test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Lack of synergy in the Romulan faction
poeddude
Member Posts: 127 Arc User
While testing on tribble it was brought up over and over but the devs ignored it. It interfered with their vision of the Romulan faction.
This is the first faction added to STO since its release and it is a real shame that it is such a chaotic mess.
I am of course talking about the lack of synergy within the Romulan faction itself.
Firstly we have Battle Cloak. Sounds good on paper but in a game where sustained dps is all that matters in 99% of the content, abandoning all damage output for 5 seconds (time it takes to fully cloak and decloak again) in order to do +300 dps (what Ambush applies to a DHC) per weapon for 15 seconds (5 without a Superior Infiltrator) is a stupid idea. Your ship has to be capable of doing massive damage to make that worthwhile. The vast majority of ships won't get anywhere near that. Most ships also take a turn rate penalty to partially compensate for this cloak.
Battle Cloak also prevents you from gaining singularity charge. Infact it will drain while cloaked. Not to mention the negative effect having charge has on cloaking.
Secondly we have the Singularity Core. +5 to +15 power based on your singularity charge level. So if you want a decent amount of power out of your core, you have to never use any singularity powers. Great, what is the point of them then? Fed/KDF get power based on their power setting in addition to a boost to max power capacity. Your core also comes with a battery but, unlike the Fed/KDF cores, its effectiveness is based off your current singularity charge, but it consumes all your charge when you use it, meaning you can't use any singularity powers for a time AND you lose any power you were getting in your other subsystems (after the base 5) from your core! If you use it with no singularity power you get no boost. Another clash.
Next i'll touch on singularity powers. Considering what you give up for these they are far too lack-luster. You sacrifice 10 from each subsystem (for -40 total) and any power you were getting from your core after the base 5.
In exchange you get one of the following: A plasma shockwave that does very poor damage even at rank 5, a singularity jump with a pull so weak anything in endgame content ignores it and you end up facing away from the target meaning you do very poor damage while you turn around, a poor copy of cannon: rapid fire and beam overload with a very poor damage increase, a move that makes copies of yourself BUT DOESN'T BREAK TARGET LOCK meaning it doesn't even get you out of that tractor beam so you can cloak again, and last but not least, a temporary health buffer that disappears in seconds in any endgame encounter. To rub salt in the wound, if you use any of these powers you are unable to charge up your singularity core for between 60 and 90 (I think) seconds, so you go even longer without power from your core.
None of these things even come close to making up for what you lose by not being able to use a Matter/Anti-Matter Warp Core.
Fleet warp cores are even worse. They are effectively 2 cores in 1. For Romulans this is just more that doesn't work well together while the other factions are rejoicing.
This is not a "Romulans get TRIBBLE stuff" post. Their ships stats are competetive, one or two of their universal consoles are top quality and their BO traits are exceptional (until the embassy makes Superior Operative available to all factions equally). They are simply outshadowed by the addition of M/A-M warp cores. And none of their "faction specific" stuff works together. It all clashes with itself. This is the biggest design flaw in the Romulan faction.
So what to do about these problems? I don't know. Frankly even if I had the perfect solution I doubt Cryptic/PWE would listen.
My first suggestion would be to make Singularity Cores and Matter/Anti-Matter Cores identical. This would remove the clash between power levels from singularity cores and singularity powers. Cloaking is a bigger problem. KDF have had battle cloaks in PVE for years and I suspect the vast majority would say they never use them in such content. The maths simply doesn't support their use.
We have now had a couple of months of using Romulan ships, singularity cores and singularity powers. It is time to revisit what the Romulans give up for these little gimmiks which, as I have already gone into, have next to no real benefit.
There is no tl;dr option. Either you are interested in the post or not. If you are feel free to post suggestion/disagreements etc. If you are not then move on.
This is the first faction added to STO since its release and it is a real shame that it is such a chaotic mess.
I am of course talking about the lack of synergy within the Romulan faction itself.
Firstly we have Battle Cloak. Sounds good on paper but in a game where sustained dps is all that matters in 99% of the content, abandoning all damage output for 5 seconds (time it takes to fully cloak and decloak again) in order to do +300 dps (what Ambush applies to a DHC) per weapon for 15 seconds (5 without a Superior Infiltrator) is a stupid idea. Your ship has to be capable of doing massive damage to make that worthwhile. The vast majority of ships won't get anywhere near that. Most ships also take a turn rate penalty to partially compensate for this cloak.
