The flip side of that coin is that if Tac Captain powers cannot improve damage with Science powers, every single existing Tac/Sci captain is instantly worthless, since without the ability to improve the only method your ship has of causing damage, there is zero reason to even fly a Sci ship as a Tac captain. Since many people have already bought rather expensive Sci Lockbox and C-Store ships for those captains, they will be very angry about having their entire character completely ruined with no recovery.
Furthermore, since the bulk of captains in the game are Tac Captains, it would kill the sale of Science ships to a large chunk of the population that now has no reason to ever be caught dead flying one.
The "Conservation of Energy" trait was a nice boost towards Sci captains trying to compete with Tac Captains in terms of dealing Science Damage: While APA is a slightly larger boost, it also has TRIBBLE uptime, whereas CoE has effectively 100% uptime as long as you can keep annoying things into shooting you. An always-on 30% boost is certainly competitive with an only-sometimes-up 50%.
But CoE only affects 4 or 5 abilities where APA affects all abilities AND weapons. Also while you may say about tactical captains getting slightly marginalised at the moment a tactical captain is the best choice for any and all ships in PvE and is a pretty solid choice in PvP also.
That is not balanced no matter how you want to spin it. Furthermore because certain abilities are causing such a massive flux in the performance of these abilities we've seen nerfs and it has caused a balancing nightmare. I mean it wasn't exactly the engineering and science captains abusing the hell out of PSW, tric mines and everything else that's been brought into line over the last year or two.
Also this always on 30% is a fallacy. Yes you can keep the bonus up almost 100% but for most of the time it's not being used. It is only useful when you use the abilities it buffs. Couple that with long cool downs on science abilities an you'll find you can keep about a 50% uptime of APA on GW, PSW (does anyone even use it for dmg?), tykens and TBR.
Furthermore in PvE you can use FOMM without it ever being cleared which means you now have an additional source of damage increasing against single targets to make up for APA changes. It's not as useful in PvP but then that's down to another problem not the ability itself. Ontop of that your weapons will STILL be doing more damage to shields than any other class, your crits will be more frequent and higher.
APA and omega do not spontaneously become worthless by removing its ability to buff science abilities. You still hit harder with your weapons and can get a bigger burst for killing disabled or weakened targets.
Anyway we should create a thread about this in the build mechanics section rather than derailing this thread. Sorry Bort.
On topic. Has anyone managed to test or show what the drain is like on tribble? I have no willing vict...assistants so I cannot really see how it does till I con someone onto it in 10+ hours.
People like to complain about the conservation of energy trait, but in reality, it's the one thing in this game that when active 3x (and it requires you to be a punching bag) actually acts more like what people want to get from using particle generators. Instead you try using +30 particle generator consoles and you get a boost to damage, but nowhere near what you expect given you're sacrificing a console slot.
Conservation of Energy = +30% damage
Any damage specific tac console = +30% damage
People complaining about this trait are kidding themselves.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
I don't know what the ratio of science, engineering and tactical captains is in the game over all. But in my experience the vast majority of alts intended for resource grinding are tacs and almost all players possessed by the mighty spirit of the min-max Juju are tac.
However when choosing the class for their first character most people I have encountered seem strongly drawn to the engineer. Admittedly this is just an impression I have formed basses upon a limited number of cases.
Personally I was always most attracted to science. Any way the point is that just because there are a lot of tacs in the game it would be wrong to assume they all want to be tactical. Many would be glad to play something else if tacs were not so much better in their role then engineers and science captains are in their own.
As far as conservation of energy goes it makes a sci better at buffing sci damage and one or two other things so it's not much use (not much use =/= useless) outside of a science ship or a hybrid escort. Even then it is limited to only half a dozen abilities.
The problem I see is that with APA and other self buffs like omega (omega of which I would also remove even though all can use it) is they're quite selfish but they also as I say buff not just your hull damage but your shield damage.
Indeed I think some of the 20k+ guys have started switching to omega3 because it helps them rip through shields faster to the hull as well as other buffs.
Compare APA on a science ship:
+50% damage to weapons and exotic abilities.
Sensor scan on a science ship:
-70 damage resistance to enemy hull only.
Now at the moment shield drains are laughably resisted by insulators so a true blue science ships and captain will have trouble getting through them to take advantage of that debuff. They will have to rely on their weapons.
A tactical captain will get through the shields 50% quicker with weapons, drains will be the same use and can then start pounding the hull of the vessel with almost as much force as the science captain will when they get through. In other words for a science captain to match that level of extra damage we would need to apply the resistance debuff to the shield as we'll doubling its effectiveness (with a perhaps slight dropping to -50)
But then here's the other reason, sensor scan and beta are TEAM related. I would say they're maybe a tad too strong if a full team uses and capitalises them but the idea isn't to boost your own damage it's to boost everyone's. Then again we go back to what is a sizable buff to the single player plucking along at missions is perhaps OP when an organised team stack it against 1 other player or team.
If we see a sizable buff to the performance of science abilities with far fewer extremities there might be no need to remove tactical buffs from it but then again in testing my tactical was able to get the same use out of GW1 with APB3 and APA as a science ship and captain with sensor scan, grav anchor with conservation of energy.
