Currently, the science kits with the extra powers are just about perfect (Romulan Xenobiologist, and the 2 new Physicist and Medic kits). I wouldn't want to mess with the cooldowns on medic at all, and I'm always wishing my Physicist kit would come off of cooldown sooner. Xenobiologist is a great mix of healing and control. I wouldn't want those 3 to change one bit. I would consider all 3 examples of getting it right.
Before the Romulan Xenobiologist kit, I would have replaced the original Xenobiologist with the Analylist kit. It was the addition of the tachyon burst that swayed me. Before that I ran with Analyist.
Currently, the analyst and the bio-research kit aren't really bad, just fully eclipsed by the xenobiologist kit.
That leaves the black sheep of the bunch, the Physician kit. It has potential as a close combat, melee weapon, take some hits and brawl it up kit, but Dylovene has a very prohibitive cooldown. It can't fullfill the roll of a close combat melee kit if you can only burst that damage up 1/3 of the time. If the cooldown was reduced to 1 minute, so that you could have it up 1/2 of the time, it would be a much more attractive option as a heals/melee damage kit.
I find science kits across the board to be in good shape. If Dylovene had a reduced cooldown, and we were to wait for mudflation to grant us upgraded Analyst and Bio-Research kits, I'd be perfectly happy with all the kits. If I were to get some magic holiday wish, Analyst and Bio-Research would be totally re-worked into 2 entirely different ways to play rather then 2 different extra takes on Xenobiologist, but I'm not payed to figure that part out, surprise me hehe.
Edit: Personally, I have naughty dreams of an elite physician kit with an added Sonic Pulse and a 1 minute cooldown Dylovene, me charging down hordes of mobs screaming "For Pony!" and hacking them to death with my Tholian sword...
I once again match my character. Behold the power of PINK!
Fleet Admiral Space Orphidian Possiblities Wizard
Eng:
-Combat Supply bring to 33% uptime, make it actually useful. 60 sec CD or so.
-Transphasic Bomb - Closer to 45-60 sec CD, but really impactful on use and much easier to use.
-Quantum Mortar Fabrication - Bring to 33% uptime, but really good while it's out. Make it better at actually hitting NPCs, make hits deal more damage.
-Medical Generator - Again, reduce the uptime but make it really significant when it's there
Add the shield generator to that list and I'll be happy
Currently, the analyst and the bio-research kit aren't really bad, just fully eclipsed by the xenobiologist kit.
Analyst is a great kit for 3 of it's 4 abilities. Anestezine Gas Grenade needs to have a shorter cooldown or the gas field needs to apply the effect for the full listed 15 seconds. When Cryptic goes to make an Analyst Mk XII, I am hoping they go for a Tachyon Harmonics IV and a Nanite Health Monitor II, it would complete the perfect balanced science kit.
-Transphasic Bomb - Closer to 45-60 sec CD, but really impactful on use and much easier to use.
Much easier, does that mean you intent to bring proximity auto-explode back?
I remember we had those bombs auto-detonate on proximity of a player, that however was causing em to have zero cooldown and got changed back to manual clicking a while later.
Imo they are one of the more powerful engineer abilities atm, all good engineers make heavy use of bombs, i've seen em one-shot people in pvp occasionally and they also have a cooldown of zero if it gets killed or times out, which means they can be keept up nonstop atm.
So when you say easier.. is the plan to bring proximity attacks back but also change the uptime? If so, are you also planing to change the 0 cooldown when they timeout/explode?
-Quantum Mortar Fabrication - Bring to 33% uptime, but really good while it's out. Make it better at actually hitting NPCs, make hits deal more damage.
They are already now the dominating spam factor in almost every pvp game and that trend will rather increase since the spire kit is the best kit of all, featuring mortar+mines and all the cc power (wm/fuse).
I've already seen pvp games were i had like 20 blue circles follow me nonstop.. we need that death bug with em fixed and i strongly suggest against buffing em regarding pvp, rather the opposite actually lol.
-Medical Generator - Again, reduce the uptime but make it really significant when it's there
So after this significant upgrade you mine a door and put 1-2 medical gen's behind a door at an angle where the opponents can't shot it, out of reach of nades what will be the counter?
I'd be worried with a significant buff there that we will see even more mexican-standoff situations were both teams just sit in some other room waiting for the others to make the move, cause theres no good way to overcome the bunkering anymore - which is already now happening sometimes.
If you buff toys for bunkering you would also need to invent some toys to counter it.
Engineer:
Transporter tech
- site to site tag: set a transport enhancer at a location . fire a tag on a friendly or unfriendly target, transporting them to the enhancer location. this can be used as a rescue or to temporarily remove a pesky enemy
- transport inversion: Swaps your location with a selected target
- pattern reversion: partially dematerialises target and rematerializes back to last known health status, thus restoring health.
-Pattern stasis: temporarily freezes target in a partial dematerialized state
shield specialist
- forcefield chamber: encases target in a temporary forcefield cylinder
- refractive forcefield: flat forcefield wall that absorbs physical damage & reflects energy fire
- personal shield booster: fires energy at a friendly target, boosting shields back to full. any target with full shields will be given a reward of (undetermined) second/minute
immunity
-
Science
medical tech
- triox dart: fires at friendly target. decreases damage from toxic compounds (inhaled?) Boosts mucular function, strength boost
- metaphasic dart: fires a dart at friendly target that allows energy damage increases health
- medicinal dart: fires a dart at a friendly target that boosts health over time
Genetacist:
Telepathic suppression: some method to suppress or resist telepathic attacks
Confusion serum: fires dart at enemy non mechanical attack pet, turning the pet on them for a time
Tactical
Explosives expert
Remote concusive charge: place a small mine at a target location to be detonated remotely. ..great for surprise attaacks and protecting choke points (Careful! Weapons can target and detonate mines) use with forcefield chamber for a deadly effect
Photon grenade: sets off a photon. blast that knocks back enemy groups and blinds them, increasing their miss chance to 75 percent. disables mechanical pets and not as effective on telepaths
plasma grenade: area damage blast with knockback. armored mechanisms have. higher resistance, so use photon grenade for more effect.
site to site tag: set a transport enhancer at a location. fire a tag on a friendly or unfriendly target, transporting them to the enhancer location. this can be used as a rescue or to temporarily remove a pesky enemy
transport inversion: Swaps your location with a selected target
pattern reversion: partially dematerialises target and rematerializes back to last known health status, thus restoring health.
Pattern stasis: temporarily freezes target in a partial dematerialized state
forcefield chamber: encases target in a temporary forcefield cylinder
refractive forcefield: flat forcefield wall that absorbs physical damage & reflects energy fire
personal shield booster: fires energy at a friendly target, boosting shields back to full. any target with full shields will be given a reward of (undetermined) second/minute
immunity
The first three ideas do not exist ingame, nor would we need them to do so. I could see it as a cheap tactic to teleport players on the other team into your team's minefields and all sorts of other nasty things. The fourth entry already exists in a sense, it's called stasis field. The fifth idea, Forcefield chamber, already exists as Forcefield dome. The sixth idea is basically cover shield, but without the damage reflection (perhaps as a duty officer). The seventh exists as Shield Recharge, but without your "immunity" idea.
triox dart: fires at friendly target. decreases damage from toxic compounds (inhaled?) Boosts mucular function, strength boost
metaphasic dart: fires a dart at friendly target that allows energy damage increases health
medicinal dart: fires a dart at a friendly target that boosts health over time
Telepathic suppression: some method to suppress or resist telepathic attacks
Confusion serum: fires dart at enemy non mechanical attack pet, turning the pet on them for a time
The first two exists as Hypospray Dylovene and Hypospray Melorozine. The third is called Biofilter sweep and the fourth is called Neural Neutralizer...if you have the Research Lab Scientist slotted.
Not in PvP, but they are a bit lackluster in PvE due to being kind of bad at actually hitting things. More damage is not the solution - you can ignore that part of the previous post, I'm just spitballing here, some mistakes will likely be made in this thinking-out-loud. Keep in mind, I also don't really want them to be out all the time - I'm thinking of them as the "DPS Cooldown" of the Fabrication-type Kit player, where their turrets are their bread-and-butter, and they bring out the Mortar for the big bad.
One cool thing would be to add a turret kit (to the omega store) that the turrets can remodulate themselves without shooting 2 small damage hits and then adapted until you come of cd. Otherwise its just going to be a mines, mortar, bomb spam which after awhile isn't much of any fun.
I would also like to see modular kits, since it would be nice to be able to setup the kit to fit your play style.
Sorry for the length of the post got a bit carried away.
I don't cover many of the Doff's since it would increase the length even more and I don't remember all of them also some of my info might be inaccurate since my memory isn't great and I used the wiki for information on ability's I don't remember well.
Other than that here's the suggestions :
Engineer :
Combat Supply - Yeah... A good improvement would be have it provide cooldown reduction for everyone in the area around it.
Chroniton Mine Barrier - Increased explosion radius or mobility would be rather nice they seem to just go to waste most of the time especially in the hands of BoFFs. The ability to deploy them at range would also fix this.
Quick Fix - Isn't that bad cooldown seems a bit long might be better as a HoT or something, would be nice if it would function similar to Nanite health monitor as well auto targeting and healing any nearby mechanical target in need and providing a constant re-modulation effect for anyone in range.
Shield Recharge - Seems fine as it is
Weapons Malfunction - It would be nice if it actually caused the opponents weapons to malfunction shooting friendly's or exploding. Cooldown seems kinda long at the moment even for what it does and there's plenty of things you really don't want to melee you if it was made to chain without the use of the doff or affect a area might work tho.
Turret Fabrication - The time it takes to setup, low survivability, lack of mobility and damage (aside from romulan mk iv) seems to kind of detract from them, The ability to set them up at a targeted location would add quite a bit to them as would improving there survivability. Unique appearance based on mark and faction would also be nice.
Transphasic Bomb - It would be nice if it had a proximity fuse and or could be tossed to a target location would need a higher cooldown tho I would imagine in that case.
Quantum Mortar Fabrication - Aside from the ability to actually lead targets its pretty decent.
Seeker Drone Fabrication - It is ok however it can also get you into some serious trouble would be nice if it was set to stay within a shorter range, It would be nice if all versions had shields and gained improved ai / ability's each tier ie. MK I - has the basic rapid burst attack & sniper bolt attack, MK II - Gaines target optics I, MK III - Would gain either Ambush or Stealth Module and actually attempt to flank targets. Faction and tier specific art would be great as well.
