seems like a one sided circular argument then right gohan?
Point is Double taps are not end all or be all which unfortunatly a lot of people think. Vape does not guarantee a 100% kill on anyone. Unless of course your running a fail build. If the Dev caters to fail builds and so forth, then I really have nothing more to say, only there is more to life than popping your umpteen cube
Now found frequenting MWO short term and then Star Citizen long term. Raged Quit PVP long ago
- Gohan (House of Beautiful /Sad Pandas)
Here's what will be coming to Tribble in the near future, using Beam Overload as an example:
-Having one Beam Overload buff active will prevent you from activating any other copies of Beam Overload
-Consuming a Beam Overload buff to fire a beam overload will trigger a 5 second cooldown period during which no other Beam Overload powers can be activated
-This 5 second cooldown period is not triggered if the buff just wears off due to duration/unuse, or if the buff is purged by a dispel effect.
I've added this behavior to each Tactical Bridge Officer weapon-enhancing power. This change is intended to leave normal gameplay completely untouched - if you are activating and then firing your weapon powers during gameplay as most players do, you should hopefully never see an effect from this change. If, however, you are stacking up multiple copies of a single weapon power over a 30 second period of non-combat in order to maximize one second of Burst Damage, you are the intended recipient of this change and will see a drastic decrease in the magnitude of that burst DPS spike.
This accomplishes what our category-based Global Cooldowns were always intended to enforce - that you can't use Beam Overload or High Yield Torpedo or Dispersal Pattern Beta back-to-back within a sub-5-second window. The complication before was that the Category Cooldown was triggered by giving yourself the buff from the ability, not by spending it to get its result - allowing you to wait out multiple cooldowns without consuming the buff to get one short cycle of tremendous burst. By adding a short cooldown to the consumption of these buffs, we hope to curve the abuse case without negatively affecting normal gameplay.
I hope these changes feel fair to you. Once the changes make their way to Tribble, please feel free to point out any cases where the changes may not be accomplishing their stated goals - I'm always happy to listen to any constructive feedback.
Hmm we'll I'm in a tac ship and am a tactical captain , I got 1 science console only 4 engineering consoles , I use 2neutroniums and 1 field generator to increase shield cap and only use rarely. Did my skills and rep system choices for my ship not all my ships ? Did you do same or you like to ship hop around hoping it should work for all your ships? It won't work well. Anyways the last 5 or 6 Op things needing nerf's I didn't remotely care about them at all and didn't support the whinning groups that always want nerf's !!! The key my dear friend is not putting only neutronium and field modulator with bad skill choices and bad rep choices sounds why your still dying because me and my friends in littler and lighter hulled ships don't die to Bo buff cd thing at all ? Do you have a problem with the black cloud when put on you ? If so we all kinda did as well but .... Hear it comes ..... The answer to all your problems .... Change adjust move around reps look at others ship builds on stowiki builds and here it is .... ADAPT not nerf ! Will solve all your problems once you try to do a more informative change than gear hit me up and let me know how Adapting works hope I could help you before to many more deaths.
Double-tap is bad gameplay - period, end of story. It's a workaround for a shared cooldown that was always supposed to prevent exactly what's happening. It fixes a lot of things about this small problem - but the point that many are making (and that I agree with) is that this fix is just a drop in the moderately large bucket in the grand scheme of unwinding and overhauling combat math to make things feel fair for both aggressors and defenders, and make combat between evenly matched adversaries take a more reasonable amount of time. The trick to any of these changes is that our PvE combat is in a pretty good place - people can have a lot of fun flying just about any ship, and can contribute meaningfully to queued events and basically have a blast. Therefore, any change to combat math that also affects PvE is extremely high risk - so the TRIBBLE we have to balance and tweak PvP pacing are limited to those that don't have unintended side effects.
It's not an impossible job - it just requires a lot of care and time investment. If things are broken or things are really bad gameplay, it's easy to justify stepping in and fixing something immediately. If things aren't either of the above but are still less fun or less engaging than they could be, we obviously want to fix them - it just takes more work and more time to get the fix right and minimize any external side effects of that fix.
That's a bit of a ramble, but I know you guys like insight into why we change things we choose to change and how we make the game, so hopefully it interests you/makes sense to you. Please try to stay positive and constructive in responses - I'm happy to entertain discussions and talk about things openly, but if you start flaming or posting off-topic things, it's really hard to justify responding to something like that.
BTW since the Varanus was snuffed 2.5 years ago ... Are you planning to make it like to the Intrepid since it was snuffed for hull? Also fixing the graphics?
Not trying to get off topic just wondering.... KDF has no scis and the sci we do have is Meh at best.
