Um... Warp cores are the generic term for the power supply plants for the ships... the feds use a Dilithium matrix for their warp core...that apparently uses a different reaction with dilithium to get their energy from some other races like the klingons... the romulans use a singularity... but it's still a warp core...
So why doesn't Warp Core Theory seem to work on my Tribble Server Romulan? And if it's not supposed to by some odd developer theory...why does it show up for Romulan characters who don't HAVE a dilithium matrix warp core, not say specifically that it doesn't affect Singularity cores and not have a trait available that does the same thing for Singularity warp cores? And I mean same thing, not +(some amount) while you have X charge on your singularity core gauge...+10. I'm dreading finding out that the engineer skill might not work on Singularity cores either...despite it...again... just being a different reactor type of warp core from the fed and kdf ones.
This 40s stuff is horrible... and no, the sometimes used, drained while you're cloaked 'special ability' of them don't make up for the -10 points of power to every system. Do you realize how easy that makes it to shut off things with disabling and system draining skills? And no, a warp core that gives back some of the power based on the level of your charge doesn't help. That just further encourages you to not use it, while tipping the scale toward just plain not using cloak any time you expect combat and still have 50% of your hull...
(Something Nice Break)
By the way, I appreciate finally having a Romulan faction, and that you recognized that only some, and a small portion at that actually have that ridge bump (note: some Vulcans also have ridge bumps (usually the more logic driven, computer like ones)...though not as pronounced as some of the ones I've seen on the more evil Romulans...like it's some kind of 'hey, I'm the bad guy' marker...and no, most Romulans aren't evil!) I really appreciate being able to start with a TOS Warbird. Thank you.
(back to warp/singularity core)
The plasma shockwave doesn't seem to really do enough damage for something I had to charge (especially since I was using it a lvl 5 charge most of the time...and I think the lowest was a 3...) it should also be 100% of causing a bigger then normal plasma burn if we're expected to charge it (and don't cloak because that drains it, although that might just be because you 'leave' combat, I tended to not pay attention to it when not fighting) and then lose it for a while before starting to recharge (and or torps for a few seconds too, if I remember an earlier blog post and observed my torp disables correctly). Not to mention the lack of much of a shock wave. It seemed to push back a tiny bit but not much, and I doubt it would have disabled the cloak of any cloaked vessels which I believe the other shocks do.
I didn't try the absorption skill...but with a name like that, shouldn't it either just cancel a certain amount of damage for a while or channel the damage into shield and weapon energy instead of giving a temporary hull buff or a direct shield regen?
Unless you pull something cheap like using Threat Generation's defense buff without the threat pull that's it's supposedly a skill FOR (worst. Skill. Ever. in my opinion. As well as most heavily abused since even the pvp 'school' you guys had said to use it... You realize it's very bad to use in pve right? That's like saying 'no, pvp isn't messed up. just build 2 chars and make one the pvp one!' ... Either take off the resistance buff and only give a def buff against 'enraged' npcs that have been pulled by the threat...or just take out the skill and make some kind of tac tray skill (like the boff ones...) that works similar to Jam but pulls reduced fire to you...) I forgot where I...oh right... then I don't see how these would even be that useful in pvp, other then making it easier for fed and kdf players to disable your ship due to your inferior power levels...
And no, singularity warp cores that 'boost' a system (like Shields +5) per charge level don't make up for it. Partly because you have Warp (dilithium) cores that seem to have similar buffs, and probably just plain flat all the time boosts to systems... Plus... the buff the Singularity cores gives seem to be dependent on you HAVING a charge on your SC gauge. Which I believe I mentioned earlier only discourages you from using the 'great' abilities you put in (and further discourages cloaking...the Actual Signature of the Romulans besides plasma torpedoes that you put in the game...since you left out their armor, their huge shields, helped make almost all the Tal Shiar evil...when it was actually just a faction... and continued Nemesis' retcon of the population of Remus with those...things... that would have been used as shock troopers and assassins right away by the Romulans or broken free pretty quickly...being stronger, having tk, and pretty much the same tech...)
Honestly it wasn't even very helpful in pve...and only begs the questions 'why do the romulan npcs have these?' and 'if they do, why do they cloak so often when it lowers the charge, and how come they're harder to disable with 'beam target' then me?' I suppose it would have been useful (the shock wave) against a bunch of fighters... but that really doesn't happen that often, nor is it usually worth the loss in system power from the singularity cores you can equip. A science officer shock wave is better, or having a beam array and 'beam fire at will' or cannons/torps with a spread skill... or one of the defensive turrets...or a tricobalt warhead.
(Trying to End on Something Nice)
And remember, I do actually appreciate having a Romulan faction. And that we will be able to make Romulan and KDF characters that start at level 1. The new hairs look nice.
Because there's too many people who don't want to go through the process of figuring out how to properly fly the Warbird and would rush to an allied ship just so they can remake their old ship build, leaving you with a small (but deadly) population that figured out how to use the Warbird properly because they used it throughout their career, and a much larger contingent of people who said "-10 power levels?! I can't work with that!!!" and will jump over to their allies ships at first opportunity, returning to their cookie-cutter builds rather than, you know, trying and bringing something NEW to the game. And then at 40 that group will split between the ones that can afford lockbox ships vs the ones who can't and will then be forced back into a Warbird that they now have no real chance of learning how to use properly, and that last bunch will be extra whiny. The way it's set up now, people will have to use the Warbirds, will have to learn how to play them properly; but if they still refused to adapt, there's a way out...but they WILL have to work for it.
Feds get 3 ship types, KDF mostly get 2, one of which is very similar to warbirds but a lot more versatile thanks to universal slots. IMO the raider type warbirds should get at least some universal slots, too. Maybe not all of them, like birds of prey, but 1 or 2 per ship certainly wouldn't be a bad thing.
So, I did all the Subcommander missions in the D'Deridex, and...it's a pain. Especially because the Elachi are pretty much set up to be MOST annoying to a slow turning Fat Bird. Plus, I suddenly needed to skill up engineering Boffs.
Then at 40 I got the Ha'feh and it's back to the agile killer paradigm. Unfortunately the DD just doesn't fit well into the warbird progression, IMO. At the very least, the Romulans need an alternate warbird option for the 30's.
_________________________________________________ [Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth] [Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk] [D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
Feds get 3 ship types, KDF mostly get 2, one of which is very similar to warbirds but a lot more versatile thanks to universal slots. IMO the raider type warbirds should get at least some universal slots, too. Maybe not all of them, like birds of prey, but 1 or 2 per ship certainly wouldn't be a bad thing.
TBH, I think the devs are just choosing their battles here...they're under enormous time pressure, and rather than focusing on giving a variety of T1-T4 ships, they're putting the variety at the top with the T5 ships. After all, there's people who burned their way to RA in under three days playtime; when you get down to it, are you going to remember that three days of lack of variety, or the years you'll be spending in endgame ships? If you can only spare the time for one, you're going to focus on the endgame stuff. I HOPE they'll come back and fill in a bit more variety at lower levels, but I can't see it happening before launch.
I think there's also a factor the single-free-ship-per-tier progression (i.e. not counting C-store or ally ships) serves as a sampler for the captain; you spend a bit of time trying each of the offerings, and then at T5 the smorgasbord awaits...you'll be able to make a better decision because you know how each of the lower level ones behaved for you. If I played only a single character in the Federation, for example, if I took it into my head that cruisers were the way to go, I'd probably start cruiser and stay cruiser until tier 5, having no idea how a science vessel or escort works. As a single-character Romulan, I could look at any warbird a teammate is flying and have at least an idea of its capabilities because I've flown one at some point.