Support Drone Fabrication - Drop the weapon have all tiers shielded and equipped with shield recharge, quick fix & equipment diagnostics with ability levels matching the drones tier. Faction and tier based art would be nice as well.
Force Field Dome - Fine the way it is.
Fuse Armor - Haven't found myself using it much so not really sure, would be incredibly amusing tho if it affected a group of enemies and kinda stuck them together and shocked em.
Medical & Shield Generator Fabrication - Seem pretty decent as they are I tend to use em mobility could be improved possibly by making them a type of drone that would follow a target they would need some balancing in that form tho adding a new version that was a drone from would probably work better and allow people to choose.
Equipment Diagnostics - It's kind of underwhelming having it remodulate weapons and provide a damage buff would help a great deal.
Cover Shield - Honestly I love and hate this ability you can block paths with it and it takes some pretty decent damage on the flip side you and your bridge officers can and will get stuck on it and its a pain to do anything about and its use if pretty situational. I would suggest making it a type of drone this drone would be untargetable but would project a moving field around the target essentially making it immune / blocking flanking shots against it until the shield had absorbed the pre-determined amount of damage or its lowered duration run its course.
Orbital Strike - Seems fine as it is the new trait solves any issues I previously had with it would be nicer if it just gave you a option to use orbital devastation instead of taking up a trait spot tho.
Reroute Power to Shields - Pretty good the activation time is a bit long tho.
Engineering Proficiency - Pretty decent making it a large aoe pulsing buff similar to overwatch would be nice tho.
New Ability's -
Site to Site Transport : It would be great if we could do a site to site transport behind a target (facing its back) and it would have a chance to temporarily stun surrounding targets (very shortly).
Explosive Drones : It would also be nice to have the ability to launch some small explosive drones which would seek and destroy targets.
Science :
Exothermic Induction Field - Seems pretty decent giving it a chance to ignite targets with a dot and possibly freak out would be amusing.
Hyperonic Radiation - Giving this a chance to cause targets to be confused every tic would be interesting.
Anesthizine Gas - A increase in the area of effect would be nice.
Electro-Gravitic Field - Seems ok for what it does, It would be nice if the Doff for this converted it to a always create the anomaly and draw targets towards it.
Sonic Pulse - It would be nice if the area of effect was increased as well as the knockback an additional chance to confuse or disable for a short time would be interesting as well.
Stasis Field - Having this make the target untargetable for the duration and apply resistance to it upon expiry would improve it a great deal.
Tachyon Harmonic - Seems fine the way it is giving it a chance to resonate off affected targets and possibly hit em again with a pbaoe shield drain and chance at knockdown could be cool too.
Medical Tricorder - Its pretty good at what it does adding a small heal over time for a amount based on how much the original healed would be a nice touch.
Nanite Health Monitor - Seems good the way it is once again adding a small HoT in addition to the main heal would be nice.
Triage - Seems pretty decent the resistance buff could be increased a bit. Giving it a low chance to revive would be great as well.
Vascular Regenerator - Its fairly decent at the moment however dropping it down to be available starting at Ensign, Lt. & Lt. Commander would be great.
Biofilter Sweep - Seems pretty good as it is.
Hypospray - Dylovene & Melorazine - Cooldown seems a bit long on it its effect durations could use a increase or cooldown reduced either would work.
Dampening Field - Seems pretty decent how it is I would like to see the animation altered to be more inline with the space version tho and the area of effect increased / latched on and mobile to the target.
Nanoprobe Infestation - Seems pretty decent as is. Having the nanoprobes jump back to friendly's and give a small shield heal might be intresting too.
Neural Neutralizer - Larger AoE would be nice.
Scientific Aptitude - As with the others increased duration and making it a large aoe pulse like overwatch would be pleasant.
New Abilitys -
Distortion field : Pretty much a pbaoe mobile stealth module which would lower the range at which npc aggro you and provide a energy damage resistance while active (on account of them essentially missing you)
Energy absorption : Would essentially create a anomaly which would absorb all energy attacks friendly or not until it hit a maximum at which point it would explode with a area and damage based off how much it absorbed as well as a knockback. (the detonation wouldn't effect friendly's)
Tactical :
Lunge - Is pretty good how it is at the moment however increasing movement speed while using it and adding a dodge buff would be amazing.
Sweeping Strikes - It's kind of iffy at the moment the activation time is kind of slow so its not uncommon to miss the target the knockback is also a bit detrimental. A large improvement would be to speed it up and make it a combo like attack where the first strike is a pbaoe knockback sweep, 2nd a lunge forward and strike (similar to how swords close in on target), 3rd would be increased damage with chance to exploit. The knockback would only be on the first attack, chance to expose on the first two.
Plasma Grenade - Adding a chance for targets affected to freak out (do nothing, flee or grab someone else spreading the DoT would be pretty nice). Larger AoE would be nice as well.
Photon Grenade - Is pretty decent how it is at the moment.
Smoke Grenade - Seem decent how it is at the moment adding a small damage & resistance buff for allies and damage debuff for enemies would improve it even more.
Stun Grenade - Seem ok adding a chance to confuse targets upon expiration would be nice.
Grenades in General - It would be nice if they had a proximity fuse as well so while in transit they would detonate a few moments after detecting a nearby target this would be great when the targets all decide to charge at you and out of its targeted area letting you actually target a area outside of shooter mode would help with this as well. It would also be nice if grenades could form combo's Ie. a plasma grenade is thrown into a smoke grenades aoe it causes a large explosion and fire patch, photon grenade at stunned opponents would be a short duration confuse, photon into plasma applies the plasma DoT to all enemies in a large radius, Stun into smoke confuse enemies inside for a short duration. There are lots of cool things that could be done with it would add plenty of versatility and amusement.
Draw Fire - It's not to bad as is adding a small stacking heal over time effect triggered by incoming fire and a small damage resistance debuff to enemies would improve it a great deal tho.
Rally Cry - Is fairly decent as is
Ambush - Its rather situational increasing its duration to 60 sec (still only affecting one shot) with a shared cooldown of 30 sec would make it much more useful and more versatile. Causing the attack to be a exploit regardless of the attack would be nice as well.
Stealth Module - Is pretty decent as is it would be nice if a bonus was added causing any melee attack from it to cause you to charge forward from a distance and attack before being detected. Having your first attack from it have a chance to expose would be nice as wel.
Battle Strategies - For what it does the cooldown seems kinda long lowering it or increasing the duration would be a marked improvement. Having it remodulate weapons would be nice as well.
Motion Accelerator - Its not too bad at the moment adding a dodge buff would be nice tho.
Overwatch - Is pretty nice how it is having it just affect all allies in a larger radius and be non-stacking would be nice as well tho.
Suppressing Fire - It's not to horrible but it is highly dependent on weapon type. A nice improvement would be to cause it to fire off a pbaoe off the target which would spread its affect in a radius around it thereby allowing you to use it effectively with non aoe weapons.
Target Optics - Its decent as is starting at Ensign would be nice tho as would causing it to have a chance to knockdown and remove the stealth / cloak effect from any targets caught in it.
Fire on my Mark - Its pretty nice due to its situational nature tho a longer cooldown and duration would be nice. Adding a chance for attacks against the target to expose would be pleasant as well.
Security Escort - They seem to die far to easily it would be nice if they had a survivability buff. Adding some more faction based randomness to who and what appears and the abilities they use would be nice as well. Being able to have a set team wearing what you want would also be a nice option.
Tactical Initiative - Seems fine only thing that I can see improving it would be making it a passive ability that gave a chance to reduce cooldowns however that's just to free up a button no other reason really.
Strike Team - Pretty decent increased duration and cooldown as well as making it a pulsing aoe buff similar to overwatch with a larger radius would be nice tho.
New Ability's -
Combat stimulant : Basically would give you a heal over time with dot removal.
Refractive shield modulation : temporarily reflect energy damage back to target, melee strikes against you knock the attacker back and stun, kinetic damage sends out a pbaoe shockwave with a chance of knocking nearby targets down radius is increased dependent on the damage of the attack.
Additional Improvements :
Doff's - I would really like to see any of the doffs that have a chance to modify ability's instead 100% modify them. This could be balanced by essentially having them change it to a new ability and decrease effects if needed this would add a great deal of customization and tweak-ability to the ability system.
Traits - That modify ability's ie. orbital devastation would be much nicer if instead you were just granted a second ability different than the first you could choose to use either they would share a cooldown and it wouldn't take up a trait slot.
Bridge Officers - Give them the ability to learn up to MK - III for instance let Science captains train officers in Nanite Health Monitor III same with other professions and similar skills. Why you ask ? simple it would give a good reason to actually train the requisite skills high enough to provide the said skills training. The captain training system could be modified in order to create / craft a trade-able and sell-able data pad containing the knowledge required for the said skill this Data pad would go to your stations tab and when commissioned / activated would give the typical train up window and options.
Thank you for taking the time to read through and I hope you find something you like or it spurs further ideas for improvement.
That's brilliant actually. Deploying a portable shoulder mounted auto-turret or mortar. The generators could be turned into healing auras, similar to cruiser commands in space, but with limited durations. That would make for some interesting gameplay. Forcefield dome could receive similar changes, allowing the dome to move with the Engineer.
I'm glad an avid ground PvPer weighed in on the idea.
I didn't actually think it out so far as to have quasi-auras on the ground, that does sound really cool actually.
So after this significant upgrade you mine a door and put 1-2 medical gen's behind a door at an angle where the opponents can't shot it, out of reach of nades what will be the counter?
I'd be worried with a significant buff there that we will see even more mexican-standoff situations were both teams just sit in some other room waiting for the others to make the move, cause theres no good way to overcome the bunkering anymore - which is already now happening sometimes.
If you buff toys for bunkering you would also need to invent some toys to counter it.
Here's some crazy spit-balling, what if the mortars and turrets (or perhaps a variant to keep current functionality untouched) were actually part of the Engineers combat suit - but reduced their speed?
The Engineer would turn into a heavy unit (like the big voth suits), but they would be mobile and could bring those powers with them - perhaps at a range, or damage loss compared to stationary pets.
Just some left field stuff.
The fabrication engineer or bunker engineer would effectively have a deployed shoulder mounted turret or mortar launcher set on auto-fire. The shield and medical generators could become mobile area of effect healing auras with the engineer as the epicenter. Forcefield dome could also receive the same treatment as Voth mechs, with the field moving with the engineer. Naturally the uptime and cooldowns would need to be fine tuned, but it would be an interesting mechanic.