Do you really think it's a good design philosophy to make one captain and class better at not just energy, projectile attacks but also get the same from science attacks too with less investment? Science captains have a lot of potential but they also lose out drastically when a team is not as coordinated or don't capitalise on the science captains abilities, this is less so with the tactical captain.
I mean the number of times I use scattering field and have to chase down my team to give them protection is silly, it's like they have an aversion to living! All that shield damage resistance more or less gets wasted on me rather than the ones that need it. Or when I use sensor scan on some enemies my team goes off and shoots 1 or 2 others flying in the opposite direction.
Hey bp, I just wanted to acknowledge your post.
I'm unable to give a proper response right now, I will get back to you.
People like to complain about the conservation of energy trait, but in reality, it's the one thing in this game that when active 3x (and it requires you to be a punching bag) actually acts more like what people want to get from using particle generators. Instead you try using +30 particle generator consoles and you get a boost to damage, but nowhere near what you expect given you're sacrificing a console slot.
Conservation of Energy = +30% damage
Any damage specific tac console = +30% damage
People complaining about this trait are kidding themselves.
There is nothing to complain about, is a well designed trait.
However conservation of energy isn't like 1 TAC console, it is a flat damage boost like APA.
So while APA while have a higher spike at 50% boost the sci Can have potentially better uptime at potentially 30% boost.
The problem I see is that with APA and other self buffs like omega (omega of which I would also remove even though all can use it) is they're quite selfish but they also as I say buff not just your hull damage but your shield damage.
Indeed I think some of the 20k+ guys have started switching to omega3 because it helps them rip through shields faster to the hull as well as other buffs.
Well from a competitive standpoint, I get the feeling some players count on some one else bringing beta 3, taking APO 3 instead at that point means you know you can score a bit higher
Is it truly better performance or is it gaming the logs in a way?
Compare APA on a science ship:
+50% damage to weapons and exotic abilities.
Sensor scan on a science ship:
-70 damage resistance to enemy hull only.
Now at the moment shield drains are laughably resisted by insulators so a true blue science ships and captain will have trouble getting through them to take advantage of that debuff. They will have to rely on their weapons.
A tactical captain will get through the shields 50% quicker with weapons, drains will be the same use and can then start pounding the hull of the vessel with almost as much force as the science captain will when they get through. In other words for a science captain to match that level of extra damage we would need to apply the resistance debuff to the shield as we'll doubling its effectiveness (with a perhaps slight dropping to -50)
The realty is that TAC captains are supposed to be better at damage.
That's the entire point of Tacs.
I get the feeling most posters here want sci to be "damage but different".
That would first require SCIs to get nerfed in some way because as it is they are already the strongest captain type in PvP (this game's hardest content )
Do you really think it's a good design philosophy to make one captain and class better at not just energy, projectile attacks but also get the same from science attacks too with less investment?
Yes but that's because I see the classes differently.
TAC = damage specialist
SCI = force multiplication specialist
When TAC buffs a few sci powers to do more damage, that's TAC doing what it was designed to do.
What I see as wrong is that outside of indirect use of SNB the SCI captain doesn't have a way to enhance the force multiplication effects of SCI powers (debuffs, control).
THIS is where the SCI captain should be superior in their usage of SCI skills.
Well from a competitive standpoint, I get the feeling some players count on some one else bringing beta 3, taking APO 3 instead at that point means you know you can score a bit higher
Is it truly better performance or is it gaming the logs in a way?
The realty is that TAC captains are supposed to be better at damage.
That's the entire point of Tacs.
I get the feeling most posters here want sci to be "damage but different".
That would first require SCIs to get nerfed in some way because as it is they are already the strongest captain type in PvP (this game's hardest content )
Yes but that's because I see the classes differently.
TAC = damage specialist
SCI = force multiplication specialist
When TAC buffs a few sci powers to do more damage, that's TAC doing what it was designed to do.
What I see as wrong is that outside of indirect use of SNB the SCI captain doesn't have a way to enhance the force multiplication effects of SCI powers (debuffs, control).
THIS is where the SCI captain should be superior in their usage of SCI skills.
Might be best to take this into the thread I made about tactical abilities decoupling from science abilities. I'll update this with tykens stuff when I hop on tribble in a bit.
Well from a competitive standpoint, I get the feeling some players count on some one else bringing beta 3, taking APO 3 instead at that point means you know you can score a bit highe... snip
bpharma is saying the science ability approach to defeating the enemy is ineffective because of to powerful mitigation forcing a science ship to play with a tactical approach despite that being weaker compared to an escort.
If by 'damage but different' you mean exotic damage if its in the tactical captains sphere of influence why is the skill relating to it in the science section of my character and why is there no Tactical exotic damage abilities on any BOFF's?
No one trained in tactics and weapons should be better at making spacial anomalies then a scientist or an engineer.
I dont like this sci's are the strongest captains in PVP statement. If the science 'class' is all about force multiplication then surely they fail to have impact unless there is a minimum amount of other 'real' captains about for them to multiply. And if they need the help they ain't top dog.
I disagree on your class definitions.