I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it, but there certainly are some merits to it.
I had an D?Deridex also and did pretty fine with it. It is well suited for hit and cloak.
I put 1 rcs console on it and under cloak i got a decent turnrate about 23 degree or so iirc.
Most npcs were dead after one pass anyways.
Basically you uncloak, open fire, pass the enemy, then cloak and initiate the turn to start over again.
With the right traits you get the cloak cd down to about 10 sec. You jsut have to take in account that the singularity abilites and the cloak have a shared 5 sec cd, if you use them, which is basically not needed anyways.
Reynolds/Thokal
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
So, I did all the Subcommander missions in the D'Deridex, and...it's a pain. Especially because the Elachi are pretty much set up to be MOST annoying to a slow turning Fat Bird. Plus, I suddenly needed to skill up engineering Boffs.
Gah, I'd forgotten about suddenly running dry on BOff skill points because of all the engineering BOffs, especially while experimenting to see what skills worked best ("well, I just wasted all those points I spent on THAT skill that didn't work out..."). >_<
Then at 40 I got the Ha'feh and it's back to the agile killer paradigm. Unfortunately the DD just doesn't fit well into the warbird progression, IMO. At the very least, the Romulans need an alternate warbird option for the 30's.
To be fair, originally at T5 the only free ship was the Ha'apax, which was essentially the D'deridex, but even MORE waddlesome...the progression of increasing weight in Dhelan < Mogai < D'deridex < Ha'apax was only natural. Now that T5 has opened up again with the cruiser/escort/sci varieties, it doesn't make as much sense.
Plasma Shockwave V
PBAoE 5km Sphere - affects max of 10 foes
0.5s activate
1,603.2 Plasma Damage
4,809.7 Plasma Damage Over Time So uh, where's the shock part of the shockwave? Where's the stun? Is it just because of the name and PSW that I'm looking for the stun? If it were Plasma Blastwave...hrmmm.
Notes: Plasma shockwave does get buffed by science officer's Conservation of Energy (up to +30% damage), decloak bonus, damage buffs like APO, etc.. Even if your base numbers are different, they can be spiked a LOT higher if you get your ducks all in a row.
As for the Shockwave...well, Singularity Cores with the [Wave] attribute have a 10% chance to knock one of a target's subsystems offline for 5 sec. So...on average, it'll happen to ONE enemy...if you're somehow hitting up to your capacity of 10 targets. Yeah.
Singularity Jump V
Self teleport forward 5km in current facing
Creates singularity for 20s
- Repel -0.54/sec (negative repel is a pull)
- 153 kinetic damage/sec
- Accuracy -100 (debuff)
- Damage -56.5 (debuff) The text blurb lists a Perception debuff, but there's no Perception debuff in the stats.
What about adding a short (5s) turn buff since the facing is maintained?
I noticed the missing perception debuff stat in the description...maybe someone could test that in a one-on-one PvP match to see if it's actually there or not?
Then again, with the accuracy and damage debuffs, even if they can SEE you, there won't be much they can DO about it...
As for the turn buff, this is where your Battle Cloak comes into play. Anyone in the Singularity when you drop it is going to take a bit of time to get out of it giving you enough time to cloak while they can't hit you; you can then quickly turn, decloak, and go to town on them.
Energy Weapons: Singularity Overcharge V
Overcharges energy weapons for 12s
(pseudo BO/CRF depending on Beam/Cannon) What about folks that do not use Energy Weapons though? They're being penalized/balanced for having this, even if they can't possibly use it because of the build. Since it's not optional to have (only optional to use) - shouldn't it also affect non energy weapons in some fashion? THY/DPB? Or maybe some special effect for the next torp fired/mine dropped, etc, etc, etc?
This is kind of the oddball of the Singularity Powers, being the only one whose effectiveness is enormously affected by your build. The way I looked at it was this: you can adjust your build to decide how you want your DPS affected by the reduction in weapon power; you can go torpedo heavy, sacrificing some shield-destruction value for much more consistent damage, or you can embrace the way of the Alpha Strike to go for enormous (if risky) Overcharge burst damage.
I think the key (unadvertised) feature of Singularity Overcharge is that while on the overcharge, your energy weapons don't drain your weapons power (of course, since it's not advertised, that might have been a bug and been removed...)
Consider a warbird that goes with a full cannon/turret build. Their DPS will suffer much of the time from the power penalty...and then they come out of cloak with APA, APO, Tac Team, Go Down Fighting, Tactical Fleet, and Singularity Overcharge...I would not want to be at the business end of that attack even if I was squatting in a Unimatrix. Assuming they've used a battery or EPtW to get their weapons up to 125 for the spike Singularity Overcharge will KEEP it there for its duration (well, at least against weapon drain, not other kinds of drain). In exchange for weaker overall sustained DPS, a cannon-boat/energy weapon warbird can make absolutely glorious damage bursts. But again, it means getting your ducks all in a row, and MAKING the circumstances where the powers can be used to their best effect.
If you go the torp route, you don't NEED weapon power; your damage output is stable regardless. You're already not being affected by the penalty that Singularity Overcharge is intended to balance...but you ARE affected by reduction in utility of the Singularity Overcharge. This is what my Fed eng-in-a-sci-boat does, she regularly runs with only 40 points in weapon power, but does very good damage for a sci boat, especially when I can get my Murderball combo going.
Personally, I'm not against seeing Singularity Overcharge giving SOME love to torp boats (other notions beyond what was mentioned, improved reload speed for the duration, a boost to the % of damage that bypasses shields)...but it might be worth waiting to see how it plays out "in the wild" on Holodeck with fully kitted Warbirds before tweaking this one.
Warp Shadow V
Creates 5x Warp Shadows for 15s
Teleport to random location
After 19.5s, +6000 Stealth for 5s How about having that +6000 Stealth at the start instead of 4.5s after the Warp Shadows have disappeared, eh?
Or how about having each Warp Shadow provide a +Defense, so that the Warp Shadows need to be dealt with in some fashion to be able to hit the target?
(Yes, I see this as the weakest ability.)
Warp Shadows (currently) can't be dealt with in any way...they're indestructible. It's been said somewhere that they put out a high initial burst of threat, so if you've ticked off too many enemies and need a breather, you have to stop hitting the enemies if you want the Shadows to hold that aggro. That being said, yes, this is the weakest of the Singularity powers. I can't see a good way to combo it with offensive powers for any real utility, and its primary use is that one circumstance: too many enemies at once. In its specialty, it IS a more effective defense than Quantum Absorption or Singularity Jump (SJ is effective as a defense only if all your enemies are bunched together), but...yeah. That's it. Just that one circumstance.
If I'm missing anything, any BOff power that can be combined with this to make it worthwhile in more circumstances, please, somebody, speak up. Otherwise, sorry devs, you need to take another look at this one.
Quantum Absorption V
0.5s activation
2,010 shield regen (single regen/heal) applied to each facing
300 shield regen (heal over time) applied to each facing for 15s
20,475 temporary hit points Not really much to add/say about this one - other than the name. It makes me think about some form of hull/shield RSP. Yet, that's not how it functions.