My only other curiosity is will there be some rebalance regarding KDF cloak? Roms have def made them worthless garbage, sadly. It also pushes peeps more away from the KDF. KDF is still a fun faction but it's very difficult given the current meta game. Not to mention ... well off topic and well. However please look into balancing KDF some because some of us still play that faction and love that faction.
hawk, please explain the reasoning behind so many developed passive heals and placates then?
even on elite the npc targets do not pose any threat. only in NWS can the overtake a group of 5....and in not one mission can they overtake a single ship.
i disagree with your notion that it is an exploit of the game. (edit: bad game play) if players can exploit the in game massive heals, so should you be able to exploit the in game damage capabilities.
have fun kill bad guys
-thrusters on full-
Reputation-based defensive and offensive abilities are individually within acceptable power limits, but ultimately the systems scale too well in that you don't have to give anything up to equip many, many passive powers. Ultimately I think this system makes more sense to move towards a deck-building system (e.g., you have 8 slots for Rep powers and can slot any 8 powers you've unlocked), but that'd be a huge system overhaul and would understandably upset players who already have access to more than 8 rep powers. We could also do something like make all the Rep powers much more potent, but limit you to 2 or 3 each in Space and Ground, plus 1 tier 5 active power, or something like that. This is all just me thinking out loud - there are no plans to change the reputation powers at this time.
Item powers like Fleet Shields or Fleet Weapons are much less of a problem, systemically - you have to choose an item to slot, and in so doing, you give necessarily give up on all other choices. The problem, then, is that there are not enough legitimate options for those slots (especially shields and fleet weapons) that perform on an equal footing. This is a mechanical balance problem - if we made Elite Fleet Phasers into a force multiplier rather than a selfish buff, for instance, inequalities between KDF and SF fleet weapons would disappear.
With regards to your disagreement, I evaluate good or bad gameplay on two axes: Is this "fun", and does it feel "fair"? Both axes are highly subjective, so of course it's possible that I may gauge something to be a problem on both axes and you may find it fine on both, but it's my job to be as objective as possible and consider the entire spectrum of our playerbase when making such evaluations. Something like Double-tap Overloads feels very fun to the person using it, but is extremely anti-fun to the recipient. A large portion of fun in combat comes from the base human state cycle of analyze events, determine action, take action, gauge success of action, recalculate, goto 1. Any time something cuts out that cycle, it creates a deep feeling of resentment or unfairness, and the earlier in the cycle you drop out, the more unfair it feels. In the case of anything that deals massive damage to a player with no warning, they are removed from the behavior cycle outlined above before they even start - it's essentially the worst problem a piece of gameplay can have.
Hope that makes sense! Doing a lot of math today, so the part of my brain that does English is sitting in the proverbial backseat, heh.
Jeff "Adjudicator Hawk" Hamilton
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Double-tap is bad gameplay - period, end of story. It's a workaround for a shared cooldown that was always supposed to prevent exactly what's happening. It fixes a lot of things about this small problem - but the point that many are making (and that I agree with) is that this fix is just a drop in the moderately large bucket in the grand scheme of unwinding and overhauling combat math to make things feel fair for both aggressors and defenders, and make combat between evenly matched adversaries take a more reasonable amount of time. The trick to any of these changes is that our PvE combat is in a pretty good place - people can have a lot of fun flying just about any ship, and can contribute meaningfully to queued events and basically have a blast. Therefore, any change to combat math that also affects PvE is extremely high risk - so the TRIBBLE we have to balance and tweak PvP pacing are limited to those that don't have unintended side effects.
It's not an impossible job - it just requires a lot of care and time investment. If things are broken or things are really bad gameplay, it's easy to justify stepping in and fixing something immediately. If things aren't either of the above but are still less fun or less engaging than they could be, we obviously want to fix them - it just takes more work and more time to get the fix right and minimize any external side effects of that fix.
That's a bit of a ramble, but I know you guys like insight into why we change things we choose to change and how we make the game, so hopefully it interests you/makes sense to you. Please try to stay positive and constructive in responses - I'm happy to entertain discussions and talk about things openly, but if you start flaming or posting off-topic things, it's really hard to justify responding to something like that.
Thanks for the response hawk.
I recognize the difficulty with making changes and their effect on the PvE crowd and your post here gives me faith that we will hopefully see some other extremes toned down in the future.
I hope you can appreciate that many of us are very passionate about this, PvP is what we enjoy about STO and we are pretty starved for some much needed changes in "unwinding and overhauling" some of the other bad gameplay mechanics that we still have at the moment.
My position is really the same as its been since my first post in this thread.
I understand the desire to tone down extreme spike, but we have a thread here from February 2013 discussing why pressure is dead and why builds have been pushed into spike.