Battle Cloak also prevents you from gaining singularity charge. Infact it will drain while cloaked. Not to mention the negative effect having charge has on cloaking.
Secondly we have the Singularity Core. +5 to +15 power based on your singularity charge level. So if you want a decent amount of power out of your core, you have to never use any singularity powers. Great, what is the point of them then? Fed/KDF get power based on their power setting in addition to a boost to max power capacity. Your core also comes with a battery but, unlike the Fed/KDF cores, its effectiveness is based off your current singularity charge, but it consumes all your charge when you use it, meaning you can't use any singularity powers for a time AND you lose any power you were getting in your other subsystems (after the base 5) from your core! If you use it with no singularity power you get no boost. Another clash.
Next i'll touch on singularity powers. Considering what you give up for these they are far too lack-luster. You sacrifice 10 from each subsystem (for -40 total) and any power you were getting from your core after the base 5.
In exchange you get one of the following: A plasma shockwave that does very poor damage even at rank 5, a singularity jump with a pull so weak anything in endgame content ignores it and you end up facing away from the target meaning you do very poor damage while you turn around, a poor copy of cannon: rapid fire and beam overload with a very poor damage increase, a move that makes copies of yourself BUT DOESN'T BREAK TARGET LOCK meaning it doesn't even get you out of that tractor beam so you can cloak again, and last but not least, a temporary health buffer that disappears in seconds in any endgame encounter. To rub salt in the wound, if you use any of these powers you are unable to charge up your singularity core for between 60 and 90 (I think) seconds, so you go even longer without power from your core.
None of these things even come close to making up for what you lose by not being able to use a Matter/Anti-Matter Warp Core.
Fleet warp cores are even worse. They are effectively 2 cores in 1. For Romulans this is just more that doesn't work well together while the other factions are rejoicing.
This is not a "Romulans get TRIBBLE stuff" post. Their ships stats are competetive, one or two of their universal consoles are top quality and their BO traits are exceptional (until the embassy makes Superior Operative available to all factions equally). They are simply outshadowed by the addition of M/A-M warp cores. And none of their "faction specific" stuff works together. It all clashes with itself. This is the biggest design flaw in the Romulan faction.
So what to do about these problems? I don't know. Frankly even if I had the perfect solution I doubt Cryptic/PWE would listen.
My first suggestion would be to make Singularity Cores and Matter/Anti-Matter Cores identical. This would remove the clash between power levels from singularity cores and singularity powers. Cloaking is a bigger problem. KDF have had battle cloaks in PVE for years and I suspect the vast majority would say they never use them in such content. The maths simply doesn't support their use.
We have now had a couple of months of using Romulan ships, singularity cores and singularity powers. It is time to revisit what the Romulans give up for these little gimmiks which, as I have already gone into, have next to no real benefit.
There is no tl;dr option. Either you are interested in the post or not. If you are feel free to post suggestion/disagreements etc. If you are not then move on.
Post edited by poeddude on
0
Comments
Warbirds aren't quite the straight up damage dealers that fed scorts or Klingon BC's are but they can be made to be much more survivable if you take the time to perfect the build. Also, I have been alpah'd by Mogais on several occassions so no problem there. Personally, I like that the 3 factions' canon ships fly a little differently from each other.
BTW I don't use purple warp cores/ singularity cores. The current exchange rate is ridiculous for what amounts to small benefits IMO. Also, my biggest surprise post LoR release is that prior to the release it seemd like everyone and their mom was going to use a T'varo. I rarely seem them in PvP or STFs.
it is not the ship or build it is the player
I.R.W. Raptor's Claw
Storm Eagle Class Warbird Fleet Ha'feh
I have never trusted humans, and I never will
Those stats aren't impressive, everyone should have that, and my post wasn't complaining the Romulans were underpowered. In fact I said it wasn't three times.
The post was to highlight how nothing works together and everything clashes. Want to cloak? Do no damage at all for 10 seconds. Want power from your warp core? Don't use any singularity powers.
Romulans have gimmiks, they are just penalised heavily for having them and penalised AGAIN for using them.
Yes you can. I'm not disagreeing with that. However a fed/kdf player can spec the same way and the gap between you will stay huge. Anything you can do, they can do better.
