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[Proposal] Space Science Boff Skills Need Buffing ... but how ...?
autumnturning
Member Posts: 743 Arc User
Basic underlying proposition ... Space Science Boff Skills are generally "too weak" at what they do when it comes to attacks, controls and debuffs. This seems to be the majority opinion of the Playerbase at this time, and is certainly the sentiment of a majority of the people posting in these forums, regardless of whether we're talking about PvE or PvP applicability. For a lot of us, the "problem" as it were isn't so much a matter of WHETHER the Space Science Boff Skills need improvement (since we pretty much agree they do), but more a matter of HOW (and how much)? A secondary consideration is the concern of "how to buff Space Science Boff Skills without handing (yet another?) unfair advantage to Tactical Captains in Escorts (who don't "need" the help)?"
I would argue that a substantial problem with the Space Science Boff Skills, and their inherent weakness(es), lies in how they are structured ... specifically in how they scale from I to II to III. At present, the overarching design decision for how almost all Boff Skills scale I-II-III (with some notable exceptions) is that the power effects tend to be scaled on 3:4:5 ratios. That's why with level I you get (for example to make things clear) 9 seconds, for level II you get 12 seconds, and level III you get 15 seconds of effects. Going 9:12:15 is just a 3:4:5 scaling progression.
There are some exceptions to this, where this sort of power progression "doesn't fit" for whatever reason, and something different occurs, but generally speaking, a 3:4:5 progression of power levels for Space Science Boff Skills tends to be the Design Guideline.
I submit for consideration the notion that a 3:4:5 scaling progression design goal is substantially "inadequate" for Space Science Boff Skills to be meaningfully effective for Controls and Debuffs in actual gameplay.
I assert this because it means that the difference between I and III in Space Science Skills is not that terribly meaningful, since you're only adding +40% to effects. In a lot of cases there just isn't enough GAIN to be had by going above level I to II or III, even though such an increase is costing extremely limited Boff Station Seating in order to achieve ... and that's not even counting the "other costs" of having a Science-heavy Ship, which usually involves reduced Weapon Slots and other Damage generating support inherent to the ship's design (when comparing to alternatives, such as Tactical heavy ships).
What I recommend, as a solution, would be to switch *SOME* Space Science Boff Skills from a 3:4:5 scaling progression design goal to a 3:5:7 scaling progression design goal.
The reason why I feel that going from a 3:4:5 progression to a 3:5:7 progression would be both a "reasonable" and a substantially successful means of "un-nerfing" Space Science Boff Skills is that the means and ability to take advantage and exploit such a change would be essentially, and substantially, limited to ... Science oriented ships. That's because the only real "movement" relative to the currently Live baseline would be in the II and III levels of Skills, and by and large, because of Station Seating, those gains would be substantially limited to, and realized by, Science oriented ships. Furthermore, the "amount" of change, relative to the currently Live baseline is something that would be large enough to be "felt" in actual gameplay, without being so "revolutionary" as to mandate a complete overhaul of Space Combat Game Balance, because it many cases you're only looking at "moving" the effectiveness of a *fraction* of the Science Boff Skills that can be taken on any given ship (ie. the II+ Skills that do Damage, Control or Debuff).
Now ... that being said, there would have to be exceptions to such a design change, since certain Game Balance considerations are built around the assumptions of the current baseline. In this case, I'm talking about Healing/Recovery/Buff type Skills since moving the Balance Point for them would involve opening up a whole OTHER can of worms than the one I'm angling for here (and I'm reasonably confident the Design Devs at Cryptic would agree with THAT assessment!). But for Attack/Control/Debuff oriented Space Science Boff Skills, switching from a 3:4:5 scaling progression to a 3:5:7 progression would be a "small enough" change to be manageable AND it wouldn't be an "upset the applecart" kind of revolutionary change forcing an adjustment to the entirety of game balance.
To get specific about which Skills I'm thinking should be changed from 3:4:5 to 3:5:7 on their scaling progression, here's an exclusive list:
QA and Playtesting the changes though ... that's where the greatest investment of Developer Resources would have to go, so as to verify and validate that such an adjustment is not Game Breaking to the established Game Balance, the latter of which needs to be preserved rather than destroyed (because once Balance is gone, it's hard to get it back
). And being able to get QA and Playtesting Time means ... SCHEDULING ... which as every Developer knows is the bane of their existence when it comes to "getting stuff done RIGHT NOW" that seems simple enough to "do" to people who make suggestions on forums, but which requires a (rigorous) Development Process in order to implement. And having attended the War College at Destination Games (CuppaJo and Critters are still awesome), as well as the two Player Summits with Paragon Studios (hi Arbiter Hawk! hi Black Scorpion!), I can certainly appreciate the *challenges* involved in getting things on the Schedule ... even if they are "simple" to do (and even "make sense" to do from a Developer perspective).