I think it used to be named Singularity Shielding; if you look at the [Res]-enhanced Singularity Cores, it makes reference to Singularity Shielding, but there's no such beast...and if SS and QA are NOT intended to be the same thing, this leaves Quantum Absorption as the only Singularity Power that doesn't have a Singularity Core property that enhances it. I tested the [Res] core with QA, though, and if it's giving the resistance boost, it's not registering in your resistance numbers...although that might be because it's only your temporary hull points getting that resistance boost. That makes sense, now that I think about it.
i just wish they would get off it these singularity abilities are gimicks and their making a group suffer for something that will get little use atleast let the ship at full singularity power have its power back so we can be on equal ground at the end of a fight.
the romulans shouldnt suffer because some dev got dumb ideas im sorry its just not the way to go its already slowest turning group in the game across the board and hull health means nothing compared to shield these days and those shields will be weaker then everyone else just because your stealing their power for a gimmick...
allow them to opt out of these abilities you will be surprised how many people will opt out of a flat nerf to good looking ships even if it does lose them silly gimmicky abilities
i just wish they would get off it these singularity abilities are gimicks
What's not a gimmick in STO?
STO is full of gimmicks.
Star Trek itself, TV/Film/other games, is full of gimmicks.
Seeing them called gimmicks over and over again in a negative tone...leaves me to think somebody should probably be playing a different game, frankly...it's very Star Trek.
Star Trek itself, TV/Film/other games, is full of gimmicks.
Seeing them called gimmicks over and over again in a negative tone...leaves me to think somebody should probably be playing a different game, frankly...it's very Star Trek.
No, we just want the option to not have those singularity powers at all without been penalized for them what we would be if we simply don't use them.
They simply exist to make the rom ships look more fancy, the new shiny. But the actual values of the powers is next to zero.
Can't be to hard to let us use a core that restores the power penalty and blocks the powers.
To get us back on equal footing with the warp cores.
Just adding a bit of extra commentary on the powers, since they're so nicely laid out.
Notes: Plasma shockwave does get buffed by science officer's Conservation of Energy (up to +30% damage), decloak bonus, damage buffs like APO, etc.. Even if your base numbers are different, they can be spiked a LOT higher if you get your ducks all in a row.
As for the Shockwave...well, Singularity Cores with the [Wave] attribute have a 10% chance to knock one of a target's subsystems offline for 5 sec. So...on average, it'll happen to ONE enemy...if you're somehow hitting up to your capacity of 10 targets. Yeah.
So what do the other captains do that don?t have the Conservation of Energy Trait, besides the normal atk pattern boost? Not to Mention that they need to fire at you first to get the stack, which will take a bit, and your decloack bonus will mostly be gone until that.
Beside the fact that you need a lvl 5 Charge of the Singualrity core for those numbers also, which quite takes a while.
And now the thing with the [Wave] stat, which cost you one of the more useful stats, cause this one only affects 1 Singularity ability.
If you hit 10 Targets at the same time, which you wo't in 95% of the cases, you won't have all of them in the firing arc, so taking out a single subsystem by chance is not really that big of a benefit. The quesiton is also if the 10% chance is rolled for every target or it is only rolled once and then applied to any target in range.
So it leaves you with a medicore plasma dot in general.
I noticed the missing perception debuff stat in the description...maybe someone could test that in a one-on-one PvP match to see if it's actually there or not?
Then again, with the accuracy and damage debuffs, even if they can SEE you, there won't be much they can DO about it...
As for the turn buff, this is where your Battle Cloak comes into play. Anyone in the Singularity when you drop it is going to take a bit of time to get out of it giving you enough time to cloak while they can't hit you; you can then quickly turn, decloak, and go to town on them.
The pull, acording to the numbers is comparable to a gravity well, and you can eascape that one really easy. Even npc?s can escape them.
After the drop you have a 5 sec global cd, and then need 3 sec to cloak. So if you have enough hitpoitns to get away then, you would probably also have made it without the singularity ability. So there is no point of using it.
This is kind of the oddball of the Singularity Powers, being the only one whose effectiveness is enormously affected by your build. The way I looked at it was this: you can adjust your build to decide how you want your DPS affected by the reduction in weapon power; you can go torpedo heavy, sacrificing some shield-destruction value for much more consistent damage, or you can embrace the way of the Alpha Strike to go for enormous (if risky) Overcharge burst damage.
I think the key (unadvertised) feature of Singularity Overcharge is that while on the overcharge, your energy weapons don't drain your weapons power (of course, since it's not advertised, that might have been a bug and been removed...)
Consider a warbird that goes with a full cannon/turret build. Their DPS will suffer much of the time from the power penalty...and then they come out of cloak with APA, APO, Tac Team, Go Down Fighting, Tactical Fleet, and Singularity Overcharge...I would not want to be at the business end of that attack even if I was squatting in a Unimatrix. Assuming they've used a battery or EPtW to get their weapons up to 125 for the spike Singularity Overcharge will KEEP it there for its duration (well, at least against weapon drain, not other kinds of drain). In exchange for weaker overall sustained DPS, a cannon-boat/energy weapon warbird can make absolutely glorious damage bursts. But again, it means getting your ducks all in a row, and MAKING the circumstances where the powers can be used to their best effect.
If you go the torp route, you don't NEED weapon power; your damage output is stable regardless. You're already not being affected by the penalty that Singularity Overcharge is intended to balance...but you ARE affected by reduction in utility of the Singularity Overcharge. This is what my Fed eng-in-a-sci-boat does, she regularly runs with only 40 points in weapon power, but does very good damage for a sci boat, especially when I can get my Murderball combo going.
Personally, I'm not against seeing Singularity Overcharge giving SOME love to torp boats (other notions beyond what was mentioned, improved reload speed for the duration, a boost to the % of damage that bypasses shields)...but it might be worth waiting to see how it plays out "in the wild" on Holodeck with fully kitted Warbirds before tweaking this one.
You could also use a Battery and CRF or BO, would have more or less the same effect for your weapons and you would keep the Powerbonus if the core is charged.
Warp Shadows (currently) can't be dealt with in any way...they're indestructible. It's been said somewhere that they put out a high initial burst of threat, so if you've ticked off too many enemies and need a breather, you have to stop hitting the enemies if you want the Shadows to hold that aggro. That being said, yes, this is the weakest of the Singularity powers. I can't see a good way to combo it with offensive powers for any real utility, and its primary use is that one circumstance: too many enemies at once. In its specialty, it IS a more effective defense than Quantum Absorption or Singularity Jump (SJ is effective as a defense only if all your enemies are bunched together), but...yeah. That's it. Just that one circumstance.
If I'm missing anything, any BOff power that can be combined with this to make it worthwhile in more circumstances, please, somebody, speak up. Otherwise, sorry devs, you need to take another look at this one.
You could cloak instead, which would you let loose the aggro also. Hit evasive, or deuterium fuel or EPtE and go cloaking, depending on the situation it might be a good idea to hit a HE or an asif before heading into cloak and some add hull resist if available.
I think it used to be named Singularity Shielding; if you look at the [Res]-enhanced Singularity Cores, it makes reference to Singularity Shielding, but there's no such beast...and if SS and QA are NOT intended to be the same thing, this leaves Quantum Absorption as the only Singularity Power that doesn't have a Singularity Core property that enhances it. I tested the [Res] core with QA, though, and if it's giving the resistance boost, it's not registering in your resistance numbers...although that might be because it's only your temporary hull points getting that resistance boost. That makes sense, now that I think about it.
