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Science Review week 2
kamipoi
Member Posts: 365 Arc User
Well we did not get a dev response in week 1 but we got some good suggestions!
I will list them in order of what needs to be done first and what need to be done last
1.buff science skills damage and effects
2.remove tactical abilities buffing sci skills
Cryptic get us involved in your balancing grab some of the brightest from the community it can't hurt to have them helping you and for the love of god stop getting so upset when we call you out on stupid statements just apologize your not above that are you?
I will list them in order of what needs to be done first and what need to be done last
1.buff science skills damage and effects
2.remove tactical abilities buffing sci skills
Cryptic get us involved in your balancing grab some of the brightest from the community it can't hurt to have them helping you and for the love of god stop getting so upset when we call you out on stupid statements just apologize your not above that are you?
Andy@andy30
Post edited by kamipoi on
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myself
I still believe you can't fix science easily without beam based turrets, cannon/turret builds fail because of the lack of subsystem targeting, dual beams fail because rear turrets don't have a good synergy. Beam arrays while not too desirable with only 6 weapons don't share the deflector angle. Dual beams are meant for science ships, but giving them so few weapons and tac abilities with no synergy any possible way is just broken.
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aswell while we are meant to be using dbb we dont have a 4/2 weapon setup? so its very questionable what weapon platform we are to use
Now I have no problems with this in principle but the science powers do have to make up for this loss of damage. As someone also mentioned there's very little synergy between weapons we should be using like dual beam banks and turrets. This leads me to think we should be using dual beam banks and mines but I highly doubt that will help much as I had run something similar but the trics got nerfed.
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.
What I do want to see changed is science skills unique abilities. For example, a 125 aux Gravity Well I should require 125 engine power to escape. Tacheyon beam should do something other than just damage shields, for instance, increase the bleedthrough from torpedoes or energy weapons so that a science officer can hit someone with a tacheyon beam and then get their torpedoes through to the hull. Tyken's rift needs to drain more energy.
The whole point of science skills is not to do damage but to put the enemy in a vulnerable state. Right now, they are mostly a minor annoyance. They need to be revamped so they actually allow a science vessels inferior weapons to do the same damage that a escort can do during the period of vulnerability.
If you just make science do more damage directly, then science skills become just an exotic weapon.
It's within a couple of minutes, where you might feel like punching something...imho.
its just crazy how useless this passive is it is intended to compensate us for the loss of 33% of our weapons but it only really works in pve and that is if your not a healer sci!
P.S. thanks for the tip ill check that out virus lets see what the escort lover gecko has to say about us....
I don't agree on a to-hit chance as in a chance to fail completely. However, I think it might be better if there were an effectiveness rating to science abilities; it would be calculated similarly to to-hit chance by taking into account relevant defensive attributes of your target(s) versus your own offensive attributes. The resulting effectiveness is then applied to impact, duration and other relevant characteristics.
For example, if your target is built with high defence against science abilities (this would be separate from normal defence from moving etc., most likely based on relevant skills such as flow capacitors vs. power insulators) then a tractor beam may only be say, 60% effective, reducing the turn rate and move rate debuffs and damage inflicted against that target compared to an enemy that is more vulnerable to them (such as a pure tactical or tactical engineering escort).
If you use gravity well then all ships in the target area will be considered for defence, with the the gravity well perhaps being scaled in effect or having a built in offensive bonus to compensate. So its effectiveness is likely to be lower against a larger group of enemies, but harder to defend against when used on a single target. This can make trying to deploy a gravity well ahead of your enemies a potentially more enticing proposition than popping it in the middle of an already clustered group.
This would all be part of scaling up science ability strength, so that they would still work out better than they are now on average.
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
course this would be the default if you had no target etc
I want to see gravity well suck in runabouts, shield drones and mines and crush them like a tin can. I want to see photonic shock wave rip apart nearby mines and small craft spam.
PvP has gotten a ton of additional spam and the abilities to deal with it have been nerfed.
crying out they are glass cannons and dont want nerfs to the DHCS wow just wow anywho stay on topic.
also he obviosly doesnt understand whats going on with our skills not doing as labled and we DO have ideas of what we want GECKO STOP SITTING BACK LAUGHING AT US!.....