I'm afraid I'll have to chime in with the "modular kit" notion as well. There's powers that might be interesting to try, but are on a kit I'd otherwise would not want to use. That being said, I'm not sure it's for the best to throw it completely open either. Maybe a lvl 50 kit has three powers fixed, but the fourth slot (and fifth for the fleet kits) are customizable?
For Combat Supply, the buff icons are nice, but I think you can go a bit further for variety. In addition to the buff icons, you could have it toss out health and shield charges (pick up for an insta-heal), and maybe give it a small chance per tick of dropping a mortar, turret, drone, or generator.
I generally find the Medic Kit to be great and would prefer everything there be largely left alone.
Kits in general have the problem of being restrictive. They are like BOFFs for your ship but unlike those you cannot so precisely pick every power in them as they are all slotted together. For instance I would LOVE to be able to use Forcefield Dome or Shield Generator but they are in a kit with other abilities that are not as useful as the Frabrication Specialist or Enemy Nuetralization.
The Transphasic Bomb is also far too slow to be placed... I would love to use it more but it is just unfeesable to have to wait to place it and then detonate it. I could achieve faster kills just shooting in that time.
I think everything in the Physicist kit is pretty good except that one hold ability... Holds stop working when you shoot the target... If you are not shooting the target then you are wasting time. So it is pointless to ever really use it when you could be killing them instead.
Other than that none of the Science kit powers are really worth caring about. They are far too situational and are paired together for whole kits that are just junk.
Combat Supply is only RARELY useful... It just does not provide anything worthwhile... Free hypos and stuff is ok but I can buy the real deal easily enough. If I pick up these things I have to go through the bother of slotting them, then finding their button from the P menu and slotting that... It is a lot of hassle for something I will probably never even use. It may be worthwhile if the consumables were really special and powerful compared to normal and would auto-slot themselves on my action bar without needing me to put them in my device slots.
I like to use Overwatch and Rally Cry but unfortunately the lack of Suppressive Fire makes this kit in general a bit harder to justify in most cases.
Also Draw Fire is kind of silly... It makes sense a bit for NPC's but a tactical toon has the least survivability of any ground toon so why should they be tanking? The Engineer can bunker themselves and all but NEEDS to be able to draw enemies to them while the Science Captain can heal themselves like no one else but the Tactical either has to kill the enemy or be dead with no recourse other than a hypo once in a blue moon.
In general I would rather that kit power buffs like Overwatch, Suppressive Fire, and so on just WORK instead of having to be hit again and again. So lengthening their cooldown is fine if you also lengthen how long they stay active. One of my biggest issues is having to always recast these powers when for the vast majority of enemies I would be best off just plugging away with normal shots and forgetting that I even HAVE a kit. It is not like anything is general SO hard to kill that you NEED kits. Only Bosses and even then it is mostly heals.
Kind like the pack engineer carrying mortars around. It's exactly what the Dinos do already. They need a damage reduction though if the spam levels aren't going to be addressed. It just isn't fun to have to get 30,40,50m away before blue circle after blue circle stops showing up under you.
Now, I'm not as knowledgeable as some of those who have posted in here, but I know 'enough' I feel to get by on the ground in PvE and PvP. Now, engineers are mostly what I know on the ground (but I have ground toons for all three classes, so I know at least something about all of them), so I will probably be focused on engies though.
Anyways, just want to say, I'd have no qualms about engineers being made into a living fortress if changes were made to those kit powers.
However, I will say that I agree with some of the others in that, adding more long CDs isn't what ground combat always needs. I'm not saying there should be none, just that putting in more isn't gonna help.
I'd like to propose a different idea for some kit powers:
Make the skill tree affect them more.
Unlike space, there are fewer skills, fewer skill points, etc to work with. So you have to basically still choose to spec into one or two kits. And the skill points invested don't always feel very worthwhile enough for it. Someone with more knowledge will probably prove me wrong, but...if I spec into Generators for example, it sure as heck don't feel like my generators are really actually getting that much more out of it. Even adding in the engy ground trait, and my stuff still dies really quickly.
Some skills are cheap, like Demolitions. Not much points needed, and the effects are useful enough to be worth doing, which is why so many spec into it and use the Enemy Neut. kit. Compare that to say Equipment Technician, which most of it's skills are much more expensive to spec into overall. Modification Specialist is not a cheap skill.
The other thing from what I can tell is that the thread is kind of looking at kit power in static, as in, without DOFFs. Again, going on Equipment Technician, every power in that kit has a DOFF for it.
Shield Recharge has those Jem'hader Diagnostic Engineers who can basically give 'perfect' shields for a few moments. Equipment Technician has the 'diamond in the rough' DOFF of Diagnostic Engineers as well, which can really boost weapons damage if they proc. Weapons malfunction has the 'spread' DOFF to let it possibly affect other people around it, while Fuse Armor has the 'chance to double damage'.
Just both things to consider IMO.
My general thought about powers is that they should generally be divided into 3 rough categories:
1. Short but sweet. Basically a power that has a fairly quick effect, and a short to medium CD. Examples include Chroniton mines, all sci and engy heals, Ambush, and so on.
2. Medium (couldn't think of something more clever). This essentially is more longer lasting effects, some of which can be given to others, or in other words, most of the buff and debuff abilities. Examples being: Battle Strategies, Equipment Diagnostics, Hypospray abilities, Weapons malfunction, Stun Grenade, etc.
3. Long-lasting. Basically something that can stay out for quite awhile. Stuff like generators, turrets, drones, mortars, and so on. These I'd argue should have the longest CDs, because they are meant to stay out.
Exceptions to every rule of course. Like I said, rough categories. These aren't at all supposed to be exact guidelines. For example, Ambush has a fairly long CD already, shortening that would be...*shudder*
Point of them is that if something is quicker in what it does, it's CD should generally reflect that. It shouldn't be completely spammed though either. Especially if you take into consideration Tactical Initiative (highly important IMO).
The medium ones mostly apply to the various buffs and debuffs. If someone specs into them, they should be worth actually using with a spec. So somewhat medium-long CDs (thinking maybe 45 seconds at most for a good portion of these skills), but nothing insane.
The long-term abilities, mostly from engineers should be tough enough to say 'ok, I just used this, now I know I have to make sure not to waste it', but not be totally invulnerable. Honestly, I have a proposal: Make player-spawned drones/turrets/etc take less damage from NPCs only, because most NPCs tend to aggro something fierce to anything like that, and usually kill it very quickly. Try a ground STF with Bunker Fab, tell me how long your turrets and such last against the Borg.
Anyways...onto some powers and kits (I will only mention ones I feel need some kind of work):
Tac:
Grenade Satchel: Weakest link of all tac kits. Besides only being grenade powers, they all share a CD which makes the whole thing feel a bit meh, since all you are getting is just grenades, nothing more to it than that.
Sci:
Honestly, to me, some issues with some sci skills fall more under the 'not worthwhile enough to spec into' category. They don't give enough of a bonus when you spec em for the desire to actually use them some times. Now, the two Hypospray abilities however do need some work. Sure you can use em on other people, and even have a DOFF to possibly let your whole team get them, but they just don't feel good enough.
Eng:
Like I said, eng is what I know the best on the ground.
Combat Supply: I REALLY love the idea that was tossed out about making this a deployable version of those ground buff things you can get from the Battlezone. That'd be great. Though one thing: Make the buffs unusable by the other team in PvP. So to avoid people being able to steal the buffs from you. This does lead me to the next thing:
Support Technician: The above change would make this kit REALLY good IMO outside of the Shield Generator part. Combat Supply would be giving buffs, while the engineer could also add extra buffs in the form of Quick Fix and Equipment Diagnostics.
Quick Fix: If memory serves, it has kind of a long CD, and the amount it gave never felt very worthwhile though. Even specced into it, it feels a bit flat. Sure having a Borg remodulation from it is a nice bonus, but there's a lot more enemies than just Borg nowadays.
Equipment Diagnostics: The buffs here are nice as well, but same with the above. It also has a rather long CD at 90 seconds, so you aren't gonna get terribly much use out of the semi-small buffs it has. Honestly, Diagnostic Engineers is what makes this shine more than anything. Being able to really buff up your damage on an engineer with them is awesome, which is why if any change is made to this skill, mostly in it's CD, you would have to consider those DOFFs.
Seeker Drones: Aside from feeling like they die early and often, I think Seekers are kinda useful. The biggest qualm besides being squishy is that I can only ever have one. Engies have DOFFs for damn nearly all their other stuff to make more of it: Turrets, mortars, generators, and even Support Drones, but not the Seekers. My only real suggestion is just let the DOFF affect Seekers and Support Drones (or make a new one that isn't a Fabrication Engineer to let us have 3 and 3 by using 2 different DOFFs).
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
I've been a hard core player of sto for over 3 years. Just one of my toons has logged 136 days. That's the hours added up. I have 14 toons at the moment. So you can see when I say over 3 years its not idle time. You really need to leave the kits alone and do not I say again do not add cool down time to the kits. You guys change the color and look out of why? To get people to like the game more or make it look cooler. This is the star trek legacy not some nambe pambe game. I understand changing with the times but not the constance nurfing. You want to make a difference, make 2 zones. One for Pve players and one for PVP players so when they wine you can nerf and make it fare for them to help control there gaming rage. It gets so upsetting having the pve gaming altered just cause of there complaining and your lack of making 2 zones. So what happens...........hmmmmm....the pve community takes the hit. Over and over and over. And yes, I know there are awesome minded pvp players out there who don't get a huge group of there players to spam the hell out of you so you acked and hush them by giving in. So to put in a recap. Don't touch the kits please. And please don't and I mean please don't add cool down times to the kits. You've done that enough to the pve community as it is. This is just a gate way to nurf the engineering kit........ This is a tough love Thread, not a ***** letter.
Feel free to contact me directly for more talks. You have all my info.
Tk
I do like the medic kit and the enemy neutralization one but none has the combo of skills i really want like say mines phaser turrets and force field dome on an engi kit.
I dislike all tac kits cause it always takes too long to buff up and lot of the times the fight is half over or i am half dead when i finished buffing up and i'm quite fast hitting the keys its just activation/anination time added up.