So basically you get a TSS with a Temporary hull boost. On the other hand you ahve to stay 5 sec more uncloaked, 5 sec are more then enough time for an decent escort to get rid of the extra shields and hull you get from taht ability. But ok that would be pvp in pve it could is at least sometimes useful.
Not to mention tha that this are all numbers of lvl 5 charged cores, which quite takes a while and put you on quite a cd when you use them.
So yeah, would be nice skills if tehy were more or less for free, came as option.
Like the way, for each Singularity ability you slot you have to pay with -6 power total divided to each subsystem. So if you use all of them you have a total of -30 Power for in exchange for the abilities. The -10 that are left to reach the total of -40 would be a ok price for the battlecloak i would say.
I mean they could the price for the cloak also put to -15 Power and use the rest -25 as described above with adapted numbers then if they think that fits better.
Maybe the devs would even have an option to see how many ppl then actually taking the penalty for the Singularity skills. That way you could figure out relative exactly how many ppl think the skills are worth the price.
But i have a guess how the results would be.
I can only agree to lostusthorn's statement. They can keep the singularity abilities in game, but it would be nice to get a core that blocks the abilities and give us better base energy lvls in exchange. It would be still ok to pay with a bit less power lvls for the cloak.
Reynolds/Thokal
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
But the actual values of the powers is next to zero.
TBH, that's highly subjective...
...I've found uses for each of them. I think it's pretty nifty having to think about which would be suit my needs in a given situation rather than just having something else to put on the spacebar to spam.
fine virus ill rephrase myself they are simply trash for the penalty to the ship these abilties are trash
you lose roughly 9% dps (roughly) from the power loss you lose tank and turn and the effectiveness of your aux abilities are also affected... heck a targetsubsystem can and will knock the lowest one off and then some so you will have to distribute power in such an odd way as to make romulan ships flying baitcans not unlike some fed cruisers:rolleyes:
frankley they can take back the bonus hull to the ships and use the turnrate penalty to account for this instead of the more crippling power cut...
i realy wanted to play romulan but at this point only tact roms will be able to compete you want to be science you might as well jump off the bridge in new romulus
P.S.
i just hope the devs will be open enough to allow romulans to opt out of this.
or lower the penalty to -5 per subsystem so it can atleast be matched by skillpoints at its current state you cant fix the power weakness almost forces them to use efficent bridge officers to come even close.
The Romulan ships seem to be the only ones in which my captain can't sit in his readyroom desk chair. Major kudos to having more sitable seats in my starship, but this really needs fixing.
How are you getting a ~9% DPS loss from the -10 Weapon Subsystem?
As for the math breakdown on that?
What's the build of the ship? What ship is it being compared to? Taking into account the short decloak buff? Using the Overcharge? What level of Overcharge? What abilities are being used?
Cause if you are seeing something like that...then the devs would likely need that kind of information from the testing you've done with it.
...I've found uses for each of them. I think it's pretty nifty having to think about which would be suit my needs in a given situation rather than just having something else to put on the spacebar to spam.
It is more the point that the skills are not useful enough for the drawbacks you have to take for them.
And if they would give us the singularity cores that would give us higher base powerlvls, as it was suggested, then ppl who think the abilites are not worth it can go with the cores that provide more power to the subsystems instead. Basically everyone would be happy then. The ones who want to keep the abilities and the lower powerlvls and the ones who don?t want the abilities but higher powerlvls instead.
Reynolds/Thokal
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
from a pure science ha'non point of view compared to a similar ship sharing the +15 aux bonus you knock the weapons power down 10points from the ship that does not have the penalty and compare to the reulsts of having 10more poitns in weapons and do the math
this is before firing but that wont matter as the drain would be roughly the same with similar builds and the curve would continue at around 9% loss from not having that power a normal sci ship with a specialty build can make it to around 120 without cutting too many skill points for their science area romy birds will be sitting at 110 with the same build likley more around 105 worst case.(worst case includes using more tank/turning focused engineering consoles)
true there is probly a better way to do that but hey you do the math and tell me your results.
and i know your going to say but andy science isnt meant for dps i know i know....but every bit on a team makes a diffrence in this games pvp you will probably agree on that note.
have not done the math for the other subsystems yet but likley losses there will be somewhat tolerable still unfaverable...
i would still like to be able to opt out of these abilities in favor of a more traditional build or atleast opt out of half of the loss the other half accounting for their cloak(where as klingons pay with hull)
but we cant pay with hull because they want us to be "sturdier" and "slower" if only they realy knew how the game played out they would understand shields are more important and being able to manuver than hull is but i digress
I heard a lot of things and read a lot of things about this topic.
I for one think the drive is comperable to other drives in the game, the fact that it can generate an huge AoE or heal your ship and shields out weights any speed factor difference between the NPC version and our player version.
I don't see any Romulans I fight as a Romulan the other day healing themselves at all. Rarely even using the AoE either, thus its a give and take on the speed factor, I for one like the fact that I can stay in a fight much longer than any of my Fed or Klingon characters of comperable level.
I like the Singularity drives, I especially enjoy how you make them go critical when I kill another Romulan the ship implodes then explodes after the singularity collapses fully, very realistic.
Personally I find the drives a little better than the drives my other character us, I was noticing they seem to have a better overall sustainability, in other words I am not constantily applying batteries to keep my systems going, yes the drives power your ship so less devices consumed means they can be saved for the true Oh TRIBBLE moments in battle. Not eating through them just to sustain your systems.
Overall I think the Singularity drives are done well, but as was stated a little more lore on them would be nice.
true there is probly a better way to do that but hey you do the math and tell me your results.
10 less weapon power results in 8% less damage.
10 less shield power results in 2.8% less shield damage reduction (though the math here gets pretty complicated based on the number of buffs to the point where it becomes even more negligible - not sure about the regen factor lost).
Both Eng and Aux will be more complicated as well because of the various things they effect - speed, turn, defense - Aux, oh so many things. Heck, even the loss of Shield Power is going to affect Extend Shields as well.
We can throw various numbers at them all we want though - and - this is where communication back and forth with Cryptic is important...what are the expectations?
Is the issue really the loss of power or is the issue about the "power" of the abilities, their durations, their cooldowns, the amount of time it takes to build singularity power, etc, etc, etc?
Rather than saying that the abilities are not worth it and they should get rid of them...why not suggest how the abilities might be worth it?
Get some dialogue going back and forth...that sort of thing.
I sure don't think the abilities are perfect - yes, they've all got their uses - I think they need to be tweaked. Course, I wasn't taking into account the mods on Singularity Cores...but I think those should be an above and beyond thing. The SC abilities need to balanced for what is lost...not some additional opportunity cost down the road.
well my math was close on the weapons thanks for doing it further as i said the other subsystems are not as big and issue but the weapons will be atleast for the ha'nom.
to make these skills worht while? well i still think they should be optional though.
but for the shockwave id lower the plasma dot damage and put a little bit more into the kinetic damage.
the healing one is alright. the shadow would be nice if as someone else said the stealth came sooner than later more inline with say the rhode island photonic displacment.(or atleast a second before they disapear or right as they disapear)
the singularty jumps singularty pull is far too low just like gravity wells pull it will be mostly ignored...weather it should have damage or not id opt on no aslong as its pull was more in the range of -0.65.
no opinions on the overload it does what it does just fine.
workign around the systems being weaker is goign to eat up alot of skill points and the romulans will be more suseptable to drains not an issue if your a klingon rommy but fed rommies will be capped out(powers as low as they can go) easily and thus more points must be placed in insulators or else...
