I'm not sure if that explanation helps or hinders the understanding our players may have of the ability's effects. I'm just hoping to put to rest a few misconceptions about what the ability is and isn't.
I doubt that the understandung what Graviy Well does is the Problem. The name describes it pretty good. Works like a gravitation field of a Planet, more or less.
The whole Point is more about the fact how much you need to invest in a skill and what you get for it, in terms of consoles and skillpoints and energylvls.
If you run a tac heavy ship with 4 tac consoles and high weapon power combined with a tac skill like csv or crf, they really deal a punch, compared to no tac console and low weapon power.
If you do the same with most of the sci skills, the difference is way less noticable, if you notice it at all.
So the investment is not really worth it, if you take in account what other consoles you could slot instead or where you could put your skillpoints alternative.
Not to mention that a higher dps has in most cases a way bigger effect in pve then some sci abilities, cause of the npc and mission design.
One good example is, if you try to get the shields of an npc down with Tachyon beam in an elite stf. You hardly recognize it. On the other hand if you use a crf on it you have the shields down in no time.
Maybe that gives you and idea, why ppl are unhappy with the way sci skills and ships work atm.
Reynolds/Thokal
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class/R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit TheWiseGuys
"Gravity Well is a slow" - FALSE
"Gravity Well is a hold" - FALSE
"Gravity Well is an engine debuff" - FALSE
"Gravity Well is a knockback" - Mostly FALSE (Knocks have an upward trajectory associated with them, and animation for animating models. It's really just a technicality.)
"Gravity Well is a Repel" - TRUE
"Gravity Well is a Repel with a Negative Trajectory" - EVEN MORE TRUE
The effects on a ship's movement and velocity may resemble many of the above, but only one of them is actually what is taking place.
The best way to think of the effect would be as if a giant hand kept shoving your ship back towards the center of the Gravity Well, every ~1 second, as long as you remain within the radius of the hazard's effects.
The strength of that push actually weakens as you near the middle, in an effort to avoid having affected ships yo-yo-ing back and forth around the epicenter.
These factors combined make it behave much more like an actual force of gravity would on your ship. You can slingshot through it, for example. And traveling very quickly through the hazard may have very little effect on your ship, because the force of the 'push' might not be able to overwhelm that of your engines' forward thrust. It's physics! (or a close approximation)
I'm not sure if that explanation helps or hinders the understanding our players may have of the ability's effects. I'm just hoping to put to rest a few misconceptions about what the ability is and isn't.
Thank you very much for the precise description of gravity wells mechanics bort.
I chose to use the terms hold and pull to describe the effects of gravity well because regardless of the mechanics these are the effects we expect of a gravity well, and they are the effects that the mechanics are intended to simulate.
We expect it to pull ships too it and we expect it to if not immobilize them at least hold them within a limited radius of its center.
Now as you described the mechanics of the pull do allow for limited examples of the slingshot effect (which is awesome btw) and will very the perceived effect of the gravity well so it is very difficult to analyze and assess the effectiveness of changes.
When I performed the 'wife test' a few posts back I attempted to deal with this by choosing a scenario that allowed me to closely replicate the same conditions for each use of the gravity well.
Killing the first two ships in the Japori system quickly and using the last one as the point of gravity well creation causes the first wave of re-informants to warp in at roughly the same location relative to the well and with roughly the same engine conditions.
Now those certainly were not ideal testing conditions for a proper analysis. However they were ideal conditions to gauge the impression of it that the general player will form when using it.
As I said before I find the well to be greatly improved now, its a huge improvement. But my disappointment in the graviton generator skill remains. If there is no perceivable difference in the effect of the well with and without a rack of consoles why not simply remove the graviton generator console from the game?
Finally, I also heard through an interview with I think it was Gecko that there may be changes to science ships and cruisers in the near to mid future.
If we knew a little bit about these changes or at least what they're intended to alter then we can perhaps give more informed feedback on where GW should be going and getting it right for such a time. I mean a 3-4k base GW3 might be ok now but be over/under powered when/if changes are made.
Now that you mention it.... These changes do make sense in that context. Gecko said Science ships could be getting another Deflector equipment slots. These Gravity Well changes may be adjustments for the additional Deflector.
Now that you mention it.... These changes do make sense in that context. Gecko said Science ships could be getting another Deflector equipment slots. These Gravity Well changes may be adjustments for the additional Deflector.
I considered this. If the additional deflector slot is used for a standard deflector as we have now then we are still going to see an undetectable amount of improvement to our gravity wells.
Case in point. Right now there is no discernible difference between the pull of a gravity well on tribble when going from 110 graviton generators skill to 240.
Adding an additional graviton deflector is going to add 18 more points. if we don't see a difference with an addition of 130 can we seriously expect to see one with 148?
Now if the additional deflector we can fit is some sort of special science ship only deflector maybe there is hope.
Edit: Of course even if the additional deflector is a special sci ship only one, unless it applies a multiplier to our sci-skills after the addition of consoles, graviton consoles will remain completely pointless.
I'm not sure if that explanation helps or hinders the understanding our players may have of the ability's effects. I'm just hoping to put to rest a few misconceptions about what the ability is and isn't.
TY for the explanation Bort,
As players we want the most bang for the buck as the saying goes. Maybe we are missing how the Dev team view Gravity Wells intended use in game?
I personally view and use it as a handy clustering ability for my Torpedo spreads.