I usually dont switch them up cause most kits are bad or no fun to me i'm happy i found the ones i have to be fun most of the time. Demolitions kit is also nice but mortars take to long to fire to do comparable dmg to say mines. Those are great cause you just click and there they are instead of taking forever do beam in a quantum mortar.
The fabrications have too little hp all around and usually get destroyed quite fast. Dont even try them against the vrex while my ferengi eng enemy neutralization has no problem taking on the vrex himself.
The shield/hp heal turrets are worst of all cause they have low hp and seemingly high aggeo potential and even with the matching doff i rarely get both.
The turret is too weak alone but very cool once the doff kicks in and you get three. I love the animation / view of loads of turrets from me and my boffs firing at a target once it comes into range.
Orbital strike with the new trait is fine now but i hate giving away one of my trait slots just to make one single power more usable maybe that should be looked at to include other mods to other skills not just the orb strike otherwise i know there will be coming a trait thats overall more important and the new strike trait will go out the window which will be very sad but nonetheless i know its coming fast with every lockbox now it seems.
Btw you guys know that with all the traits we got noone will really care for new ones at some point when we still got only 9 slots which are already quite crowded. You know there should always be a nice relation between number of choises i can make and how many choises there are. I basically had to make a ground eng and and space eng which is kind of sad but thats what we are forced to do with skilld and traits the way they are.
I have little to say on any specific kit powers as i habe rarely used any outside my currently used kits cause as you yourself admitted they are bad. But when you change them pls change all related doffs as well cause i really hate chance based doffs for anything. They are always worse then doffs that just always work. It males you feel bad about your kit if they keep not procing which happens a lot of times like i have a doff slotted for chance for more drones but its not working i guess i never saw any. And the turret/mortar doffs proc too little.
I do hope you realize people will absolute hate it because thats very VIDEO GAMISH and true I dont use Combat supply now but if I get spewing over VIDEO GAME ORBS then I am really never EVER going to use them and honestly, I would even take the leaver penalty if I see such a thing.
Simply put, Combat Supply is a relative worthless ability and nothing is really going to change that because people dont really use consumables anyway, giving it a area buff would be weird as well since we have those and that includes Tactical Initiative, if you want shorter CO get a Tac with it.
And leave the Transpathic Bombs alone, they work FINE, I dont want to get stuck with a long cooldown that makes the worthless in exchange for a higher damage because I use them to clear mobs along with mines, they are remote activated so I get things within a kill zone and if you want to buff them, make them have higher shield penetration, not raise the CO TWICE as long for more damage because 858 damage should kill most trash mobs and its a drop in the ocean of the HP bloat bossed, this is not a improvement its a HUGE nerf to them by messing around with their cooldowns, makes them W-O-R-T-H-L-E-S-S on prolong combat (meaning Cure Ground) because a freaking Borg Tactical can kill us WELL under one minute .
And no freaking explode on proximity, I dont want for them to go off because a squirrel got too close and if you want another example, I dont want them to go off and kill the first of the wave and leave the other 4 without being hurt.
Dear Lord, is this "Engs are OP in the ground and how to nerf them?" because yes, some abilities are relative useless but trying to fix what is not broken so its now worthless thats not a fix.
In regards to the not wanting a proximity fuse simply having it give 2 ability's would be a feasible solution its something that would be good for a large number of skills really.
You could choose what you want setup a remote or a proximity depending on the situation and what you want. Its not like it would be Op or anything since the cooldown would be the same regardless and its not like you could get two of em out.
Heck it would be interesting if you could get a option to modify the charge on em as well to do plasma or cryo it could be a really interesting and versatile skill but the whole 1 kit, 1 slot, 1 static ability thing really needs a rework it would be more work on the dev's side but it would add a great deal to the game if more skills gave you access to more tactical options.
Also a decent proximity fuse would detonate the device not when it was first sensed and in range but upon sensing the target around 2-3 seconds which would allow its movement speed and its buddies to bring themselves all into the kill zone, the sensor mechanic could also be set to require 3 or more targets to be within range to auto-detonate otherwise it would go off whenever remotely triggered.
Long animations that root the player in place are the biggest issue for Engineers. Transphasic bomb is great against Borg, but it sucks against anything that can move. Fabrications also have the same issue, little to no damage resistances combined with a few that don't even have shields mean that you can lose a fab before the animation is even done, not to mention you can then get knocked back for your trouble. Hell, a single grenade can take out ALL of your fabrications at once
Why not turn fabrications into pets? with a mobile hover mode & an active (grounded) mode. The buffs would be smaller & personal in mobile mode, while deployed mode would be similar to what we have. I imagine that due to space constraints the fabrications would need to be merged. A shield/medical pet & a mortar/turret pet, both with shields, a little bit of energy resistance, and a decent amount of kinetic/physical. Instead of rooting the player during call in you could disable the players weapons until the animation finishes & if you throw in quick fix on top of all that and give it a 30 second PBAOE mechanical S&H HOT+Res I think you would have a really interesting kit.
We would no longer need to call in new fabrications every time we move to a new group of mobs. Additionally, the changes to quick fix would give them a little more staying power, and if you make them invulnerable during beam in that would go a long way to fixing the current issues. Of course, you would have to change almost all the current assets to do that, and maybe even add new code... so the chances are slim, but there's nothing stooping you from making changes to quick fix, adding call in invulnerability, shields & the animation changes.
I'm currently taking a look at a number of Kit Powers that are largely ignored, and coming up with tweaks to them to make them more usable and more interesting.
I already gave feedback on Engineering abilities way back when. I'll copy that into here for discussion.
Who knows, maybe somebody actually reads these things? These are my thoughts on the engineer's kit abilities, some of which are just plain lacking and lead to basically only two of the kits being used by most engineers I have seen.
First, the ones that work fine and so will not be discussed further:
Chroniton mine barrier
Fuse armor
Medical generator
Quantum mortar
Seeker drone
Transphasic bomb
Weapon malfunction
Everything else has issues that make them annoying or useless:
1.) Combat supply.
A nice premise, but the mechanics are a serious pain in the antennae. You can't equip things during battle, which means you can't equip your combat supplies when you pick them up nor can you change to normal supplies when you run out of the ones combat supply gave you. There's also some bugs with the way this ability works if you have SOME empty device slots but not enough to pick up all the combat supplies. Finally there's the pure inelegance of having to shuffle around in your inventory every time you use this.
Recommendation: Total overhaul. Instead of giving players disposable consumables that are carried away and require inventory shenanigans, make it so that anybody standing near a combat supply crate gets a small extension on their tray with the options to use a combat supply device, just like the small tray extension given by equipping an environmental suit. Using devices from the crate this way costs nothing and can be done as many times as desired while the combat supply crate persists, though the combat supply does trigger the consumables cooldown. If a player has ordinary devices equipped and on their tray for normal use, make it so that charges are not used up if they are near a combat supply crate. So you have med hypo * 5 in your Shift+4 slot, walk up to the crate, use your med with Shift+4, and you still have med hypo * 5. Finally, with a Quartermaster, let the supply crate grant minor and major regenerators.
2.) Equipment diagnostics
The only part of this that currently matters is the shield hardness modifier. Because of the way damage resists work, the damage resist bonus is negligible, and removing mechanical debuffs isn't something that happens often enough to justify burning this ability for that. With 30 seconds of active time and 1:30 recharge, it's something you use before a big fight but this doesn't really give enough performance to suit its cooldown profile/opportunity cost.
Recommendation: Add a constant shield recharge effect to replace the meaningless damage resist, add a bonus to both rate of fire and damage on energy weapons, and a skill bonus to engineering abilities. Basically all of your equipment should be Just Plain Better while equipment diagnostics is active. Diagnostic Technician doffs should extend the duration of Diagnostics rather than adding new features to it.
3.) Force field dome
Nice idea, but again, because of the way damage resists stack this is a lot less impressive than it looks.
Recommendation: Change the defensive bonus to a dodge chance instead of an armor resist.
4.) Quick Fix
As a personal ability it's nice and spammable, but as a way to support fabrications this is pointless since fabrications have almost no survivability and often die to one good attack.
Recommendation: When used on a fabrication, this ability should proactively add a lot of temporary hitpoints (couple hundred), and give a significant bonus to weapon damage, to make the fabrication a significant threat. The only kit that has Quick Fix is the Support Technician, who lacks any offensive abilities of their own, so this gives them something to do to contribute to the fight.
5.) Shield generator
Way too weak. Offers effectively no real difference in the defensive strength of players and will generally be destroyed by one good attack.
Recommendation: Give the shield generator itself strong shields which constantly replenishes at a decent rate, to protect it. Enemies should be forced to actually concentrate on destroying the generator rather than taking it out as collateral damage on AOE. Double (triple??) the shield regeneration effect for players inside the bubble.
6.) Shield recharge
Magnitude is too low given how fast enemies rip through shields.
Recommendation: Needs to either offer an immediate and full recharge, or a more persistent defensive bonus.
7.) Turret fabrication
Mostly okay once it's deployed, but has a painfully long animation attached to its creation which can get you killed just trying to plant the thing.
Recommendation: Change the summon animation from the crouch to the same "on the move" style that support and seeker drones have.
adjudicatorhawk
So, why am I here on the forums, telling you all this? For one, I'm curious how you all feel about kits. Are they fun pieces of equipment? Do you enjoy switching them up to change playstyles from time to time?
For the most part yes. I think it would overall be better if we could make our own kits and swap out parts on the fly instead of changing our role/playstyle entirely, but it is a useful feature and all my characters carry at least 2 kits for different purposes.
(adjudicatorhawk)
The reason for this is twofold - primarily, most of a player's actions on ground are Weapon activations, and the longer activation and root times of kit powers lend themselves less well to frequent use than do the short times of weapon powers. Second, having longer cooldown times on kit powers lets us make them really impactful when they do go off, so you only have to spend 1-2 seconds of animation to do something really cool.
Not wild about this. As you say, most of our ground activity is pew pewing at bad guys. For the most part ground battles are moving engagements where we only spend 15 seconds gunning the bad guys down and then we move on. Giving abilities longer cooldowns in general is going to feel like a downgrade because we will be forced to conserve our cooldowns. Instead of being able to throw a weapon malfunction at any random borg in our path, we will be forced to save it for the few "known" heavies and elites. It also diminishes the feel of the kits since everybody will be Anonymous McRifleman for 95% of the battle instead of seeing kit abilities going off all the time.
