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Devs: Please add shield distrobution to eng and sci team asap.
wrathofachilles
Member Posts: 937 Arc User
Dear Devs,
I recently realized that adding shield distribution to engineering team and sci team would not be over powered because if one uses eng team or sci team instead of tac team (as most everyone currently does) one loses their nigh immunity to fire on my mark, attack patterns beta and delta, and boarding parties. With this in mind, engineering team being able to heal the hull and distribute shields will be counter balanced by taking more damage and bleed damage to hull from the effects of attack pattern beta and fire on my mark without tac team to remove these effects, likewise, so shall science team with shield distribution give as ship very hard shields, but bleed through damage will be enhanced by the afore mentioned tactical abilities and if you can get to the hull, it will be weaker as well.. Not to mention, ships that use engineering team or sci team instead of tac team shall be far more vulnerable to boarding parties, which would allow this currently useless engineering skill to potentially make a comeback.
So perty, perty please, with cherries and whatever else you want on top, add shield distribution to the other specialties teams as soon as possible.
I recently realized that adding shield distribution to engineering team and sci team would not be over powered because if one uses eng team or sci team instead of tac team (as most everyone currently does) one loses their nigh immunity to fire on my mark, attack patterns beta and delta, and boarding parties. With this in mind, engineering team being able to heal the hull and distribute shields will be counter balanced by taking more damage and bleed damage to hull from the effects of attack pattern beta and fire on my mark without tac team to remove these effects, likewise, so shall science team with shield distribution give as ship very hard shields, but bleed through damage will be enhanced by the afore mentioned tactical abilities and if you can get to the hull, it will be weaker as well.. Not to mention, ships that use engineering team or sci team instead of tac team shall be far more vulnerable to boarding parties, which would allow this currently useless engineering skill to potentially make a comeback.
So perty, perty please, with cherries and whatever else you want on top, add shield distribution to the other specialties teams as soon as possible.
Post edited by wrathofachilles on
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Comments
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
It makes you pretty much invulnerable to attack pattern beta, delta, and boarding parties, *edit* also fire on my mark, a tactical ability that is pretty much useless in pvp currently. That's more than enough damage mitigation/bridge officer powers not being on cool/subsystem or two not knocked offline to be quite useful. You ever tried fighting the borg without tac team to clear their boarding parties?
Possibly, but it would still make eng team and sci team more viable choices without TRIBBLE oneself to the high damage of elite content and high damage in pvp that will blow through any shields not distributed with tac team speed.
If the devs don't do this, then they need to make manual distribution work as quickly as tac team distribution, one or the other, and I'm betting a copy and paste of tac team distribution onto eng and sci team is far easier/more cost effective than trying to tweak manual distribution.
I don't know which would be easier (from a coding standpoint, they both should be easy), but I think this would be a good compromise if the existing powers aren't changed.
Also, Tac Team useless? What? Look at this:
Eng Team:
-Hull heal
-Eng Debuff cleanse (Target Subsystem, VM, Subsystem offline, etc.)
- +5 to Hull Repair Skill
Sci Team:
-Shield Heal
-Sci Debuff Cleanse (SNB, acouple of the weapon procs I think)
- +5 to a skill I forget, I think it's Shield Emitters
Tac Team:
-Damage Buff (+ to both Starship Projectile/Energy Skills)
-Tac Debuff Cleanse (Boarding parties)
- +5 to Attack Patterns Skill
-Fastest readily available Shield Redistribution:rolleyes:
It's like the Shield Redistribution is missing from the others when looked at this way.