Hi all. There are only two things that I noticed in the open beta weekend that I can comment on and they are both dealing with ships. I noticed that their where no small craft like fighters and shuttles, and there were no carriers. I personally like the ships that are currently listed, but it would be more of a complete package, I think, if the captains where not limited to using the ally's carriers and small craft but instead had unique Romulan or Remen ships of this sort of their own. And secondly, I noticed that the ship interior's, although BEAUTIFUL , seem to have no allowance for customizations. I hope this is only due to just being in beta, but if not I would hope to see variants allowed in bridge packages and layouts that mimic the size of the ship and allowances for personalization like trophies and accolades. All in all....GREAT JOB though
Since the powers will not be removed at all, to much time went into developing them.
How about this:
Singularity core behaves just like a warp core power wise.
Remove the innate power penalty from the Romulan ships.
Introduce a science console equipable only on warbirds,
this console provides the jump, warp shadows and quantum absortion.
Do the same with a tac console that provides the singularity overcharge and plasma shockwave.
That way you solve many problems, ships are on equal footing powerwise and people would don't want to use the powers are not penalized for them.
You give the player the choice which power flavor they want to use and get them balanced by having the ship using them giving up console space. Science for defense/fancy powers and tactical for offensive powers. Balancing out defense and offensive from passive consoles with defense and offense from active/singularity powers.
Next would be the battlecloak, from the veteran ship, we know that it is valued at 8% shield and hull.
Canon wise we also know that cloaking devices are rather small and can be carried by normal people.
I would suggest to decouple the cloak from the ship and create devices for them,
Equipping a cloaking device then lowers hull and shield by say 4%, for a battle cloak by 8% and a EBC by 16%.
Could do the same for the klingon ships, after normalizing their hull and shield values and device slots.
And of course turn the fed cloaking consoles into cloaking devices as well.
What is the point of all this? Allowing the players a choice how to equip and play their ship.
"Conversely, singularity cores focus on science-based stats and modifying a Warbird-class ship?s singularity powers, giving Romulan players extra tricks with which to dispose of their enemies. Some cores boost abilities such as particle generators or graviton generators, while others instead affect the rate at which you gain singularity power or reduce the wait time between using two singularity powers. With these cores, we?re aiming to allow players to tweak their own singularity mechanics to their liking, and to play with each new singularity power to discover optimal uses for each one. Rare singularity cores let you enhance your favorite Singularity power, adding effects like high-yield torpedo redirection to your Warp Shadow or a crit severity buff during your Singularity Overcharge. Very rare cores provide an analogue to the ?capacitor? powers found on Matter/Antimatter cores: they allow you to drain your current Singularity power level and shunt a portion of it into a particular subsystem."
Have to wonder just what's out there and how that will affect things...
...also, have to wonder whether there will be Fleet/Reputation Cores...
...and what that will mean in regard to the ships/power/etc.
"singularity cores focus on science-based stats and modifying a Warbird-class ship?s" .... well that is not correct.
With two VA Romulans under my belt and a a blue sig core now on my ship I don't think the W-cores and S-cores are equal. Currently the W-cores are stupid good and we will see a huge boost to Fed and KDF ships.
I think it is time to remove the -40 power from Romulan ships and if not now give it a month post the LoR release and people will oh TRIBBLE this needs to be fix the W-cores are very OP.
what ive seen of the cores they better be holding somethign back or half of that devblogs outright bait and switch tactics.
these skills due to the power lost to get them/the time to chargethem/cooldown/recharge again and the fact that after firing the ability you lose the bonus power from the core for anouther 30-45 seconds...plus recharge yea more a hindrance then anything
taking power is fine but if we cant compensate for the cut without spending a all to large majority of our skillpoint budget its a moot point only diehard romulan fans wont care the rest of us will stick to fed klink for pvp unless they surprise me im not thrilled about endgame play as a rommy everythign up till then is good though...
what ive seen of the cores they better be holding somethign back or half of that devblogs outright bait and switch tactics.
these skills due to the power lost to get them/the time to chargethem/cooldown/recharge again and the fact that after firing the ability you lose the bonus power from the core for anouther 30-45 seconds...plus recharge yea more a hindrance then anything
taking power is fine but if we cant compensate for the cut without spending a all to large majority of our skillpoint budget its a moot point only diehard romulan fans wont care the rest of us will stick to fed klink for pvp unless they surprise me im not thrilled about endgame play as a rommy everythign up till then is good though...
I have spent some good time as a VA Romulan twice and the power reduction is a pain in the back side. So many points spent into the trying to get my power back and it really still put me way under my other VA transferred toons. The still really don't balance anything at as other other still also have those skills you are just always short changed on power.
Heck I'm glad I don't pvp as Romulans are going to kicked in the teeth in pvp and if you go up vs a energy drain build bye bye Rommi.
I have spent some good time as a VA Romulan twice and the power reduction is a pain in the back side. So many points spent into the trying to get my power back and it really still put me way under my other VA transferred toons. The still really don't balance anything at as other other still also have those skills you are just always short changed on power.
Heck I'm glad I don't pvp as Romulans are going to kicked in the teeth in pvp and if you go up vs a energy drain build bye bye Rommi.
Yeah... I was comparing some characters on live to my Romulan. Just looking at weapons power. Thrown every point and skill at it and never budged beyond 118. I think on live I hit 125 without any gear based buffs.
And like you my concern was power draining skills. Better up the points spent on protection from that
Comments
So why doesn't Warp Core Theory seem to work on my Tribble Server Romulan? And if it's not supposed to by some odd developer theory...why does it show up for Romulan characters who don't HAVE a dilithium matrix warp core, not say specifically that it doesn't affect Singularity cores and not have a trait available that does the same thing for Singularity warp cores? And I mean same thing, not +(some amount) while you have X charge on your singularity core gauge...+10. I'm dreading finding out that the engineer skill might not work on Singularity cores either...despite it...again... just being a different reactor type of warp core from the fed and kdf ones.
This 40s stuff is horrible... and no, the sometimes used, drained while you're cloaked 'special ability' of them don't make up for the -10 points of power to every system. Do you realize how easy that makes it to shut off things with disabling and system draining skills? And no, a warp core that gives back some of the power based on the level of your charge doesn't help. That just further encourages you to not use it, while tipping the scale toward just plain not using cloak any time you expect combat and still have 50% of your hull...
(Something Nice Break)
By the way, I appreciate finally having a Romulan faction, and that you recognized that only some, and a small portion at that actually have that ridge bump (note: some Vulcans also have ridge bumps (usually the more logic driven, computer like ones)...though not as pronounced as some of the ones I've seen on the more evil Romulans...like it's some kind of 'hey, I'm the bad guy' marker...and no, most Romulans aren't evil!) I really appreciate being able to start with a TOS Warbird. Thank you.
(back to warp/singularity core)
The plasma shockwave doesn't seem to really do enough damage for something I had to charge (especially since I was using it a lvl 5 charge most of the time...and I think the lowest was a 3...) it should also be 100% of causing a bigger then normal plasma burn if we're expected to charge it (and don't cloak because that drains it, although that might just be because you 'leave' combat, I tended to not pay attention to it when not fighting) and then lose it for a while before starting to recharge (and or torps for a few seconds too, if I remember an earlier blog post and observed my torp disables correctly). Not to mention the lack of much of a shock wave. It seemed to push back a tiny bit but not much, and I doubt it would have disabled the cloak of any cloaked vessels which I believe the other shocks do.