Tactical: Weapon damage
Science: debuffs, exotic damage, heals
Engineer: power, mitigation, heals
This better fits the skills and traits captains can obtain and the skills BOFF's have.
You've pidgeon holed science captains and science BOFF abilities into what you need from the token sci captain in your premade PVP team. I think this is to the detriment to the entire game including premade PVP.
And if you want sci to be effective in debuffs and control then we need effective debuffs and control. Guess what TR wont be?
Yes but that's because I see the classes differently.
TAC = damage specialist
SCI = force multiplication specialist
So can you elaborate on why the most powerful force multiplication ability in PvE, the part of the game most people focus upon including the devs, is a tactical boff ability and why you don't think that is a terrible thing? Aside from being dismissive toward PvE and saying it doesn't matter of course. Or beating the dead horse that PvE should become more like PvP since that has very little chance of occurring.
Keep in mind my issue with tacs has little to do with the captain abilities as I feel S7 really shafted tactical s for PvE while giving enough love to sci/eng to make them a bit more on par with one another. It is the bridge officer abilities that I find to be seriously unbalanced.
I dont like this sci's are the strongest captains in PVP statement. If the science 'class' is all about force multiplication then surely they fail to have impact unless there is a minimum amount of other 'real' captains about for them to multiply.
I'm not going to spend time arguing this.
Feel free to bring 5 Tacs, and I will put together a team of 3 Scis and 2 Tacs.
This is the best way to demonstrate the power of Sci captains.
So can you elaborate on why the most powerful force multiplication ability in PvE, the part of the game most people focus upon including the devs, is a tactical boff ability and why you don't think that is a terrible thing?
Are we talking about Captains or BOFF powers now?
Because you quoted me on Captain powers.
Regardless, Tac captains are damage specialists (I'm not sure where I said this couldn't include debuffs that help deal more damage).
As you already recognize, all Careers were given Primary focuses and Secondary focuses to an extent.
In ye olde days of STO the devs appear to have given Tacs a primary in self buffing for damage and a secondary in debuffing damage resistance - I'm not sure why this was the design chosen but both of these still fall under "damage specialist".
It seems like the goal was to have all BOFF powers allow for a degree of hybridization. In which case APB belongs to everyone (and it does) and is basically career agnostic.
Sci captains being force multipliers goes beyond straight damage debuffing. It's not my fault the majority of PvE makes these types of force multiplication irrelevant.
Guys, this is NOT the thread to have this debate in. This is a thread on testing tykens rift in PvP and by extension PvE (as NPCs do not have a you stole all our power flag to wave) so that it may be fine tuned.
I created a thread for you to debate force multipliers and whether tactical buffs should affect science abilities.
Guys, this is NOT the thread to have this debate in. This is a thread on testing tykens rift in PvP and by extension PvE (as NPCs do not have a you stole all our power flag to wave) so that it may be fine tuned.
I created a thread for you to debate force multipliers and whether tactical buffs should affect science abilities.
Ok back on topic. We have ONE person state anecdotal evidence that the current power is OP and then we have Bort reduce the effectiveness of the power at only 100 flow caps by 30%
Damn you got some pull Webdeath ><
If the power is still the same as it was at the start of this thread, could we actually get some tests done on it by those able to access Tribble before it gets nerfed?
It'd really be a great way to validate this reduction instead of reading ONE person saying they got drained from an unknown value to somewhere close to 0 in something like 1-3 secs.
Again I just got to say you got some pull with Bort Webdeath, I'm impressed with your evidence XD
Anyway it would be great if this power ACTUALLY got tested.
Back on topic. I managed to get someone to sit around testing tykens rift 1 and 2.
I hit him with 1 and 2 at 112 flow caps. He had 84 in insulators from skill points and maybe some more from gear as you seem to give insulators out like candy on gear. He was also in a mogai so had already got -40 all systems and ran it on the weapons config and had 125,43,52,35.
Tykens rift 1 he didn't even notice and just largely ignored. It barely drained his power and as I quote "That's a joke".
Tykens Rift 2 just about knocked his aux off he thinks but in his own words "I could just fly out of it"
I then doubled the flow caps to 224.
Tykens rift 1 he said he barely felt a drain. He didn't give me numbers but I know it didn't cause his shields to go offline so it may have been somewhere between 1 and 2 on the previous test.
Tykens rift 2 took all but weapons offline eventually however it was only near the end of the rift that it did so. Weapons went down to 65 so the drain to each subsystem was about 60.
The damage from it was ok, 600 per tick more or less but I didn't stack for getting damage out of it. I would perhaps recommend the damage be increased by 50% and the effect of particle gens on it halved or brought into line with gravity well.
My victim did not use any escape abilities like evasive manuevers, emergency power to engines, deuterium surplus, impulse capacitance cell etc but was able to escape very easily without having to divert power to engines.
Another thing to point out is the secondary tykens that can spawn using a gravimetric duty officer were practically useless. It would be nice if they scaled with the rank of your tykens rift and gravity well so you got secondary tykens rift 3's and secondary gravity wells 3 if you used the T3 rank of those abilities.
