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Fix needed for Scimitar Aux2Batt boats
darramouss1
Member Posts: 1,811 Arc User
The last 15 captains I've been up against who used Scimitars I've noted the abilities they've bee using.
Without fail all of them have been used -
Aux2Batt
APO
BFAW
DEM
Not some of them. Not most of them. ALL of them. Couple that with the ridiculously high damage and crit they can achieve with their BOFFs and coming out of cloak, sprinkle the fact that they maintain shields when they cloak and you've got the most OP ship in the game.
At least with other strong ships, like the JHAS and Wells, you see variety in the builds. A bit of creativity. A spark of imagination. Not with the scimitar. There's no need to because that one single build is OP enough to beat most ships. Any person with no nous can paint by numbers this OP ship and fly in circles, killing most things and retreating with shields in to cloak when in trouble.
Something needs to be done to balance this OP ship/build combination.
Without fail all of them have been used -
Aux2Batt
APO
BFAW
DEM
Not some of them. Not most of them. ALL of them. Couple that with the ridiculously high damage and crit they can achieve with their BOFFs and coming out of cloak, sprinkle the fact that they maintain shields when they cloak and you've got the most OP ship in the game.
At least with other strong ships, like the JHAS and Wells, you see variety in the builds. A bit of creativity. A spark of imagination. Not with the scimitar. There's no need to because that one single build is OP enough to beat most ships. Any person with no nous can paint by numbers this OP ship and fly in circles, killing most things and retreating with shields in to cloak when in trouble.
Something needs to be done to balance this OP ship/build combination.
Post edited by darramouss1 on
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The schimitars can still work around aux2bat though
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
Alternatively, since those are on short cooldowns anyway, scale the 30% reduction to all skills down to something like 9-15% - 3-5% per doff.
Doffs should give some extra benefit or flavour to using a certain skill, not railroad you into using a particular skill because the doff effects are so powerful.
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
PvE crying that PvPers ruin the game, PvPers crying that PvEers ruin the game, the more realist people ignored in their explanations of how OP these doffs were...
But that's just the community we are a part of
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
You're right in saying this, however Aux2Batt is the only way of getting all of your abilities to their global cooldown.
Valdus | Charn | Costello | Typhus | Thyran
Because things that are OP interfere with everyone else. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Last I checked, Scimitar captains were the few.
Basically, an A2B scimitar using resilient shields is nearly unkillable in PVE, and can out damage anything else out there.
In PVP the build has drawbacks, but unless you are against a very loaded sci boat with good skill specs and gear then you will simply beat the enemy down with sheer DPS.
Let me respond to that question with another question:
Why do you feel it is balanced and good for the state of the game that one doff allows a core balancing mechanic (cooldowns) to be axed for all boff abilities, while similar doffs only do so for a very limited set of abilities, on a basis of random procs?
Do you mean "all"
Or "only"
There are other ways to get abilities to gcd, aux2bat squeezes 1 or perhaps 2 extras at the cost of 2 engineering ones
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
What I meant is that at the cost of 2 lt slots and 3 DOFFs you can reduce every other single ability on your ship down to global CD. BFAW, EWP, VM, APO, DEM, EPtX, everything. That's 10 abilities on your ship that you don't need copies or DOFFs for, all reduced to their global CD.
Well use SS with the doff that messes with there boff cooldowns which takes away the point of A2B and their doff's..
There is a counter to everything in this game, instead of asking for nerfs, trying finding these counters
If you use SS and that DOFF you slow them down for 10 seconds. Even after that 10 seconds they'll be able to get most of their abilities back down to global. SS and the DOFF is nowhere near a counter.
Peeps that rely on aux2bat Scimis are no skill space bar jockeys. At the end of the day, they know this too.
