output of tactical team and give the shield distribution ability to science and engineering team or to remove the shared cooldown.
The only problem I have with science ability damage is that it is kinetic damage, trying to tell me my baby black hole is doing the same kind of damage as a simple torpedo?
I think sci abilities should be returned to exotic damage, make the major tac buffs from the tac career don't buff it and thinks might be okay.
That was the first thing I tried.
Result was pathetic. Grav well did not even keep ships in its maw nor did tachyon beam drain shields worth mentioning nor did any other offensive sci skill behave visibly better.
heals though, those went through the roof.
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ok as to viral matrix sadly we will never see a reemergence of the old viral due in most part to the fact it was very unbalanced as it works now with very little change needed it is one of the last skills doing its job
and since in most builds 2 tact teams are a must there is no engineering team to clear it.
drains do need a look at due to the fact that currently only the side with every drain trick in the book is it feasible to turn someone off whilst drains should never make you hit 0/0/0/0 power levels its feasible to allow 25/25/25/25 thus a crippled ship is the result rather then a floating scrap heap to be!
and to the damage aspect the reason us sci have only 6 weapons was to balance out the fact we will be doing most of our hard work with our skills thus allowing them to actually do decent damage without us out performing escorts. And we did not do so until kinetic/energy damage was the mainstay of our skills damage types and thus tact officers where able to buff there damage by right around 300%!
as of how it stood before the nerf bowl of 2012 science damage was in the right place by in large part due to the fact the original devs had it right!
Please keep the constructive feedback coming don't get discouraged by cryptics lack of attention for we can force the issue and we will!
I think something most of us agree on is that the redistribution of shields should not be with one particular team ability as it makes the other two obsolete.
This would require a rethink of tactical team though as if all teams redistributed shields then no reason to choose it and if it lost that ability it would be useless. I think a movement buff (not defence just movement) might help this so they can zip in and out of combat as hit and run.
Another good point made by the OP is that getting someone to 0 power is making them a wreck in PvP so I do think you have a point but then again the idea behind drains is so you can do that and knock the shields off for a torpedo attack etc.
Another user mentioned about having a PvP and PvE skill tree or a separation, I for one would like to know from Cryptic if skills or skill point allocations can be split between PvE and PvP. It would be a lot easier to balance skills if they were split as you would no longer end up with something being good in PvE but completely OP in PvP.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
yes the concept of tactical team being the only one with this skill is a bit disturbing however bringing its ability over to the other team skills might not be an option without a rebalanced of how the other two teams work or as stated how tact team itself would work. so as for this i agree but have no idea how they could improve that situation.
and yes while bringing a shield facing down would be nice its just simply too strong to do so unless your build is using the highest tier of drains.what could work is changing the drain skills from flat numbers to percentage based and saying level one drains can take 25% base with level threes being 75% length determined by flow capacitors. and the resistance skills could and should counter at maximum 25%-50% of drain.
i don't like the idea of taking someone out of the fight completely with any abilities as not having control over your own ship just is not fun unless there are counters and as it stands there may be counters but the balance of those counters to the balance of the skills themselves is way off
Here is why i think this way. Drain abilities if used on the context of a debuff to avoid damage and weaken the target can be a much easier balance over drain to shut a target down completely. Unless its a targeted attack to one individual subsystem such as tachyon beam it is a targeted drain at the shields and thus should do three things.
1.drain shield facing capacity
2.drain shield subsystem power by 5-10-15% with resistances provided by power insulators
3.reduce shield resistance by additional 10-15-20% with resistance coming from shield healing abilities
the use of this would to be to drain shields reduce their recharge and finally to make them weaker to attacks thus providing counters to the current over healing/resistance and making this skill not only useful but devastating if not dealt with.
that is one example and I am sure others can be pointed out.
My goal is to make cryptic think outside the box a little bit while at the same time adding in very easy to understand checks and balances to how science plays on the battle field and we are not the only class that they should do this for all three classes could use some of this.
I avoid feedback pulse, photonic shockwave, any of the sensor placates or systems disruptions like viral matrix.
Some things one can max out and still have no chance of doing anything like Tachyon beam to shields. Why doesn't that work half as well as the tachyon pulse from the Andorian Wings? I have one of those and they just simply don't do anything compared to the wings.
I've also noticed that there's a real disparity in trying to get the subsystem targeting to work well. It's like you don't want me to use the better subsystem targeting on any of the ships I've used including the Vesta. all of the partical abilities, the only ones that we can use with any definitive results btw, are all LT C and C abilities pretty much removing any chance of using the system target abilities that might work well.