As it is, drains are just too easily resisted by taking insulators to 84 points and that's an always on thing that reduces 3-4 abilities effectiveness by half. Even stacking energy syphon 3 with tykens rift 2 my victim could fly out no problem. He even said energy syphon 3 only drained 5 energy.
I will test tykens rift 3 when I can find time. I also got to test gravity well 1 and 3 on my victim and will post feedback on that. Spoiler: We weren't impressed by the push.
Back on topic. I managed to get someone to sit around testing tykens rift 1 and 2.
I hit him with 1 and 2 at 112 flow caps. He had 84 in insulators from skill points and maybe some more from gear as you seem to give insulators out like candy on gear. He was also in a mogai so had already got -40 all systems and ran it on the weapons config and had 125,43,52,35.
Tykens rift 1 he didn't even notice and just largely ignored. It barely drained his power and as I quote "That's a joke".
Tykens Rift 2 just about knocked his aux off he thinks but in his own words "I could just fly out of it"
I then doubled the flow caps to 224.
Tykens rift 1 he said he barely felt a drain. He didn't give me numbers but I know it didn't cause his shields to go offline so it may have been somewhere between 1 and 2 on the previous test.
Tykens rift 2 took all but weapons offline eventually however it was only near the end of the rift that it did so. Weapons went down to 65 so the drain to each subsystem was about 60.
The damage from it was ok, 600 per tick more or less but I didn't stack for getting damage out of it. I would perhaps recommend the damage be increased by 50% and the effect of particle gens on it halved or brought into line with gravity well.
My victim did not use any escape abilities like evasive manuevers, emergency power to engines, deuterium surplus, impulse capacitance cell etc but was able to escape very easily without having to divert power to engines.
Another thing to point out is the secondary tykens that can spawn using a gravimetric duty officer were practically useless. It would be nice if they scaled with the rank of your tykens rift and gravity well so you got secondary tykens rift 3's and secondary gravity wells 3 if you used the T3 rank of those abilities.
As it is, drains are just too easily resisted by taking insulators to 84 points and that's an always on thing that reduces 3-4 abilities effectiveness by half. Even stacking energy syphon 3 with tykens rift 2 my victim could fly out no problem. He even said energy syphon 3 only drained 5 energy.
I will test tykens rift 3 when I can find time. I also got to test gravity well 1 and 3 on my victim and will post feedback on that. Spoiler: We weren't impressed by the push.
Figures. About the only useful drain is energy syphon and most ships can ignore it.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Back on topic. I managed to get someone to sit around testing tykens rift 1 and 2.
Thanks for taking the time to do this Bpharma. How horribly disappointing. I was very happy when I found out these abilities were finally getting some attention. But bit by bit my hope is slowly dyeing.
Please don't waist time on fixing abilities that are going to remain useless and consequently unused cryptic.
I know. Breaks my heart to see science abilities being so poor and in the state they are in. I mean 84-100 in flow caps and polaron weapons is a bigger drain than some science abilities. That's just not right in my book.
I can't imagine this will be great in PvP unless you REALLY stack drains and even then it won't be easy to take shields out completely and would require an extremely significant investment in flow caps.
To be honest I just hate how one dimension the current science skills set up makes the abilities and thus builds. To get a good return on a skill you must use 4 of those consoles in your science slots most of the time which then forces you to either use wishy washy other abilities or something that's buffed by all those consoles.
Couple that with how many are so passively resisted to a high extent and it's just not worth playing science ships most of the time. Which is a shame as there's a lot of revenue to be made from them.
I was the target I was running full Romulan set and a pure pve set up I could escape all of them by just switching to full engine power or using evasive maneuvers, next time I might set up frap or demorecord to record what is being done. Also note I was sitting still letting it happen not popping any powers till we did the run away test and the fact I am running a pve build shows how easy these are to over come. but show what they could do to an NPC.
Also I was a Romulan tac with all romulan/reman crew with no rep system powers.
I can't imagine this will be great in PvP unless you REALLY stack drains and even then it won't be easy to take shields out completely and would require an extremely significant investment in flow caps.
I think the problem here is one of perspective.
A single AoE power should not be able to "take out shields completely" in PvP, especially one that also drains every other subsystem at the same time.
By it's very nature, being both an AoE and a multi-subsystem drain, it needs to be on the weaker side to keep it from being ridiculous.
Powers like this are always hampered by their own nature, and are generally PvE powers or mostly useful for spam clearing.
I know this sounds harsh, but I promise you 1 Tac with CSV 3 is not taking out any decent opposition either.
For the PvE side Tykens + GW in some combination with the CD reduction doff should be decent.
A single AoE power should not be able to "take out shields completely" in PvP, especially one that also drains every other subsystem at the same time.
By it's very nature, being both an AoE and a multi-subsystem drain, it needs to be on the weaker side to keep it from being ridiculous.
Powers like this are always hampered by their own nature, and are generally PvE powers or mostly useful for spam clearing.
I know this sounds harsh, but I promise you 1 Tac with CSV 3 is not taking out any decent opposition either.