If I've heard correctly, the reason Science vessels have 3/3 weapons loadouts is because, pre F2P, science skills did so much raw damage that they were considered a "weapon" of their own...
As it sits right now, I think I top my GW III at 1,200 damage per tick over 10 ticks with ~109 particle generator skill. This is a hair under the expected damage of a DHC. Another way to look at this is to compare the theoretical max damage (12,000) of the GW against, say, quantum torpedoes (unbuffed by DOffs so on it's full 6 second cooldown) which does that 12,000 in two shots - 12 seconds.
In both cases, the GW damage matches the DHC or Quantum torp damage for the 10 seconds it's up, and does nothing to cover the 20 seconds that it is down following the launch of the skill.
Therefore, by tripling GW III's damage, the skill finally becomes a "weapon replacement", but then sciences are wasting a CMDR science slot to become a weapons slot, which no other class has to do. So, we might need to quadruple GW IIIs damage just to make it both a weapon replacement and a useful skill both at the same time...
PSW, CPB, etc. would also probably be considered effective, useful, and possibly necessary if they were tripled/quadrupled, too.
Either that, or give Science vessels a weapons loadout on a par with escorts, even if the only ship that can mount DHCs are Vestas, then leave sci skill damages on a par with what they have now. If you go the weapons route, then make an [aux] modifier that allows beam arrays, DBBs, etc., to draw off Aux so that Sciences don't have to switch between Aux and Weapons - since no other class needs to do this on a regular basis...
More when I have more time...
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]
they simply need to do quite a few upgrades to the science abilities and separate the attack patterns into two separate skills attack pattern / evasive pattern so that there isn't this I win button on the part of the escorts. They need to make the science skills canon so they actually function like they did in the shows/movies. They need to re-emphasize roles between the ship types. These things by themselves would solve many of the problems we're seeing with imbalance.
The part of the interview I referenced...
He made it quite clear. Those of us commenting about Science needing any love simply need to learn to play. We're obviously doing it wrong. For those thinking that they should do more damage, they're doing it wrong. It's support. Just support.
Tac Captains in their Escorts are the Heroes of STO. Everybody else is just Support. We might have recurring roles or we might just be their for a single episode to help the Tac Captain in their Escort look better or perhaps even be saved by them...
...the interview made that very clear (as if the game hasn't made that clear, eh?).
I HATED it when he said that escorts get all the love because they sell the most. That's a mentality that reinforces the status quo. If escorts are developed to be the best more people will buy them and then nobody will ever devote as much love and attention to the other ships leading to more escort sales and thus the circle continues.
Hey Gecko, be brave and start to improve other classes. You never know, if the other classes were actually competitive the sales might balance out. Of course you'll never know if you lack the courge and conviction to achieve balance.
(Yes, I know there are some ships that aren't escorts, like the Vesta, that are very competitive but if you don't think the number of effective ships is skewed towards escorts then you are clearly blind.)
Learn to play a science, because it is support? Wait, escorts need a support? Since when? What skill actually can help escorts (boff skills)? 1 sec lag is worse than every sci skill.
Ok, so this is devs official pvp sci guide, right?:
scramble sensors, jam sensors, transfer shield to the nearest escort, die, repeat. score: 0 dmg, 10000 heal, 10 deaths, 0 kills, listen to escorts shouting how they are good and you are noob. reeaaaally fun.
Do the easiest thing, improve science skill dmg by 200%. Don't worry, sci will be still soooooooooo much worse than escorts, but get more fun. How much time this will take, like an hour? But no, our beloved money precious money escorts could cry. But LRSVR cost my money too. I want to enjoy it.......
From more upside view. I doubt devs have ever seen startrek original series. Because they have no idea what startrek for most ppl is. Yes, there are some novels, but who know them? Go to a square, shout STARTREK and response will be ENTERPRISE, VOYAGER or the ds9 ship (can't remember now:-)) and not escorts, vesta, breen destroyer, andorian whatever. But still the three ships from movies are the worst here.