I didn't try the absorption skill...but with a name like that, shouldn't it either just cancel a certain amount of damage for a while or channel the damage into shield and weapon energy instead of giving a temporary hull buff or a direct shield regen?
Unless you pull something cheap like using Threat Generation's defense buff without the threat pull that's it's supposedly a skill FOR (worst. Skill. Ever. in my opinion. As well as most heavily abused since even the pvp 'school' you guys had said to use it... You realize it's very bad to use in pve right? That's like saying 'no, pvp isn't messed up. just build 2 chars and make one the pvp one!' ... Either take off the resistance buff and only give a def buff against 'enraged' npcs that have been pulled by the threat...or just take out the skill and make some kind of tac tray skill (like the boff ones...) that works similar to Jam but pulls reduced fire to you...) I forgot where I...oh right... then I don't see how these would even be that useful in pvp, other then making it easier for fed and kdf players to disable your ship due to your inferior power levels...
And no, singularity warp cores that 'boost' a system (like Shields +5) per charge level don't make up for it. Partly because you have Warp (dilithium) cores that seem to have similar buffs, and probably just plain flat all the time boosts to systems... Plus... the buff the Singularity cores gives seem to be dependent on you HAVING a charge on your SC gauge. Which I believe I mentioned earlier only discourages you from using the 'great' abilities you put in (and further discourages cloaking...the Actual Signature of the Romulans besides plasma torpedoes that you put in the game...since you left out their armor, their huge shields, helped make almost all the Tal Shiar evil...when it was actually just a faction... and continued Nemesis' retcon of the population of Remus with those...things... that would have been used as shock troopers and assassins right away by the Romulans or broken free pretty quickly...being stronger, having tk, and pretty much the same tech...)
Honestly it wasn't even very helpful in pve...and only begs the questions 'why do the romulan npcs have these?' and 'if they do, why do they cloak so often when it lowers the charge, and how come they're harder to disable with 'beam target' then me?' I suppose it would have been useful (the shock wave) against a bunch of fighters... but that really doesn't happen that often, nor is it usually worth the loss in system power from the singularity cores you can equip. A science officer shock wave is better, or having a beam array and 'beam fire at will' or cannons/torps with a spread skill... or one of the defensive turrets...or a tricobalt warhead.
(Trying to End on Something Nice)
And remember, I do actually appreciate having a Romulan faction. And that we will be able to make Romulan and KDF characters that start at level 1. The new hairs look nice.
Feds get 3 ship types, KDF mostly get 2, one of which is very similar to warbirds but a lot more versatile thanks to universal slots. IMO the raider type warbirds should get at least some universal slots, too. Maybe not all of them, like birds of prey, but 1 or 2 per ship certainly wouldn't be a bad thing.
Then at 40 I got the Ha'feh and it's back to the agile killer paradigm. Unfortunately the DD just doesn't fit well into the warbird progression, IMO. At the very least, the Romulans need an alternate warbird option for the 30's.
[Kluless][Kold][Steel Heels][Snagtooth]
[Louis Cipher][Outta Gum][Thysa Kymbo][Spanner][Frakk]
[D'Mented][D'Licious]
Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
TBH, I think the devs are just choosing their battles here...they're under enormous time pressure, and rather than focusing on giving a variety of T1-T4 ships, they're putting the variety at the top with the T5 ships. After all, there's people who burned their way to RA in under three days playtime; when you get down to it, are you going to remember that three days of lack of variety, or the years you'll be spending in endgame ships? If you can only spare the time for one, you're going to focus on the endgame stuff. I HOPE they'll come back and fill in a bit more variety at lower levels, but I can't see it happening before launch.
I think there's also a factor the single-free-ship-per-tier progression (i.e. not counting C-store or ally ships) serves as a sampler for the captain; you spend a bit of time trying each of the offerings, and then at T5 the smorgasbord awaits...you'll be able to make a better decision because you know how each of the lower level ones behaved for you. If I played only a single character in the Federation, for example, if I took it into my head that cruisers were the way to go, I'd probably start cruiser and stay cruiser until tier 5, having no idea how a science vessel or escort works. As a single-character Romulan, I could look at any warbird a teammate is flying and have at least an idea of its capabilities because I've flown one at some point.
I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it, but there certainly are some merits to it.
I put 1 rcs console on it and under cloak i got a decent turnrate about 23 degree or so iirc.
Most npcs were dead after one pass anyways.
Basically you uncloak, open fire, pass the enemy, then cloak and initiate the turn to start over again.
With the right traits you get the cloak cd down to about 10 sec. You jsut have to take in account that the singularity abilites and the cloak have a shared 5 sec cd, if you use them, which is basically not needed anyways.
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
Gah, I'd forgotten about suddenly running dry on BOff skill points because of all the engineering BOffs, especially while experimenting to see what skills worked best ("well, I just wasted all those points I spent on THAT skill that didn't work out..."). >_<
To be fair, originally at T5 the only free ship was the Ha'apax, which was essentially the D'deridex, but even MORE waddlesome...the progression of increasing weight in Dhelan < Mogai < D'deridex < Ha'apax was only natural. Now that T5 has opened up again with the cruiser/escort/sci varieties, it doesn't make as much sense.
Notes: Plasma shockwave does get buffed by science officer's Conservation of Energy (up to +30% damage), decloak bonus, damage buffs like APO, etc.. Even if your base numbers are different, they can be spiked a LOT higher if you get your ducks all in a row.
As for the Shockwave...well, Singularity Cores with the [Wave] attribute have a 10% chance to knock one of a target's subsystems offline for 5 sec. So...on average, it'll happen to ONE enemy...if you're somehow hitting up to your capacity of 10 targets. Yeah.
I noticed the missing perception debuff stat in the description...maybe someone could test that in a one-on-one PvP match to see if it's actually there or not?
Then again, with the accuracy and damage debuffs, even if they can SEE you, there won't be much they can DO about it...
As for the turn buff, this is where your Battle Cloak comes into play. Anyone in the Singularity when you drop it is going to take a bit of time to get out of it giving you enough time to cloak while they can't hit you; you can then quickly turn, decloak, and go to town on them.
This is kind of the oddball of the Singularity Powers, being the only one whose effectiveness is enormously affected by your build. The way I looked at it was this: you can adjust your build to decide how you want your DPS affected by the reduction in weapon power; you can go torpedo heavy, sacrificing some shield-destruction value for much more consistent damage, or you can embrace the way of the Alpha Strike to go for enormous (if risky) Overcharge burst damage.
I think the key (unadvertised) feature of Singularity Overcharge is that while on the overcharge, your energy weapons don't drain your weapons power (of course, since it's not advertised, that might have been a bug and been removed...)
Consider a warbird that goes with a full cannon/turret build. Their DPS will suffer much of the time from the power penalty...and then they come out of cloak with APA, APO, Tac Team, Go Down Fighting, Tactical Fleet, and Singularity Overcharge...I would not want to be at the business end of that attack even if I was squatting in a Unimatrix. Assuming they've used a battery or EPtW to get their weapons up to 125 for the spike Singularity Overcharge will KEEP it there for its duration (well, at least against weapon drain, not other kinds of drain). In exchange for weaker overall sustained DPS, a cannon-boat/energy weapon warbird can make absolutely glorious damage bursts. But again, it means getting your ducks all in a row, and MAKING the circumstances where the powers can be used to their best effect.