Well sometimes, its not about minimizing/maximizing potential. Sometimes its about fun. Anyways, KDF and Fed don't get Romulan and Reman BOFFs. Nor do other faction escorts have the "oh **** I'm about to die, save me button" otherwise known as quantum absorbtion. That counts for something
Anyways, you are right about the subsystem power issues. I just like the feel of warbirds despite the power level problems. Since I went with science I find the gimm er singularity powers complement well.
Romulans must be the new PVP faction. An environment where their weaknesses don't matter and their strengths shine. My mistake is trying to get them to match up to the other factions in PVE. You know, 99% of the game.
The Romulan faction = stealth attempt to revitalise pvp.
Who cares about PvE, its so ridiculously easy, the loss of -10 to each subsystem is barely noticed. BTW if power levels are really bothering yout jus slap a plasmonic leach console into the build. Once you learn the mechanics of the game, PvE just isn't challenging in any way. Besides, some of us really enjoy PvP because the PvE lacks a challenge.
thats funny being that the majoridy of the server spends 20 times more time in pve then pvp face it pvp is dead and has been for some time now
Uhm no, its not dead. I'll call it dead when the queue takes 30 minutes to get a match going. I get that not everyone likes it. Howeer, if PvP were truely dead I wouldn't even play the game. I mean were talking about a MMPPORG where a player doesn't even have to group for a single second to make it to the final level. The first time you have to group is for STFs. Take away PvP and your left with a either a free game for lolz or a very expensive single player game with optional grouping. Unless of course you consider the zone chat in ESD enlightening :P
The way you say this.... have you only played EQ and STO? Players being able to solo their way to max level in an MMO these days is you know, normal.
You're right about the PvE content being easy. The -10 to power levels for Romulans certainly isn't a problem in that respect. But that's not what the OP is talking about.
I think what the OP is missing in his analysis though is the idea of choice and flexibility.
Romulans get +power based on the singularity charge level, but lose this if they exercise a singularity ability and having singularity charge interferes with stealth. They don't all work together. Not all at the same time.
But if you're playing in a situation where the cloak has no value (i.e. STO) and you want to keep your power levels up, don't use singularity abilities unless it's an emergency.
If you're playing in a situation where the cloak does have some value then fire off a singularity ability before you cloak - whichever is suitable. The singularity jump or quantum absorption are probably the best candidates.
So there is no lack of synergy unless you assume that everything in the Romulan bag of tricks is intended to be pulled out at the same time.
I missed nothing.
Choice and flexibility doesnt mean jack in this pve game.
Damage output is all that matters. That and surviving to do damage. The gimmik singularity powers dont help either of these things more than the extra power from not using a singularity core would. Cloak doesn't help you survive or do more overall damage.
You give up the only thing that really matters in this game for silly powers. Cryptic can keep their "choices" and "flexibility". I'll take effectiveness over these anyday.
That's why i've gone back to my fed character. None of the penalties you get with romulans. Scimitar might tempt me back if it is more effective at the areas of the game that actually exist (pve, pure damage / tanking ability) than the other romulan ships.
No you really did. Synergy is not the problem because your whole argument is based on the faulty assumption that every Romulan trick is intended to be employed simultaneously and indiscriminately.
You could just as easily select any 3 boff abilites at random, see no synergy between them or worse that they clash, and claim that boff abilities lack synergy.
It's not logical.
That said, I am with you on throwing in the towel on Romulans for now. They have potential but also real problems.
Not simultaneously and indiscriminately. My point was the situations in which these things are useful are either so rare or downright non existent that it is stupid to balance anything in the game around them. 99% of this game is simple, blitz pve. You dont need tricks for that. Hell, if you run a cannon escort, you dont need more than 1 bridge officer!
Give me one situation where singularity overcharge, a skill that actually LOWERS the dps output of DHCs, is worth using. How about a plasma shockwave that doesnt do enough damage to kill fighters. Or a singularity that is too weak to actually attract anything. Or a warp shadow that doesnt even break target lock.
These abilities are useless and the romulan faction is heavily penalised for the "benefit" of having them. :rolleyes:
I am certain that if Cryptic released a singularity core that had a M/AM core stats but shut down your singularity powers almost every romulan would buy it, just so they could get around the built in gimping cryptic designed in the romulan faction.
Write off the Romulans if you wan. But if all you want is damage, then write off sci captains, eng captains, 90% of all ships and only go for lockbox ships :rolleyes: Sci captains contribute alot to overall group dmage even if most pew pew captains don't realize it with their parsers.