When I first saw this topic come up a loooong time ago when I started playing, which was not long after free to play opened up, I could see people's point, like the one above saying tac team would be useless if the other teams got shield distribution, but after attempting to go without tac team a few times, pvp and pve, I realized just how useful tac team is for keeping my ship running properly without those pesky boarding parties TRIBBLE everything up. And from using attack pattern beta and delta and fire on my mark in pve, I've seen just how devastating these tac powers can be. With back to back tac teams, these elements haven't really been a concern of pvpers, or pve'ers who use tac team, and nearly everyone ends up using the B2B-TT approach once they figure out it's essentially the gold standard of staying alive in this game. And since people haven't had to worry about these abilities in forever, I think they have forgotten just how evil they are when afflicted by them and that tac team is useful far beyond simply distributing shields.
Insanely wrong.
Why?
ET 3 can be pushed out to 17k hull heal.
ST 3 can be pushed into the 5~6 heal per facing (total 20K+)
You can't give huge burst heals TT's shield distrobution on top of that because it would be ludicrously overpowered.
But I would prefer that the healing components of sci and engineering team be removed and replaced with a range of appropriate captain skill bonuses, (to a greater extent then tactical team currently has) and that tactical team be given more skill bonuses to bring all the teams in line.
IT'S EVEN ON THE SAME PAGE!!
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.
Um it could continue to do what you ask for in your sig, increase your DPS a tad just like it does today. Plus clear really nasty things that will make your hull explode in seconds or wish a subnuke was used upon you instead of a boarding party/assimilate ship....
Like I said, with the additional issues caused by boarding parties and extra bleed and hull damage caused by actually being affected by fire on my mark and attack patterns beta and delta, the additional heal should largely be mitigated.
To push those heals out that far, one must REALLY push, they would sacrifice armor for heal or shield capacity for heal, which is a trade off, sure you can heal for nearly 20k hull, but without the armor consoles you gave up to have that high of a heal, you're really going to need that extra 10k of heal to compensate.
I think that's more work than the devs are willing to do, the devs have said before that players have lots of great ideas, just so many of them require far too much reworking of things to be worth time invested... or whatever. So this thread is simply about how adding distribution to the other teams shouldn't be unbalanced all things considered.
The old thread was full of all kinds of alternative ideas that were good in one way or another but I think would be too much work for the devs to be interested in implementing, like I said above, if the devs are going to tweak things that already exist, they want to just tweak them, not rewrite the book.
Thus I felt that the best thing to do was cut through all of the rest and start this new thread dedicated to the simple notion that adding distribution to eng team and sci team makes them more or less equivalent to tac team, not far and away incredibly better than it, with the hope that the devs will find the argument sound, and with enough support, implement it.
Tactical Team
Removes hostile boarding parties for 10 sec
Removes tactical debuffs for 10 sec
+X Startship Energy Weapon Training for 10 sec
+X Starship Projectile Weapon Training for 10 sec
Distributes shield strength to shields receiving damage for 10 sec
Engineering Team
+X Hit Points
Repairs disabled systems and Engineering Debuffs for 5 sec
Science Team
+X Shield Regeneration applied once to each facing
Removes science debuffs for 5 sec
Let's not stop there though, not for the moment, let's look at another thing...
Tactical Fleet
+X% All Damage for 30 sec
+Y Starship Maneuvers for 30 sec
+Y Starship Targeting Systems for 30 sec
Engineering Fleet
+X All Damage Resistance Rating for 30 sec
+Y Starship Hull Repair for 30 sec
+Y Starship Warp Core Potential for 30 sec
Science Fleet
+Y Starship Shield Emitters for 30 sec
+Y Starship Power Insulators for 30 sec
Reduces Damage to Shields by X% for 30 sec
And let's look at one more thing...
Emergency Power to Weapons
Repairs disabled weapons systems
+X% All Energy Damage for 30 sec
+Y Weapon Power Setting for 30 sec
Emergency Power to Shields
+X Shield Regeneration for each facing (one shot Regen)
+Y Shield Power Setting for 30 sec
Repairs disabled shields
Reduces Damage to Shields by Z% for 30 sec
Emergency Power to Auxiliary
Repairs disabled auxiliary systems
+X Stealth for 30 sec
+Y km Perception radius
+Z Auxiliary Power Setting for 30 sec
+A Starship Graviton Generators for 30 sec
+A Starship Particle Generator for 30 sec
+A Starship Subspace Decompiler for 30 sec
Sure, folks are going to argue about how balanced the various Fleet abilities and EPtX abilities are...but they do have something, imho, that at least makes them appear far more balanced than the Team abilities.