Also, the Aux2Damp doff needs a nerf. The dmg resist is way too high.
well a 30% CD reduction on a 30sec recharge is about 9sec, so those 10sec form SS with the doff is a counter
When a regular ship is hit by SS and the DOFF, 10 seconds can hurt. When an Aux2Batt ship is hit with SS and the DOFF, any ability with 45 seconds or longer standard cooldown will still get reduced to global owing to the fact that even with the SS penalty you'll still get to fire off 2 Aux2Batts. For abilities that are 30 seconds, rather than being penalised like an ordinary ship, the ability will have a full 30 second recharge as one Aux2Batt will be able to be fired during that ability's down time. Rather than suffering a penalty you can feel it will just behave like a normal ship.
I hardly call that a counter!!
Because the synergy of Aux2Batt and the Scimitar is far stronger than Aux2Batt and any other ship, even the Avenger.
A different point to bring up:
A2B builds are AVAILABLE to many people compared to other CD reductions. Sure buying Technicians off the exchange are pricy, but you can get em for free out of B'tran.
And HOW much are say...Attack Pattern DOFFs? Energy Weapon Officers? Deflector Officers? Etc
Rarely cheap and hard to get most of the time.
Technicians...they tend to fit in well with so many ships, people can get them for free if they choose to just work a little for them.
This game is F2P, and there's a LOT of F2P folks out there, I'm sure a lot of whom as well don't have more than the 10 million EC limit as well. So using A2B lets them be useful depending on ship, and not have to spend a ton on stuff.
Then you are not online at the same times as me, because I see that friggin' Bat Bus everywhere. Every queued mission has at least two.
And the vast, vast, VAST majority of them can't even parse 10k DPS.
I agree and leading on from this.
To be honest I think this is one of the reasons a lot of people are annoyed at the technicians with A2B.
I mean let's be honest here, if attack pattern doffs were as common as mud no-one would be running A2B...well ok maybe a handful of ships but most scimitars would drop it in a heartbeat.
Wanna start pointing fingers? Point them at the people who horde and extort others for these rare doffs, the people that made them with limited/expensive supply. Point it at the only other option being photonic blooming officer and it's completely lacklustre performance.
A2B is a symptom of the game pricing out other ways of cool down reduction. I mean even photonic officer you need to buy a premium 20 million ec boff for. Personally I would love to have 2 attack pattern cool down doffs on all my active characters but just a quick totting up brings it to some 280mil...
P.s. Sorry Mimey, I really want to love photonic officer but it's just plain TRIBBLE compared to everything else that reduces cool downs. <--- only part directed at Mimey.
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 the Avenger will, the Assault, the Monbosh, even the neghvar or the lv40-assault, which can be quite good with Aux2Bat.
Its the same with the FAW-Bug. The Scimitar, and even Avenger and co., dont care. But the Ody, the Neghvar and so on, ships not intended for high dps, have hugh dps-reductions.
Its not that any ability is far superior to anything else. Ill admit, Aux2Bat is the closest thing to op. But in reality, it isnt.
The problem is just, that the scimitar is basically the perfect ship. It doesnt need Aux2Bat, if you take it away, it can easily modified to have no dps-drawback. It doesnt need faw, even with single-target-fire it easily cracks 18k and thus solos stf. But other, lower ships, get busted without those abilities. A neghvar, a obelisk, a galaxy can do moderate damage with aux2bat, without it, they are just garbage. Even lv.30 escorts would be more worthwhile.
All nerf-Aux2Bat or nerf-FAW-threads just miss the point: the scimitar is the most powerful ship, and the romulans the most powerful faction. Thats the problem. And aside what you nerf except the scimitar or superior agents, the scimi wont care.
*scratches head* That seemed rather harsh and such, particularly at me. I was just trying to point out that Technicians anybody can get, and many ships can make good use of such builds. I wasn't 'pointing fingers' just saying that more people can easily have access to Technicians over stuff like AP DOFFs.
PO has been in the game since launch, and so far as I know, has never changed. Unfortunate really. But it is a decent skill at best, I won't deny, and trying to make it work just isn't worthwhile in the current game. But that isn't really the fault of players, it just isn't useful enough. I do hope one day it gets a fair balance pass though, to make it more useful.
If you think stuff like AP DOFFs are pricy now though, you should've seen those and SNB DOFFs at the height of their power, so to speak. I should know, I sold a couple of those things back then (it really helped my fleet out as well, and even paid for some things I still use to this day).