For the PvE side Tykens + GW in some combination with the CD reduction doff should be decent.
trust me you can just fly out of it I was sitting in the middle of the rift when my shields and other subsys went offline once I was just slightly out of the centre it did very little and unless you put a ton into flow cap the drain is MASSIVE swing it might go to zero then swing hard back to 20 then 10 then back to 20 and a gw tyken combo wouldnt work becuase you CAN just fly out of it you have to realize this toon was a tac built for pve and single player a pvp built toon this wouldnt even touch plus YOU CAN FLY OUT OF IT the tyken has almost no pull once about 500 meters from the centre the drain drops fast.
A single AoE power should not be able to "take out shields completely" in PvP, especially one that also drains every other subsystem at the same time.
By it's very nature, being both an AoE and a multi-subsystem drain, it needs to be on the weaker side to keep it from being ridiculous.
Powers like this are always hampered by their own nature, and are generally PvE powers or mostly useful for spam clearing.
I know this sounds harsh, but I promise you 1 Tac with CSV 3 is not taking out any decent opposition either.
For the PvE side Tykens + GW in some combination with the CD reduction doff should be decent.
The one with the issue of perspective is yourself.
Ignore the test. Ignore the only data in this thread. Get back on your high horse and spout more ideology BS while ignoring data and many comments -6 pages of it mostly directed at you with some very good questions you don't bother to answer- that question the validity on this ideology. Continue to nitpick posts ignoring the overall point made for some small concession that doesn't even validate your opinion.
There is more than just 1 profession and ship type in this game.
It would be nice if we could get these underperforming ships and professions up to the hallowed levels of your tactical.
I know this scares you.. You are after all the rogue in vanilla WOW. You pown all the noobs, you don't want to get worse.
Let me get my Headmasters Staff! I want my Sci ship and not feel like I'm handycapping my PVE or PVP team.
Back on topic. I managed to get someone to sit around testing tykens rift 1 and 2.
I hit him with 1 and 2 at 112 flow caps. He had 84 in insulators from skill points and maybe some more from gear as you seem to give insulators out like candy on gear. He was also in a mogai so had already got -40 all systems and ran it on the weapons config and had 125,43,52,35.
Tykens rift 1 he didn't even notice and just largely ignored. It barely drained his power and as I quote "That's a joke".
Tykens Rift 2 just about knocked his aux off he thinks but in his own words "I could just fly out of it"
I then doubled the flow caps to 224.
Tykens rift 1 he said he barely felt a drain. He didn't give me numbers but I know it didn't cause his shields to go offline so it may have been somewhere between 1 and 2 on the previous test.
Tykens rift 2 took all but weapons offline eventually however it was only near the end of the rift that it did so. Weapons went down to 65 so the drain to each subsystem was about 60.
The damage from it was ok, 600 per tick more or less but I didn't stack for getting damage out of it. I would perhaps recommend the damage be increased by 50% and the effect of particle gens on it halved or brought into line with gravity well.
Okay - I managed to get a little testing on Tyken's 3. First test was with a mere 68 aux and 109 Flow caps. My target (thanks to broken!) had 92 in insulators. By the end of the rift, he only had 22 power drained.
Then I took things up. 125 Aux, with 205 Flow Caps. This time, things were a little more dramatic. Tooltip drain was 11.3 per second. When staying in the rift, all subsystems hit 0 by around the 13-14 second mark - including weapons, which was at 125. I saw shields flickering at about 8-10 seconds. Getting a bit of distance resulted in a slight mitigation, giving him about a second more before total drain. An aftershock, although individually not strong, could speed things up. Multiple Tyken's 3 would probably be even worse, especially on slow ships. With a suitably strong set of holds, this would mean that TR3 is actually pretty effective - and may even verge on OP when stacked.
Of course, the target was not using emergency powers, batteries or anything like that. However, I had only 3 embassy flow cap consoles, which means that this isn't an upper limit for the drain. It could actually be devastating to carriers-except for the fact that hazard emitters clears the debuff.
As i stated before in a different post already, the point is what you have to invest and what you get in return.
A Commander Hold/Drain should be able to hold a Target on its own or drain its Power on its own completely in a reasonable amount of time, if you have invested quite skillpoints and consoles for it.
And as far as i see from the testresunlts that is not the case for tykens or gravwell.
Reasonable amount of time means basicly shortly after it is deployed, and not 2 seconds before the effect ends. ....
Btw, when reading your posts, that the powers are to strong in pvp, it sounds like you sitting around in pvp and doing nothing to coutner the atks. Not to mention that you have teammates that might be able to support you also.
All i read in your pvp posts is the atk side off pvp, not mentioning once the counters. Which is a big deal, cause as long as you have a effective counter, there is no problem if the skill is really strong on its own.
Second you always complaining that sci skills are to strong when stackign in pvp, but you could say the same about atk skills like crf, or bo. Not to mention that the cd's on the sci skills are higher...
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The biggest issue with these sci abilities is that people (and NPCs) can just drive out of them!
Seriously, they need to like knock engines offline or something whenever someone is within 4k of one. Even full gravitons does next to nothing vs anything but the weakest of ships.
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Comments
But CoE only affects 4 or 5 abilities where APA affects all abilities AND weapons. Also while you may say about tactical captains getting slightly marginalised at the moment a tactical captain is the best choice for any and all ships in PvE and is a pretty solid choice in PvP also.