To that effect the "Repel" even with minimal skill points was very effective in the (Tribble)Romulan Mission: Smash & Grab fired with a high Aux power at the center transport it had the ability to pull the other 2 transports and all surrounding craft into the well. IMO that is how it should work since we are artificially creating a short duration "Black Hole", I like how the Repel scales with aux, but is the intention of the "Graviton Generator" consoles to boost the Repel and/or Radius? I think they should actually do both in IMO.
Now "The Particle Generator is a Ship Science Console that improves damage for attacks that use exotic particles, such as Gravity Well and Tyken Rift. It only improves the damage, and not other effects."(from STOwiki)
Compared to "Tactical Consoles improve your starships ability to attack with weapons, be it energy based (cannons, beams) or kinetic based (torpedoes, mines)."(from STOwiki)
As a Sci ship captain I can stack 4-Rare XI + skills and basically get Disruptor Dual Heavy Cannons which has a listed base damage of 366 up to around 1900+ ,[per cannon x3-4 on any escort class ship,] not counting any additional damage buffs like APO or APB debuffs, but the same does not appear to be true of the same amount of boost to sci damage from an investment of 4-rare XI Particle Generators which are the sci Damage boost console.
I think maybe what I'm asking is - that since both console types increase damage to a particular area what is the Devs intended Threshold for lack of a better word on sci-damage consoles?
It's worth looking at feedback from Bort in the tykens rift thread also. I don't want to make the man repeat himself but essentially what we might be seeing is a tightening up of the upper and lower ends of the spectrum for science abilities.
Now before you cry, this can be good as it allows for abilities to be made powerful enough to be noticeable without having to invest huge amounts of points into one specific skill via consoles. It also means the ability does not have to be balanced around a 300+ particle gen GW doing insane damage that only 1 type of captain can reproduce in 1 specific ship, leading to all other forms being pretty sub par.
Seems like it might be following a more tactical approach in trying to make an ability more standard for all and for consoles to perhaps only buff them marginally.
I just wonder if we'll see more general science consoles or a reworking of them. I must say I have been considering walking from this game but these changes have rekindled my interest.
Everyone talks about how 'tacs have run away with the game' in PvE mostly and the number one reason is attack pattern beta, also the reason they haven't run away with the game in PvP as TT removes it.
Attack Pattern Beta.
Luckily APBeta is Career agnostic, it has nothing to do with tacs.
APBeta can be had on a wide variety of non-escorts, and with DOFFs can even have near or permanent uptime. Making actually better than taking the equivalent tier weapon power.
This is even more important if you also have a lot of non-weapon sources of damage like..pets and...Gravity Well, etc.
Then there are those pets that have beta...
IIRC BPpharma runs a Sci/Carrier that puts out damage that would make the casual player escort shed tears. It's not just Tacs that run away with everything, except scoring the highest in DPS results - that doesn't mean the baseline for what Sci/Eng can do hasn't been vastly lifted due to across the board power increases.
The whole Point is more about the fact how much you need to invest in a skill and what you get for it, in terms of consoles and skillpoints and energylvls.
If you run a tac heavy ship with 4 tac consoles and high weapon power combined with a tac skill like csv or crf, they really deal a punch, compared to no tac console and low weapon power.
That ship also took about 6 different skills to 6 or 9 ranks. There is also investment into Tac skills for performance.
So the investment is not really worth it, if you take in account what other consoles you could slot instead or where you could put your skillpoints alternative.
This is only true in PvE.
In PvP, dedicated healers and controllers who run (and should run) heavily spec'd ships with 125/130 Aux power will stand out head and shoulders above ships that do not in their level of effectiveness.
The effectiveness is there, you're just focused on an environment fighting paper tigers. A hard sneeze kills most NPCs in this game.
Not to mention that a higher dps has in most cases a way bigger effect in pve then some sci abilities, cause of the npc and mission design.
Indeed, but the important part is the last part.
The majority of this game's PvE issues stem from encounter and environment design.
There is a saying, "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" - well, STO PvE is more like - "every problem actually is a nail.".
It's worth looking at feedback from Bort in the tykens rift thread also. I don't want to make the man repeat himself but essentially what we might be seeing is a tightening up of the upper and lower ends of the spectrum for science abilities.
Now before you cry, this can be good as it allows for abilities to be made powerful enough to be noticeable without having to invest huge amounts of points into one specific skill via consoles. It also means the ability does not have to be balanced around a 300+ particle gen GW doing insane damage that only 1 type of captain can reproduce in 1 specific ship, leading to all other forms being pretty sub par.
Seems like it might be following a more tactical approach in trying to make an ability more standard for all and for consoles to perhaps only buff them marginally.
I just wonder if we'll see more general science consoles or a reworking of them. I must say I have been considering walking from this game but these changes have rekindled my interest.
The thing is, I don't have too much of an issue with Tyken's Rift since they added extra damage in exchange for lower drain on the high end (backs the theory that devs don't like drains in general even if there are power insulators for them but are always fine with heal and damage buffs). If you get trapped in Tyken's Rift AoE, it's because your engines have been sucked dry between the rift and other drains or a subsystem disable because it was never supposed to keep you in there anyway. With Gravity Well, we got more -repel and size in exchange for less DPS? (Which decreases with distance from center) Unless the repel from a GW3 will keep a human player that has fallen into a dead stop in the center, from which they can only escape from with EPtE3, the DPS scaling should be left as it was (as the tooltip shows in Holodeck). Otherwise, like before, people will ignore in favor of things like TBR, because in the end, DPS is king.
I'm still curious as to why "killing a group of frigates" rendered the power as to strong.