Adding Shield Distribution to the other Team abilities, wouldn't balance them...imho.
Removing Shield Distribution from Tac Team and boosting the buff to Energy/Projectile Training...would.
edit: TLDR elaboration. Each Team ability has a Damage Affecting Component (either increasing damage or healing damage), a Cleanse, and a Repair. Why should TT have the additional component?
And it's not complicated. Tactical team is the only possible way to deal with many situations of burst damage. Manual shield balancing does not move points fast enough to survive. Tactical team has therefore become an essential bandaid to an underlying issue, which is that shield balancing is not effective.
Solution: Increase the rate that manual shield allocation can move points around to the same rate as tactical team. The perk of tactical team then becomes the fact that it can do this automatically for you and also split your shield power in 2 different directions (as well as its obvious utility in clearing tactical debuffs).
Actually it is less that it cannot keep up with burst (PvE at least) and more that my spacebar gets sick of being mashed every 2-5 seconds.
Give me 'auto-distribute' just like autofire, and with the same justification I might add, and TT will become much less 'required' for me.
This game has gone waaaaay too far down the path of needing back to back tac teams to survive much of elite level damage and pvp damage for us to be removing it. It also doesn't need to be added as a separate ability available to each department as that would just be chewing up yet another boff power. If tac team needs a buff to the projectile/weapon training if the other teams get distro, then so be it, But then the other teams may need their repair/immune function boosted from 5 seconds to 10 like tac team's. But really, I think if we let tac team have the longer repair/immunity, simply adding distribution to the other teams should be quite balanced, especially considering that you would still probably need level 3 of eng or sci team to counter the bonus damage coming from being affected by fire on my mark and attack patterns beta and delta in while tac team one will still do you on making you immune to all tac debuffs and boarding parties.
If devs prefer to correct manual shield distribution to where it should be instead, that's fine, I imagine a copy and paste of tac team distribution to the other teams would require less work and shouldn't be OP, which falls in line with the dev's criteria for tweaking, but whatever, either way, something needs to be done about shield distribution.
Even spacebar mashing with "distribute shields" added to it won't distribute your shields quickly enough to eat many forms of burst. Don't get me wrong, it's quite useful in boosting surviveability over not using it, but it won't get you by when you need a tac team, no matter how fast you mash.
Um...see, I disagree. There's other abilities that one can use. Folks want to rely on TT as a crutch while ignoring those other abilities so they can maximize damage. Which in turn leads to many complaints about how easy content is and that it's just a DPS race.
Manual distribution not enough in a situation? What does almost every other game out there for situations like that? STO has it as well. Folks just don't want to do it.
What's the pretty much standard party makeup out there? Tank, Heals, 3x DPS...right?
In STO? Nope. Which I definitely applaud on one hand...but it's not without problems of its own.
Redistribution on TT is a problem, imho...spreading it around to other teams doesn't address the issue, it just spreads the issue.
If folks don't have to think as much about survival, they're free to focus on doing as much damage as possible. Put them in a position where they have to consider both, sure - some folks will do their glass cannon builds...wait, what's that? Actual glass cannons?
TT is that powerful, imho, and it's that broken.
On further reflection, I think the issue is that tac team sucks points from other shield facings attempting to keep the facing taking damage at full while manual distribution seems to simply say "transfer x points from other shields into this facing" it may be percentage based or a hard number, I don't know, but if manual distribution told your shields to transfer as many points as necessary to keep your aft shield at full for the duration, it would work more like tac team but just for the facing selected. Also, if it didn't distribute points between the three other facings evenly and try to do so constantly, your other facings could easily be blown through, so that would leave even distribution as the only one most people would use if it tried to keep the shields even at tac team speed for the duration. Maybe the devs think if they "fix" manual distribution in this way, it would still be kind of broken as even distribution is all anyone would use... but then even distribution is all anyone uses now.