That is not balanced no matter how you want to spin it. Furthermore because certain abilities are causing such a massive flux in the performance of these abilities we've seen nerfs and it has caused a balancing nightmare. I mean it wasn't exactly the engineering and science captains abusing the hell out of PSW, tric mines and everything else that's been brought into line over the last year or two.
Also this always on 30% is a fallacy. Yes you can keep the bonus up almost 100% but for most of the time it's not being used. It is only useful when you use the abilities it buffs. Couple that with long cool downs on science abilities an you'll find you can keep about a 50% uptime of APA on GW, PSW (does anyone even use it for dmg?), tykens and TBR.
Furthermore in PvE you can use FOMM without it ever being cleared which means you now have an additional source of damage increasing against single targets to make up for APA changes. It's not as useful in PvP but then that's down to another problem not the ability itself. Ontop of that your weapons will STILL be doing more damage to shields than any other class, your crits will be more frequent and higher.
APA and omega do not spontaneously become worthless by removing its ability to buff science abilities. You still hit harder with your weapons and can get a bigger burst for killing disabled or weakened targets.
Anyway we should create a thread about this in the build mechanics section rather than derailing this thread. Sorry Bort.
On topic. Has anyone managed to test or show what the drain is like on tribble? I have no willing vict...assistants so I cannot really see how it does till I con someone onto it in 10+ hours.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Conservation of Energy = +30% damage
Any damage specific tac console = +30% damage
People complaining about this trait are kidding themselves.
Oh, they are? How did you find that out?
However when choosing the class for their first character most people I have encountered seem strongly drawn to the engineer. Admittedly this is just an impression I have formed basses upon a limited number of cases.
Personally I was always most attracted to science. Any way the point is that just because there are a lot of tacs in the game it would be wrong to assume they all want to be tactical. Many would be glad to play something else if tacs were not so much better in their role then engineers and science captains are in their own.
Hey bp, I just wanted to acknowledge your post.
I'm unable to give a proper response right now, I will get back to you.
There is nothing to complain about, is a well designed trait.
However conservation of energy isn't like 1 TAC console, it is a flat damage boost like APA.
So while APA while have a higher spike at 50% boost the sci Can have potentially better uptime at potentially 30% boost.
Take threat control, it works well for my sci.
Can't take any of this too seriously
Well from a competitive standpoint, I get the feeling some players count on some one else bringing beta 3, taking APO 3 instead at that point means you know you can score a bit higher
Is it truly better performance or is it gaming the logs in a way?
The realty is that TAC captains are supposed to be better at damage.
That's the entire point of Tacs.
I get the feeling most posters here want sci to be "damage but different".
That would first require SCIs to get nerfed in some way because as it is they are already the strongest captain type in PvP (this game's hardest content
Yes but that's because I see the classes differently.
TAC = damage specialist
SCI = force multiplication specialist
When TAC buffs a few sci powers to do more damage, that's TAC doing what it was designed to do.
What I see as wrong is that outside of indirect use of SNB the SCI captain doesn't have a way to enhance the force multiplication effects of SCI powers (debuffs, control).
THIS is where the SCI captain should be superior in their usage of SCI skills.
Might be best to take this into the thread I made about tactical abilities decoupling from science abilities. I'll update this with tykens stuff when I hop on tribble in a bit.
I wish everyone had that kind of attitude and maturity.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
bpharma is saying the science ability approach to defeating the enemy is ineffective because of to powerful mitigation forcing a science ship to play with a tactical approach despite that being weaker compared to an escort.
If by 'damage but different' you mean exotic damage if its in the tactical captains sphere of influence why is the skill relating to it in the science section of my character and why is there no Tactical exotic damage abilities on any BOFF's?
No one trained in tactics and weapons should be better at making spacial anomalies then a scientist or an engineer.
I dont like this sci's are the strongest captains in PVP statement. If the science 'class' is all about force multiplication then surely they fail to have impact unless there is a minimum amount of other 'real' captains about for them to multiply. And if they need the help they ain't top dog.
I disagree on your class definitions.
Tactical: Weapon damage
Science: debuffs, exotic damage, heals
Engineer: power, mitigation, heals
This better fits the skills and traits captains can obtain and the skills BOFF's have.
You've pidgeon holed science captains and science BOFF abilities into what you need from the token sci captain in your premade PVP team. I think this is to the detriment to the entire game including premade PVP.
And if you want sci to be effective in debuffs and control then we need effective debuffs and control. Guess what TR wont be?
Good job.......
So can you elaborate on why the most powerful force multiplication ability in PvE, the part of the game most people focus upon including the devs, is a tactical boff ability and why you don't think that is a terrible thing? Aside from being dismissive toward PvE and saying it doesn't matter of course. Or beating the dead horse that PvE should become more like PvP since that has very little chance of occurring.
Keep in mind my issue with tacs has little to do with the captain abilities as I feel S7 really shafted tactical s for PvE while giving enough love to sci/eng to make them a bit more on par with one another. It is the bridge officer abilities that I find to be seriously unbalanced.
I'm not going to spend time arguing this.