So as long as the other side of the coin, eventually, gets toned down as well I don't see this as necessarily a bad change:
Things like
perma 60%+ shield resistance,
+90% shield resistance vs. torpedos,
66% Tac Team uptime coverage,
25s RSP 3 from DOFF on 60s Cooldown (A2B) for nearly 50% uptime on "invincibility" mode,
If the Dev caters to fail builds and so forth, then I really have nothing more to say, only there is more to life than popping your umpteen cube
We don't cater to any build - we just want to set up good, basic groundrules for combat that are fair and fun for all. Dying in 3 seconds isn't fun. Dying only after 30 minutes is also not fun. There's a middle ground - we've got to get there. It's really that simple.
Jeff "Adjudicator Hawk" Hamilton
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Double-tap is bad gameplay - period, end of story. It's a workaround for a shared cooldown that was always supposed to prevent exactly what's happening. It fixes a lot of things about this small problem - but the point that many are making (and that I agree with) is that this fix is just a drop in the moderately large bucket in the grand scheme of unwinding and overhauling combat math to make things feel fair for both aggressors and defenders, and make combat between evenly matched adversaries take a more reasonable amount of time. The trick to any of these changes is that our PvE combat is in a pretty good place - people can have a lot of fun flying just about any ship, and can contribute meaningfully to queued events and basically have a blast. Therefore, any change to combat math that also affects PvE is extremely high risk - so the TRIBBLE we have to balance and tweak PvP pacing are limited to those that don't have unintended side effects.
It's not an impossible job - it just requires a lot of care and time investment. If things are broken or things are really bad gameplay, it's easy to justify stepping in and fixing something immediately. If things aren't either of the above but are still less fun or less engaging than they could be, we obviously want to fix them - it just takes more work and more time to get the fix right and minimize any external side effects of that fix.
That's a bit of a ramble, but I know you guys like insight into why we change things we choose to change and how we make the game, so hopefully it interests you/makes sense to you. Please try to stay positive and constructive in responses - I'm happy to entertain discussions and talk about things openly, but if you start flaming or posting off-topic things, it's really hard to justify responding to something like that.
Thanks for the insight.
Based on you insight, can you share your thoughts on:
The aux 2 batt technician doffs interacting with the d'kora EMP burst (Drastically reduces cooldown on this ability)?
Grav pulse which can be buffed to 50+ seconds
As other people have asked, friend and foe, is Temporal Inversion Field working as intended? What is meant to be hard counters to it?
I recognize the difficulty with making changes and their effect on the PvE crowd and your post here gives me faith that we will hopefully see some other extremes toned down in the future.
I hope you can appreciate that many of us are very passionate about this, PvP is what we enjoy about STO and we are pretty starved for some much needed changes in "unwinding and overhauling" some of the other bad gameplay mechanics that we still have at the moment.
My position is really the same as its been since my first post in this thread.
I understand the desire to tone down extreme spike, but we have a thread here from February 2013 discussing why pressure is dead and why builds have been pushed into spike.
So as long as the other side of the coin, eventually, gets toned down as well I don't see this as necessarily a bad change:
Things like
perma 60%+ shield resistance,
+90% shield resistance vs. torpedos,
66% Tac Team uptime coverage,
25s RSP 3 from DOFF on 60s Cooldown (A2B) for nearly 50% uptime on "invincibility" mode,
etc.
I really want to get a %healing reduction ability into every career somewhere. Not sure if the right flavor for an ability like that is to apply it to the healer (I target your deflector! Your TSS sucks now!) or the heal-ee (Proton Scattering Ray blasts your shields, making them receive 50% less healing from abilities!), but either way, it lets us make distinctions between PvE and PvP time-to-kill without hurting one for the sake of the other.
Jeff "Adjudicator Hawk" Hamilton
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Reputation-based defensive and offensive abilities are individually within acceptable power limits, but ultimately the systems scale too well in that you don't have to give anything up to equip many, many passive powers. Ultimately I think this system makes more sense to move towards a deck-building system (e.g., you have 8 slots for Rep powers and can slot any 8 powers you've unlocked), but that'd be a huge system overhaul and would understandably upset players who already have access to more than 8 rep powers. We could also do something like make all the Rep powers much more potent, but limit you to 2 or 3 each in Space and Ground, plus 1 tier 5 active power, or something like that. This is all just me thinking out loud - there are no plans to change the reputation powers at this time.
Based on you insight, can you share your thoughts on:
The aux 2 batt technician doffs interacting with the d'kora EMP burst (Drastically reduces cooldown on this ability)?
I think purple aux2batt technicians are probably a little too strong in general, but they've been in-game as-is for so long that touching them is high-risk. Technician procs should only be affecting Bridge Officer abilities as far as I'm aware, although this proc predates my tenure here so I could be wrong on that. I suspect though that any consoles affected by Technicians are a bug.