Because of the Almighty Schedule, and its ironclad grip on anything ever getting done (about anything), I wouldn't expect any kind of "movement" towards Live on a proposal such as this one for ... say ... at least a year ... if not longer ... even if the System Design Lead read this today and agreed with me and decided to make this a priority to get done, simply because that's the sort of ... grip ... I would expect the SCHEDULE to have on what gets done and what doesn't. I say that because any Studio with competent management is going to have their next year of activities planned out in advance, meaning resources are ALREADY booked for the next year! :eek:
Still ... it wouldn't hurt to get some feedback going on this idea in the meantime, would it? :rolleyes:
I would argue that a substantial problem with the Space Science Boff Skills, and their inherent weakness(es), lies in how they are structured ... specifically in how they scale from I to II to III. At present, the overarching design decision for how almost all Boff Skills scale I-II-III (with some notable exceptions) is that the power effects tend to be scaled on 3:4:5 ratios. That's why with level I you get (for example to make things clear) 9 seconds, for level II you get 12 seconds, and level III you get 15 seconds of effects. Going 9:12:15 is just a 3:4:5 scaling progression.
There are some exceptions to this, where this sort of power progression "doesn't fit" for whatever reason, and something different occurs, but generally speaking, a 3:4:5 progression of power levels for Space Science Boff Skills tends to be the Design Guideline.
I submit for consideration the notion that a 3:4:5 scaling progression design goal is substantially "inadequate" for Space Science Boff Skills to be meaningfully effective for Controls and Debuffs in actual gameplay.
I assert this because it means that the difference between I and III in Space Science Skills is not that terribly meaningful, since you're only adding +40% to effects. In a lot of cases there just isn't enough GAIN to be had by going above level I to II or III, even though such an increase is costing extremely limited Boff Station Seating in order to achieve ... and that's not even counting the "other costs" of having a Science-heavy Ship, which usually involves reduced Weapon Slots and other Damage generating support inherent to the ship's design (when comparing to alternatives, such as Tactical heavy ships).
What I recommend, as a solution, would be to switch *SOME* Space Science Boff Skills from a 3:4:5 scaling progression design goal to a 3:5:7 scaling progression design goal.
The reason why I feel that going from a 3:4:5 progression to a 3:5:7 progression would be both a "reasonable" and a substantially successful means of "un-nerfing" Space Science Boff Skills is that the means and ability to take advantage and exploit such a change would be essentially, and substantially, limited to ... Science oriented ships. That's because the only real "movement" relative to the currently Live baseline would be in the II and III levels of Skills, and by and large, because of Station Seating, those gains would be substantially limited to, and realized by, Science oriented ships. Furthermore, the "amount" of change, relative to the currently Live baseline is something that would be large enough to be "felt" in actual gameplay, without being so "revolutionary" as to mandate a complete overhaul of Space Combat Game Balance, because it many cases you're only looking at "moving" the effectiveness of a *fraction* of the Science Boff Skills that can be taken on any given ship (ie. the II+ Skills that do Damage, Control or Debuff).
Now ... that being said, there would have to be exceptions to such a design change, since certain Game Balance considerations are built around the assumptions of the current baseline. In this case, I'm talking about Healing/Recovery/Buff type Skills since moving the Balance Point for them would involve opening up a whole OTHER can of worms than the one I'm angling for here (and I'm reasonably confident the Design Devs at Cryptic would agree with THAT assessment!). But for Attack/Control/Debuff oriented Space Science Boff Skills, switching from a 3:4:5 scaling progression to a 3:5:7 progression would be a "small enough" change to be manageable AND it wouldn't be an "upset the applecart" kind of revolutionary change forcing an adjustment to the entirety of game balance.