Maybe manual distribution needs to be removed from the game and auto distribution removed from tac team and simply add 'distribute shields' that works once every 15 seconds for 10 seconds and works like tac team distribution. But then the issue there would be that if this was made a ship-embedded ability, subnuke wouldn't be able to put it on ridiculous cool down, so that could be considered a nerf to science... I mean, i wouldn't mind subnuke not being able to TRIBBLE up my shield distribution, but I'm sure there are others that would complain, so when faced with all these options, I think we come back round, once again, to adding distribution to all teams and calling it a day.
You have to use other abilities+tac team to stay alive, one uses emergency power to shields plus tac team plus hull heals, maybe even using transfer shield strength so you have to pour in heals plus use tac teams shield distribution to stay alive. Are you under the impression that tac team stands alone? It doesn't, but it is still far and away better than eng team or sci team.
Um... what? That is obviously an incomplete thought, so once you finish that thought, I can address it.
We do not want star trek online to be like other mmo's where you NEED a tank and NEED a healer, no ship in star trek was a "heal boat" and no ship in star trek was a toothless tank that... what? taunted the enemy over an open comm link? "Your mother was a targ, you petaq!" Is that how the sovereign would get attention away from a defiant? No, A sovereign would pwn faces to get attention.
Tac team is only OP compared to other teams because damage in this game requires tac team as a counter, the kind of damage a tac team will save you from an eng team or sci team will not, the shield distribution is king. To correct this issue would require a massive pass over all skills and weapon damage and all kinds of TRIBBLE the devs WILL NOT DO. I repeat:
WILL.
NOT.
DO.
The only way we will balance the teams is to 'spread the issue' as you call it and be done with it. Ideally there is SOOOO much that could, and arguably should, be changed in this game, but we're not going to get it, so it's time to get off of our idealistic high horses and accept the reality of our situation and make the best of it. So lets lobby for and get implemented the things we can instead of holding out for what will never be.
You can the Gate and Tac Cube without TT. You can fly around SB24 aggroing everything in sight without needing TT. There are that many other heals, passives, procs in the game - that outside of clearing Tactical debuffs, TT's pointless. In PvP, against somebody that's intent on killing you - the shield distribution isn't going to help with all the bleed damage being done that doesn't care about shields.
I've died far more often from not having a ST to cleanse Scramble/AMS than from not having TT. I've had far more issues with not having ET to cleanse VM than needing TT to distribute shields for me. Tac debuffs - sure, but that's an issue of there being potentially too many Tac debuffs that stack. Of course, on the opposite side of the coin of that is that a TT1 can cleanse so many debuffs. That any Ensign ranked ability can cleanse an unlimited number of debuffs and Commander/Captain+ ranked debuffs is kind of silly, imho.
It was a question - not a thought - not a statement. If you can't answer it to address it, I'll answer it...
No ship in Star Trek was real. You can't point to what any ship did, trying to refer to Canon as a basis for mechanics - because the writers did whatever they needed to do to move the story along. A Hero Ship was invincible until it needed to be vulnerable. Star Trek writing was so full of deus ex machina type gifts about how they managed to get out of a situation.
Deny it all one wants, but the foundation exists there. Cryptic is even further reinforcing that concept with the introduction of the Cruiser Commands...additional support abilities for Cruisers.
The game has Escort tanking, Cruiser tanking, and Sci Vessel tanking - each doing it in it's own fashion. The game has healing all over the place.
But as I said, I'm glad that they didn't go that way...of forcing it...needing X, Y, 3x Z to queue. That doesn't mean that somebody can sit back and ignore those aspects on their ships. They shouldn't expect to be able to do everything equally well on a single ship with a single toon.
