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Discussion: Balancing Ensign Engineer powers.
starboardnacelle
Member Posts: 67 Arc User
Emergency Power to Auxiliary
Emergency Power to Engines
Emergency Power to Shields
Emergency Power to Weapons
Engineering Team
Four of these powers run on the same system and share a 15-second cooldown with each other. The fifth puts a vital defensive ability on cooldown. Noticing a pattern here? It's difficult to get any mileage out of ships with three Ensign-level Engineering powers because it's a tangled mess of overlapping downtime. It's inefficient, and it's not fun to fly.
What are some solutions we can try to make this more of a boon than a hindrance?
My solution is to remove the shared cooldowns between the Emergency Power abilities and rename them to "Secondary Power to X." This would reinforce the idea that Cruisers are filled to the brim with energy, but incurs some other balance problems that would need to be taken into account.
Escorts would be able to obtain incredible damage mitigation by stacking Emergency Power to Shields, Emergency Power to Engines, and Attack Pattern Omega all at once. One direct source of defense, one indirect source of defense, and two sources of damage resistance. In order to prevent Escorts from becoming too durable, the defense stat boost from Attack Pattern Omega would need to be removed.
Auxiliary to Battery builds would become very enticing if you were able to keep multiple system buffs up 100% of the time. That being said, between this and the upcoming Tribble changes, they would essentially be forced to use rank 1 of each system power, so the buffs they get from them wouldn't be too outrageous. This may not need any adjustments.
Engineering Team still puts Tactical Team on cooldown. Perhaps we should extend Tactical Team's shield distribution properties to the other Team powers? This would benefit Cruisers like the Negh'Var and the Galaxy because they would be able to use Engineering Team for burst heals without TRIBBLE over their defense.
Any other thoughts on how to solve this glaring design flaw?
Emergency Power to Engines
Emergency Power to Shields
Emergency Power to Weapons
Engineering Team
Four of these powers run on the same system and share a 15-second cooldown with each other. The fifth puts a vital defensive ability on cooldown. Noticing a pattern here? It's difficult to get any mileage out of ships with three Ensign-level Engineering powers because it's a tangled mess of overlapping downtime. It's inefficient, and it's not fun to fly.
What are some solutions we can try to make this more of a boon than a hindrance?
My solution is to remove the shared cooldowns between the Emergency Power abilities and rename them to "Secondary Power to X." This would reinforce the idea that Cruisers are filled to the brim with energy, but incurs some other balance problems that would need to be taken into account.
Escorts would be able to obtain incredible damage mitigation by stacking Emergency Power to Shields, Emergency Power to Engines, and Attack Pattern Omega all at once. One direct source of defense, one indirect source of defense, and two sources of damage resistance. In order to prevent Escorts from becoming too durable, the defense stat boost from Attack Pattern Omega would need to be removed.
Auxiliary to Battery builds would become very enticing if you were able to keep multiple system buffs up 100% of the time. That being said, between this and the upcoming Tribble changes, they would essentially be forced to use rank 1 of each system power, so the buffs they get from them wouldn't be too outrageous. This may not need any adjustments.
Engineering Team still puts Tactical Team on cooldown. Perhaps we should extend Tactical Team's shield distribution properties to the other Team powers? This would benefit Cruisers like the Negh'Var and the Galaxy because they would be able to use Engineering Team for burst heals without TRIBBLE over their defense.
Any other thoughts on how to solve this glaring design flaw?
Post edited by starboardnacelle on
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Comments
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=619411
Interesting. If there were no shared CD timers between any "EPtX" abilities, Aux2Bat builds would be insane. Cruisers would run 4 different copies of EPtX abilities and keep their powers sky high with 100% uptime. Should the current Tribble stats apply (w/o shared cd), Cruisers would suddenly be the new Escorts of STO with the abilty to speed/shield tank and do high sustained damage. As a cruiser pilot myself, I'm not sure that's the right direction to take.
However, the idea of "Secondary Powers to X" is a good thought. Instead of renaming the current EPtX abilities, I'd like to see "SPtX" as a new skill set with their own separate shared CD. This will allow for people to run a second "Emergency Power" along side their favorite EPtX and solve the problem of cruisers with the "useless 3rd ensign". Also, in order to make it not a complete "copy n paste" of EPtX, they'd have to change some of the effects of SPtX.
But of course, we'd also start to see Escorts that have some boffs in engineering doing the same thing. To solve this issue, they'd have to balance the scaling of EPtX and SPtX.
All hands! Prepare the popcorn and tinfoil hats!
Also, automatic shield distribution should either be added to all Teams, or removed from Tac Team and put into a new ability.
This is another really good idea that I'd like to see implemented.
You cant really take take away the shared cd on teams or epx... It would break a fundamental mechanic of the game. You can however add an alternative worth using... Such as DEM1
Although many people lamenting that ensign slot would probably get a lot of use out of eptE... Just a thought.
Not possible/practical from a Dev Investment perspective. Already proposed essentially the same thing (Aux to Dampeners instead of Directed Energy Modulation) in the Tribble forums and got a reply from Borticus within 30 minutes (:eek:). Perhaps you should have a look at what Borticus said ... and why ...
Link
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
Of course, I imagine the same problems extend to creating new powers as well as changing the tiers of existing ones. That said, we really do need more options at Ensign level, and based on Bort's post it's being looked at.
Regarding DEM being moved to ensign... is it really necessary to give escorts even more access to Marion-enhanced DEM? Leaving it where it is means cruisers are more able to benefit from it than escorts, which is fine.
As to Aux to Dampeners, moving it to Ensign for rank 1 would be fine in my opinion.
My own suggestion, paraphrased from the original threads when EPtX powers were being changed on Tribble:
Cryptic apparently wants EPtX powers to be more reactionary, instead of being 100% uptime, but they can't really do that without absolutely ruining most PvE tank builds; the main reason being EPtS having 100% uptime of a major shield resistance value.
The 100% uptime shield resistance should be stripped from EPtS and made into its own power (maybe with some regen on it but no immediate heal), starting at Ensign level, with 100% uptime. This allows EPtX powers to be changed to reactionary powers as Cryptic apparently intended with the original Tribble update. EPtS can keep its shield heal and shield power level boost.
This change would force Escorts to make a defensive choice between the shield heal and power level of EPtS or the sustained damage reduction of the new power, while tank-built cruisers could use both. Science vessels that are more defensive in nature still have access to higher values of TSS, so they suffer less than escorts by this change. To maintain a balance for PvP, EPtS should have an extremely high but short-lived resistance for countering alpha strikes, while the other ability is designed more for pressure resistance.
Main problems I can see initially with my suggestion is that it causes a sort of overlap with TSS, while EPtS becomes possibly too similar in function to RSP. But short of coming up with an absolutely new game effect for an engineering power, I'm kind of at a loss on how to improve the suggestion.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
As I said, I'm pretty sure adding new powers has the same problems as changing which powers are available at which tier; from a technical standpoint, they're likely exactly the same thing, or very nearly so. You have to change everything related to that tier of bridge officer powers for that career - trainers, random bridge offer power selection, the bridge officers ability to hold those powers, etc. Renaming "Auxiliary to Inertial Dampeners I" to "Auxiliary to Inertial Dampeners II" would likely not be very hard, but adding the "new" AtD1 power would cause the problems Bort was referring to.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.