To get specific about which Skills I'm thinking should be changed from 3:4:5 to 3:5:7 on their scaling progression, here's an exclusive list:
- Jam Sensors
- Tachyon Beam
- Tractor Beam
- Charged Particle Burst
- Energy Siphon
- Feedback Pulse
- Tractor Beam Repulsors
- Scramble Sensors
- Tyken's Rift
- Gravity Well
- Photonic Shockwave
- Viral Matrix
QA and Playtesting the changes though ... that's where the greatest investment of Developer Resources would have to go, so as to verify and validate that such an adjustment is not Game Breaking to the established Game Balance, the latter of which needs to be preserved rather than destroyed (because once Balance is gone, it's hard to get it back
). And being able to get QA and Playtesting Time means ... SCHEDULING ... which as every Developer knows is the bane of their existence when it comes to "getting stuff done RIGHT NOW" that seems simple enough to "do" to people who make suggestions on forums, but which requires a (rigorous) Development Process in order to implement. And having attended the War College at Destination Games (CuppaJo and Critters are still awesome), as well as the two Player Summits with Paragon Studios (hi Arbiter Hawk! hi Black Scorpion!), I can certainly appreciate the *challenges* involved in getting things on the Schedule ... even if they are "simple" to do (and even "make sense" to do from a Developer perspective).Because of the Almighty Schedule, and its ironclad grip on anything ever getting done (about anything), I wouldn't expect any kind of "movement" towards Live on a proposal such as this one for ... say ... at least a year ... if not longer ... even if the System Design Lead read this today and agreed with me and decided to make this a priority to get done, simply because that's the sort of ... grip ... I would expect the SCHEDULE to have on what gets done and what doesn't. I say that because any Studio with competent management is going to have their next year of activities planned out in advance, meaning resources are ALREADY booked for the next year! :eek:
Still ... it wouldn't hurt to get some feedback going on this idea in the meantime, would it? :rolleyes:
THE Balanced Budget Build
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
Post edited by autumnturning on
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Science skills, are, at this time, balanced for PvP. Therefore, they most likely will not get a boost.
However, they are not balanced with an eye for their "primary user", aka the Science captain. They are balanced so that a Tactical captain in an MVAE (or other lockbox ship that might have LtCmdr science) or a dedicated science vessel does not one hit kill other PvP escorts with science power + GDF + FoMM + APA on top of the communally available APB APO etc.
What makes these powers "so weak" in the hands of the class that's supposed to rely upon them, aka science, is that our captain skills do not grant the level of buffs that GDF + FoMM + APA does.
At this time, the "simplest" change that can be made, moving / (re)creating "exotic" damage types for them that don't fall into the GDF + FoMM + APA boosting range then re-adjusting the values to something useful (aka higher) keeps getting met with "but we're tacticals, we're supposed to do more damage than sciences are".
Sadly, the Devs seem to agree, as I have yet to see that science abilities will ever get made really useful for sciences, with decent enough speccing / skilling for PvE, not much ever seems to escape my gravity wells even though they aren't necessarily crushing the opposition, 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]
Furthermore it would provide a counter to people who stack insane shield damage reduction - an example of this wich happends with freqvency is extend shield emg shield and transfer shield strength combined with elite fleet shields on a single target.
Ofcourse for this to help shield drain must first be fixed ( it is currently more or less useless in pvp at the moment)
Longer disables are bad for PVP. The few seconds that a photonic shockwave can buy you may seem pathetic, but players who time their attacks right and stack their alpha strike can pop even the strongest shielded science ships in that time, during which you cant hit your tactical team. There are some very expensive bird of prey build which will use this disable as they decloak. Full marks to these people for making the investment and exploiting the opertunity, but it isnt fun to be on the receaving end.
Long cool down timers are bad for PVE. PVE is generaly about killing lots of stuff quickly. You pop your long cool down debuff, kill one thing slightly faster then you would without it and then spend the next 1 to 3 minutes contributing less then the guy in the cruiser or escort, or then the tactical or enginearing captain while you wait for your cool down to be up.
So it seems to me that we need to keep the long duration disables off of the crusers and escorts. They realy should only get an increase in effectivness on the science ships that sacrafice DPS to have them.
We also have the problem that enginearing and tactical captains actualy do better in science ships then science captains do. An enginear can provide the boost to power that science ships need as they generaly cant ignore auxilery power as many cruiser and escort builds do. A tactical captain can help compensate for the DPS loss science ships recive through less weapons and tactical consoles.
A science captain gains nothing in a science ship except insurficent dps to take advantage of the opertunities their subnuclionic beam can provide them in PVP.
Possible solutions?
Have sensor scan provide a temporery volnrability to other science skills? Possibly counter hold imunity? or apply a negative number to the targets power insulators.
Provide Science ships with an inate auxilery to battery skill, or an inate photonic officer ability?
Im not convinced the solution to our science woes lies in altering the science skills, I think their primary problem is that there is little advantage to using them as a science captain or in a science ship.
What makes sci skills so useless are the resistences. You can gain high resistance against drain skills with a T2 captain skill (Power Insulators). Basically you could compensate the lower dmg you had with your drain abilities compared to other ships, which you can?t do now, cause the drain is so low that you hardly notice it.