I feel like, for the most part, kits need a mix of spammable abilities and big-hitters and that we're already there.
I'm currently taking a look at a number of Kit Powers that are largely ignored, and coming up with tweaks to them to make them more usable and more interesting. In some rare cases, powers are so unused that we can pretty much totally change their functionality completely *cough*CombatSupply*cough* - but in most cases, I'm taking care to retain the essence of any given power while making it more usable and more competitive with other Kit Powers.
I'd like to throw in a word of caution, which is: be very careful about the metrics you are using to judge "largely ignored". Tactical Initiative is "largely ignored" if you go by its frequency of use by the average player, and yet it's (indirectly) the most powerful ground ability in the game. Heck, I know people that clear space elites in under 2 mins that dont use it.
Could you give us a "watch list" of powers you are thinking about playing about with? Details of what you are contemplating arent necessary, just a list of:
"* Power x - potentially underpowered,
* Power y - Never used by anyone, ever.
* Power z - used so ubiquitously we're considering a nerf to make other kits more popular"
would be helpful in giving focused feedback.
How would you feel about, say, Weapons Malfunction being a 60 second cooldown instead of 30 seconds - but being a much bigger deal when it goes off? Are there any Kit Powers that you really like being able to use every 15 seconds?
Weapons Malfunction in its current form performs very well when used in elite STFs. It is a short term control power that has a frequent enough cooldown that you can just about use it on the most dangerous NPC in each encounter group. It is great for the initial contact with that group, when enemy dps is at its most dangerous. Increasing its cooldown to 60 seconds would relegate it to a power that you'd only use on 3-4 specific NPCs in each run, and those are the sorts of NPCs you'd want to be immune to a "something cool" version of it for game balance purposes.
Since we're skirting around the subject. How do you as devs feel about Chroniton Mine Barrier? Is your aim to make all kits as equally appealing as the Enemy Neutrilisation kit? If not, is there a specific level of performance you are aiming for?
In the short term i'll throw a few things out there:
Grenades as a whole need looking at, especially the grenade satchel kit.
-Plasma Grenade: Please consult with the people responsible for NPC movement AI and ask if there is any work going to be done on fixing how NPCs react to ground fire hazards. If no work is planned, please remove the plasma fire hazard component in the short term. (maybe raise the DoT dps by 25% as compensation) As it currently stands, plasma grenades are negative dps powers due to the way they break ai scripts and cause NPCs to scatter out of efficient to kill clusters. They can also cause erratic behavior, such as worker drones in cure ground going into disable transformer mode immediately at their spawn.
Combat Supply:
Is very very impractical. To use it, you need to run to it, clicky it, open your inventory, drag the item to your device tray, open the powers manager, and drag the device to your power tray. All this to replicate the effect of devices we can buy for insignificant EC cost.
You could achieve an identical level of power from having a buff that meant anyone using a stim, powercell or shield charge within 30 yards of the combat supply box didnt consume a charge of their consumables.
It would probably be easiest to change this to work like the candy in Winter Colony Invasion, but instead to give a random 2 minute long 10% buff.
The ground game has the least customizability when it comes to your captain.
Think about it.
You can give your boffs the same amount of equipment (well no secondary weapon) and train them in 4 powers of your choice.
Your captain on the other hand is stuck with a pre determined set of available powers that are pre arranged. I don't get the option of picking the powers I want I have to pick the kit that has some powers I want and some I may not have speced into or that don't really fit my strategy.
If there were kit "powers" and kit "devices" it could at least add more variety. Maybe the kit you wear is more like a harness for equipment, granting you mostly passive buffs to specific skill sets and access to some click powers. Then each harness comes with a pre determined number of slots for your kit devices, like turrets or grenade or even tricorders and hypos(for sci).
Along that vein why is it only tacs can use grenades? Grenades are pretty standard equipment in a combat force, seems odd than engineers and scientists cant figure them out but can use the wide array of energy and melee weapons just fine.
As a time traveller, Am I supposed to pack underwear or underwhen?
Not everything you see on the internet is true - Abraham Lincoln
I'll put up more thoughts on this later, but one thing that I would like to see is the ability to pick 1-2 abilities from another profession (maybe one of each) and put them on a kit/toon. Note that I mean being able to SELECT them - not having a bunch of crummy ones stapled on to existing kits, or having the selection be insanely limited or with mostly poor choices. For instance, I'd absolutely love to stick Support Drone or Seeker Drone on my tac (in fact, it's one of the few abilities I want for him). My enthusiasm for this drops like a rock if I am forced to choose Combat Supply for my Squad Leader kit, though - or even worse, Security Protocol (which gathers dust in my inventory) to get Support Drone.
And again, only 1-2 - you don't get to haul along a full eng or sci kit on your tac, for instance.
Not in PvP, but they are a bit lackluster in PvE due to being kind of bad at actually hitting things. More damage is not the solution - you can ignore that part of the previous post, I'm just spitballing here, some mistakes will likely be made in this thinking-out-loud. Keep in mind, I also don't really want them to be out all the time - I'm thinking of them as the "DPS Cooldown" of the Fabrication-type Kit player, where their turrets are their bread-and-butter, and they bring out the Mortar for the big bad.
Thank you for noticing the problem with quantum mortar.
I find that whether or not it does damage is essentially 3% the fact that it's on the field at all, and 97% dumb luck if an NPC or anything you want to die happens to be where it's trying to bomb at the time.
I recently switched from primarily playing a Tac to an Engineer. I've found that I like the Enemy Neutralization kit quite a bit: Weapons Malfunction is nice when fighting an Elite Tac Drone and Chroniton Mine Barrier is useful for killing just about anything quickly, be it a stationary target (generators in Khitomer Ground STF) or a swarm of Borg Drones, and its useful against cloaked Voth Spec Ops in the Battlezone. Place some mines between yourself and them; when they lunge, they die.
Do not change anything about Chroniton Mine Barrier! I've found the damage and activation time are about appropriate for its cooldown. However, are there any DOffs with powers that affect this ability? Some abilities have several DOffs that affect them. Consider adding something in this respect.
The visuals of Tac kits could use some work. They appear big and bulky, and kind of exaggerated for their function. (Seriously, I'm talking about you, Close Combat Specialist). Science kits are sexy as TRIBBLE. Engineer kits are in between, depending on the kit. I've grown fond of Enemy Neut Mk X.
Finally, I had a brief thought about adding a Universal kit as a piece of a future set. But I realized that would require Universal abilities, as well. Then, when the Dyson Sphere space set included two warp cores, my faith was revitalized. However, including three kits, plus a weapon, shield, and armor as a 6-item set would be slightly obnoxious. Plus, there's bound to be an idiot who would accidentally buy the wrong one and blame someone else.
Summary: don't change Chroniton Mine Barrier and alter the visuals for Tactical kits.
Lifetime Subscriber since October 31st, 2014
Star Trek Online Captain since September, 2012
I don't think there's anything wrong with Transphasic Bomb. If anything it sounds like a lot of you are having problems with it 'cause you're trying to use it in the middle of a firefight when it's designed to be an ambush weapon. If see a group of enemies ahead you're supposed to place the bomb out of sight (behind a tree or corner) and then kite the enemies over to it by letting them chase you and when they're close BOOM!!!! Done well you can easily heavily damage if not one-shot an entire mob with the thing. Heck, even you place it out in the open the computer will idiotically ignore it on its approach as long as the mooks have something else it can shoot at.
As for me the one skill I have the most trouble with is Ambush, I've never seen it do anymore damage than a regular shot even when i'm both flanking and immediately coming out of cloak via Stealh Module.
I haven't read everything in this thread (because I'm lazy) so excuse me for repeating things.
The best solution for kits, right now, is to ala carte them, let us pick and choose the powers we want to use. Improve them, change cooldowns, whatever, the current kit system isn't very much fun. Often I find that on a kit I have at least 1 power I almost NEVER use, runs contrary to the rest of the of the powers, or is just utterly useless (fixing that would help).
Worse, many of the powers on a single kit are actually spread across multiple skill sets. Not just 2, but sometimes 3 or more, and there's not enough skill points to make them effective. It also means once you spec into a kit, you can never, EVER change because if you do, you'll find half the powers are too weak to be useful. Kit swapping is a dream.
Let us pick the powers. Whatever you do to the powers, let us pick from the branch already.
As for specific powers, I think a lot of the problems is that non-single player combat is much too fast for the animations going off right now and have changed the point of certain powers. I run a medical kit on my main Sci, and she almost NEVER heals anyone else, she heals herself and as a result ends up being the tank in many ground encounters. There's no time to tag someone, heal them and then flip back to the target, especially when auto fire is set.
That's the other thing, powers can't really be queued up to go off as soon as one animation is done. It will blink, then not go off if the previous animation is still in progress. And if you have autofire set on the primary fire, it wont' interrupt or queue up behind it. There have been times I've tried to fire off a secondary fire, or a grenade, or whatever and instead of it going off, the primary activates AGAIN because it didn't trigger due to the primary's animation. Rolls do the same thing, which is why I disabled them totally.
Shorten the animations, make them either interruptible or queueable and whatever else you do with kit powers is fine.
I know there is a method but all I see is madness.
I find it disturbing everytime someone says engies, and their abilities are useless.
Got to remember that their abilities are also influenced by their skills and traits.
If the wrong skills and traits (and reps) are being used, ofc they'd seems lousy and useless.
Saying that engs need more defense and shieldbuffs. Bah. Pity the fool I say.
An Eng is also to be remembered as being a support class.
Their purpose is not to storm ahead and rambo everything.
Certain obstacles needs to be tactically solved.
Aggro. Pull back. Raise shield. Aggro more. Roflstomp with orbital bombardement/beam of death. Root, disable guns, add drones, medical towers, stick of levitation, rock of evil twins.
So many options. No reason to die. Healingkits? Pfffh. Only needed against the thollie captain in the cave of doom on new romulus.
Comments
Before the Romulan Xenobiologist kit, I would have replaced the original Xenobiologist with the Analylist kit. It was the addition of the tachyon burst that swayed me. Before that I ran with Analyist.
Currently, the analyst and the bio-research kit aren't really bad, just fully eclipsed by the xenobiologist kit.
That leaves the black sheep of the bunch, the Physician kit. It has potential as a close combat, melee weapon, take some hits and brawl it up kit, but Dylovene has a very prohibitive cooldown. It can't fullfill the roll of a close combat melee kit if you can only burst that damage up 1/3 of the time. If the cooldown was reduced to 1 minute, so that you could have it up 1/2 of the time, it would be a much more attractive option as a heals/melee damage kit.