Having problems with survivability? Maybe invest more in survivability. Folks on the team dying - can you provide more support or more heals? Hey, do it...simple as that.
Like I said, I'm glad that they didn't go that route - but that doesn't mean folks should rest on their laurels while complaining they can't do UBER DPS, while having UBER TANK, and tossing UBER HEALS...on the same ship, same career choice, etc, etc, etc.
There's opportunity cost. Cryptic has provided options. If folks don't want to avail themselves of those options...well, that's on them - not Cryptic.
But it doesn't.
Thus the suggestion to remove the shield distribution...and tada...
TT: Repairs disabled weapons. Cleanse Tac debuffs. +DMG.
ET: Repairs disabled systems. Cleanse Eng debuffs. Hull Heal.
ST: Repairs disabled aux. Cleanse Sci debuffs. Shield Heal.
A more balanced choice.
Why do they have to do a massive pass over everything when TT's not required for anything other than cleansing Tac debuffs (even there, there's a DOFF that can do it as well).
Just remove the distribution. But it will never happen because STO is an extremely casual game that caters to the most extremely casual players...providing such crutches. The game is riddled with them.
I'm average at best...and that's only on a good day...a very good day - but it's easy to see how the game is riddled with such crutches because people do not want to bother even trying.
The reality is that outside of cleansing Tac debuffs, you can get by without TT. That in situations that you might actually think you need it, it's not going to help you anyway.
As VD stated matches my PvE experience. Only reason I stick with the TT crutch in most ships/builds is the assimilate/boarding party clearing and I'm too lazy to mash spacebar every 3-5 seconds.
Worst case scenario I turn for a few seconds.
Now you're just being silly.
+Hull Repair (SIF) consoles come in Neutronium & Monotanium flavor from Dil mine holdings.
+Shield Heal and +Hull Heal Procs come on most Sci Embassy consoles - like Emitters for example which pump up your shield heals.
I don't know what ship you're using that can tank an elite tac cube or gate without tac team, whatever ship it is must have the most ridiculously thick shields and hull possible, because otherwise, you need tac team to absorb the spikes.
A proper tac escort will blow through a shield facing in two seconds flat and no amount of all the other heals in the game combined will save you from that except maybe a reverse shield polarity or MAYBE if you also have an epic extend shield on you, but more likely than not, you're going to need a tac team, whether it comes from you or someone else throwing it on you.
They appeared to be rhetorical questions with a statement to follow, but the questions were incomplete so there was no way to address your thoughts.
Erm, the "you can't point to cannon" thing is BS, we all know from cannon that cruisers were the biggest best ships in starfleet that "had it all" and that science vessels and escorts were basically like splitting a cruiser in half, escort being the tactical part, science ship being the science and exploration part, that way you could send your escorts to do tactical things and your science ships to do science things, and it was basically more time/resources efficient to make these smaller, role-specific vessels than to construct massive 'do it all' ships.
Would STO work as a game if crusiers were the epic "do it all" ships? Only if cryptic hadn't made the recent fleet engineering consoles that allow a cruiser to both tank and turn. If cruisers were the lumbering hulks they used to be, giving them super heavy damage and tank and the ability to use science abilities wouldn't be OP because they would lack the maneuverability to be strategic. Science ships would be able to maneuver to use their science skills far more effectively than a cruiser could, and escorts too would be able to stay in an enemy's weak spot in a way a cruiser could not. Instead, we largely have escorts as the "do it all" ships with uber damage and pretty uber tank, epic maneuverability and speed, and basically all around a total package. I think it's good that cryptic seems to be trying to make science and cruisers more viable, but i don't think the best way to do that is to force them into the original roles they were cast in, "heal ship/space mage" and "toothless meatshield."
We currently have a problem because escorts put out so much damage without really trying that they can pretty easily destroy all but the most zombie tank of cruisers, but that same cruiser will barely be able to scratch that escort, and even a cruiser that gears itself entirely for damage probably won't be able to scratch that escort either.