Y'know, if you'd said that many people would switch off A2B builds like a year ago, I would believe you. Nowadays though? I doubt it honestly. Just simply too many ships to make usage of it anymore. Romulans, all the new lockbox ships, all the new C-store ships, so many of them can make good of it nowadays. If Cryptic doesn't want to keep 'feeding the A2B habit', then they need to make ships that are going to at least going to offer options that people don't automatically think 'I'll just A2B that'.
Maybe you are right, I dunno. I could understand people wanting AP DOFFs, among many others, if they were more affordable if it meant running ships in other ways besides A2B. I wouldn't mind changing up the meta, the game really needs it right now.
Part of the problem isn't 'evil Exchange barons controlling all the prices for anything of value, evilly', it's that there's no lower level versions of most of these DOFFs. Many a person I know who wants a DOFF that does this or that, would be glad to use something if it had a lower level version. Take Marion and how pricy he has gotten. Is there a rare or uncommon version of him? Nope. Everyone who has always wanted that effect on DEM HAD to buy him and only him.
Marion would still be stupid expensive, but it'd be much more a case of paying the big bucks for min/maxing, and a lot more people could actually get USAGE out of the more expensive DOFFs if they had lower level versions.
Are there people who work the Exchange? Yes. But prices are prices still, and if something got expensive, there's probably a reason why, irregardless. I'm not an 'Exchange Baron', I consider it WAY too boring to be worthwhile, and hearing all these stories of people making it 'big' just make me roll my eyes, because of course they aren't gonna share their wealth-making with me lest I take away their profit or something.
Again, it is that case of availability. Things like Technicians are available to anyone, but AP DOFFs (which are also from an old DOFF pack from months ago as well), not so much.
Now, against all pragmatic logical discourse, it's still the same situation backed by gum and paperclips and when they release a powerhouse like the Scimi, this is what we get; a ship with a tactical backbone that can make slingshots feel like nukes.
Honestly the best way to wipe the sweat off our brow, relinquish the burdens of dealing with the Scimi's perverse advantage with beams is to demand a real fix for beams. There's no logical reason why a relatively unremarkable weapon can be made into an end-all be-all weapon of choice.
Back in the day everybody wanted to use beams but wouldn't use them because they were terrible. Nobody could agree on what the proper fix was. In fact the crux of the argument fell into the trenches of flame wars mostly between players.
Might have been easier if they just enabled polls on these forums so devs could see what the most popular fix for beams would/should have been. I highly doubt everybody would have voted for this cracker jack solution.
I think you do have a point Mimey, I myself got a blue rsp doff for all my characters for peanuts because an extra few seconds meant very little to me compared to the price.
Still this all comes back to and everything that is imba or people have problems with also comes back to the tactical stuff being better than everything else.
To clarify. The purpose of everything in this game is to blow up something. From PvE to PvP, everything is about blowing up the enemy. Unfortunately tactical captains receive the biggest straight and multiplicative damage boost and the same with tactical abilities.
Now that wouldn't be so much of a problem if ships were more equal and if damage had a drop off in effectiveness...but it doesn't. This is why the PvE scimitars are wrecking and causing so much of a stir in PvP and specifically the PvP channels. I'm not going to pretend everyone is being sporting about it, lots of bad sportsmanship across all sides. However it does highlight the issue I have been saying for months.
Having all damage and all damage boosts being in the hands of one ability section (tactical abilities) isn't good. I mean people aren't using A2B to turn the game on its head with science abilities and very few people bother with the engineering ones outside of emergency power abilities and DEM. In fact Mal has the current highest recorded dps in the game and he isn't even running A2B, he just knows that fast cycling of tactical buffs and activating the right captain buffs at the right time makes your dps explode.
Ok there's a bit more to it than that and it does take a lot of practise and experimenting with position, formation and team dynamics but yeah, highest dps in the game isn't even on A2B. Nerfing A2B will only harm the lower levels of ships,, as woodwhitty said.
Once again, this is not directed at you Mimey outside of the first 3 sentences.
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.