I find science kits across the board to be in good shape. If Dylovene had a reduced cooldown, and we were to wait for mudflation to grant us upgraded Analyst and Bio-Research kits, I'd be perfectly happy with all the kits. If I were to get some magic holiday wish, Analyst and Bio-Research would be totally re-worked into 2 entirely different ways to play rather then 2 different extra takes on Xenobiologist, but I'm not payed to figure that part out, surprise me hehe.
Edit: Personally, I have naughty dreams of an elite physician kit with an added Sonic Pulse and a 1 minute cooldown Dylovene, me charging down hordes of mobs screaming "For Pony!" and hacking them to death with my Tholian sword...
Fleet Admiral Space Orphidian Possiblities Wizard
Add the shield generator to that list and I'll be happy
Analyst is a great kit for 3 of it's 4 abilities. Anestezine Gas Grenade needs to have a shorter cooldown or the gas field needs to apply the effect for the full listed 15 seconds. When Cryptic goes to make an Analyst Mk XII, I am hoping they go for a Tachyon Harmonics IV and a Nanite Health Monitor II, it would complete the perfect balanced science kit.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
Much easier, does that mean you intent to bring proximity auto-explode back?
I remember we had those bombs auto-detonate on proximity of a player, that however was causing em to have zero cooldown and got changed back to manual clicking a while later.
Imo they are one of the more powerful engineer abilities atm, all good engineers make heavy use of bombs, i've seen em one-shot people in pvp occasionally and they also have a cooldown of zero if it gets killed or times out, which means they can be keept up nonstop atm.
So when you say easier.. is the plan to bring proximity attacks back but also change the uptime? If so, are you also planing to change the 0 cooldown when they timeout/explode?
They are already now the dominating spam factor in almost every pvp game and that trend will rather increase since the spire kit is the best kit of all, featuring mortar+mines and all the cc power (wm/fuse).
I've already seen pvp games were i had like 20 blue circles follow me nonstop.. we need that death bug with em fixed and i strongly suggest against buffing em regarding pvp, rather the opposite actually lol.
So after this significant upgrade you mine a door and put 1-2 medical gen's behind a door at an angle where the opponents can't shot it, out of reach of nades what will be the counter?
I'd be worried with a significant buff there that we will see even more mexican-standoff situations were both teams just sit in some other room waiting for the others to make the move, cause theres no good way to overcome the bunkering anymore - which is already now happening sometimes.
If you buff toys for bunkering you would also need to invent some toys to counter it.
Engineer:
Transporter tech
- site to site tag: set a transport enhancer at a location . fire a tag on a friendly or unfriendly target, transporting them to the enhancer location. this can be used as a rescue or to temporarily remove a pesky enemy
- transport inversion: Swaps your location with a selected target
- pattern reversion: partially dematerialises target and rematerializes back to last known health status, thus restoring health.
-Pattern stasis: temporarily freezes target in a partial dematerialized state
shield specialist
- forcefield chamber: encases target in a temporary forcefield cylinder
- refractive forcefield: flat forcefield wall that absorbs physical damage & reflects energy fire
- personal shield booster: fires energy at a friendly target, boosting shields back to full. any target with full shields will be given a reward of (undetermined) second/minute
immunity
-
Science
medical tech
- triox dart: fires at friendly target. decreases damage from toxic compounds (inhaled?) Boosts mucular function, strength boost
- metaphasic dart: fires a dart at friendly target that allows energy damage increases health
- medicinal dart: fires a dart at a friendly target that boosts health over time
Genetacist:
Telepathic suppression: some method to suppress or resist telepathic attacks
Confusion serum: fires dart at enemy non mechanical attack pet, turning the pet on them for a time
Tactical
Explosives expert
Remote concusive charge: place a small mine at a target location to be detonated remotely. ..great for surprise attaacks and protecting choke points (Careful! Weapons can target and detonate mines) use with forcefield chamber for a deadly effect
Photon grenade: sets off a photon. blast that knocks back enemy groups and blinds them, increasing their miss chance to 75 percent. disables mechanical pets and not as effective on telepaths
plasma grenade: area damage blast with knockback. armored mechanisms have. higher resistance, so use photon grenade for more effect.
Weapons expert
The first two exists as Hypospray Dylovene and Hypospray Melorozine. The third is called Biofilter sweep and the fourth is called Neural Neutralizer...if you have the Research Lab Scientist slotted.
The first one already exists, it's called transphasic bomb and engineers may use it. Photon and Plasma Grenades already exist for Tactical officers.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
One cool thing would be to add a turret kit (to the omega store) that the turrets can remodulate themselves without shooting 2 small damage hits and then adapted until you come of cd. Otherwise its just going to be a mines, mortar, bomb spam which after awhile isn't much of any fun.
Sorry for the length of the post got a bit carried away.
I don't cover many of the Doff's since it would increase the length even more and I don't remember all of them also some of my info might be inaccurate since my memory isn't great and I used the wiki for information on ability's I don't remember well.
Other than that here's the suggestions :
Engineer :
Combat Supply - Yeah... A good improvement would be have it provide cooldown reduction for everyone in the area around it.
Chroniton Mine Barrier - Increased explosion radius or mobility would be rather nice they seem to just go to waste most of the time especially in the hands of BoFFs. The ability to deploy them at range would also fix this.
Quick Fix - Isn't that bad cooldown seems a bit long might be better as a HoT or something, would be nice if it would function similar to Nanite health monitor as well auto targeting and healing any nearby mechanical target in need and providing a constant re-modulation effect for anyone in range.
Shield Recharge - Seems fine as it is
Weapons Malfunction - It would be nice if it actually caused the opponents weapons to malfunction shooting friendly's or exploding. Cooldown seems kinda long at the moment even for what it does and there's plenty of things you really don't want to melee you if it was made to chain without the use of the doff or affect a area might work tho.
Turret Fabrication - The time it takes to setup, low survivability, lack of mobility and damage (aside from romulan mk iv) seems to kind of detract from them, The ability to set them up at a targeted location would add quite a bit to them as would improving there survivability. Unique appearance based on mark and faction would also be nice.
Transphasic Bomb - It would be nice if it had a proximity fuse and or could be tossed to a target location would need a higher cooldown tho I would imagine in that case.
Quantum Mortar Fabrication - Aside from the ability to actually lead targets its pretty decent.
Seeker Drone Fabrication - It is ok however it can also get you into some serious trouble would be nice if it was set to stay within a shorter range, It would be nice if all versions had shields and gained improved ai / ability's each tier ie. MK I - has the basic rapid burst attack & sniper bolt attack, MK II - Gaines target optics I, MK III - Would gain either Ambush or Stealth Module and actually attempt to flank targets. Faction and tier specific art would be great as well.
Support Drone Fabrication - Drop the weapon have all tiers shielded and equipped with shield recharge, quick fix & equipment diagnostics with ability levels matching the drones tier. Faction and tier based art would be nice as well.
Force Field Dome - Fine the way it is.
Fuse Armor - Haven't found myself using it much so not really sure, would be incredibly amusing tho if it affected a group of enemies and kinda stuck them together and shocked em.
Medical & Shield Generator Fabrication - Seem pretty decent as they are I tend to use em mobility could be improved possibly by making them a type of drone that would follow a target they would need some balancing in that form tho adding a new version that was a drone from would probably work better and allow people to choose.
Equipment Diagnostics - It's kind of underwhelming having it remodulate weapons and provide a damage buff would help a great deal.
Cover Shield - Honestly I love and hate this ability you can block paths with it and it takes some pretty decent damage on the flip side you and your bridge officers can and will get stuck on it and its a pain to do anything about and its use if pretty situational. I would suggest making it a type of drone this drone would be untargetable but would project a moving field around the target essentially making it immune / blocking flanking shots against it until the shield had absorbed the pre-determined amount of damage or its lowered duration run its course.
Orbital Strike - Seems fine as it is the new trait solves any issues I previously had with it would be nicer if it just gave you a option to use orbital devastation instead of taking up a trait spot tho.
Reroute Power to Shields - Pretty good the activation time is a bit long tho.
Engineering Proficiency - Pretty decent making it a large aoe pulsing buff similar to overwatch would be nice tho.
New Ability's -
Site to Site Transport : It would be great if we could do a site to site transport behind a target (facing its back) and it would have a chance to temporarily stun surrounding targets (very shortly).
Explosive Drones : It would also be nice to have the ability to launch some small explosive drones which would seek and destroy targets.
Science :
Exothermic Induction Field - Seems pretty decent giving it a chance to ignite targets with a dot and possibly freak out would be amusing.
Hyperonic Radiation - Giving this a chance to cause targets to be confused every tic would be interesting.
Anesthizine Gas - A increase in the area of effect would be nice.
Electro-Gravitic Field - Seems ok for what it does, It would be nice if the Doff for this converted it to a always create the anomaly and draw targets towards it.
Sonic Pulse - It would be nice if the area of effect was increased as well as the knockback an additional chance to confuse or disable for a short time would be interesting as well.
Stasis Field - Having this make the target untargetable for the duration and apply resistance to it upon expiry would improve it a great deal.
Tachyon Harmonic - Seems fine the way it is giving it a chance to resonate off affected targets and possibly hit em again with a pbaoe shield drain and chance at knockdown could be cool too.
Medical Tricorder - Its pretty good at what it does adding a small heal over time for a amount based on how much the original healed would be a nice touch.
Nanite Health Monitor - Seems good the way it is once again adding a small HoT in addition to the main heal would be nice.
Triage - Seems pretty decent the resistance buff could be increased a bit. Giving it a low chance to revive would be great as well.
Vascular Regenerator - Its fairly decent at the moment however dropping it down to be available starting at Ensign, Lt. & Lt. Commander would be great.
Biofilter Sweep - Seems pretty good as it is.
Hypospray - Dylovene & Melorazine - Cooldown seems a bit long on it its effect durations could use a increase or cooldown reduced either would work.
Dampening Field - Seems pretty decent how it is I would like to see the animation altered to be more inline with the space version tho and the area of effect increased / latched on and mobile to the target.
Nanoprobe Infestation - Seems pretty decent as is. Having the nanoprobes jump back to friendly's and give a small shield heal might be intresting too.
Neural Neutralizer - Larger AoE would be nice.