CSV really melts through frigates even at elite difficulties. FAW requires a little more effort but basically can achieve the same thing without going to extreme measures, same for torp spreads. I consider these to be fair to compare against as a good number of ships have universal slots now so powers need to be directly comparable.
So what was the design point of the adjustment since a group of frigates is a viable benchmark? Should GW at 50 power and 75 particle investment leave them with 60% hull remaining? Should a sci captain with 130 aux ~200 particle and an amp core giving full bonus % damage then sensor scan them and crush em like tin cans? Where should the power be scaling to from bottom to top.
Luckily APBeta is Career agnostic, it has nothing to do with tacs.
APBeta can be had on a wide variety of non-escorts, and with DOFFs can even have near or permanent uptime. Making actually better than taking the equivalent tier weapon power.
I personally believe that the classes are pretty decent in relation to one another for PvE after S7. However no one can argue that a ship's performance in PvE can be judged primarily by how many tactical bridge officer abilities you can get out of it.
Tactical team is the defensive problem of that coin, and attack pattern beta is the offensive side. Not really much of a surprise that nearly every ship I have uses both. But really I don't think anyone knowledgeable with the game can debate that the performance of APB is a wee bit too high.
What I am trying to say I guess is that if the entire purpose of these changes is to create a better foundation for exotic damage and control abilities then one of the first priorities should be the examination of how other abilities/skills/etc interact with them and to determine if those are good or bad. For example I feel the combination of eject warp plasma and gravity well to be a good one as they complement one another very well. Same for EPtA with gravity well. Or sensor scan, sensor analysis, and the capacitor trait. But I do not think a good foundation can be established so long as Attack Pattern abilities continue to be capable of increasing the damage of abilities like gravity well, especially when they typically increase it significantly more than anything else is capable of.
I personally believe that the classes are pretty decent in relation to one another for PvE after S7. However no one can argue that a ship's performance in PvE can be judged primarily by how many tactical bridge officer abilities you can get out of it.
We've had this dance before though.
The heart of the problem is the encounter design, it's designed to be shot.
Or the CE/CCE. Finally we have a place where healing is measured and debuffs matter.
Except debuffs don't matter in a logical way to support building for them.
You don't need skill ranks in the relevant skills for E-Siphon, Tach Beam, Tykens, etc., you just need those skills to strip the CE's stacking buffs.
The heart of the problem is the encounter design, it's designed to be shot.
Or the CE/CCE. Finally we have a place where healing is measured and debuffs matter.
Except debuffs don't matter in a logical way to support building for them.
You don't need skill ranks in the relevant skills for E-Siphon, Tach Beam, Tykens, etc., you just need those skills to strip the CE's stacking buffs.
You don't even need consoles or aux power.
And after how many years if that is the only type of design that has been embraced by Cryptic why shouldn't the bridge officer ability design follow it. No reason to give me an apple core slicer thingie if you only feed me oranges.
I'm still curious as to why "killing a group of frigates" rendered the power as to strong.
CSV really melts through frigates even at elite difficulties. FAW requires a little more effort but basically can achieve the same thing without going to extreme measures, same for torp spreads. I consider these to be fair to compare against as a good number of ships have universal slots now so powers need to be directly comparable.
I too wonder why that test rendered it too strong, but it's perfectly ok to spray away with CSV the same group and do the exact same thing very quickly.
No noticable "pull" unless Grav Well AFtershocks Proced. But did notice a Grav well "Tendril" stay with him the entire effect even after he was at least 7km away.
You think that your beta test was bad?
Think about this: American Football has been in open beta for 144 years. ~Kotaku
No noticable "pull" unless Grav Well AFtershocks Proced. But did notice a Grav well "Tendril" stay with him the entire effect even after he was at least 7km away.
I've always wondered if the tendril means you're still under its effect or if it's a leftover animation like when you fly far away from a tractor beam and you still see as if it was on you.
No noticable "pull" unless Grav Well AFtershocks Proced. But did notice a Grav well "Tendril" stay with him the entire effect even after he was at least 7km away.
This is exactly what my pvp test with a friend on holo found a couple of months ago. With as much graviton generator skill and aux power as I could muster he found his speed, acceleration and ability to maneuver to be completely unaffected. He was not of course using any abilities, and had no more inertial dampeners then the next average PvEer.
The reason we were given for that was that graviton generator skill and aux power wasn't effecting the well. Supposedly they do now. Aux certainly did in my testing on NPCs, but generators didn't.
It sounds like your pvp test on tribble went a little better then mine did on holo. If your subject was effected when the aftershock procked that shows some improvement.
However I am horribly disappointed that this implementation of gravity well is still effectively unaffected by graviton generators. Cryptic know that graviton generators have no use right? A tractor beam with no graviton generator consoles and 6 points of captain skill is all we need for a perfect hold.
Luckily APBeta is Career agnostic, it has nothing to do with tacs.
APBeta can be had on a wide variety of non-escorts, and with DOFFs can even have near or permanent uptime. Making actually better than taking the equivalent tier weapon power.
This is even more important if you also have a lot of non-weapon sources of damage like..pets and...Gravity Well, etc.
I didn't talk about tac captains in my post i was just talking about ships and boff skills.
And btw. most non tac ships have not the slots to use high versions of the Atk patterns.
Then there are those pets that have beta...
IIRC BPpharma runs a Sci/Carrier that puts out damage that would make the casual player escort shed tears. It's not just Tacs that run away with everything, except scoring the highest in DPS results - that doesn't mean the baseline for what Sci/Eng can do hasn't been vastly lifted due to across the board power increases.
