test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
A solution for burst, please try it
bareel
Member Posts: 3 Arc User
This is a proposal to introduce a limited resource to STO that would require the least amount of work for the highest payoff and should be relatively easy to set up a test environment for to find out. That resource will be hull.
1) Quadruple current hull health. Turn 50k into 200k.
2) Reduce current passive hull repair/regeneration by a third. If you currently repair 30k a minute reduce it to 20k.
3) Reduce all hull heals/restores by half or a third. Ideally the base values would be cut in half but the skill modifier would be slightly increased.
4 *optional*) Increase damage overall or decrease shield resistance by a small (10%?) amount.
At this point hull becomes the limited resource that STO lacks. Yes other tweaks may be needed for unintended side effects such as transphasics becoming too powerful but the overall improvement would be immense. Now for the reasoning behind this suggested experiment.
What is a limited resource and why is it important?
A limited resource is something that you only get so much of while in combat. Eventually it will run out. In a basic sense for most RPGs it is your health or hit points. During combat these will slowly decrease and you have a limited capability to restore them when engaged. In groups and the Trinity it becomes mana, typically the healers mana.
This resource allows combat to last a predetermined amount of time as you can tweak damage output to make it longer or shorter. It also creates the tension of combat as you watch both your resource and the opponents being depleted. And most of all it gives you a bit of room for error in your design. You don't have to worry too much about creating monsters that can kill in a single hit in order to challenge the player because most monsters will eventually kill them anyway.
But aren't shields, hull, and cooldowns already a resource?
Yes and no. While they are resources they cannot truly be considered limited because of how quickly and easily both shields and hull can be healed from almost nothing back to full. Additionally most cooldowns are so short that they don't fall into that category either. It's all about ratios.
If it takes a few minutes to fully restore the resource but you will exhaust that resource after a minute of combat then it is limited. Otherwise it is just another fiddly bit so to speak.
You can tweak offense and defense in STO until you are blue in the face and it will not fix the problem. Only by changing the relationship, or ratio of offense and defense VS health can you find the solution. It needs to take longer than 5 seconds for offense to exceed health. And defense should never be capable of exceeding offense for an indefinite period of combat.
A story about tabletop mechanics
I play tabletop RPGs, lots of them. I enjoy both playing the systems and learning them. Finding how all the mechanics work, why they work, and where they fail. I also tend to modify them mostly to help them fit the story or setting they are being used with.
One of my first, and favorite systems was DnD 3rd edition and 3.5. One mechanic in particular stands out and that was the iterative attack system. You see as you went up in levels you gain the ability to make more than one attack a turn but those attacks would have a penalty on the 'to hit' roll. This tended to slow down combat and confuse some players as you would have a +12/+7/+2 to add to the roll for your 1st/2nd/3rd attacks respectively. Best way to describe it is clunky. But it served an important purpose. A high level monster could have either a high or low armor class and they system would still work. Sure your first attack will hit, but your second and third where iffy and that fourth if you had one would likely miss! Additionally a Fighter tended to have a higher 'to hit' bonus than a say a Rogue but it would still work out in the end. Basically AC could vary by 20 or even 30 points and the combat would still work mechanically and be engaging for a variety of characters.
Latter versions tried to remove it because of how clunky it was. Saga only allowed one attack but if you gained a feat you could make two or three attacks and all of them shared the same penalty. This was easier no doubt but it was no longer much of a choice as it always seemed to be a better idea to make more attacks. Needing to roll a 14 but getting to roll twice seems alot better than trying to get a 12 once on a d20.
4th edition just flat out removed it. They tried to compensate by allowing you to choose your attack type that may add a bonus or inflict a penalty on your attack roll to allow for a higher variance in AC but it still didn't work all that well. Say one character has a +4 and another a +8, only a four point difference and shouldn't be a big deal with a d20 roll right? Except that if you make the AC or target value a 18 then one only needs to roll an 10 or higher (55% success) and the other a 14 (35% success) which are drastically different. Additionally you end up with players 'missing' more often and feeling like they didn't do anything that turn.
In the end the removal of that one clunky mechanic destroyed a large amount of built in flexibility within the mechanics of the game. Now that is not necessary a bad thing, or a good thing, merely an example of how a single small mechanic can have such a massive impact on the feel of a game when you play it or design monsters.
PS: Its 3 AM and this might not make much sense if so I apologize.
1) Quadruple current hull health. Turn 50k into 200k.
2) Reduce current passive hull repair/regeneration by a third. If you currently repair 30k a minute reduce it to 20k.