Scientific Aptitude - As with the others increased duration and making it a large aoe pulse like overwatch would be pleasant.
New Abilitys -
Distortion field : Pretty much a pbaoe mobile stealth module which would lower the range at which npc aggro you and provide a energy damage resistance while active (on account of them essentially missing you)
Energy absorption : Would essentially create a anomaly which would absorb all energy attacks friendly or not until it hit a maximum at which point it would explode with a area and damage based off how much it absorbed as well as a knockback. (the detonation wouldn't effect friendly's)
Tactical :
Lunge - Is pretty good how it is at the moment however increasing movement speed while using it and adding a dodge buff would be amazing.
Sweeping Strikes - It's kind of iffy at the moment the activation time is kind of slow so its not uncommon to miss the target the knockback is also a bit detrimental. A large improvement would be to speed it up and make it a combo like attack where the first strike is a pbaoe knockback sweep, 2nd a lunge forward and strike (similar to how swords close in on target), 3rd would be increased damage with chance to exploit. The knockback would only be on the first attack, chance to expose on the first two.
Plasma Grenade - Adding a chance for targets affected to freak out (do nothing, flee or grab someone else spreading the DoT would be pretty nice). Larger AoE would be nice as well.
Photon Grenade - Is pretty decent how it is at the moment.
Smoke Grenade - Seem decent how it is at the moment adding a small damage & resistance buff for allies and damage debuff for enemies would improve it even more.
Stun Grenade - Seem ok adding a chance to confuse targets upon expiration would be nice.
Grenades in General - It would be nice if they had a proximity fuse as well so while in transit they would detonate a few moments after detecting a nearby target this would be great when the targets all decide to charge at you and out of its targeted area letting you actually target a area outside of shooter mode would help with this as well. It would also be nice if grenades could form combo's Ie. a plasma grenade is thrown into a smoke grenades aoe it causes a large explosion and fire patch, photon grenade at stunned opponents would be a short duration confuse, photon into plasma applies the plasma DoT to all enemies in a large radius, Stun into smoke confuse enemies inside for a short duration. There are lots of cool things that could be done with it would add plenty of versatility and amusement.
Draw Fire - It's not to bad as is adding a small stacking heal over time effect triggered by incoming fire and a small damage resistance debuff to enemies would improve it a great deal tho.
Rally Cry - Is fairly decent as is
Ambush - Its rather situational increasing its duration to 60 sec (still only affecting one shot) with a shared cooldown of 30 sec would make it much more useful and more versatile. Causing the attack to be a exploit regardless of the attack would be nice as well.
Stealth Module - Is pretty decent as is it would be nice if a bonus was added causing any melee attack from it to cause you to charge forward from a distance and attack before being detected. Having your first attack from it have a chance to expose would be nice as wel.
Battle Strategies - For what it does the cooldown seems kinda long lowering it or increasing the duration would be a marked improvement. Having it remodulate weapons would be nice as well.
Motion Accelerator - Its not too bad at the moment adding a dodge buff would be nice tho.
Overwatch - Is pretty nice how it is having it just affect all allies in a larger radius and be non-stacking would be nice as well tho.
Suppressing Fire - It's not to horrible but it is highly dependent on weapon type. A nice improvement would be to cause it to fire off a pbaoe off the target which would spread its affect in a radius around it thereby allowing you to use it effectively with non aoe weapons.
Target Optics - Its decent as is starting at Ensign would be nice tho as would causing it to have a chance to knockdown and remove the stealth / cloak effect from any targets caught in it.
Fire on my Mark - Its pretty nice due to its situational nature tho a longer cooldown and duration would be nice. Adding a chance for attacks against the target to expose would be pleasant as well.
Security Escort - They seem to die far to easily it would be nice if they had a survivability buff. Adding some more faction based randomness to who and what appears and the abilities they use would be nice as well. Being able to have a set team wearing what you want would also be a nice option.
Tactical Initiative - Seems fine only thing that I can see improving it would be making it a passive ability that gave a chance to reduce cooldowns however that's just to free up a button no other reason really.
Strike Team - Pretty decent increased duration and cooldown as well as making it a pulsing aoe buff similar to overwatch with a larger radius would be nice tho.
New Ability's -
Combat stimulant : Basically would give you a heal over time with dot removal.
Refractive shield modulation : temporarily reflect energy damage back to target, melee strikes against you knock the attacker back and stun, kinetic damage sends out a pbaoe shockwave with a chance of knocking nearby targets down radius is increased dependent on the damage of the attack.
Additional Improvements :
Doff's - I would really like to see any of the doffs that have a chance to modify ability's instead 100% modify them. This could be balanced by essentially having them change it to a new ability and decrease effects if needed this would add a great deal of customization and tweak-ability to the ability system.
Traits - That modify ability's ie. orbital devastation would be much nicer if instead you were just granted a second ability different than the first you could choose to use either they would share a cooldown and it wouldn't take up a trait slot.
Bridge Officers - Give them the ability to learn up to MK - III for instance let Science captains train officers in Nanite Health Monitor III same with other professions and similar skills. Why you ask ? simple it would give a good reason to actually train the requisite skills high enough to provide the said skills training. The captain training system could be modified in order to create / craft a trade-able and sell-able data pad containing the knowledge required for the said skill this Data pad would go to your stations tab and when commissioned / activated would give the typical train up window and options.
Thank you for taking the time to read through and I hope you find something you like or it spurs further ideas for improvement.
I'm glad an avid ground PvPer weighed in on the idea.
I didn't actually think it out so far as to have quasi-auras on the ground, that does sound really cool actually.
How would you feel about ussultimatum's idea:
The fabrication engineer or bunker engineer would effectively have a deployed shoulder mounted turret or mortar launcher set on auto-fire. The shield and medical generators could become mobile area of effect healing auras with the engineer as the epicenter. Forcefield dome could also receive the same treatment as Voth mechs, with the field moving with the engineer. Naturally the uptime and cooldowns would need to be fine tuned, but it would be an interesting mechanic.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
For Combat Supply, the buff icons are nice, but I think you can go a bit further for variety. In addition to the buff icons, you could have it toss out health and shield charges (pick up for an insta-heal), and maybe give it a small chance per tick of dropping a mortar, turret, drone, or generator.
He'd need the Omega stealth field... and Shattering Harmonics' night vision.
He'd also have to probably be a lot smarter and tougher than the average Nausicaan :P
Armor-mounted weaponry is a cool idea, but it might work better as a set bonus than as a kit power.
Kits in general have the problem of being restrictive. They are like BOFFs for your ship but unlike those you cannot so precisely pick every power in them as they are all slotted together. For instance I would LOVE to be able to use Forcefield Dome or Shield Generator but they are in a kit with other abilities that are not as useful as the Frabrication Specialist or Enemy Nuetralization.
The Transphasic Bomb is also far too slow to be placed... I would love to use it more but it is just unfeesable to have to wait to place it and then detonate it. I could achieve faster kills just shooting in that time.
I think everything in the Physicist kit is pretty good except that one hold ability... Holds stop working when you shoot the target... If you are not shooting the target then you are wasting time. So it is pointless to ever really use it when you could be killing them instead.
Other than that none of the Science kit powers are really worth caring about. They are far too situational and are paired together for whole kits that are just junk.
Combat Supply is only RARELY useful... It just does not provide anything worthwhile... Free hypos and stuff is ok but I can buy the real deal easily enough. If I pick up these things I have to go through the bother of slotting them, then finding their button from the P menu and slotting that... It is a lot of hassle for something I will probably never even use. It may be worthwhile if the consumables were really special and powerful compared to normal and would auto-slot themselves on my action bar without needing me to put them in my device slots.
I like to use Overwatch and Rally Cry but unfortunately the lack of Suppressive Fire makes this kit in general a bit harder to justify in most cases.
Also Draw Fire is kind of silly... It makes sense a bit for NPC's but a tactical toon has the least survivability of any ground toon so why should they be tanking? The Engineer can bunker themselves and all but NEEDS to be able to draw enemies to them while the Science Captain can heal themselves like no one else but the Tactical either has to kill the enemy or be dead with no recourse other than a hypo once in a blue moon.
In general I would rather that kit power buffs like Overwatch, Suppressive Fire, and so on just WORK instead of having to be hit again and again. So lengthening their cooldown is fine if you also lengthen how long they stay active. One of my biggest issues is having to always recast these powers when for the vast majority of enemies I would be best off just plugging away with normal shots and forgetting that I even HAVE a kit. It is not like anything is general SO hard to kill that you NEED kits. Only Bosses and even then it is mostly heals.
Vanilla Ground PvP information
Now, I'm not as knowledgeable as some of those who have posted in here, but I know 'enough' I feel to get by on the ground in PvE and PvP. Now, engineers are mostly what I know on the ground (but I have ground toons for all three classes, so I know at least something about all of them), so I will probably be focused on engies though.
Anyways, just want to say, I'd have no qualms about engineers being made into a living fortress if changes were made to those kit powers.
However, I will say that I agree with some of the others in that, adding more long CDs isn't what ground combat always needs. I'm not saying there should be none, just that putting in more isn't gonna help.
I'd like to propose a different idea for some kit powers:
Make the skill tree affect them more.
Unlike space, there are fewer skills, fewer skill points, etc to work with. So you have to basically still choose to spec into one or two kits. And the skill points invested don't always feel very worthwhile enough for it. Someone with more knowledge will probably prove me wrong, but...if I spec into Generators for example, it sure as heck don't feel like my generators are really actually getting that much more out of it. Even adding in the engy ground trait, and my stuff still dies really quickly.
Some skills are cheap, like Demolitions. Not much points needed, and the effects are useful enough to be worth doing, which is why so many spec into it and use the Enemy Neut. kit. Compare that to say Equipment Technician, which most of it's skills are much more expensive to spec into overall. Modification Specialist is not a cheap skill.
The other thing from what I can tell is that the thread is kind of looking at kit power in static, as in, without DOFFs. Again, going on Equipment Technician, every power in that kit has a DOFF for it.
Shield Recharge has those Jem'hader Diagnostic Engineers who can basically give 'perfect' shields for a few moments. Equipment Technician has the 'diamond in the rough' DOFF of Diagnostic Engineers as well, which can really boost weapons damage if they proc. Weapons malfunction has the 'spread' DOFF to let it possibly affect other people around it, while Fuse Armor has the 'chance to double damage'.
Just both things to consider IMO.