Which can only be done by one specific ship, cause no other ship can carry those pets. So it bascially is the exception of the rule. Not to mention that it was not the brightest idea to implement such pets in the first place.
That ship also took about 6 different skills to 6 or 9 ranks. There is also investment into Tac skills for performance.
Which are mostly skills you have to skill in a non tac ship also. Basically the same that you also normally skill some eng/sci skills that improve shields, hull or power. I bet there are only a really small amount of ppl out there which haven?t skilled in Energy Weapons and so on. The reason for that is it is worth it.
Also this are skills oyu recognize every time you fire a weapon, with or without a boffskill. Wondering when you recongnize Graviton Generators outside using a a boff skill..... (Just an example) And yeas i know, same would go for Atk Patterns.
This is only true in PvE.
In PvP, dedicated healers and controllers who run (and should run) heavily spec'd ships with 125/130 Aux power will stand out head and shoulders above ships that do not in their level of effectiveness.
The effectiveness is there, you're just focused on an environment fighting paper tigers. A hard sneeze kills most NPCs in this game.
Dunno if you recognized, but most ppl doing pve, not pvp.
Besides that you have the same issue with most sci skills in pvp also.
I did quite some pvp before the game went f2p and we got all those consoles and other stuff. You know, back in the days when pvp was fun?
And i know when you combine the skills of several sci they can be quite effctive in pvp, which only works in premade teams. But on the other hand if you put focus fire on someone they go down also.
So baseline is, stuff that works in pvp doesn?t work in pve all the time or the other way round, cause the circumstances are different.
Which is one reason i would like to seperate pvp and pve skill and itemwise. In some other games they did that excactly and it works quite good.
Indeed, but the important part is the last part.
The majority of this game's PvE issues stem from encounter and environment design.
There is a saying, "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" - well, STO PvE is more like - "every problem actually is a nail.".
At least we can agree on that one.
Imo the balance in sto was never really that great, but with all the new consoles, doffs and other stuff they make it even more worse instead of fixing it. The ships are more powerful then they were ever before. Now we have the situation that the class specific advantages and disadvantages don?t count that much anymore.
Reynolds/Thokal
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class/R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit TheWiseGuys
When we select a ship we get a choice of boff slots. All ships only come with one commander ability (one commander slot).
What we put in that slot is based on what kind of mileage and utility we can get out of whatever we have to choose from.
Right?
Ok, our career path really has little meaning to this decision, since cross building is a very common thing to do in this game (tac caps in sci ships, engineers in tac ships, etc)
Let us compare two commander level abilities.
Cannon scatter volley 3
Gravity well 3
Regardless of career path, you can spec into either ability via your gear and your skill tree.
The problem is, if you spec into cannons and damage dealing consoles, you will get TEN TIMES the mileage out of CSV3 than you will out of Gravity well 3, even if you all out spec for it.
Why?
Because damage is all that matters in this game, Borticus.
Grav well does less than 1/8th of the damage of a well placed CSV, requires more of an investment to even get to that level of damage, results in a mediocre at best crowd control ability that practically any player or NPC can just ignore and fly away from.
Why would any player choose GW3 over CSV3? Be honest with me. Ive heard there is concern with the damage output of GW3 getting too high. How can that be a justifiable argument when my science captain can do 250,000 points of damage to a group of targets with a couple cycles of CSV3 (the same time frame as ONE copy of gravity well 3 that only does about 25000 to the same group, if they even stay in it?)
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
Ok I am going to summarize some key points here.... fantastic summarization.... ... more fantastic sumerization.... a cutting inquiry....
... I love you and want to have your babies... ... Er.... I mean you don't happen to have any jelly babies do you? I always like to bite the heads off first.
Firstly it's the recluse and has a commander universal, it is not a sci carrier and is not how I run it for PvE. For PvE I run it in a similar fashion to the 20k people in as much as I use APB3 with FAW2+3 and rely on my weapons to do most of the damage. I do end up with a lt.comm science which I pack GW1 usually as it isn't bugged and can clump units ok when they don't hit EptE.
I could make a more science orientated build out of it but the cripplingly low turn and with a lot of abilities needing forward firing arcs doesn't make me want to try. Maybe when I get some more fleet armour consoles I will try it but I know it will be less efficient and may increase completion times drastically as mesh weavers are sporadic with their beta use and do not obey commands properly
I also ran some tests with APB3 spam (4 stacks on target) and without. The difference in damage on the new gravity well was absolutely redonkulus. We're talking a more than doubling of damage from the gravity well, if I remember correctly with sensor scan you can hit about 3.5k and with grav anchor I pushed it to or near 4k.
So now that's out of the way. Problem I see is that a nice strong gravity well or 2 stacked in PvE can be useful to fire at enemies that are fairly low order and to tear them apart through war core breaches and the wells themselves.
4-5 stacked on a player with tractor beams holding them in the centre and some nice damage resistance lowering is just insane. Especially if you add in that sensor scan is AoE and 3 science captains can debuff an entire team that way.
As has been pointed out PvE content only requires a hammer, unfortunately some captains and classes of ship are sledgehammers to that nail while others are plastic toy hammers.
It's also worth thinking about that if you're having to rely on lowering the cooldowns on tactical abilities and trying to keep a high uptime on them, then you're not exactly playing a science ship anymore, you're just playing a weak tactical ship with a heavier focus on science. I can make my wells into a FAW2+APB2 beam boat with some space wizardry, it'll be ok but I am now sacrificing science in order to stay competitive and even then I'm not staying competitive. Not as much as in my recluse with a similar build but higher tactical seating and less science.