Grav pulse which can be buffed to 50+ seconds
It's kind of hard to say with STO, since our space combat is slower-paced than most MMO combat. As a general guideline for MMOs, CC shouldn't be longer than 8-10 seconds - it interrupts the player behavior core loop that I talked about earlier in the thread, causing frustration. In STO space combat, that duration can probably be safely doubled, but higher than 20 seconds seems silly. Grav pulse in particular, I think its scaling is too high and its base effectiveness may be too low.
As other people have asked, friend and foe, is Temporal Inversion Field working as intended? What is meant to be hard counters to it?
Need more information - what are you seeing, and how is it different from what you would expect?
Jeff "Adjudicator Hawk" Hamilton
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Feel free to go through your own thread to find any of the things you claim.
Try facts next time.
Here are some quotes, from your own thread, that you should actually try reading even a little.
Let me know when you're ready to have a discussion that includes facts and not straw-man attacks, lies and complete nonsense.
bah you're rigth thats what happens when you fast read every thing and you see lots of people basicly saying nothing....so i'm sorry... , all i want is that this game is fair and fun to play...
but the part about the escorts i keep it because its related to the post you did right before mine... xD
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] Federation :: Fleetless :: Klingon Jorge Silva - Tac | Nayja - Sci | Jorge E. Silva - Eng Jorge R. Silva - Tac (Romulan Fed) Nayja K Silva - Sci | Vurg'jah - Tac
Reputation-based defensive and offensive abilities are individually within acceptable power limits, but ultimately the systems scale too well in that you don't have to give anything up to equip many, many passive powers. Ultimately I think this system makes more sense to move towards a deck-building system (e.g., you have 8 slots for Rep powers and can slot any 8 powers you've unlocked), but that'd be a huge system overhaul and would understandably upset players who already have access to more than 8 rep powers. We could also do something like make all the Rep powers much more potent, but limit you to 2 or 3 each in Space and Ground, plus 1 tier 5 active power, or something like that. This is all just me thinking out loud - there are no plans to change the reputation powers at this time.
Item powers like Fleet Shields or Fleet Weapons are much less of a problem, systemically - you have to choose an item to slot, and in so doing, you give necessarily give up on all other choices. The problem, then, is that there are not enough legitimate options for those slots (especially shields and fleet weapons) that perform on an equal footing. This is a mechanical balance problem - if we made Elite Fleet Phasers into a force multiplier rather than a selfish buff, for instance, inequalities between KDF and SF fleet weapons would disappear.
With regards to your disagreement, I evaluate good or bad gameplay on two axes: Is this "fun", and does it feel "fair"? Both axes are highly subjective, so of course it's possible that I may gauge something to be a problem on both axes and you may find it fine on both, but it's my job to be as objective as possible and consider the entire spectrum of our playerbase when making such evaluations. Something like Double-tap Overloads feels very fun to the person using it, but is extremely anti-fun to the recipient. A large portion of fun in combat comes from the base human state cycle of analyze events, determine action, take action, gauge success of action, recalculate, goto 1. Any time something cuts out that cycle, it creates a deep feeling of resentment or unfairness, and the earlier in the cycle you drop out, the more unfair it feels. In the case of anything that deals massive damage to a player with no warning, they are removed from the behavior cycle outlined above before they even start - it's essentially the worst problem a piece of gameplay can have.
Hope that makes sense! Doing a lot of math today, so the part of my brain that does English is sitting in the proverbial backseat, heh.
pretty much sums up why i wont ever be returning to this game. vape is dead, ive been after that golden moment for 3 yrs and sometimes it was hard lately it still wasnt easy vs good players.
i guess the idea is to give a "fair warning" when attacking from stealth. really pathetic man, as if dnd rogue, sneak attacks, or elements of SURPRISE were the enemy. for shame, eternal shame. u may edit my post but you will read this. you have done a disservice to all long time vet players and especially kdf.
the fact u even mention pve reveals ur ignorance. i am really sad that greater more wellinformed devs arent aorund now. jheinig, snix, where art thou? ive instavaped them in pvps from opvp and they ddnt cry.
i imagine u will see a big drop off in pvp even more than recently as sto dies in nerf cycle to oblivion. drastically changing a paid service after collecting the money should be illegal
player vs craptic players always lose. every lame console is ok, but doubleing up tac powers isnt? heres hopin this is my last post here ever, bad gameplay period. THATS FUGGIN STOS MO= bad **** gameplay since day 1
Changing them to traits would solve the scaling problems of the system but would greatly damage players' current builds - they would experience an across-the-board reduction in effectiveness and no longer be able to choose all the traits they previously liked. Rep powers are better than traits, for the most part - they don't really belong in the same "deck of cards", in my opinion.
Jeff "Adjudicator Hawk" Hamilton
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Gotta say a system where we slot passives is pretty much a terrible system... better then what we got but not much better.