3) Reduce all hull heals/restores by half or a third. Ideally the base values would be cut in half but the skill modifier would be slightly increased.
4 *optional*) Increase damage overall or decrease shield resistance by a small (10%?) amount.
At this point hull becomes the limited resource that STO lacks. Yes other tweaks may be needed for unintended side effects such as transphasics becoming too powerful but the overall improvement would be immense. Now for the reasoning behind this suggested experiment.
What is a limited resource and why is it important?
A limited resource is something that you only get so much of while in combat. Eventually it will run out. In a basic sense for most RPGs it is your health or hit points. During combat these will slowly decrease and you have a limited capability to restore them when engaged. In groups and the Trinity it becomes mana, typically the healers mana.
This resource allows combat to last a predetermined amount of time as you can tweak damage output to make it longer or shorter. It also creates the tension of combat as you watch both your resource and the opponents being depleted. And most of all it gives you a bit of room for error in your design. You don't have to worry too much about creating monsters that can kill in a single hit in order to challenge the player because most monsters will eventually kill them anyway.
But aren't shields, hull, and cooldowns already a resource?
Yes and no. While they are resources they cannot truly be considered limited because of how quickly and easily both shields and hull can be healed from almost nothing back to full. Additionally most cooldowns are so short that they don't fall into that category either. It's all about ratios.
If it takes a few minutes to fully restore the resource but you will exhaust that resource after a minute of combat then it is limited. Otherwise it is just another fiddly bit so to speak.
You can tweak offense and defense in STO until you are blue in the face and it will not fix the problem. Only by changing the relationship, or ratio of offense and defense VS health can you find the solution. It needs to take longer than 5 seconds for offense to exceed health. And defense should never be capable of exceeding offense for an indefinite period of combat.
A story about tabletop mechanics
I play tabletop RPGs, lots of them. I enjoy both playing the systems and learning them. Finding how all the mechanics work, why they work, and where they fail. I also tend to modify them mostly to help them fit the story or setting they are being used with.
One of my first, and favorite systems was DnD 3rd edition and 3.5. One mechanic in particular stands out and that was the iterative attack system. You see as you went up in levels you gain the ability to make more than one attack a turn but those attacks would have a penalty on the 'to hit' roll. This tended to slow down combat and confuse some players as you would have a +12/+7/+2 to add to the roll for your 1st/2nd/3rd attacks respectively. Best way to describe it is clunky. But it served an important purpose. A high level monster could have either a high or low armor class and they system would still work. Sure your first attack will hit, but your second and third where iffy and that fourth if you had one would likely miss! Additionally a Fighter tended to have a higher 'to hit' bonus than a say a Rogue but it would still work out in the end. Basically AC could vary by 20 or even 30 points and the combat would still work mechanically and be engaging for a variety of characters.
Latter versions tried to remove it because of how clunky it was. Saga only allowed one attack but if you gained a feat you could make two or three attacks and all of them shared the same penalty. This was easier no doubt but it was no longer much of a choice as it always seemed to be a better idea to make more attacks. Needing to roll a 14 but getting to roll twice seems alot better than trying to get a 12 once on a d20.
4th edition just flat out removed it. They tried to compensate by allowing you to choose your attack type that may add a bonus or inflict a penalty on your attack roll to allow for a higher variance in AC but it still didn't work all that well. Say one character has a +4 and another a +8, only a four point difference and shouldn't be a big deal with a d20 roll right? Except that if you make the AC or target value a 18 then one only needs to roll an 10 or higher (55% success) and the other a 14 (35% success) which are drastically different. Additionally you end up with players 'missing' more often and feeling like they didn't do anything that turn.
In the end the removal of that one clunky mechanic destroyed a large amount of built in flexibility within the mechanics of the game. Now that is not necessary a bad thing, or a good thing, merely an example of how a single small mechanic can have such a massive impact on the feel of a game when you play it or design monsters.
PS: Its 3 AM and this might not make much sense if so I apologize.
Post edited by bareel on
0
Comments
What I am trying to say with that wall of text above is that STO does not have a built in, tolerance or room for error, or flexibility when it comes to offense VS defense. And the reason for that is how low total health is when compared to the amount of offensive and defensive capability ships at end game posses.
In PvE you can either tank something indefinitely or it kills you in seconds. There is no middle ground, no a top tier player can tank it for two minutes and an average for one minute. This is also true in PvP.
That is the core of the problem. Think about it if you were to put a flat 25% damage increase into the game it would break completely. If you put a flat 25% resistance increase into the game it would also break completely. It lacks that flexibility and always has because it lacks a limited resource that is designed solely to provide said flexibility.