Also don't rage on ussultimatum, he doesn't know my build and I haven't shared it with anyone so he wasn't to know I don't use science on the recluse.
When we select a ship we get a choice of boff slots. All ships only come with one commander ability (one commander slot).
What we put in that slot is based on what kind of mileage and utility we can get out of whatever we have to choose from.
Right?
Ok, our career path really has little meaning to this decision, since cross building is a very common thing to do in this game (tac caps in sci ships, engineers in tac ships, etc)
Let us compare two commander level abilities.
Cannon scatter volley 3
Gravity well 3
Regardless of career path, you can spec into either ability via your gear and your skill tree.
The problem is, if you spec into cannons and damage dealing consoles, you will get TEN TIMES the mileage out of CSV3 than you will out of Gravity well 3, even if you all out spec for it.
Why?
Because damage is all that matters in this game, Borticus.
Grav well does less than 1/8th of the damage of a well placed CSV, requires more of an investment to even get to that level of damage, results in a mediocre at best crowd control ability that practically any player or NPC can just ignore and fly away from.
Why would any player choose GW3 over CSV3? Be honest with me. Ive heard there is concern with the damage output of GW3 getting too high. How can that be a justifiable argument when my science captain can do 250,000 points of damage to a group of targets with a couple cycles of CSV3 (the same time frame as ONE copy of gravity well 3 that only does about 25000 to the same group, if they even stay in it?)
So I also got to test Gravity Well 3 with my victim when I tested tykens rift. As far as I know I had 154 in grav gens so by no means was I pumping it to push a lot. However the other player had 0 in inertial dampners as far as I know.
All he needed to do to escape was divert power to engines to properly escape otherwise he was bobbing back and forth. The damage wasn't great, about 1600 on average per tick with sensor scan debuffing his resistance. I will find out what his resists were and update this.
At the moment for a commander level ability it doesn't seem to push enough compared to how easy it is to escape. Do I want it to be an uber grab everything and force it to the centre? No, but I do expect for a commander level ability for someone to require more effort to counter it than simply diverting power to engines.
My advice, if you've halved the effect of grav gens with a view to make science abilities more standard then you should increase the push by 50% then we can test it again. As far as I'm concerned there are many devices and abilities which give a speed burst that can free you. For a high ranking science ability I expect it to compare to other abilities in power. Damage I can't comment on without knowing his resists.
I also demonstrated way back how stacking of beta might be a concern from mesh weavers however a team of players can do that just as easily.
Gravity Well 1 was similar in push but slightly easier for him to escape and less damage.
It might also be worth mentioning he was built for PvE and not PvP so had little to no resistace against holds, and would very likely had few escape techniques.
If they're made slightly OP by accident at worst you'll see people trying a much less used ship class for a few months while it's slowly toned down.
Is there anything in particular you would like to know or tested Devs?
If so make a quick post and we can test and give more focused feedback.
Oct 3rd release notes are up. The changes to TR and GW go live tomorrow. Thank god this has been thoroughly tested. The good news is Tact Captains will continue to get more bang out of these abilities than Sci Captains. I'm excited!
I am a bit pissed that a good deal of our feedback got wholly ignored and not included. Almost everyone that tested this agreed that the changes were not enough, especially at Ltcomm and comm levels of the skill.
But whatever, ill keep running lt commander/commander tactical abilities, since lt commander/commander science is never going to be worth it.
FFS.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
I tried using a nebbie to maximize these changes, to no avail really. The best I could get was to go balls out with Grav Gen and nail everything in a 5km radius down. Going ptg however ended up everything just running out of my trap, dealing next to no damage.
I have TR2 on my Klink alts, but that's because they were built to farm CEE... That will forever be the only reason I run an anomaly at all.
If you want to do Sci damage, your choice is pretty much to fly a nebbie, load plasma weapons, 4 fleet plas ptg consoles, and roll with Aux2batt, BFAW, DEM+Marion, PSW3 and TBR2. Which btw a Tac captain can get WAY MORE MILEAGE out of than a Sci.
"Last Engage! Magical Girl Origami-san" is in print! Now with three times more rainbows.
Comments
I doubt that the understandung what Graviy Well does is the Problem. The name describes it pretty good. Works like a gravitation field of a Planet, more or less.
The whole Point is more about the fact how much you need to invest in a skill and what you get for it, in terms of consoles and skillpoints and energylvls.
If you run a tac heavy ship with 4 tac consoles and high weapon power combined with a tac skill like csv or crf, they really deal a punch, compared to no tac console and low weapon power.
If you do the same with most of the sci skills, the difference is way less noticable, if you notice it at all.
So the investment is not really worth it, if you take in account what other consoles you could slot instead or where you could put your skillpoints alternative.
Not to mention that a higher dps has in most cases a way bigger effect in pve then some sci abilities, cause of the npc and mission design.
One good example is, if you try to get the shields of an npc down with Tachyon beam in an elite stf. You hardly recognize it. On the other hand if you use a crf on it you have the shields down in no time.
Maybe that gives you and idea, why ppl are unhappy with the way sci skills and ships work atm.
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class / R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer
U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit
TheWiseGuys
Thank you very much for the precise description of gravity wells mechanics bort.
I chose to use the terms hold and pull to describe the effects of gravity well because regardless of the mechanics these are the effects we expect of a gravity well, and they are the effects that the mechanics are intended to simulate.
We expect it to pull ships too it and we expect it to if not immobilize them at least hold them within a limited radius of its center.