Frankly I would imagine that after such a thing was implemented someone at cryptic would make every new rep system have super fantastic much better then the old ones type of passives. The kind that force you to keep grinding... and lead to even more power creep.
The real fix to the passives... is to STOP freaking doing them.
At this point the only way to fix healing is going to be to do something drastic... like institute a diminishing return on shield resists... with out changing anything in game.
That would hurt people that don't have all there rep ground out and aren't dishing out for fleet shields... but really I don't see how else you balance it at this point with out taking things from people.
As long as people can keep 50%+ shield resists up all the time with nothing but the very basic of buffs... and push it to darn close to or to the cap any time they feel a little bit of a tickle... this game will be broken.
The resists + tactical team Shield Quadrupling are what lead people to take what used to be a very niche idea (the double tap) and ratchet it up to try and score kills.
I am not saying the tap was needed... just that it was a response to the state of the game. Frankly if you leave the state of the game as it is for very long after this double tap fix... we are going to bleed even more PvP players. The **** just isn't all that fun anymore. There are some that enjoy hour long matches... but most people find it tedious and annoying more then anything else... and They end up leaving the game with a massive rant on a TS somewhere... and after the /uninstall they aren't coming back.
Changing them to traits would solve the scaling problems of the system but would greatly damage players' current builds - they would experience an across-the-board reduction in effectiveness and no longer be able to choose all the traits they previously liked. Rep powers are better than traits, for the most part - they don't really belong in the same "deck of cards", in my opinion.
We all got along just fine before Rep systems.... and even then we all agreed there was to much healing.
bah you're rigth thats what happens when you fast read every thing and you see lots of people basicly saying nothing....so i'm sorry... , all i want is that this game is fair and fun to play...
but the part about the escorts i keep it because its related to the post you did right before mine... xD
had to add one more post. about lowercased nova core noobs. really a shame u dont die forever when u lose. these guys wouldnt have made it past level 1.
We don't cater to any build - we just want to set up good, basic groundrules for combat that are fair and fun for all. Dying in 3 seconds isn't fun. Dying only after 30 minutes is also not fun. There's a middle ground - we've got to get there. It's really that simple.
I didn't mean what I said in a dig against you, but rather the current meta game as a whole.
is it not equally fun seeing vapes fail to kill you and then line them up for your teammates to kill? or better kill them selves?
Of course a middle ground is essential and a general concensus is needed on that. But care must be taken with any change, especially of this magnitude to change the meta game again like a yo yo.
When players reach a certain level, they tire of the same old STF's and griding out nukara/defera e.t.c. PVP is where and should be where the end game is.
I encourage you Devs to take a new perspective at this and really balance this as a whole rather than take what the flavour of the month is and using a wide angled Torp to nerf it.
Now found frequenting MWO short term and then Star Citizen long term. Raged Quit PVP long ago
- Gohan (House of Beautiful /Sad Pandas)
You want fair, either don't allow people to join as groups, make every match a random mishmash of FED/KDF/ROM ships or sit down and do something with the PvP system as a whole. The Elachi your dead console, OP, needed to be changed, BO double tap is not a I win button. I can tell you that BO double tap, only works on stragglers and builds that are not up to PvP snuff. BO double tap is not a one hit knock out that people say it is, there is a delay between the first and second BO that a lot of things can be done to prevent or save yourself (I listed them earlier, and they are some essential things that a ship should come into PvP with).
Hi, my name is: Elim Garak, Former Cardassian Oppressor
LTS, here since...when did this game launch again?
If you can talk the people that decide how you folks spend your time....
Perhaps the real solution is to just isolate PvP from the current PvE system.
Create PvP paper dolls for our ships....
Fill a PvP vendor with "-p" marked gear.... and this way we can remove things like borg sets / fleet shields from PvP... as well as Rep passives (I assume you guys could code a way for the system to turn these systems off when loaded into a PvP map).
This game at the base is pretty well balanced honsetly... if you strip out the power creeped gear... and passives... and just leave Boff Skills and Doffs.... things would be pretty well taken care of. (even some of the powerful doffs wouldn't be so bad with power creep removed).
Many other major Titles have went this route.
Some people may not be fans... but I think overall the majority of PvP players would support this system... and it would make the point of entry into PvP much easier for new players. IMO
If you can talk the people that decide how you folks spend your time....
Perhaps the real solution is to just isolate PvP from the current PvE system.
Create PvP paper dolls for our ships....
Fill a PvP vendor with "-p" marked gear.... and this way we can remove things like borg sets / fleet shields from PvP... as well as Rep passives (I assume you guys could code a way for the system to turn these systems off when loaded into a PvP map).
This game at the base is pretty well balanced honsetly... if you strip out the power creeped gear... and passives... and just leave Boff Skills and Doffs.... things would be pretty well taken care of. (even some of the powerful doffs wouldn't be so bad with power creep removed).