Betting singularity jump would be fun to stop a Bortesque special attack. Teleported right infront of his nasty attack? Jump away.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
The main reason we do not have a Romulan Faction separate is primarily Klingon tears. Let's face it, there is little to benefit playing a KDF now. Personally I am happy to see Romulans and have no problem with Quonos becoming a failing mall in the bad part of town.
But it benefits the Fed side to have Romulans, and even the KDF side, though with the opposing console packs its much more economical and beneficial as a character to play fed/romulan.
But I think that is the primary reason, it would kill off the KDF faction (with the way some carry on at times I don't think anyone would really miss them, though some are pretty cool and skilled). The second reason was probably star bases. Fed and KDF would lose people contributing to star bases and it would be as profitable long term for cryptic. Imagine even more billions of little fleets springing up trying to start up star bases, people get frustrated with the system and give out.
My opinion agree or disagree, just my thoughts.
It has been said, in PVE, even on elite difficulty, you don't have to have the best possible build. A good build will do. After that, talking about perceived lack of synergy in this case is an elitism I don't really care about. He might even have some truth in what he says ... but in these circumnstances it boils down to preferred playstyles and these do not warrant great changes. And the OP does not propose a solution to the presumably assessed problem either ...
Agreed he seems to enjoy crying about Romulans. I really like my Romulan toon. It is performing on par (actually better IMO) w/ by KDF toons now that it is getting fully specced out with doffs, rep, etc. The singularity abilites are really helpful in PvP and some of the Romulan only consoles (Shield absorb) are clearly OP. I usually heal as much as I damage with 5 tac consoles in any match.
I used to fly like that but am bummed I can't get Aux2Struct III from my Fed Eng ... anyway...
Singularity Powers are mostly for survival, it does compensate the -10 power level, even in PvE where most Fed or KDF would have to bite the dust because of a few mistakes in an STF. A Romulan can just BC/Sing Power out of it.
Romulan strength is in their coordination. The KDF and FED are more powerful ships, but I envision a romulan team that owns everyone through command and control.
They do not out dps or out power or out anything straight up. If you look at them they are like insurgents, they can attack and withdrawl at their discretion. You cannot fix them in battle, you cannot force the fight. Where romulans gain the advantage is entering battle cloaked, maintaining formation, identifying a target, waiting for said target to get stupid, decloak attack and then cloak. Even if unsuccessful at killing they shouldnt die if they have their TRIBBLE together.
Now this completely negates the singularity powers because the core won't charge, but that is an equalizer probably to prevent all romulan teams from steam rolling.
Their strength and synergy will come from organization, granted that most pvp players are not that organized, and the tempo is allowed to get ridiculously fast paced. The successful romulan team will be patient, cunning, devious, and disciplined. True to Romulans. Romulan teams have to control the tempo, execute precisely and be prepared to retreat in the name of survival. Lump them with a KDF battle cloaking alpha strike and they are more potent.
What I am not sure is how Romulan/Fed teams would be as effective given the same level of organization, gear and skill. Rom/KDF works with all battle cloaks.
The battle cloak is under utilized as combat is fire and maneuver, but it seems that most focus only on fire. The arcade nature of pvp makes it less obvious to slow the match down.
I have seen people rage quit at chasing a dd, lowering hull to 15% and then it cloaks heals and returns. One DD on our Fed team was able to act more like a decoy than anything else. Able to decloak well away from our group and see undisciplined people disengage our main force looking for an easy kill. All they got was easy dps, then a cloaked enemy. At the least the Romulan is unconventional. To place the Romulan in a conventional roll is the same as expecting a cruiser to dps or a scort to tank.
Hmm the last time I tried queuing for PvP (last night) I gave up after 90 minutes. I'm not a big fan of pvp but every time I've tried no game ever popped up. So to me this qualifies as dead.
Don't blame the pvp vitality on a poor queue system. Get in the chat channels for pvp, sometimes you have to go to the group.
I have never waited that long on a queue though.
There might be somethings hurting your odds of joining: your join settings, events running and time you are playing. Also it helps to get on a team, i rarely join as solo pug. Come to the chat channels or get in a good pvp fleet, that is where the activity is. I can understand that it looks dead to an outsider, but the public queue system is not always the best indicator of what is really going on.
Whats the point of this post? This is so far beyond exageration its practically a bald faced lie, not to mention a waste of a post. It DOES NOT take 90 minutes in a queue. I have never, ever waited anywhere near that long to get into PvP. Thats as KDF where the wait is for fed carebears to find their manhood and stop tgt practicing against Cubes and Spheres. Feds have FvF PvP queues to cut down on their wait times. There are times that it takes awhile to get into a game. But thats to be expected at non peak hours.