All I'm saying is the nerfs to the science abilities are a bit overzealous they need a buff or two and they need to work, just look at how people have trained their captains you'll see how many actually avoid these specific abilities because they simply don't do anything to the enemies, not even the normal ones on normal mode PVE events.
There's also a serious disparity between the sensor analysis ability and the sheer number of buffs to damage that engineer and tactical captains can use effectively.
Put simply, our deflector and partical effects need to advance the sensor analysis buff, not just the sensor abilities because quite frankly there aren't enough sensor abilities to advance the analysis. It's this far ahead into the future in this timeline and no one has better sensor analysis it's all the same analysis with no discovering of enemies weaknesses? Even Data had the ability to see cloaked ships and find weaknesses in the shields of enemy ships on the Enterprise D and that was a cruiser not a science ship. I would think by now that since we have all these ships flying around some of which from the future (time ship) that the sensors would have had a massive upgrade by now on science ships in this part of the timeline (belerophon anyone?)
and yes Attack Pattern Omega is definitely stepping on the escorts weakness to being held down and tickled to death(haha sad but true). There are just way too many buffs on that one skill they need to get split up to attack patterns AND defensive patterns with defensive patterns being a tier 4 skill tree.
and perhaps placates need a looking at!
i would think we could turn them into accuracy debuffs!
jam sensors
description:This skill fires particles into the enemies sensor arrays causing mirages of the target making it hard to accurately fire at their location.
10-20-30% accuracy debuff
for 10 seconds-30seconds
length increased by skill starship countermeasures
resistance granted by starship sensors for length and starship targeting systems for accuracy debuff
scramble would be weaker but aoe varient of this move.
Scramble sensors
description: a particle burst at the targets location that interferes with targeting systems causing them to be less accurate at determining targets location.
5km burst around target
5-10-15% accuracy debuff
for 5seconds-15seconds
length increased by skill starship countermeasures
resistance granted by starship sensors for length and starship targeting systems for accuracy debuff
Tacts have too much power for defense and offense in these maneuver abilities. You don't see science ships have debuff removal and 100% continuous shield restoration for 10 seconds in the same ability do you? OR 100% hull restoration with shield restoration in the same ability on engineers do you? Nope. So why do tacts have damage buff resistance buff and immunity to holds all at the same time?
So instead I think what we should do is figure out a basic that all sci skills should do and say max counters will make it do that. This basic amount it does will not make the skill entirely useless it's just the skill will be only slightly annoying and need many stacks to achieve the effect at its strongest.
I think you had a good idea about drains being a percentage base but I do think if someone has not specced into a resist of some kind and certainly isn't using any form of counter they should become a sitting duck to the ability. Remember this is how scis make up for the lack of tactical consoles and tactical bridge officers.
Resists as you say should provide a reduction in the abilities effectiveness and certainly should have a cap. I think it should be comparable to the resistance to damage obtained with armour and reinforcement skills (lol so it would be practically worthless) probably more actually but with the diminishing returns you see on resists in general.
So say at full aux tachyon beam 1 will drain 500 off shields with the target having full resists, perhaps a 75% reduction in effectiveness.
Now with 0 resists and full aux it will drain off 2000 as it is not reduced by 75%, this would encourage captains to invest in some counters to it and if made so its not too hard to get about or just over 50% reduction using 6 points and maybe a bit from your deflector this would lower tachyon beam 1 to about 1000 off shield facings. Not exactly dire.
With 2 being at 1000 full resists and 3 being 1500 full resists. While with no resists 2 would drain for 4000 and 3 for 6000. Perhaps some balancing might be needed as it would need to be designed so most people can counter it with a bit of forethought and investing of some skill points but not made completely pointless either.
Once again this is just an example based on what kamipoi has suggested. Though what really messes this all up is what about aux power and how that scales?
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
we are in the case where even before resists our skills are only slightly useable but as i said earlier i dont feel we should be able to turn someone off completely thats just no fun for either party.
as sci is sposed to be a debuffer and do our damage mostly with our skills taht MUST be reflected in how they balance them at this point they are suggesting we are doing it wrong and should go back to the academy to learn why we cant do anything.
why should a pvp academy be where people learn how to use a class in the most basic form?no that should be covered by skill descriptions AND missions that have you use them.
Gravity Well
description: summons a graviton singularity at the targets location that distorts space thus causing a strong pull to the center with the forces being exerted structural damage is likely.effects are weaker the farther out from the center.
15-45 seconds
-25% to -75% movement speed
-0.40 to -0.75 repulse towards center of the singularity
1000-3000 exotic damage
size set at 5km
pull countered by inertial dampeners,damage by kinetic resistance,movement debuff by engine power