Gravity well changes PvP feedback.

bpharma · October 2013

Hey all,

Just plonk your feedback on how you feel the new and improved gravity well is performing in PvP here.

From my testing a lot of people found Grav Gens didn't seem to have much impact on the push.

PrtG would add about 5 damage per tick per point onto the gravity well.

Attack pattern beta 3 (-50 damage resistance) added about 750 damage per tick.

That's as a rough guide for anyone wanting the info.

I think it would help the devs out significantly in tweaking it up/down and in which areas if we could give constructive feedback on how useful it is now and what might need boosting/nerfing.

seansamurai1 · October 2013

Nice to see they've done something with a sci skill, shame most of the ones I've come across tonight have zero debuff anymore.
Fully specced APO3? Doesn't work, still sucked back, EPtE, nope still sucked back, evasives, na, sucked back.
6km out, get sucked in.
All it's been is groups spamming a-hell out of it tonight to the point you can't move and can barely see anything.
Think the tweak was a little over zealous, especially for a Boff power nearly all can have.

bpharma · October 2013

I don't think nearly all can have gravity well but I am surprised about that result. Hopefully some of the other heavy PvPers are currently testing the hell out of it at the moment both in terms of counter and power.

See how it goes for a few days, if it becomes a problem then it's a shame but I guess my super useful PvE gravity well will need a look at.

Still very surprising as my target could get out of it by merely putting full power to engines and I had about 150 GrvG with 130 aux. Looking forward to everyone else's feedback

seansamurai1 · October 2013

It wasnt damaging though, not until the second went down, I think teams have come up with one specs in pull and the other specs in damage, the pull obviously drags you in and holds, the other well damages.

bpharma · October 2013

Anyone else messing with this or do I suspect a "this is powerful maybe as good as double tap, let's stay quiet" thing is going on?

naz4 · October 2013

Used it for a while last night. Pull is poor, but the damage has been buffed. You have to suppliment the pull effect with tractors, viral, etc....

naz4 · October 2013

Used it for a while last night. Pull is poor, but the damage has been buffed. You have to suppliment the pull effect with tractors, viral, etc....

6 in dampners is enough to mitigate the pull. You can just drift out. Nothing in dampners is a different story...

bpharma · October 2013

Well I trust my own tests on tribble and that was that the pull was effective on enemies (PC and NPC) with about 50 engine power but as soon as you got to 100 engine power the pull became troll face.

I can't really remember the damage (proper damage numbers not tooltip) from before but with only 84 from captain skill point allocation I think I'm getting more but high end users stacking PrtG will be getting less.

When I was testing the well got my tester down to 70-80% hull while trying to escape with no armour consoles and not much points in kinetic resistance. I thought that was ok but now I know that he had barely any mitigation I feel justified in my recommendation of +500dmg per tick on base.

khayuung · October 2013

My xp, with all grav gens, GW3, on a Karfi:

Damage TRIBBLE poor, guns do better
Holds everything down
Large radius of effect, able to drag shards from right in my face back to the CE 5km away

No parses because I didn't have any prepatch parses to compare to.

smokeybacon90 · October 2013

Same with my experience. Damage is pants, but the pull is much improved.

adamkafei · October 2013

I agree with the lower damage, higher pull guys. I still get decent enough damage out of it but it is lower than it was for my science character but the pull being more frequent now makes it vastly more powerful.

bpharma · October 2013

Is this in PvP or in PvE?

The reason we need to know is it seems to be very nice and working well in PvE bundling everything up but it seems to be lacking a bit in PvP from what I saw in tribble and what Naz is saying.

In the end we do need more feedback however I do appreciate it's only been a day and people are still working out the ins and outs =D

lter · October 2013

Just tested today my GW3 in a couple of arenas. I did the same damage as always, and hold (repel, slingshooted, w/e) as always. Good for the first, zero for the second.

Veredict: It's a faaaake!!

nandospc · October 2013

Ok, just tested gw3 in arena, the pull is really great, and with sensor scan e some tactical debuff, i had like more than 2k kinetic damage on enemies' hull (just a parsed max hit with act). Without, the base damage is lower than before, yes, but not so low imho. I think now this skill is useful and fine.

buccaneerdtb · October 2013

nandospc wrote: »

Ok, just tested gw3 in arena, the pull is really great, and with sensor scan e some tactical debuff, i had like more than 2k kinetic damage on enemies' hull (just a parsed max hit with act). Without, the base damage is lower than before, yes, but not so low imho. I think now this skill is useful and fine.