Feel free to bring 5 Tacs, and I will put together a team of 3 Scis and 2 Tacs.
This is the best way to demonstrate the power of Sci captains.
Tac's have a secondary in debuffing specifically for damage, that's why APB & FOMM fall under tactical.
By your own definition, Sci captains should not be able to debuff targets resistance for weapons damage - which is exactly what Sensor Scan does.
So perhaps, to fit your definition better, Sensor Scan should only decrease damage resistance for Exotic (PG linked) Damage powers?
This better fits the skills and traits captains can obtain and the skills BOFF's have.
Token Sci captain?
Now you're just being silly.
Most tournament built premades will bring 3 Sci captains. Some teams would bring 5 except most tournaments have a rule specifically against this.
The above challenge is available anytime you'd like.
Are we talking about Captains or BOFF powers now?
Because you quoted me on Captain powers.
Regardless, Tac captains are damage specialists (I'm not sure where I said this couldn't include debuffs that help deal more damage).
As you already recognize, all Careers were given Primary focuses and Secondary focuses to an extent.
In ye olde days of STO the devs appear to have given Tacs a primary in self buffing for damage and a secondary in debuffing damage resistance - I'm not sure why this was the design chosen but both of these still fall under "damage specialist".
It seems like the goal was to have all BOFF powers allow for a degree of hybridization. In which case APB belongs to everyone (and it does) and is basically career agnostic.
Sci captains being force multipliers goes beyond straight damage debuffing. It's not my fault the majority of PvE makes these types of force multiplication irrelevant.
I created a thread for you to debate force multipliers and whether tactical buffs should affect science abilities.
This is the thread: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=863841
Now let's please get back on topic.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
But I like to feed trolls!
Ok back on topic. We have ONE person state anecdotal evidence that the current power is OP and then we have Bort reduce the effectiveness of the power at only 100 flow caps by 30%
Damn you got some pull Webdeath ><
If the power is still the same as it was at the start of this thread, could we actually get some tests done on it by those able to access Tribble before it gets nerfed?
It'd really be a great way to validate this reduction instead of reading ONE person saying they got drained from an unknown value to somewhere close to 0 in something like 1-3 secs.
Again I just got to say you got some pull with Bort Webdeath, I'm impressed with your evidence XD
Anyway it would be great if this power ACTUALLY got tested.
I hit him with 1 and 2 at 112 flow caps. He had 84 in insulators from skill points and maybe some more from gear as you seem to give insulators out like candy on gear. He was also in a mogai so had already got -40 all systems and ran it on the weapons config and had 125,43,52,35.
Tykens rift 1 he didn't even notice and just largely ignored. It barely drained his power and as I quote "That's a joke".
Tykens Rift 2 just about knocked his aux off he thinks but in his own words "I could just fly out of it"
I then doubled the flow caps to 224.
Tykens rift 1 he said he barely felt a drain. He didn't give me numbers but I know it didn't cause his shields to go offline so it may have been somewhere between 1 and 2 on the previous test.
Tykens rift 2 took all but weapons offline eventually however it was only near the end of the rift that it did so. Weapons went down to 65 so the drain to each subsystem was about 60.
The damage from it was ok, 600 per tick more or less but I didn't stack for getting damage out of it. I would perhaps recommend the damage be increased by 50% and the effect of particle gens on it halved or brought into line with gravity well.
My victim did not use any escape abilities like evasive manuevers, emergency power to engines, deuterium surplus, impulse capacitance cell etc but was able to escape very easily without having to divert power to engines.
Another thing to point out is the secondary tykens that can spawn using a gravimetric duty officer were practically useless. It would be nice if they scaled with the rank of your tykens rift and gravity well so you got secondary tykens rift 3's and secondary gravity wells 3 if you used the T3 rank of those abilities.
As it is, drains are just too easily resisted by taking insulators to 84 points and that's an always on thing that reduces 3-4 abilities effectiveness by half. Even stacking energy syphon 3 with tykens rift 2 my victim could fly out no problem. He even said energy syphon 3 only drained 5 energy.
I will test tykens rift 3 when I can find time. I also got to test gravity well 1 and 3 on my victim and will post feedback on that. Spoiler: We weren't impressed by the push.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Figures. About the only useful drain is energy syphon and most ships can ignore it.
- Judge Aaron Satie
Thanks for taking the time to do this Bpharma. How horribly disappointing. I was very happy when I found out these abilities were finally getting some attention. But bit by bit my hope is slowly dyeing.
Please don't waist time on fixing abilities that are going to remain useless and consequently unused cryptic.
We'll see how tykens 3 does.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
THANK YOU this is what we need in this thread not high horse BS and vague ideology.
So to your tests bpharma. We are talking about the total drain over 15 secs correct?
If so 60 in 15 secs is far from amazing. Power Insulators reduced it by 50% so 120 in 15 secs.... still weak.
That would mean against the same target with TR3 we should be seeing about 90 after 15 secs. If that's the case how can this reduction be validated?
I can't imagine this will be great in PvP unless you REALLY stack drains and even then it won't be easy to take shields out completely and would require an extremely significant investment in flow caps.