Many other major Titles have went this route.
Some people may not be fans... but I think overall the majority of PvP players would support this system... and it would make the point of entry into PvP much easier for new players. IMO
+1 To this. You kill based on skill not how much you spend or grind. The learnig curve will be lower and fairer to all new comers. No more where you get that or when do i get that or how do i get that. Just good old fair pew pew
Now found frequenting MWO short term and then Star Citizen long term. Raged Quit PVP long ago
- Gohan (House of Beautiful /Sad Pandas)
Changing them to traits would solve the scaling problems of the system but would greatly damage players' current builds - they would experience an across-the-board reduction in effectiveness and no longer be able to choose all the traits they previously liked. Rep powers are better than traits, for the most part - they don't really belong in the same "deck of cards", in my opinion.
Except they actually need to be dialed down some anyway. Restructuring them into traits means reinventing them so, that is when you do it. Give them a respec token and a bunch of good traits, QQ will be contained.
I think purple aux2batt technicians are probably a little too strong in general, but they've been in-game as-is for so long that touching them is high-risk. Technician procs should only be affecting Bridge Officer abilities as far as I'm aware, although this proc predates my tenure here so I could be wrong on that. I suspect though that any consoles affected by Technicians are a bug.
As a precident, and to back up what your saying, the nadeon detenator console had the same interaction with photonic DOFFS - This was fixed as you said, only Bridge officer abilities should be affected.
It's kind of hard to say with STO, since our space combat is slower-paced than most MMO combat. As a general guideline for MMOs, CC shouldn't be longer than 8-10 seconds - it interrupts the player behavior core loop that I talked about earlier in the thread, causing frustration. In STO space combat, that duration can probably be safely doubled, but higher than 20 seconds seems silly. Grav pulse in particular, I think its scaling is too high and its base effectiveness may be too low.
So glad to hear. Personally, 10 seconds would be more than enough for it to be removed of a "ban" list if another tournament was to be hosted 10 seconds un-buffed, 15 secs fully buffed? Nice middle ground for a future patch? :P
In summary. it is an AOE force multiplier:
Stops movements as well as engaging additional cooldown timers similar to the Sci captain sub nucleonic beam in an AOE manner.
Minimal if any skill tree interaction to minimise it's AOE effect ie in a similar way power insulators reduces the effects of Charged Particle Burst.
On a slightly different but similar subject, any chance of commenting on this thread? In the recent past, the first version of this thread brought some severely needed attention from the devs which was collectively appreciated overall.
Comments
a properly spec'd engineer an a defensive minded ship cannot be taken out by 1 "vaper"
is this not just the argument in reverse?
A properly speced Sci in a recluse or Temp wells also cannot be taken out by a vaper alone.
In fact the vaper may die from FBP with added stacked exotic damage and resist debuffs doffs
- Gohan (House of Beautiful /Sad Pandas)
seems like a one sided circular argument then right gohan?
Point is Double taps are not end all or be all which unfortunatly a lot of people think. Vape does not guarantee a 100% kill on anyone. Unless of course your running a fail build. If the Dev caters to fail builds and so forth, then I really have nothing more to say, only there is more to life than popping your umpteen cube
- Gohan (House of Beautiful /Sad Pandas)
BTW since the Varanus was snuffed 2.5 years ago ... Are you planning to make it like to the Intrepid since it was snuffed for hull? Also fixing the graphics?
Not trying to get off topic just wondering.... KDF has no scis and the sci we do have is Meh at best.
My only other curiosity is will there be some rebalance regarding KDF cloak? Roms have def made them worthless garbage, sadly. It also pushes peeps more away from the KDF. KDF is still a fun faction but it's very difficult given the current meta game. Not to mention ... well off topic and well. However please look into balancing KDF some because some of us still play that faction and love that faction.
THANKS!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Reputation-based defensive and offensive abilities are individually within acceptable power limits, but ultimately the systems scale too well in that you don't have to give anything up to equip many, many passive powers. Ultimately I think this system makes more sense to move towards a deck-building system (e.g., you have 8 slots for Rep powers and can slot any 8 powers you've unlocked), but that'd be a huge system overhaul and would understandably upset players who already have access to more than 8 rep powers. We could also do something like make all the Rep powers much more potent, but limit you to 2 or 3 each in Space and Ground, plus 1 tier 5 active power, or something like that. This is all just me thinking out loud - there are no plans to change the reputation powers at this time.
Item powers like Fleet Shields or Fleet Weapons are much less of a problem, systemically - you have to choose an item to slot, and in so doing, you give necessarily give up on all other choices. The problem, then, is that there are not enough legitimate options for those slots (especially shields and fleet weapons) that perform on an equal footing. This is a mechanical balance problem - if we made Elite Fleet Phasers into a force multiplier rather than a selfish buff, for instance, inequalities between KDF and SF fleet weapons would disappear.