So says the Tactical Captain. Science is stuck with half your damage numbers.

nandospc · October 2013

buccaneerdtb wrote: »

So says the Tactical Captain. Science is stuck with half your damage numbers.

But i did it with my sci toon on a wells, 1 particle gen console and 3x conservation of energy stacked. I mean, in the best circumstance is really powerful. Normally it's still good, i dont see all these problems about, maybe i did too few tests

rmy1081 · October 2013

the damage isn't all too great, but the pull is amazing. Just did our weekly Friday PvP with my fleet and gravity wells have a wider and stronger pull. I think gravity well was more broken than anyone thought. Thanks for the fix

orondis · October 2013

Spammed this in a few matches with my sci. In all matches most of the opposing team spent the majority of time stuck in a gravity well, with only APO-using escorts flying about freely.

One team majored in pet spam which was totally eradicated, along with their cluster torps, mines and heavy plasma torps.

Another match had both of our teams spamming grav well, which was interesting to say the least.

VASTLY more effective than previously and the pull is godly.

majortiraomega · October 2013

It would be really nice to see a damage buff to Gravity Well, right now it's rather lacking. Now as for the effectiveness in PvP, the pull is better, but ships with EPtE still fly out of the Gravity Well very easily.

The only problem is right now Tactical Officers have Attack Pattern Omega, Engineers have Emergency Power to Engines and Auxiliary to Intertal Dampers, yet there is no Science counter to Gravity Well. I think it would be nice if the devs were to add a 10-50% Gravity Well tractor resistance to Polarize Hull I, 20-60% for Polarize Hull II, and 25-75% resistance for Polarize Hull III with resistance scaling on auxiliary power. It would give science vessels a counter to other science vessels using Gravity Well. In addition, it would provide science captains an incentive to use higher versions of polarize hull.

bpharma · October 2013

majortiraomega, could they still get out using EM, deuterium surplus and engine batteries?

If I personally had to say anything about GW and it's counters in the push I would either think as you say with PH or perhaps look at the others in terms of how much control resistance they're giving vs the version they're using and the "cost" of that ability. I mean if 1 ability is nullifying 2-5 other abilities and has a 50%-100% uptime then it does need a look at.

majortiraomega · October 2013

bpharma wrote: »

majortiraomega, could they still get out using EM, deuterium surplus and engine batteries?

If I personally had to say anything about GW and it's counters in the push I would either think as you say with PH or perhaps look at the others in terms of how much control resistance they're giving vs the version they're using and the "cost" of that ability. I mean if 1 ability is nullifying 2-5 other abilities and has a 50%-100% uptime then it does need a look at.

They can indeed escape with Evasive Maneuvers + Engine battery, but not if a tractor beam or Chroniton torpedo debuff is active, which is why a polarize hull tractor effectiveness reduction would be useful, at the very least for version 2 and 3 if not for version 1. It's really quite amusing, earlier today I popped a gravity well on another science vessel and then tractor beam, the other science vessel did the same thing to me. We both sat there waiting for the gravity well to wear off...yeah it's fixed alright, the hold is great against players. The only problem is the fact that the damage is so low neither of us went below 97% hull.

bpharma · October 2013

I was eating something and nearly choked when I read that part about the gravity wells and tractor beams =D Must have been quite a funny moment!

hroothvitnir · October 2013

I would be extraordinarily surprised if they ever increased the damage of the sci powers, as the first response to "fixing" GW was that it did damage like csv and that was oh so terribly incorrect for some reason. To which it got smash with a nerf bat had its base boosted so an escort with no specs would be able to better utilize it and then had its top end fully specked performance further neutered. Basically a giant finger to sci ship boff slots not used for healing or TB.

Its still do not understand the dev logic about why this power shouldn't be able to do impressive damage when fully specked, buffed and against a debuffed target.