Now as you described the mechanics of the pull do allow for limited examples of the slingshot effect (which is awesome btw) and will very the perceived effect of the gravity well so it is very difficult to analyze and assess the effectiveness of changes.
When I performed the 'wife test' a few posts back I attempted to deal with this by choosing a scenario that allowed me to closely replicate the same conditions for each use of the gravity well.
Killing the first two ships in the Japori system quickly and using the last one as the point of gravity well creation causes the first wave of re-informants to warp in at roughly the same location relative to the well and with roughly the same engine conditions.
Now those certainly were not ideal testing conditions for a proper analysis. However they were ideal conditions to gauge the impression of it that the general player will form when using it.
As I said before I find the well to be greatly improved now, its a huge improvement. But my disappointment in the graviton generator skill remains. If there is no perceivable difference in the effect of the well with and without a rack of consoles why not simply remove the graviton generator console from the game?
Now that you mention it.... These changes do make sense in that context. Gecko said Science ships could be getting another Deflector equipment slots. These Gravity Well changes may be adjustments for the additional Deflector.
I considered this. If the additional deflector slot is used for a standard deflector as we have now then we are still going to see an undetectable amount of improvement to our gravity wells.
Case in point. Right now there is no discernible difference between the pull of a gravity well on tribble when going from 110 graviton generators skill to 240.
Adding an additional graviton deflector is going to add 18 more points. if we don't see a difference with an addition of 130 can we seriously expect to see one with 148?
Now if the additional deflector we can fit is some sort of special science ship only deflector maybe there is hope.
Edit: Of course even if the additional deflector is a special sci ship only one, unless it applies a multiplier to our sci-skills after the addition of consoles, graviton consoles will remain completely pointless.
TY for the explanation Bort,
As players we want the most bang for the buck as the saying goes. Maybe we are missing how the Dev team view Gravity Wells intended use in game?
I personally view and use it as a handy clustering ability for my Torpedo spreads.
To that effect the "Repel" even with minimal skill points was very effective in the (Tribble)Romulan Mission: Smash & Grab fired with a high Aux power at the center transport it had the ability to pull the other 2 transports and all surrounding craft into the well. IMO that is how it should work since we are artificially creating a short duration "Black Hole", I like how the Repel scales with aux, but is the intention of the "Graviton Generator" consoles to boost the Repel and/or Radius? I think they should actually do both in IMO.
Now "The Particle Generator is a Ship Science Console that improves damage for attacks that use exotic particles, such as Gravity Well and Tyken Rift. It only improves the damage, and not other effects."(from STOwiki)
Compared to "Tactical Consoles improve your starships ability to attack with weapons, be it energy based (cannons, beams) or kinetic based (torpedoes, mines)."(from STOwiki)
As a Sci ship captain I can stack 4-Rare XI + skills and basically get Disruptor Dual Heavy Cannons which has a listed base damage of 366 up to around 1900+ ,[per cannon x3-4 on any escort class ship,] not counting any additional damage buffs like APO or APB debuffs, but the same does not appear to be true of the same amount of boost to sci damage from an investment of 4-rare XI Particle Generators which are the sci Damage boost console.
I think maybe what I'm asking is - that since both console types increase damage to a particular area what is the Devs intended Threshold for lack of a better word on sci-damage consoles?
Now before you cry, this can be good as it allows for abilities to be made powerful enough to be noticeable without having to invest huge amounts of points into one specific skill via consoles. It also means the ability does not have to be balanced around a 300+ particle gen GW doing insane damage that only 1 type of captain can reproduce in 1 specific ship, leading to all other forms being pretty sub par.
Seems like it might be following a more tactical approach in trying to make an ability more standard for all and for consoles to perhaps only buff them marginally.
I just wonder if we'll see more general science consoles or a reworking of them. I must say I have been considering walking from this game but these changes have rekindled my interest.
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.
Luckily APBeta is Career agnostic, it has nothing to do with tacs.
APBeta can be had on a wide variety of non-escorts, and with DOFFs can even have near or permanent uptime. Making actually better than taking the equivalent tier weapon power.
This is even more important if you also have a lot of non-weapon sources of damage like..pets and...Gravity Well, etc.
Then there are those pets that have beta...
IIRC BPpharma runs a Sci/Carrier that puts out damage that would make the casual player escort shed tears. It's not just Tacs that run away with everything, except scoring the highest in DPS results - that doesn't mean the baseline for what Sci/Eng can do hasn't been vastly lifted due to across the board power increases.
That ship also took about 6 different skills to 6 or 9 ranks. There is also investment into Tac skills for performance.
This is only true in PvE.
In PvP, dedicated healers and controllers who run (and should run) heavily spec'd ships with 125/130 Aux power will stand out head and shoulders above ships that do not in their level of effectiveness.
The effectiveness is there, you're just focused on an environment fighting paper tigers. A hard sneeze kills most NPCs in this game.
Indeed, but the important part is the last part.
The majority of this game's PvE issues stem from encounter and environment design.
There is a saying, "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" - well, STO PvE is more like - "every problem actually is a nail.".
The thing is, I don't have too much of an issue with Tyken's Rift since they added extra damage in exchange for lower drain on the high end (backs the theory that devs don't like drains in general even if there are power insulators for them but are always fine with heal and damage buffs). If you get trapped in Tyken's Rift AoE, it's because your engines have been sucked dry between the rift and other drains or a subsystem disable because it was never supposed to keep you in there anyway. With Gravity Well, we got more -repel and size in exchange for less DPS? (Which decreases with distance from center) Unless the repel from a GW3 will keep a human player that has fallen into a dead stop in the center, from which they can only escape from with EPtE3, the DPS scaling should be left as it was (as the tooltip shows in Holodeck). Otherwise, like before, people will ignore in favor of things like TBR, because in the end, DPS is king.