With regards to your disagreement, I evaluate good or bad gameplay on two axes: Is this "fun", and does it feel "fair"? Both axes are highly subjective, so of course it's possible that I may gauge something to be a problem on both axes and you may find it fine on both, but it's my job to be as objective as possible and consider the entire spectrum of our playerbase when making such evaluations. Something like Double-tap Overloads feels very fun to the person using it, but is extremely anti-fun to the recipient. A large portion of fun in combat comes from the base human state cycle of analyze events, determine action, take action, gauge success of action, recalculate, goto 1. Any time something cuts out that cycle, it creates a deep feeling of resentment or unfairness, and the earlier in the cycle you drop out, the more unfair it feels. In the case of anything that deals massive damage to a player with no warning, they are removed from the behavior cycle outlined above before they even start - it's essentially the worst problem a piece of gameplay can have.
Hope that makes sense!
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Thanks for the response hawk.
I recognize the difficulty with making changes and their effect on the PvE crowd and your post here gives me faith that we will hopefully see some other extremes toned down in the future.
I hope you can appreciate that many of us are very passionate about this, PvP is what we enjoy about STO and we are pretty starved for some much needed changes in "unwinding and overhauling" some of the other bad gameplay mechanics that we still have at the moment.
My position is really the same as its been since my first post in this thread.
I understand the desire to tone down extreme spike, but we have a thread here from February 2013 discussing why pressure is dead and why builds have been pushed into spike.
So as long as the other side of the coin, eventually, gets toned down as well I don't see this as necessarily a bad change:
Things like
We don't cater to any build - we just want to set up good, basic groundrules for combat that are fair and fun for all. Dying in 3 seconds isn't fun. Dying only after 30 minutes is also not fun. There's a middle ground - we've got to get there. It's really that simple.
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Thanks for the insight.
Based on you insight, can you share your thoughts on:
The aux 2 batt technician doffs interacting with the d'kora EMP burst (Drastically reduces cooldown on this ability)?
Grav pulse which can be buffed to 50+ seconds
As other people have asked, friend and foe, is Temporal Inversion Field working as intended? What is meant to be hard counters to it?
I really want to get a %healing reduction ability into every career somewhere. Not sure if the right flavor for an ability like that is to apply it to the healer (I target your deflector! Your TSS sucks now!) or the heal-ee (Proton Scattering Ray blasts your shields, making them receive 50% less healing from abilities!), but either way, it lets us make distinctions between PvE and PvP time-to-kill without hurting one for the sake of the other.
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Its because of all the pay2win and uni consoles which made people squishy as **** these days :P
I think purple aux2batt technicians are probably a little too strong in general, but they've been in-game as-is for so long that touching them is high-risk. Technician procs should only be affecting Bridge Officer abilities as far as I'm aware, although this proc predates my tenure here so I could be wrong on that. I suspect though that any consoles affected by Technicians are a bug.
It's kind of hard to say with STO, since our space combat is slower-paced than most MMO combat. As a general guideline for MMOs, CC shouldn't be longer than 8-10 seconds - it interrupts the player behavior core loop that I talked about earlier in the thread, causing frustration. In STO space combat, that duration can probably be safely doubled, but higher than 20 seconds seems silly. Grav pulse in particular, I think its scaling is too high and its base effectiveness may be too low.
Need more information - what are you seeing, and how is it different from what you would expect?
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
but the part about the escorts i keep it because its related to the post you did right before mine... xD
Federation :: Fleetless :: Klingon
Jorge Silva - Tac | Nayja - Sci | Jorge E. Silva - Eng
Jorge R. Silva - Tac (Romulan Fed)
Nayja K Silva - Sci | Vurg'jah - Tac
pretty much sums up why i wont ever be returning to this game. vape is dead, ive been after that golden moment for 3 yrs and sometimes it was hard lately it still wasnt easy vs good players.
i guess the idea is to give a "fair warning" when attacking from stealth. really pathetic man, as if dnd rogue, sneak attacks, or elements of SURPRISE were the enemy. for shame, eternal shame. u may edit my post but you will read this. you have done a disservice to all long time vet players and especially kdf.
the fact u even mention pve reveals ur ignorance. i am really sad that greater more wellinformed devs arent aorund now. jheinig, snix, where art thou? ive instavaped them in pvps from opvp and they ddnt cry.
i imagine u will see a big drop off in pvp even more than recently as sto dies in nerf cycle to oblivion. drastically changing a paid service after collecting the money should be illegal
player vs craptic players always lose. every lame console is ok, but doubleing up tac powers isnt? heres hopin this is my last post here ever, bad gameplay period. THATS FUGGIN STOS MO= bad **** gameplay since day 1
It's not fun NOT being able to kill targets either based on certain things.