To be honest I just hate how one dimension the current science skills set up makes the abilities and thus builds. To get a good return on a skill you must use 4 of those consoles in your science slots most of the time which then forces you to either use wishy washy other abilities or something that's buffed by all those consoles.
Couple that with how many are so passively resisted to a high extent and it's just not worth playing science ships most of the time. Which is a shame as there's a lot of revenue to be made from them.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Also I was a Romulan tac with all romulan/reman crew with no rep system powers.
I think the problem here is one of perspective.
A single AoE power should not be able to "take out shields completely" in PvP, especially one that also drains every other subsystem at the same time.
By it's very nature, being both an AoE and a multi-subsystem drain, it needs to be on the weaker side to keep it from being ridiculous.
Powers like this are always hampered by their own nature, and are generally PvE powers or mostly useful for spam clearing.
I know this sounds harsh, but I promise you 1 Tac with CSV 3 is not taking out any decent opposition either.
For the PvE side Tykens + GW in some combination with the CD reduction doff should be decent.
trust me you can just fly out of it I was sitting in the middle of the rift when my shields and other subsys went offline once I was just slightly out of the centre it did very little and unless you put a ton into flow cap the drain is MASSIVE swing it might go to zero then swing hard back to 20 then 10 then back to 20 and a gw tyken combo wouldnt work becuase you CAN just fly out of it you have to realize this toon was a tac built for pve and single player a pvp built toon this wouldnt even touch plus YOU CAN FLY OUT OF IT the tyken has almost no pull once about 500 meters from the centre the drain drops fast.
Luckily you can use TB at the same time.
Or EWP.
This is no different from an escort using APO + CRF for an enhanced effect.
The one with the issue of perspective is yourself.
Ignore the test. Ignore the only data in this thread. Get back on your high horse and spout more ideology BS while ignoring data and many comments -6 pages of it mostly directed at you with some very good questions you don't bother to answer- that question the validity on this ideology. Continue to nitpick posts ignoring the overall point made for some small concession that doesn't even validate your opinion.
There is more than just 1 profession and ship type in this game.
It would be nice if we could get these underperforming ships and professions up to the hallowed levels of your tactical.
I know this scares you.. You are after all the rogue in vanilla WOW. You pown all the noobs, you don't want to get worse.
Let me get my Headmasters Staff! I want my Sci ship and not feel like I'm handycapping my PVE or PVP team.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=12647141#post12647141 Please, oh god please nitpick my post and explain why im wrong. Go here. Leave this place.
I don't respond to posts like that, or most like yours for that matter.
It's clear you have zero clue what premade PvP is and why Sci captains are as powerful they are.
My offer of demonstration is always on the table.
Good stuff
Let me know when you're ready to bring a 4 or 5 Tac team vs. my 3 Sci/2 Tacs.
Sure when? We can Youtube it and you can continue to prove my point from 3 pages ago
Okay - I managed to get a little testing on Tyken's 3. First test was with a mere 68 aux and 109 Flow caps. My target (thanks to broken!) had 92 in insulators. By the end of the rift, he only had 22 power drained.
Then I took things up. 125 Aux, with 205 Flow Caps. This time, things were a little more dramatic. Tooltip drain was 11.3 per second. When staying in the rift, all subsystems hit 0 by around the 13-14 second mark - including weapons, which was at 125. I saw shields flickering at about 8-10 seconds. Getting a bit of distance resulted in a slight mitigation, giving him about a second more before total drain. An aftershock, although individually not strong, could speed things up. Multiple Tyken's 3 would probably be even worse, especially on slow ships. With a suitably strong set of holds, this would mean that TR3 is actually pretty effective - and may even verge on OP when stacked.
Of course, the target was not using emergency powers, batteries or anything like that. However, I had only 3 embassy flow cap consoles, which means that this isn't an upper limit for the drain. It could actually be devastating to carriers-except for the fact that hazard emitters clears the debuff.
But as far as i red the testresults, it seems tylens is not really better then it is on holodeck atm.
It just takes to long to have a effect on the target. Besides the fact that you just need to pop a HE to clear it.
So basically everyone can qutie easy get away from it.
@ussultimatum:
As i stated before in a different post already, the point is what you have to invest and what you get in return.
A Commander Hold/Drain should be able to hold a Target on its own or drain its Power on its own completely in a reasonable amount of time, if you have invested quite skillpoints and consoles for it.
And as far as i see from the testresunlts that is not the case for tykens or gravwell.
Reasonable amount of time means basicly shortly after it is deployed, and not 2 seconds before the effect ends. ....
Btw, when reading your posts, that the powers are to strong in pvp, it sounds like you sitting around in pvp and doing nothing to coutner the atks. Not to mention that you have teammates that might be able to support you also.
All i read in your pvp posts is the atk side off pvp, not mentioning once the counters. Which is a big deal, cause as long as you have a effective counter, there is no problem if the skill is really strong on its own.
Second you always complaining that sci skills are to strong when stackign in pvp, but you could say the same about atk skills like crf, or bo. Not to mention that the cd's on the sci skills are higher...
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Seriously, they need to like knock engines offline or something whenever someone is within 4k of one. Even full gravitons does next to nothing vs anything but the weakest of ships.
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