The hold skills are not as powerful as they were before also.
Baseline is, that sci skills should be that way again that sci ships perform best with a sci in it, not with a tac or an engineer.
There is a reason why you see so less ppl running drain builds anymore. Befor the big sci drain nerf bat they were a more common sight.
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class / R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer
U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit
TheWiseGuys
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Balanced? They're F'ing useless.
All drain abilities are completely countered by just ONE point in power insulator skill. Just ONE. Flow cap 9 + the 100 bonus from reputation tier 5 ability active + 3 purple flow cap consoles + 125 aux power .. completely countered by ONE gdamn flow cap point.
Gravity well is a joke. It has been nerfed so many ways its only a threat to mentally TRIBBLE npcs. Yes, that means STF drones nothing else.
Sensor/Countermeasures ... vanish at the first hit of any weapon (not the user's weapons which is how it freaking SHOULD be).
The only things that function are healing abilities and tractor beams. The two things escorts and tac captains need. See how nifty that works? Cryptic will only, ever, do anything if escorts and tac captains benefit (or fix it if they suffering from it).
Science will never be fixed. It cannot be monetized like tactical stuff can. That's the end of it.
Let me give one very concrete example of the sort of thing I'm thinking of here.
Viral Matrix
40 second shared cooldown, 60 second individual cooldown (@9)
Rank I: 4 seconds duration
Rank II: 7 seconds duration
Rank III: 9 seconds duration
That's the current Live performance. Note that this skills "breaks" the more typical 3:4:5 progression in favor of something ... weird (4:7:9?).
So how would this change for a 3:5:7 scaling progression? First, set the base "multiplier" of the duration at 1.4 seconds (for reference, Tricobalt Torpedoes have a 1.7 second duration, and Tricobalt Mines have a 2.5 second duration), then multiply by Skill Rank of 3:5:7 and get ...
Rank I: 4.2 seconds
Rank II: 7.0 seconds
Rank III: 9.8 seconds
Net effect ... +0.2 second duration at Rank I (ie. negligible) ... +0 second duration at Rank II (ie. no change) ... +0.8 second duration at Rank III (ie. slight buff). I think that we can all agree that improving the BASE duration of Rank III Viral Matrix beyond 10 seconds would be ... problematic for game balance ... because it's the duration at skill rank that gets multiplied by Starship Subspace Decompiler to extend the duration of the disable effect (up to +49.5% at skill 9).
Still, that would mean a very "healthy" improvement in duration by choosing Viral Matrix III (9.8 seconds, proposed) in the Commander slot to Viral Matrix I (4.2 seconds) in the Lt Commander slot, making for a rather dramatic increase in "power" of the skill because of the interaction with Boff Seating Assignments. Even with a more typical Starship Subspace Decompiler skill of 6 instead of 9 (ie. +42% instead of +50% duration), that means that Viral Matrix III lasts 13.9 seconds (proposed) instead of 12.8 seconds (current Live) ... hardly a game balance destroying change ... especially since such a "dramatic" gain can only be realized by Viral Matrix III, which in turn is limited to the Commander Science Station (or Universal Station). That means that Science oriented ships benefit, while Tactical oriented ships see little (to no) gain ... As Intended.
Now, admittedly, Viral Matrix might not be the best "example" skill to use for demonstration purposes, but it does show what I was talking about perhaps needing to "tweak" the Rank I in order to make the math work out nicely for Ranks II-III in skills so as to get a 3:5:7 scaling progression working in a smooth and predictable manner. It also shows that it is perfectly possible to structure these changes so as to keep the results fairly close to the current balance points without going off the deep end.
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
maybe all power types should scale differently based on your captain type, so that a matching BOFF yields a higher scale on their power. IE: your an eng captain and you use an eng BOFF ability, this would yield a higher than normal scale than if a SCI or TAC captain used an eng boff ability.
The same ofc would apply to all 3, SCI/TAC/ENG each getting a better effect from a matching BOFF type, this would mean a tac captain cant just steamroll others using their escort boat while using powerful eng/sci abilities while letting the other 2 feel the extra benefit from their respective abilities.
It also means an eng captain in a cruiser can do his heal/tank role better and a science captain can do his CC/EWarfare better and both actually have a role other than just trying to top a damage meter.
There will never be balance as long as they treat pvp and PVE the same. Balance in one area is always going to cause imbalance in the other.
sig
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It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
The fact that we have been saying this forever and it has not been done does not bode well.