Search for the balance bro.
And have fun kill bad guys.
Changing them to traits would solve the scaling problems of the system but would greatly damage players' current builds - they would experience an across-the-board reduction in effectiveness and no longer be able to choose all the traits they previously liked. Rep powers are better than traits, for the most part - they don't really belong in the same "deck of cards", in my opinion.
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Gotta say a system where we slot passives is pretty much a terrible system... better then what we got but not much better.
Frankly I would imagine that after such a thing was implemented someone at cryptic would make every new rep system have super fantastic much better then the old ones type of passives. The kind that force you to keep grinding... and lead to even more power creep.
The real fix to the passives... is to STOP freaking doing them.
At this point the only way to fix healing is going to be to do something drastic... like institute a diminishing return on shield resists... with out changing anything in game.
That would hurt people that don't have all there rep ground out and aren't dishing out for fleet shields... but really I don't see how else you balance it at this point with out taking things from people.
As long as people can keep 50%+ shield resists up all the time with nothing but the very basic of buffs... and push it to darn close to or to the cap any time they feel a little bit of a tickle... this game will be broken.
The resists + tactical team Shield Quadrupling are what lead people to take what used to be a very niche idea (the double tap) and ratchet it up to try and score kills.
I am not saying the tap was needed... just that it was a response to the state of the game. Frankly if you leave the state of the game as it is for very long after this double tap fix... we are going to bleed even more PvP players. The **** just isn't all that fun anymore. There are some that enjoy hour long matches... but most people find it tedious and annoying more then anything else... and They end up leaving the game with a massive rant on a TS somewhere... and after the /uninstall they aren't coming back.
We all got along just fine before Rep systems.... and even then we all agreed there was to much healing.
had to add one more post. about lowercased nova core noobs. really a shame u dont die forever when u lose. these guys wouldnt have made it past level 1.
I didn't mean what I said in a dig against you, but rather the current meta game as a whole.
is it not equally fun seeing vapes fail to kill you and then line them up for your teammates to kill? or better kill them selves?
Of course a middle ground is essential and a general concensus is needed on that. But care must be taken with any change, especially of this magnitude to change the meta game again like a yo yo.
When players reach a certain level, they tire of the same old STF's and griding out nukara/defera e.t.c. PVP is where and should be where the end game is.
I encourage you Devs to take a new perspective at this and really balance this as a whole rather than take what the flavour of the month is and using a wide angled Torp to nerf it.
- Gohan (House of Beautiful /Sad Pandas)
LTS, here since...when did this game launch again?
Perhaps the real solution is to just isolate PvP from the current PvE system.
Create PvP paper dolls for our ships....
Fill a PvP vendor with "-p" marked gear.... and this way we can remove things like borg sets / fleet shields from PvP... as well as Rep passives (I assume you guys could code a way for the system to turn these systems off when loaded into a PvP map).
This game at the base is pretty well balanced honsetly... if you strip out the power creeped gear... and passives... and just leave Boff Skills and Doffs.... things would be pretty well taken care of. (even some of the powerful doffs wouldn't be so bad with power creep removed).
Many other major Titles have went this route.
Some people may not be fans... but I think overall the majority of PvP players would support this system... and it would make the point of entry into PvP much easier for new players. IMO
+1 To this. You kill based on skill not how much you spend or grind. The learnig curve will be lower and fairer to all new comers. No more where you get that or when do i get that or how do i get that. Just good old fair pew pew
- Gohan (House of Beautiful /Sad Pandas)
I'm currently doing content (missions) rather than systems.
/summoned like Hastur
Common, you know it makes sense...
Then after that, you can give engineers a force multiplier...
Wohalla, a new golden age.
hahahaha.
Except they actually need to be dialed down some anyway. Restructuring them into traits means reinventing them so, that is when you do it. Give them a respec token and a bunch of good traits, QQ will be contained.
As a precident, and to back up what your saying, the nadeon detenator console had the same interaction with photonic DOFFS - This was fixed as you said, only Bridge officer abilities should be affected.
So glad to hear. Personally, 10 seconds would be more than enough for it to be removed of a "ban" list if another tournament was to be hosted 10 seconds un-buffed, 15 secs fully buffed? Nice middle ground for a future patch? :P
Argument for
Argument against
In summary. it is an AOE force multiplier:
Stops movements as well as engaging additional cooldown timers similar to the Sci captain sub nucleonic beam in an AOE manner.
Minimal if any skill tree interaction to minimise it's AOE effect ie in a similar way power insulators reduces the effects of Charged Particle Burst.
On a slightly different but similar subject, any chance of commenting on this thread? In the recent past, the first version of this thread brought some severely needed attention from the devs which was collectively appreciated overall.