CSV really melts through frigates even at elite difficulties. FAW requires a little more effort but basically can achieve the same thing without going to extreme measures, same for torp spreads. I consider these to be fair to compare against as a good number of ships have universal slots now so powers need to be directly comparable.
So what was the design point of the adjustment since a group of frigates is a viable benchmark? Should GW at 50 power and 75 particle investment leave them with 60% hull remaining? Should a sci captain with 130 aux ~200 particle and an amp core giving full bonus % damage then sensor scan them and crush em like tin cans? Where should the power be scaling to from bottom to top.
I personally believe that the classes are pretty decent in relation to one another for PvE after S7. However no one can argue that a ship's performance in PvE can be judged primarily by how many tactical bridge officer abilities you can get out of it.
Tactical team is the defensive problem of that coin, and attack pattern beta is the offensive side. Not really much of a surprise that nearly every ship I have uses both. But really I don't think anyone knowledgeable with the game can debate that the performance of APB is a wee bit too high.
What I am trying to say I guess is that if the entire purpose of these changes is to create a better foundation for exotic damage and control abilities then one of the first priorities should be the examination of how other abilities/skills/etc interact with them and to determine if those are good or bad. For example I feel the combination of eject warp plasma and gravity well to be a good one as they complement one another very well. Same for EPtA with gravity well. Or sensor scan, sensor analysis, and the capacitor trait. But I do not think a good foundation can be established so long as Attack Pattern abilities continue to be capable of increasing the damage of abilities like gravity well, especially when they typically increase it significantly more than anything else is capable of.
We've had this dance before though.
The heart of the problem is the encounter design, it's designed to be shot.
Or the CE/CCE. Finally we have a place where healing is measured and debuffs matter.
Except debuffs don't matter in a logical way to support building for them.
You don't need skill ranks in the relevant skills for E-Siphon, Tach Beam, Tykens, etc., you just need those skills to strip the CE's stacking buffs.
You don't even need consoles or aux power.
And after how many years if that is the only type of design that has been embraced by Cryptic why shouldn't the bridge officer ability design follow it. No reason to give me an apple core slicer thingie if you only feed me oranges.
I too wonder why that test rendered it too strong, but it's perfectly ok to spray away with CSV the same group and do the exact same thing very quickly.
Me 292 Gravity gens
Opponent with 62 Engine power and 3 in ID
No noticable "pull" unless Grav Well AFtershocks Proced. But did notice a Grav well "Tendril" stay with him the entire effect even after he was at least 7km away.
Think about this:
American Football has been in open beta for 144 years. ~Kotaku
I've always wondered if the tendril means you're still under its effect or if it's a leftover animation like when you fly far away from a tractor beam and you still see as if it was on you.
This is exactly what my pvp test with a friend on holo found a couple of months ago. With as much graviton generator skill and aux power as I could muster he found his speed, acceleration and ability to maneuver to be completely unaffected. He was not of course using any abilities, and had no more inertial dampeners then the next average PvEer.
The reason we were given for that was that graviton generator skill and aux power wasn't effecting the well. Supposedly they do now. Aux certainly did in my testing on NPCs, but generators didn't.
It sounds like your pvp test on tribble went a little better then mine did on holo. If your subject was effected when the aftershock procked that shows some improvement.
However I am horribly disappointed that this implementation of gravity well is still effectively unaffected by graviton generators. Cryptic know that graviton generators have no use right? A tractor beam with no graviton generator consoles and 6 points of captain skill is all we need for a perfect hold.
I didn't talk about tac captains in my post i was just talking about ships and boff skills.
And btw. most non tac ships have not the slots to use high versions of the Atk patterns.
Which can only be done by one specific ship, cause no other ship can carry those pets. So it bascially is the exception of the rule. Not to mention that it was not the brightest idea to implement such pets in the first place.
Which are mostly skills you have to skill in a non tac ship also. Basically the same that you also normally skill some eng/sci skills that improve shields, hull or power. I bet there are only a really small amount of ppl out there which haven?t skilled in Energy Weapons and so on. The reason for that is it is worth it.
Also this are skills oyu recognize every time you fire a weapon, with or without a boffskill. Wondering when you recongnize Graviton Generators outside using a a boff skill..... (Just an example) And yeas i know, same would go for Atk Patterns.
Dunno if you recognized, but most ppl doing pve, not pvp.
Besides that you have the same issue with most sci skills in pvp also.
I did quite some pvp before the game went f2p and we got all those consoles and other stuff. You know, back in the days when pvp was fun?
And i know when you combine the skills of several sci they can be quite effctive in pvp, which only works in premade teams. But on the other hand if you put focus fire on someone they go down also.
So baseline is, stuff that works in pvp doesn?t work in pve all the time or the other way round, cause the circumstances are different.
Which is one reason i would like to seperate pvp and pve skill and itemwise. In some other games they did that excactly and it works quite good.
At least we can agree on that one.
Imo the balance in sto was never really that great, but with all the new consoles, doffs and other stuff they make it even more worse instead of fixing it. The ships are more powerful then they were ever before. Now we have the situation that the class specific advantages and disadvantages don?t count that much anymore.
U.S.S. Helios -Vesta Class / R.R.W. Dark Science - Dyson Surveillance Science Destroyer
U.S.S. Donut - Fleet Advanced Research Vessel Retrofit
TheWiseGuys
When we select a ship we get a choice of boff slots. All ships only come with one commander ability (one commander slot).