Made worse that they rushed through such and important change to a sci ship power when there was almost no one to test it on the test server.

ivantomdisplay · October 2013

Im glad some offensive sci powers beside viral matrix are useful again. My tvaro was sucked in GW3, i had APO on cd, i barely made it with epte engine battery and evasive out of there. the thing is...Pull is grabbing u asap. I think they changed that as well.

bpharma · October 2013

The problem is that gravity well has the capacity to do a lot of damage by sucking in a lot of targets. Further more it shouldn't be a fire gravity well and boom goes everything.

On the flip side of it, if you're doing a direct comparison to a tactical ability like CSV or TS then you can use them twice in the time it takes to fire a second gravity well. I would say that's why it has the push and the damage. Perhaps it is time to drop the shared cooldown of gravity well to 30s?

A boost of maybe 500 damage per tick to base might help add a bit of a sting too or would it be better to add 1000? Don't forget about buffing, 1000 extra means 1500 at least for tactical captains and science captains and then you get buff stacking.

mustrumridcully0 · October 2013

Random thought... I wonder what would happen if Gravity Wells would become stronger going from the center to the outside. Then people would want to stay in the middle to avoid damage, and getting out is risky and difficult. It is, of course, completely illogical as a physical effect, but from a gameplay perspective, it sounds interesting, with interesting synergies with effects like Tractor Beam Repulsors or Tyken's Rift (not all of which can be used on one ship due to the shared cooldowns, of course.)
This would work well with an increase in area of effect.

scurry5 · October 2013

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

Random thought... I wonder what would happen if Gravity Wells would become stronger going from the center to the outside. Then people would want to stay in the middle to avoid damage, and getting out is risky and difficult. It is, of course, completely illogical as a physical effect, but from a gameplay perspective, it sounds interesting, with interesting synergies with effects like Tractor Beam Repulsors or Tyken's Rift (not all of which can be used on one ship due to the shared cooldowns, of course.)
This would work well with an increase in area of effect.

While we're on random thoughts - what if the damage from Gravity Wells, Tractor Beams and Tractor Beam Repulsors scaled with speed? So that using an immunity/resist like APO, AtD or PH would let you get out - while soft counters like EPtE and EM would get you out, but nearly tear your hull apart in the process. After all, isn't that what happens when you try to extricate yourself with brute force? If you didn't have a counter up, you'd have to take the damage or slow down. Failing that, maybe getting out using speed boosts should have a chance to overload engines for a few moments.

snoge00f · October 2013

Awesome to hear that GW 3 is back in action again.

I did miss the old GW.

majortiraomega · October 2013

bpharma wrote: »

The problem is that gravity well has the capacity to do a lot of damage by sucking in a lot of targets. Further more it shouldn't be a fire gravity well and boom goes everything.

On the flip side of it, if you're doing a direct comparison to a tactical ability like CSV or TS then you can use them twice in the time it takes to fire a second gravity well. I would say that's why it has the push and the damage. Perhaps it is time to drop the shared cooldown of gravity well to 30s?

A boost of maybe 500 damage per tick to base might help add a bit of a sting too or would it be better to add 1000? Don't forget about buffing, 1000 extra means 1500 at least for tactical captains and science captains and then you get buff stacking.

I could live with that. +500 base damage per tick would help significantly.

des101 · October 2013

G/W's and T/R's seem to be the new OP thing to use now in PvP. They've gone from being a joke to stupidly over powerful !!

Just come out of a match where I think everyone on the opposing team were using them (mainly GW's). To say it wasn't a fun match is an understatement.

Can't blame the peeps though for using them - I Blame the DEV's for not having a clue about balance :rolleyes:

They seem to attempt to fix one thing & completely throw something else out of whack!!

**edited bit**

I should point out that they were using the GW's & TR's properly, not the just spam & see what happens version that most people use.

Got hit by one, which dragged me straight in. not a prob, EM to the rescue
Got hit by a 2nd, dragged into that, then a 3rd and a 4th.. and boned!! As were most of my team mates who also got dragged in & unable to get out..

Then the TR's - hit by one, then another.. and either pushed straight out range or into another GW!!

DEV's - Ever heard of stacking penalties?? Try using them once in a while

Gravity well changes PvP feedback.

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