If you go the torp route, you don't NEED weapon power; your damage output is stable regardless. You're already not being affected by the penalty that Singularity Overcharge is intended to balance...but you ARE affected by reduction in utility of the Singularity Overcharge. This is what my Fed eng-in-a-sci-boat does, she regularly runs with only 40 points in weapon power, but does very good damage for a sci boat, especially when I can get my Murderball combo going.
Personally, I'm not against seeing Singularity Overcharge giving SOME love to torp boats (other notions beyond what was mentioned, improved reload speed for the duration, a boost to the % of damage that bypasses shields)...but it might be worth waiting to see how it plays out "in the wild" on Holodeck with fully kitted Warbirds before tweaking this one.
Warp Shadows (currently) can't be dealt with in any way...they're indestructible. It's been said somewhere that they put out a high initial burst of threat, so if you've ticked off too many enemies and need a breather, you have to stop hitting the enemies if you want the Shadows to hold that aggro. That being said, yes, this is the weakest of the Singularity powers. I can't see a good way to combo it with offensive powers for any real utility, and its primary use is that one circumstance: too many enemies at once. In its specialty, it IS a more effective defense than Quantum Absorption or Singularity Jump (SJ is effective as a defense only if all your enemies are bunched together), but...yeah. That's it. Just that one circumstance.
If I'm missing anything, any BOff power that can be combined with this to make it worthwhile in more circumstances, please, somebody, speak up. Otherwise, sorry devs, you need to take another look at this one.
I think it used to be named Singularity Shielding; if you look at the [Res]-enhanced Singularity Cores, it makes reference to Singularity Shielding, but there's no such beast...and if SS and QA are NOT intended to be the same thing, this leaves Quantum Absorption as the only Singularity Power that doesn't have a Singularity Core property that enhances it. I tested the [Res] core with QA, though, and if it's giving the resistance boost, it's not registering in your resistance numbers...although that might be because it's only your temporary hull points getting that resistance boost. That makes sense, now that I think about it.
the romulans shouldnt suffer because some dev got dumb ideas im sorry its just not the way to go its already slowest turning group in the game across the board and hull health means nothing compared to shield these days and those shields will be weaker then everyone else just because your stealing their power for a gimmick...
allow them to opt out of these abilities you will be surprised how many people will opt out of a flat nerf to good looking ships even if it does lose them silly gimmicky abilities
What's not a gimmick in STO?
STO is full of gimmicks.
Star Trek itself, TV/Film/other games, is full of gimmicks.
Seeing them called gimmicks over and over again in a negative tone...leaves me to think somebody should probably be playing a different game, frankly...it's very Star Trek.
No, we just want the option to not have those singularity powers at all without been penalized for them what we would be if we simply don't use them.
They simply exist to make the rom ships look more fancy, the new shiny. But the actual values of the powers is next to zero.
Can't be to hard to let us use a core that restores the power penalty and blocks the powers.
To get us back on equal footing with the warp cores.
So what do the other captains do that don?t have the Conservation of Energy Trait, besides the normal atk pattern boost? Not to Mention that they need to fire at you first to get the stack, which will take a bit, and your decloack bonus will mostly be gone until that.
Beside the fact that you need a lvl 5 Charge of the Singualrity core for those numbers also, which quite takes a while.
And now the thing with the [Wave] stat, which cost you one of the more useful stats, cause this one only affects 1 Singularity ability.
If you hit 10 Targets at the same time, which you wo't in 95% of the cases, you won't have all of them in the firing arc, so taking out a single subsystem by chance is not really that big of a benefit. The quesiton is also if the 10% chance is rolled for every target or it is only rolled once and then applied to any target in range.
So it leaves you with a medicore plasma dot in general.
The pull, acording to the numbers is comparable to a gravity well, and you can eascape that one really easy. Even npc?s can escape them.
After the drop you have a 5 sec global cd, and then need 3 sec to cloak. So if you have enough hitpoitns to get away then, you would probably also have made it without the singularity ability. So there is no point of using it.
You could also use a Battery and CRF or BO, would have more or less the same effect for your weapons and you would keep the Powerbonus if the core is charged.
You could cloak instead, which would you let loose the aggro also. Hit evasive, or deuterium fuel or EPtE and go cloaking, depending on the situation it might be a good idea to hit a HE or an asif before heading into cloak and some add hull resist if available.
So basically you get a TSS with a Temporary hull boost. On the other hand you ahve to stay 5 sec more uncloaked, 5 sec are more then enough time for an decent escort to get rid of the extra shields and hull you get from taht ability. But ok that would be pvp in pve it could is at least sometimes useful.
Not to mention tha that this are all numbers of lvl 5 charged cores, which quite takes a while and put you on quite a cd when you use them.
So yeah, would be nice skills if tehy were more or less for free, came as option.
Like the way, for each Singularity ability you slot you have to pay with -6 power total divided to each subsystem. So if you use all of them you have a total of -30 Power for in exchange for the abilities. The -10 that are left to reach the total of -40 would be a ok price for the battlecloak i would say.
I mean they could the price for the cloak also put to -15 Power and use the rest -25 as described above with adapted numbers then if they think that fits better.
Maybe the devs would even have an option to see how many ppl then actually taking the penalty for the Singularity skills. That way you could figure out relative exactly how many ppl think the skills are worth the price.
But i have a guess how the results would be.
I can only agree to lostusthorn's statement. They can keep the singularity abilities in game, but it would be nice to get a core that blocks the abilities and give us better base energy lvls in exchange. It would be still ok to pay with a bit less power lvls for the cloak.
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
TBH, that's highly subjective...
...I've found uses for each of them. I think it's pretty nifty having to think about which would be suit my needs in a given situation rather than just having something else to put on the spacebar to spam.
you lose roughly 9% dps (roughly) from the power loss you lose tank and turn and the effectiveness of your aux abilities are also affected... heck a targetsubsystem can and will knock the lowest one off and then some so you will have to distribute power in such an odd way as to make romulan ships flying baitcans not unlike some fed cruisers:rolleyes:
frankley they can take back the bonus hull to the ships and use the turnrate penalty to account for this instead of the more crippling power cut...
i realy wanted to play romulan but at this point only tact roms will be able to compete you want to be science you might as well jump off the bridge in new romulus
P.S.
i just hope the devs will be open enough to allow romulans to opt out of this.
or lower the penalty to -5 per subsystem so it can atleast be matched by skillpoints at its current state you cant fix the power weakness almost forces them to use efficent bridge officers to come even close.
As for the math breakdown on that?
What's the build of the ship? What ship is it being compared to? Taking into account the short decloak buff? Using the Overcharge? What level of Overcharge? What abilities are being used?
Cause if you are seeing something like that...then the devs would likely need that kind of information from the testing you've done with it.
It is more the point that the skills are not useful enough for the drawbacks you have to take for them.
And if they would give us the singularity cores that would give us higher base powerlvls, as it was suggested, then ppl who think the abilites are not worth it can go with the cores that provide more power to the subsystems instead. Basically everyone would be happy then. The ones who want to keep the abilities and the lower powerlvls and the ones who don?t want the abilities but higher powerlvls instead.