Or it may be simple. Maybe devs just took ds9 and galons of vodka, then started to work.;)
It is perfectly reasonable that science is not a damage class. It is not reasonable that science captains do less science damage than tactical captains. It is not reasonable that science abilities have been nerfed to the point where a science vessel with 125 aux power cannot hold ships with a Gravity Well III. Even if science damage stays the same, the ability to "weaken" the enemy by holding, reducing power, disabling subsystems et cetera needs to be buffed without resorting to gimmicks like Auxiliary cannons.
may i point out anti matter spread,andorians tachyon pulse,etc
why are we being punished because the escorts pilots couldn't handle having to counter our skills with other skills instead of just being dps focused? why did our skills dmg get nerfed to hell to the point where to get our old damage you have to be an tactical captain?
again after this statement im no longer tied to this game i might end up leaving sooner then i thought i would have because a rude dev and bad choice of words.
gecko your biting the hands that feed you i would watch what your doing.there are plenty of us sci whales but we are not going to pay for a thing if our skills can't even manage to hit the par of cruisers....
Now I would like to know from people how we go about scaling abilities between PvP and PvE as we can all agree that shields, hull strength and defence differ massively between the two.
I for one would rather see NPCs only being 50% resistant to our abilities at most and having their shields and health scaled back quite a bit but adding more abilities. The Borg queen in space is a great example as tacticals in escorts used to high DPS PvE builds suddenly had a lot of trouble on it and science and cruisers really showed their true colours.
Science abilities still sucked, in fact they were mostly useless but still being able to last, cross heal, remove debuffs and help control...well not control as she ignores GW but still it's a good example of how missions should be to show our ships strengths.
So with a redesign of current end game content and perhaps changing our abilities to being % drain of shields, power drain and you could even make tykens and GW do a % damage to targets too could go some ways to make them more balanced.
What's your thoughts?
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.
and yes i would love for npcs at least the top level ones to use more abilities and possibly more weapons and their 1 shot miracle beams/torps need to go away 1shot death != fun gameplay yes i know borg have done that to ships in the show but as he has stated many times this is a game it is supposed to be fun even if we are not his intended people to be having the fun.
Ummm, no. Thats like asking for they guy standing next to you yelling in a bullhorn to have the chance of sticking his fingers in your ears.
:cool:
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Kamipoi was meaning this with his first point about removing the interplay between science skill effects and damage from tactical abilities. Perhaps he might edit it for clarification stating:
1) Remove the interplay between tactical abilities and science skills and effects allowing for a buff for sci skills.
Still not a big fan of the chance to hit or miss thing mainly because if that does happen with current cool downs some skills could effectively have 1 use in up to 1 min 30s. I know your thinking behind it but a buff from a tactical and engineering ability ALWAYS hits, they will always do that increased weapon damage and always have that fire rate bonus.
Yes their weapons have a chance to miss where that extra damage is lost but it wasn't anything they weren't already losing. For example say on average 8 out of 10 shots hit for 100dmg as you are now, then you use a tactical buff that increases damage by 50%. You will now do 50% more damage regardless of hit/miss and that hit/miss ratio is unlikely to change much. So you get 8 out of 10 shots hitting for 150dmg now, you will always get that benefit regardless of what happens.
Saying for us to have a chance for it to do nothing rather than the sweet FA it most likely will do is not cricket especially as they will most likely still be easy to evade or get away from. I appreciate the idea was part of a very extensive redo of science altogether and with better skills it might be worth thinking about but those skills would need to cripple (and I mean you have to run or buff up to survive) targets if they had chances to miss, which I can't see happening, especially after what Geko said.
I did have an idea that the miss could do reduced effects and damage rather than a full blown nothing but I figure it would just make things too complicated to what is already a mess to balance.
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.
Therefore, considering PvP with my first point:
1. Science ships are down one weapon slot vs Escorts, 2 vs Cruisers. Science ships normally are only allowed to mount beam weapons and single-shot cannons (turrets included). Therefore, considering 2x beam arrays = ~ 1 DHC, offensive powers should do about the same damage as, say, one full cooldown worth's of DHC + whatever tac abilities tend to do at the level of the skill (so GW III should be doing 12k+ damage over it's 10 seconds baseline as I described above + what an AP-B III adds to an escort's firepower, for example...) Skills with a major extra effect (TBR) can be scaled to do baseline DHC damage over cooldown as the extra effect = extra damage (or heal, as in a TBR shoving an escort well outside cannon range). This way, Science ships are not better than an escort at causing damage, but sci can hit with a bigger "burst" than an escort... On a side note, these numbers can be switched around some if there's 2 damage skills on a shared cooldown that complement each other...