What we put in that slot is based on what kind of mileage and utility we can get out of whatever we have to choose from.
Right?
Ok, our career path really has little meaning to this decision, since cross building is a very common thing to do in this game (tac caps in sci ships, engineers in tac ships, etc)
Let us compare two commander level abilities.
Cannon scatter volley 3
Gravity well 3
Regardless of career path, you can spec into either ability via your gear and your skill tree.
The problem is, if you spec into cannons and damage dealing consoles, you will get TEN TIMES the mileage out of CSV3 than you will out of Gravity well 3, even if you all out spec for it.
Why?
Because damage is all that matters in this game, Borticus.
Grav well does less than 1/8th of the damage of a well placed CSV, requires more of an investment to even get to that level of damage, results in a mediocre at best crowd control ability that practically any player or NPC can just ignore and fly away from.
Why would any player choose GW3 over CSV3? Be honest with me. Ive heard there is concern with the damage output of GW3 getting too high. How can that be a justifiable argument when my science captain can do 250,000 points of damage to a group of targets with a couple cycles of CSV3 (the same time frame as ONE copy of gravity well 3 that only does about 25000 to the same group, if they even stay in it?)
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
... I love you and want to have your babies... ... Er.... I mean you don't happen to have any jelly babies do you? I always like to bite the heads off first.
Firstly it's the recluse and has a commander universal, it is not a sci carrier and is not how I run it for PvE. For PvE I run it in a similar fashion to the 20k people in as much as I use APB3 with FAW2+3 and rely on my weapons to do most of the damage. I do end up with a lt.comm science which I pack GW1 usually as it isn't bugged and can clump units ok when they don't hit EptE.
I could make a more science orientated build out of it but the cripplingly low turn and with a lot of abilities needing forward firing arcs doesn't make me want to try. Maybe when I get some more fleet armour consoles I will try it but I know it will be less efficient and may increase completion times drastically as mesh weavers are sporadic with their beta use and do not obey commands properly
I also ran some tests with APB3 spam (4 stacks on target) and without. The difference in damage on the new gravity well was absolutely redonkulus. We're talking a more than doubling of damage from the gravity well, if I remember correctly with sensor scan you can hit about 3.5k and with grav anchor I pushed it to or near 4k.
So now that's out of the way. Problem I see is that a nice strong gravity well or 2 stacked in PvE can be useful to fire at enemies that are fairly low order and to tear them apart through war core breaches and the wells themselves.
4-5 stacked on a player with tractor beams holding them in the centre and some nice damage resistance lowering is just insane. Especially if you add in that sensor scan is AoE and 3 science captains can debuff an entire team that way.
As has been pointed out PvE content only requires a hammer, unfortunately some captains and classes of ship are sledgehammers to that nail while others are plastic toy hammers.
It's also worth thinking about that if you're having to rely on lowering the cooldowns on tactical abilities and trying to keep a high uptime on them, then you're not exactly playing a science ship anymore, you're just playing a weak tactical ship with a heavier focus on science. I can make my wells into a FAW2+APB2 beam boat with some space wizardry, it'll be ok but I am now sacrificing science in order to stay competitive and even then I'm not staying competitive. Not as much as in my recluse with a similar build but higher tactical seating and less science.
Also don't rage on ussultimatum, he doesn't know my build and I haven't shared it with anyone so he wasn't to know I don't use science on the recluse.
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.
Impliying that what is redonkulus and broken isn't those pets stacking 4 ABPIII. That's what needs to be fixed in the first place.
Quoted...
for...
truth.
All he needed to do to escape was divert power to engines to properly escape otherwise he was bobbing back and forth. The damage wasn't great, about 1600 on average per tick with sensor scan debuffing his resistance. I will find out what his resists were and update this.
At the moment for a commander level ability it doesn't seem to push enough compared to how easy it is to escape. Do I want it to be an uber grab everything and force it to the centre? No, but I do expect for a commander level ability for someone to require more effort to counter it than simply diverting power to engines.
My advice, if you've halved the effect of grav gens with a view to make science abilities more standard then you should increase the push by 50% then we can test it again. As far as I'm concerned there are many devices and abilities which give a speed burst that can free you. For a high ranking science ability I expect it to compare to other abilities in power. Damage I can't comment on without knowing his resists.
I also demonstrated way back how stacking of beta might be a concern from mesh weavers however a team of players can do that just as easily.
Gravity Well 1 was similar in push but slightly easier for him to escape and less damage.
It might also be worth mentioning he was built for PvE and not PvP so had little to no resistace against holds, and would very likely had few escape techniques.
If they're made slightly OP by accident at worst you'll see people trying a much less used ship class for a few months while it's slowly toned down.
Is there anything in particular you would like to know or tested Devs?
If so make a quick post and we can test and give more focused feedback.
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 whatever, ill keep running lt commander/commander tactical abilities, since lt commander/commander science is never going to be worth it.
FFS.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
I have TR2 on my Klink alts, but that's because they were built to farm CEE... That will forever be the only reason I run an anomaly at all.
If you want to do Sci damage, your choice is pretty much to fly a nebbie, load plasma weapons, 4 fleet plas ptg consoles, and roll with Aux2batt, BFAW, DEM+Marion, PSW3 and TBR2. Which btw a Tac captain can get WAY MORE MILEAGE out of than a Sci.
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In essence, aceton assimilator pulses... those deal directional damage too....
- 1200,4 dmg... is that normal ?