PLEASE HELP.
Negatives:
*10 less subsystem power
*A bit less base defense
Positives (for my build)
*40+ seconds of +25% damage each time I cloak. Downtime to cloak and gain bonus damage is 4 seconds. All you need to do is cloak, watch 5 second timer tick down to 2 and uncloak to get the full ambush buff. So math: say you do 5k dps, with 4 second downtime to cloak you're losing 20k. 45 seconds of 25% more dps = 56k, total gain for using cloak in combat: 36k dps. This is not even counting the 56k dps from opening attack at no loss. Moving on.
* 20% more end defense than my fed/kdf. This is because all my boffs have subterfuge and half have the infiltrator traits. In addition I get 4% crit and 10% severity from the operative traits.
*Massive synergy from consoles. Unlike mostly gimmicky consoles feds and kdf get the rommy ones (at least the refit ships) are all amazing. I wont go into details you can look at them yourself on the wiki.
*In survivability, we get the quantum absorbtion, which on my ship gives me ~3k shields with another 3K shield regen and 18k hull. Please tell me what fed skill does this? Cooldown? 1 min, reduced with some consoles.
I could keep going but I really dont want to make a case for a nerf. Point is, you have the same weapon power as kdf or fed due to being able to put 100 into weapons. You get an amazingly long damage buff from cloaking that you can renew at will. You have multiple of sh** buttons with powers and consoles. You can get higher crit and severity and much higher defense due to romulan and reman boffs, and you look sexy doing it. I rest my case here but I'd love to see how you can disagree with me. You probably just had a junk build/boff setup.
According to Cryptic, Infiltrator is not supposed to stack. Making the maximum Ambush duration 15 seconds. Do the maths again and you will see that cloaking is pointless from a damage output POV. And that 25% is to base weapon damage, it actually works out as no more than 5% total damage bonus.
As for your first comment, good damage output != synergy. Get a dictionary.
I completely agree with all of that.
Stealth is presently a joke - unless you have the optimal Romulan/Reman boff set up with the right traits that lets you use stealth without sacrificing DPS. It's otherwise almost never worth using.
And the PVE difficulty level is extremely low. My first level 50 character was a Romulan and I got him there with hundreds of thousands of unspent skill points and largely ignoring boff abilities cos I was more interested in the story at that time that untangling all of that and figuring out how I should spend those points. Cannon escorts all the way!
I can't speak to your claim of singularity overcharge lowing cannon dps.
Plasma shockwave , as advertised, I believe does less damage to shields? So I mostly use it when those aren't a factor. It's not one I use very often but it's occasionally handy.
I haven't checked the stats on the singularity jump attraction strength but I use it to good effect in combination with a regular singularity (i.e. gravity well). I'm too lazy to log in and check but from memory the main effect of singularity jump is teleport + creating a debuff singularity, not control/attraction. That debuff includes perception so in combination with the teleport it's a good escape mechanism. And if you're a science type like me you can create one after dropping a gravity well which ensures no escape from the debuff. Good to use as an opening move when large groups of ships approach in STFs.
Warp shadow I haven't found any use for.
Just my impression but I think our nerfs are more related to stealth than the singularity powers.
The -10 to all power levels primarily boils down to lower defence. Most players run weapons on max, don't care about aux and can take a hit to engines. And there's the possible lower resistance of warbids on top of that. I believe that's because we have the option of exiting combat thanks to the battle cloak, so we can use it to completely avoid damage if we're taking too much.
At normal difficulty level that's almost never necessary. But that is only at normal difficulty level. In STFs I have used stealth once or twice to escape after drawing too much aggro.
Up the difficulty level so combat is harder and factor in the associated ship damage that comes with "dieing" and I can potentially see more value to stealth - provided you've managed to accumulate the right kind of boffs.
Are you sure?
My recollection is that the intention was that the ambush duration bonus from Infiltrator and the stealth bonus from Subterfuge were only supposed to be counted once from boffs, but stacked with captain's traits. So a Reman player might get 20 plus seconds of ambush duration.
Though given how expensive Reman boffs with this trait are I haven't been able to test it.
Plus these things aren't necessarily working as intended. They weren't when LOR launched and last I checked the stealth bonus was stacking from every boff.