2. Mitigation powers should hurt. Have a sensor-scrambled Escort auto-fire on their friends - no more "hold fire for 10 seconds to evade sensor scramble", and jamming should last the entire cooldown or for 1/2 the time if the science ship is doing "average" damage to the victim. Remember, a sci is sacrificing sensor analysis if they're swapping to an escort every 30 seconds or so to keep a sensor jamming up...
3. For PvE, let's look at the captain's powers more - is the resistance reduction / damage bonus of sensor scan on a par with GDF, FoMM, or APA? Sensor analysis on a 10 second ramp-up is not worth the missing weapons slot, but it can be retained/restructured to be an excellent boost (+50% to +100%) against the "big big things" like gateways, etc. that withstand a full minute worth of fire? Or can the sensor analysis bonus be shared amongst the team - sort of a scaling AP-B? Not like I'm not gonna be trying to tell my friends "shoot here, this is the weak spot" like what happened in First Contact when Picard swooped in against the cube over Earth...
Combine this with our shield tanking and I'd feel that science is viable and that the mold of "escorts online" is being broken. Keep in mind, too, that our hulls are squishier than escorts so that if we don't shield tank well we will still die relatively quickly - and are still the most susceptible to bleedthrough. Sorry if I seem a bit DPS-focused, but I'm shooting to be in the same vein as the devs, who have a massive focus on DPS and not on anything else (or else a GW III should trap opponents for 20 seconds on a 30 second cooldown, etc.)
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]
2.remove tactical abilities buffing sci skills
this is mainly to put us back to how we were before the nerfs started rolling in last January kinda sad that we have to keep begging to be fixed and we keep hearing from the escort pilots and devs our jobs not dps etc. heck even cruisers are hearing this now...
oh and need to run some tests but now that gravity well is kinetic and it doesn't do much damage to shields
as it used to bypass them it does even less damage then you realize! it is not a bullet or projectile yet it does damage like one...gravity well is a STRESS it is literally pulling on the ship it would ignore shields all together anyways!shows how much the devs thought about it when they changed it to kinetic.
come on i want the original devs back fire this gecko dude and bring back those who know wth they are doing.
if im going to be told that i cant do anything that's worth a spit in your endgame content then why should i pay for stuff? simple answer is WE WON'T and thus why escorts are selling better they are really the only choice to play these days.
you guys want more money well fix science and engineering to be capable at endgame not just support ships that really are not needed now that escorts have tanks thick as everyone else...thicker if you consider how much beams actually miss escorts...and the abilities that are used to counter the speed now have a counter that can be up 90% of the time with the 10% hole filled with other abilities....
It was more along the lines that the guy wearing noise dampening headphones with earplugs beneath those not being affected in the same way that the guy without is...
If somebody made the investment to defend against something, then it should defend against it.
With Jam Sensors, the example kind of went like this:
Thomas - 0 points in CMS, no CMS gear, not using QSM, etc, etc, etc.
vs.
Richard - 0 points in Sensors, no Sensors gear, not using QSM, etc, etc, etc.
Harold - 9 points in Sensors, all the Sensors gear the ship can fit, and using QSM, etc, etc, etc.
Tom uses his JS1. Whether it's Rick or Harry, they're both initially jammed. That lil' placate breaks several abilities/things that might have been in use at the time. Sure, the Jam will last less time for Harry...but that initial damage has already been done.
Why shouldn't there be a pseudo To-Hit roll between Tom and Harry - taking into consideration Tom's investment to do the Jam and Harry's investment to avoid the Jam?
I think that's part of the rub with the whole thing. While many folks would still not be happy with being relegated to support, if that support was even needed in the first place - at least some folks would feel that they're being useful...both those flying "support" and those that have a tendency to /facepalm when they see "support".
and tanks have been obsolete for a long time due to escorts being able to grab agro so easily compared to how a cruiser can so thus they can't even really do their job to tank.
i would propose for taunting and stuff but in the core of the mechanics its not going to change the fact that both are just simply not needed when an escort has such a tank is currently has and dps that exceeds the need for cc/debuffing.