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
this is before firing but that wont matter as the drain would be roughly the same with similar builds and the curve would continue at around 9% loss from not having that power a normal sci ship with a specialty build can make it to around 120 without cutting too many skill points for their science area romy birds will be sitting at 110 with the same build likley more around 105 worst case.(worst case includes using more tank/turning focused engineering consoles)
true there is probly a better way to do that but hey you do the math and tell me your results.
and i know your going to say but andy science isnt meant for dps i know i know....but every bit on a team makes a diffrence in this games pvp you will probably agree on that note.
have not done the math for the other subsystems yet but likley losses there will be somewhat tolerable still unfaverable...
i would still like to be able to opt out of these abilities in favor of a more traditional build or atleast opt out of half of the loss the other half accounting for their cloak(where as klingons pay with hull)
but we cant pay with hull because they want us to be "sturdier" and "slower" if only they realy knew how the game played out they would understand shields are more important and being able to manuver than hull is but i digress
I for one think the drive is comperable to other drives in the game, the fact that it can generate an huge AoE or heal your ship and shields out weights any speed factor difference between the NPC version and our player version.
I don't see any Romulans I fight as a Romulan the other day healing themselves at all. Rarely even using the AoE either, thus its a give and take on the speed factor, I for one like the fact that I can stay in a fight much longer than any of my Fed or Klingon characters of comperable level.
I like the Singularity drives, I especially enjoy how you make them go critical when I kill another Romulan the ship implodes then explodes after the singularity collapses fully, very realistic.
Personally I find the drives a little better than the drives my other character us, I was noticing they seem to have a better overall sustainability, in other words I am not constantily applying batteries to keep my systems going, yes the drives power your ship so less devices consumed means they can be saved for the true Oh TRIBBLE moments in battle. Not eating through them just to sustain your systems.
Overall I think the Singularity drives are done well, but as was stated a little more lore on them would be nice.
10 less weapon power results in 8% less damage.
10 less shield power results in 2.8% less shield damage reduction (though the math here gets pretty complicated based on the number of buffs to the point where it becomes even more negligible - not sure about the regen factor lost).
Both Eng and Aux will be more complicated as well because of the various things they effect - speed, turn, defense - Aux, oh so many things. Heck, even the loss of Shield Power is going to affect Extend Shields as well.
We can throw various numbers at them all we want though - and - this is where communication back and forth with Cryptic is important...what are the expectations?
Is the issue really the loss of power or is the issue about the "power" of the abilities, their durations, their cooldowns, the amount of time it takes to build singularity power, etc, etc, etc?
Rather than saying that the abilities are not worth it and they should get rid of them...why not suggest how the abilities might be worth it?
Get some dialogue going back and forth...that sort of thing.
I sure don't think the abilities are perfect - yes, they've all got their uses - I think they need to be tweaked. Course, I wasn't taking into account the mods on Singularity Cores...but I think those should be an above and beyond thing. The SC abilities need to balanced for what is lost...not some additional opportunity cost down the road.
to make these skills worht while? well i still think they should be optional though.
but for the shockwave id lower the plasma dot damage and put a little bit more into the kinetic damage.
the healing one is alright. the shadow would be nice if as someone else said the stealth came sooner than later more inline with say the rhode island photonic displacment.(or atleast a second before they disapear or right as they disapear)
the singularty jumps singularty pull is far too low just like gravity wells pull it will be mostly ignored...weather it should have damage or not id opt on no aslong as its pull was more in the range of -0.65.
no opinions on the overload it does what it does just fine.
workign around the systems being weaker is goign to eat up alot of skill points and the romulans will be more suseptable to drains not an issue if your a klingon rommy but fed rommies will be capped out(powers as low as they can go) easily and thus more points must be placed in insulators or else...
How about this:
Singularity core behaves just like a warp core power wise.
Remove the innate power penalty from the Romulan ships.
Introduce a science console equipable only on warbirds,
this console provides the jump, warp shadows and quantum absortion.
Do the same with a tac console that provides the singularity overcharge and plasma shockwave.
That way you solve many problems, ships are on equal footing powerwise and people would don't want to use the powers are not penalized for them.
You give the player the choice which power flavor they want to use and get them balanced by having the ship using them giving up console space. Science for defense/fancy powers and tactical for offensive powers. Balancing out defense and offensive from passive consoles with defense and offense from active/singularity powers.
Next would be the battlecloak, from the veteran ship, we know that it is valued at 8% shield and hull.
Canon wise we also know that cloaking devices are rather small and can be carried by normal people.
I would suggest to decouple the cloak from the ship and create devices for them,
Equipping a cloaking device then lowers hull and shield by say 4%, for a battle cloak by 8% and a EBC by 16%.
Could do the same for the klingon ships, after normalizing their hull and shield values and device slots.
And of course turn the fed cloaking consoles into cloaking devices as well.
What is the point of all this? Allowing the players a choice how to equip and play their ship.
"Conversely, singularity cores focus on science-based stats and modifying a Warbird-class ship?s singularity powers, giving Romulan players extra tricks with which to dispose of their enemies. Some cores boost abilities such as particle generators or graviton generators, while others instead affect the rate at which you gain singularity power or reduce the wait time between using two singularity powers. With these cores, we?re aiming to allow players to tweak their own singularity mechanics to their liking, and to play with each new singularity power to discover optimal uses for each one. Rare singularity cores let you enhance your favorite Singularity power, adding effects like high-yield torpedo redirection to your Warp Shadow or a crit severity buff during your Singularity Overcharge. Very rare cores provide an analogue to the ?capacitor? powers found on Matter/Antimatter cores: they allow you to drain your current Singularity power level and shunt a portion of it into a particular subsystem."
Have to wonder just what's out there and how that will affect things...
...also, have to wonder whether there will be Fleet/Reputation Cores...
...and what that will mean in regard to the ships/power/etc.
With two VA Romulans under my belt and a a blue sig core now on my ship I don't think the W-cores and S-cores are equal. Currently the W-cores are stupid good and we will see a huge boost to Fed and KDF ships.
I think it is time to remove the -40 power from Romulan ships and if not now give it a month post the LoR release and people will oh TRIBBLE this needs to be fix the W-cores are very OP.
these skills due to the power lost to get them/the time to chargethem/cooldown/recharge again and the fact that after firing the ability you lose the bonus power from the core for anouther 30-45 seconds...plus recharge yea more a hindrance then anything
taking power is fine but if we cant compensate for the cut without spending a all to large majority of our skillpoint budget its a moot point only diehard romulan fans wont care the rest of us will stick to fed klink for pvp unless they surprise me im not thrilled about endgame play as a rommy everythign up till then is good though...
I have spent some good time as a VA Romulan twice and the power reduction is a pain in the back side. So many points spent into the trying to get my power back and it really still put me way under my other VA transferred toons. The still really don't balance anything at as other other still also have those skills you are just always short changed on power.
Heck I'm glad I don't pvp as Romulans are going to kicked in the teeth in pvp and if you go up vs a energy drain build bye bye Rommi.
Yeah... I was comparing some characters on live to my Romulan. Just looking at weapons power. Thrown every point and skill at it and never budged beyond 118. I think on live I hit 125 without any gear based buffs.
And like you my concern was power draining skills. Better up the points spent on protection from that
Love the way it flies. Layout is fine.
But graphically its a dud. Cant get very enthused about flying the Space Shuttle Atlantis day after day.
This is what the Tier 5s look like to me:
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/09/19/space_shuttle_endeavour_AP782504941337_fullwidth_620x350.jpg