Since this game is obviously a DPS race, instead of trying to deny that or make some silly side objectives for cruisers/sci ships to busy themselves with to feel useful, lets just lean into it. make all ships "damage" with a side of whatever second specialty, so escorts can be damage with a secondary in evasion/maneuverability, crusiers can be damage with a secondary in meat tank and support, and science can be damage with a secondary in crowd control/space magic. Because, you're right, as it stands, each class has its way of tanking and, depending on build, they can all tank quite well, I have seen every class of ship do epic tanking, but the epic damage is largely the realm of the escort, and they have also been so hybridized that they can use enough sci and support skills that trying to make the cruiser or sci dedicated support is simply redundant.
It does. I don't know what content you are referring to, maybe it's not elite, maybe you're not pvping against the best people, but I assure you, tac team is pretty darn necessary.
You call it a crutch, as if it's something only the noobs use cause they don't know better, but it's actually the other way round. People are considered noobs when they don't use tac team. it's what 99.9% of the population that doesn't instapop uses to stay alive, if we got rid of shield distribution entirely, this game would go from 5 minute pvp slaughter fests to 1minute ones.
Like I said, I don't know what content you are referring to, story missions? Yeah, against most of the content that lots of players only play through once on their journey to end game, and typically play it on the normal easy mode won't "need" tac team, but then I see them in an elite STF getting blown through in two seconds flat because no amount of pure heal will counter that damage.
I remember when I first got to this game and went into kerrat, there was this gurumba that kept tearing me in half, I was an engineer with emergency power to shields 3 and engineering team 3 and hazard emitters and aux to structural 3 and polarize hull and allllll these heals and this one little gurumba would tear my cruiser in half within a couple volleys while my beams would barely scratch him. After several attempts at beating this person, I finally decided to quit my frantic struggle to stay alive and pay attention entirely to his stats and what skills he was using... and then I found it, the magic, the holy grail of surviving, *dramatic music* *darkness turning to light* TAC TEAM! *angelic voices*
Yes, tac team is the gold standard of survival, while it doesn't really stand alone, it stands alone better than eng team or sci team ever could, and it pairs with the other heals in the game better than eng team or sci team ever could, and again, no amount of heal will save you from an escort that can chew through one of your facings in two seconds flat, the cool timers keep those heals from being popped often enough to be able to counter that level of damage, only an RSP could possibly hope to counter that kind of damage without tac team distribution, and then rsp has a loooong cool and a rather short up time. Even then tac team distribution with an rsp=full shields, so even RSP performs better with tac team.
The synergy of tac team with all other heal skills is the gold standard.
But anyway, you say you're just an average player, but that's relative. I don't know what sort of content you do or how you perform in that content, but I can only guess that we don't swim in the same pools if you think that tac team isn't a borderline requirement.
You can't get 20k heals using hybrid armor and heal consoles, you can only get that with dedicated heal consoles, so YOU'RE being silly.
The procs from embassy consoles hardly do anything, they are a chance at a very small heal, are locked to only be able to proc so often, and you'll have to go with some other science console other than shield capacity to get them, and high capacity shields will do more for you than boosting shield heal capability.
You can go with 8k shields with a 6k sci team, but when a borg uber torp spread hits those thin shields, they're gonna tear right through them and your ship. If you have 14k shields with capacity consoles, most of it will be absorbed in your shields and you won't have to heal as much, especially with a tac team as the extra cushion from those shields gives your tac team enough time to react to absorb the damage without letting much through to the hull. Thinner shields=easier to spike through.
You can tank without TT, I've seen it done. I don't mean barely hold on either, I'm talking full on, send me your super tachyon beams, your random crits and your sphere ganking and he laughed it off while using APD to help the team.
As I said, you're having the same discussion as yeodred had ONE THE SAME PAGE as this one. Do the decent thing and request a mod to either merge or delete this thread.
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.