Bah, I still think I am speaking gibberish oh well. Time to Doff...which has a built in limited resource in assignment slots (plus time to complete said assignments) and cooldowns on repeat assignments which provides the flexibility for them to not all be perfectly balanced and still work! A bad example but still.
4 times the hit points
Half the resistance levels
Same strength heals and damage.
Killing your opponent would be a lot more like killing an Npc, only infinitely more fun to fight. strong spike will seriously bloody, but it will be near impossible to 1 shot. your heals at current strength, will half the res, will not be able to keep 4 times as many hitpoints healed.
This would be the quick and easy way to fix everyone's complaints with pvp all at once.
Really, I wish the Devs would sit down and watch the Battle of the Mutara Nebula (end of WoK) and ask themselves "How can we make PvP more like that?"
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
Muahahaahahahahaha. *cloaks*
Seems like a good idea. Total revamp of the game tho.
And people would still complain that they got "4 shotted"
I'll keep playing no matter what. But I think at this point even good ideas like this are just futily wasted brain power on our part.
Kudos on the well written post tho.
Have fun kill bad guys
-thrusters on full-
If you give my Sci like 50k shields, I'll be tempted to just send that through the roof by throwing on oodles of Field Gens.
You will note I did not suggest increasing current shield values beyond a possible slight decrease to their resistance. This is for two reasons first off you only really need *one* limited resources and secondly it fits the setting/theme/whatever that shields would go up and down in strength during combat.
Also modifing shields would be a nightmare of a balancing act with passive regeneration values, shield types, shield power, all the abilities and so forth. Whereas hull has fewer fiddly bits interacting with it. Still quite a few but no where near as bad as the shield mechanics.
Lastly DDIS and I agree on something. That doesn't happen very often and while we may not see eye to eye on the specific details the fact we agree on the core concept is, well a bit scary honestly
The other side of the coin is that making PCs more like NPCs would see builds push to where they are in PvE.
In PvE the top DPS Escorts are "All Cannons" and the top DPS Cruisers are "All Beams"
Burst powers that come with built-in disadvantages, such as dropping weapons power or needing to build around a solution to it, or torpedos that need to be timed & require their own damage consoles, are very marginal in this game's PvE very specifically due to there not being much point to using them as consistent attrition damage weapons are a better, more efficient way of getting the job done.
So while I think spike healing and spike damage could be toned down to bring us closer toward the middle, a solution like this would push them back to the far edges of the game - I'd like to see them stay relevant without completely dominating (not that torpedos are relevant in PvP right now)
Which is where they were, not too long ago (the far edges, i.e. niche builds) - right about before they got special DOFFs to boost them specifically because almost no one was really making much use of them.
Burst still has a very important role in PvE and would retain that role even with these changes in PvP. Granted it might not be flavor of the month or as popular in PvE but I'll take my defiant that can clear the spheres before they even activate in ISE with spike over sustained any day of the week.
The spikers would still be important to 'swing' the battle. When everyone starts to get a wee bit low the spike would determine who dies first so to speak.
Compare it to a MOBA. Yes the carry does the majority of the damage (sustained DPS) but without a proper initiator to set the inital advantage for the fight (sci/CC) and the assassin to shut down the enemy carry/support/whatever (spike) you are at a severe disadvantage.
Spike has moved from far edge nitch to popular less because of the doffs and more out of necessity. Honestly they only way to get kills against enemies of equal skill is either spike or offensive cc spam (subnuke, scramble sensors /w doff, etc) right now because Defense is > than Offense. If you change that formula to Offensive > Defense without fixing the lack of a limited resource you will simply see everyone exploding left and right.
And it's not even the 'decloak one shot' spike this is intended to fix. This is to fix the 'you have 5 seconds to kill the target or why bother' problem this game has always had to some extent along with the 'one shot or faceroll tank' PvE problem. I have tanked the CE with over 150 stacks of it's buff with impunity while watching 8 of the other 10 players explode every 25 seconds! That is not good...
idk what a fix for that would look like.
While ideally a system such as the one you mention would be great it would also be very difficult to test and create. I am hoping the Devs could set up a test environment and see what effects my proposal would have without committing a large amount of resources. If it works out then it also shouldn't be extremely difficult to implement, comparatively speaking as they would merely have to adjust a handful of values.
And actually I do think most of the hull heals would work better if they functioned like the singularity power and added temporary hit points but that once again increases the difficulty of testing and implementing the changes.
Resists and temporary hit points are completely different. Resists reduce incoming damage by a percentage temporary hit points reduce it by a flat amount. They are related and interconnected but in no way the same thing. Resists have a relative value, the amount of incoming damage determines how much damage is prevented. Temporary hit points prevent a set maximum amount of damage. They interact but are completely different mechanics.
As for having powers and what-not actually drain subsystem power that is how weapons used to work and they did not like that one bit so I highly doubt they will return to it, even though it would work far better when applied to defensive abilities instead of offensive but meh.
Lastly yes tribble is the public test environment but they can easily set up a mock shard on their internal servers to test what I proposed. I have no doubt the values will need tweaking but the simple fact remains..
Offense and Defense is far to high in relation to total health. The problem is not too much damage, nor too much healing, it is too little health when compared to the two.
Please leave this thread now. If we're all very fortunate it will be deleted. It is so stuffed full of bad I'm afraid it may spread.
Eww. I think you got some on you! Ruuuuun!!
http://www.warship.org/no21987.htm
Starship Skill Point Effects
this would seem to indicate the skill currently grants 1.3 Hull hp mod for 9pts most people seem to skill it anyways so if you changed the modifier to 2, 2.5, 3, etc it would have the desired effect of increased Hull HP hopefully without breaking anything else.
certain starship components boost the skill, so setting the 99 skill modifier to 3.0:
Nebula example 31500 x 3.0 mod for 99 points = 94500 Hull hp then add in different bonuses from SIF consoles, KHG defelector etc you would approach the 4x base hull.
Care to elaborate just a tiny bit?
Offense is offense. Tractor beam deals a measurable amount of damage when it strips a target's bonus defense. Difficult to measure sure, but still measurable.
Their is no real difference in the end between the debuff / cleanse / debuff / cleanse interaction than their is with damage / heal / damage / heal. At the end of the day if total HP is too low the game becomes extremely swingy or yo-yo like. This is true in any system.
-introduce energy resist of hull to 60%
No longer double tap BO deaths. Torpedo's will again have its role
@rudiefix Feds: Rudiefix / Thron / Opa
@rudiefix KDFs: Lill / Xifeidur / Dehr / Ugly
@rudiefix Roms (KDF alligned): Chicita
Not damage from tb. Disparity, all other things being equal, between high acc/low or held target and avg acc/high def or moving target.
Mobile now will try to come back later.
Thissler be nice calming breaths try to explain.
I am suggesting hull becomes like hit points in a MOBA like league of legends. Where it is difficult to restore it after one takes a beating and one must make changes in the middle of combat based on how much they have left such as disengaging when low to go hide in the corner for a bit or explode. Granted that would vary a bit from ship to ship, build and to build.
What's wrong with that its good fun to watch and be part of
Long live the marmot
Back on topic
My perspective is that damage control is not a magic heal. It is the difference between surviving battle for a few more minutes (and possibly not sinking afterward) and going down with all hands.
There is a limit to what damage control can do during a combat situation. And there is a difference in what kinds of repairs can be effected when the luxuries of time and not being shot at are available.
Granted the advanced magic technology of the Federation and the Empire gives us some leeway there, but even in the TV shows and movies ships got damaged and they didn't magically heal in combat. They got progressively more damaged and they either survived long enough to end the combat, jury-rigged a critical system, or blew up.
That's what's missing here. Bareel's idea tries to restore that very canonical notion. Unfortunately I don't see how it becomes reality.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
Ships take physical damage and subsystem damage. Crew repairs damage, they do it faster when they are out of combat. Engineering, science, and tactical teams repair different kinds of damage. Teams can be beamed to another ship to affect faster repairs (you give up some of your own crew).
Then set a time-to-die floor at about 30 seconds for same-class combat, get rid of magic heals like AtSIF and the healing part of HE, and let the attrition wars begin.
Honestly look at the game and be honest about it for a second though.
Its pretty well balanced.... Not counting Set items / Fleet Gear / Fleet Weapons / Reputation passives and skills / Consoles that provide Click Skills / Consoles that provide crazy p2w stats.
So how do you balance anything while all that stuff is still around.....
Simple remove the stuff that isn't balanced from the system.
What is really needed to fix pvp...
Is a PvP segregation system.
We should have a PvP Ship Doll.... that Doll should only allow gear with the "-p" mod to be equipped.
Cryptic SHOULD never SELL "-p" gear... what they should do is setup vendors that provide White "-p" gear for 100% free.
When you load a PvP map... All click consoles / rep powers should be disabled.... and the system should use the items you have equipped on your PvP Ship Doll.
Guess what the game would be super balanced... and PvP would be 10x more fun.