My general thought about powers is that they should generally be divided into 3 rough categories:
1. Short but sweet. Basically a power that has a fairly quick effect, and a short to medium CD. Examples include Chroniton mines, all sci and engy heals, Ambush, and so on.
2. Medium (couldn't think of something more clever). This essentially is more longer lasting effects, some of which can be given to others, or in other words, most of the buff and debuff abilities. Examples being: Battle Strategies, Equipment Diagnostics, Hypospray abilities, Weapons malfunction, Stun Grenade, etc.
3. Long-lasting. Basically something that can stay out for quite awhile. Stuff like generators, turrets, drones, mortars, and so on. These I'd argue should have the longest CDs, because they are meant to stay out.
Exceptions to every rule of course. Like I said, rough categories. These aren't at all supposed to be exact guidelines. For example, Ambush has a fairly long CD already, shortening that would be...*shudder*
Point of them is that if something is quicker in what it does, it's CD should generally reflect that. It shouldn't be completely spammed though either. Especially if you take into consideration Tactical Initiative (highly important IMO).
The medium ones mostly apply to the various buffs and debuffs. If someone specs into them, they should be worth actually using with a spec. So somewhat medium-long CDs (thinking maybe 45 seconds at most for a good portion of these skills), but nothing insane.
The long-term abilities, mostly from engineers should be tough enough to say 'ok, I just used this, now I know I have to make sure not to waste it', but not be totally invulnerable. Honestly, I have a proposal: Make player-spawned drones/turrets/etc take less damage from NPCs only, because most NPCs tend to aggro something fierce to anything like that, and usually kill it very quickly. Try a ground STF with Bunker Fab, tell me how long your turrets and such last against the Borg.
Anyways...onto some powers and kits (I will only mention ones I feel need some kind of work):
Tac:
Grenade Satchel: Weakest link of all tac kits. Besides only being grenade powers, they all share a CD which makes the whole thing feel a bit meh, since all you are getting is just grenades, nothing more to it than that.
Sci:
Honestly, to me, some issues with some sci skills fall more under the 'not worthwhile enough to spec into' category. They don't give enough of a bonus when you spec em for the desire to actually use them some times. Now, the two Hypospray abilities however do need some work. Sure you can use em on other people, and even have a DOFF to possibly let your whole team get them, but they just don't feel good enough.
Eng:
Like I said, eng is what I know the best on the ground.
Combat Supply: I REALLY love the idea that was tossed out about making this a deployable version of those ground buff things you can get from the Battlezone. That'd be great. Though one thing: Make the buffs unusable by the other team in PvP. So to avoid people being able to steal the buffs from you. This does lead me to the next thing:
Support Technician: The above change would make this kit REALLY good IMO outside of the Shield Generator part. Combat Supply would be giving buffs, while the engineer could also add extra buffs in the form of Quick Fix and Equipment Diagnostics.
Quick Fix: If memory serves, it has kind of a long CD, and the amount it gave never felt very worthwhile though. Even specced into it, it feels a bit flat. Sure having a Borg remodulation from it is a nice bonus, but there's a lot more enemies than just Borg nowadays.
Equipment Diagnostics: The buffs here are nice as well, but same with the above. It also has a rather long CD at 90 seconds, so you aren't gonna get terribly much use out of the semi-small buffs it has. Honestly, Diagnostic Engineers is what makes this shine more than anything. Being able to really buff up your damage on an engineer with them is awesome, which is why if any change is made to this skill, mostly in it's CD, you would have to consider those DOFFs.
Seeker Drones: Aside from feeling like they die early and often, I think Seekers are kinda useful. The biggest qualm besides being squishy is that I can only ever have one. Engies have DOFFs for damn nearly all their other stuff to make more of it: Turrets, mortars, generators, and even Support Drones, but not the Seekers. My only real suggestion is just let the DOFF affect Seekers and Support Drones (or make a new one that isn't a Fabrication Engineer to let us have 3 and 3 by using 2 different DOFFs).
Boy...I put a lot. Better stop there for now.
I've been a hard core player of sto for over 3 years. Just one of my toons has logged 136 days. That's the hours added up. I have 14 toons at the moment. So you can see when I say over 3 years its not idle time. You really need to leave the kits alone and do not I say again do not add cool down time to the kits. You guys change the color and look out of why? To get people to like the game more or make it look cooler. This is the star trek legacy not some nambe pambe game. I understand changing with the times but not the constance nurfing. You want to make a difference, make 2 zones. One for Pve players and one for PVP players so when they wine you can nerf and make it fare for them to help control there gaming rage. It gets so upsetting having the pve gaming altered just cause of there complaining and your lack of making 2 zones. So what happens...........hmmmmm....the pve community takes the hit. Over and over and over. And yes, I know there are awesome minded pvp players out there who don't get a huge group of there players to spam the hell out of you so you acked and hush them by giving in. So to put in a recap. Don't touch the kits please. And please don't and I mean please don't add cool down times to the kits. You've done that enough to the pve community as it is. This is just a gate way to nurf the engineering kit........ This is a tough love Thread, not a ***** letter.
Feel free to contact me directly for more talks. You have all my info.
Tk
I dislike all tac kits cause it always takes too long to buff up and lot of the times the fight is half over or i am half dead when i finished buffing up and i'm quite fast hitting the keys its just activation/anination time added up.
I usually dont switch them up cause most kits are bad or no fun to me i'm happy i found the ones i have to be fun most of the time. Demolitions kit is also nice but mortars take to long to fire to do comparable dmg to say mines. Those are great cause you just click and there they are instead of taking forever do beam in a quantum mortar.
The fabrications have too little hp all around and usually get destroyed quite fast. Dont even try them against the vrex while my ferengi eng enemy neutralization has no problem taking on the vrex himself.
The shield/hp heal turrets are worst of all cause they have low hp and seemingly high aggeo potential and even with the matching doff i rarely get both.
The turret is too weak alone but very cool once the doff kicks in and you get three. I love the animation / view of loads of turrets from me and my boffs firing at a target once it comes into range.
Orbital strike with the new trait is fine now but i hate giving away one of my trait slots just to make one single power more usable maybe that should be looked at to include other mods to other skills not just the orb strike otherwise i know there will be coming a trait thats overall more important and the new strike trait will go out the window which will be very sad but nonetheless i know its coming fast with every lockbox now it seems.
Btw you guys know that with all the traits we got noone will really care for new ones at some point when we still got only 9 slots which are already quite crowded. You know there should always be a nice relation between number of choises i can make and how many choises there are. I basically had to make a ground eng and and space eng which is kind of sad but thats what we are forced to do with skilld and traits the way they are.
I have little to say on any specific kit powers as i habe rarely used any outside my currently used kits cause as you yourself admitted they are bad. But when you change them pls change all related doffs as well cause i really hate chance based doffs for anything. They are always worse then doffs that just always work. It males you feel bad about your kit if they keep not procing which happens a lot of times like i have a doff slotted for chance for more drones but its not working i guess i never saw any. And the turret/mortar doffs proc too little.
In regards to the not wanting a proximity fuse simply having it give 2 ability's would be a feasible solution its something that would be good for a large number of skills really.
You could choose what you want setup a remote or a proximity depending on the situation and what you want. Its not like it would be Op or anything since the cooldown would be the same regardless and its not like you could get two of em out.
Heck it would be interesting if you could get a option to modify the charge on em as well to do plasma or cryo it could be a really interesting and versatile skill but the whole 1 kit, 1 slot, 1 static ability thing really needs a rework it would be more work on the dev's side but it would add a great deal to the game if more skills gave you access to more tactical options.
Also a decent proximity fuse would detonate the device not when it was first sensed and in range but upon sensing the target around 2-3 seconds which would allow its movement speed and its buddies to bring themselves all into the kill zone, the sensor mechanic could also be set to require 3 or more targets to be within range to auto-detonate otherwise it would go off whenever remotely triggered.
Why not turn fabrications into pets? with a mobile hover mode & an active (grounded) mode. The buffs would be smaller & personal in mobile mode, while deployed mode would be similar to what we have. I imagine that due to space constraints the fabrications would need to be merged. A shield/medical pet & a mortar/turret pet, both with shields, a little bit of energy resistance, and a decent amount of kinetic/physical. Instead of rooting the player during call in you could disable the players weapons until the animation finishes & if you throw in quick fix on top of all that and give it a 30 second PBAOE mechanical S&H HOT+Res I think you would have a really interesting kit.
We would no longer need to call in new fabrications every time we move to a new group of mobs. Additionally, the changes to quick fix would give them a little more staying power, and if you make them invulnerable during beam in that would go a long way to fixing the current issues. Of course, you would have to change almost all the current assets to do that, and maybe even add new code... so the chances are slim, but there's nothing stooping you from making changes to quick fix, adding call in invulnerability, shields & the animation changes.
I already gave feedback on Engineering abilities way back when. I'll copy that into here for discussion.
For the most part yes. I think it would overall be better if we could make our own kits and swap out parts on the fly instead of changing our role/playstyle entirely, but it is a useful feature and all my characters carry at least 2 kits for different purposes.
Not wild about this. As you say, most of our ground activity is pew pewing at bad guys. For the most part ground battles are moving engagements where we only spend 15 seconds gunning the bad guys down and then we move on. Giving abilities longer cooldowns in general is going to feel like a downgrade because we will be forced to conserve our cooldowns. Instead of being able to throw a weapon malfunction at any random borg in our path, we will be forced to save it for the few "known" heavies and elites. It also diminishes the feel of the kits since everybody will be Anonymous McRifleman for 95% of the battle instead of seeing kit abilities going off all the time.
I feel like, for the most part, kits need a mix of spammable abilities and big-hitters and that we're already there.
Could you give us a "watch list" of powers you are thinking about playing about with? Details of what you are contemplating arent necessary, just a list of:
"* Power x - potentially underpowered,
* Power y - Never used by anyone, ever.
* Power z - used so ubiquitously we're considering a nerf to make other kits more popular"
would be helpful in giving focused feedback.
Weapons Malfunction in its current form performs very well when used in elite STFs. It is a short term control power that has a frequent enough cooldown that you can just about use it on the most dangerous NPC in each encounter group. It is great for the initial contact with that group, when enemy dps is at its most dangerous. Increasing its cooldown to 60 seconds would relegate it to a power that you'd only use on 3-4 specific NPCs in each run, and those are the sorts of NPCs you'd want to be immune to a "something cool" version of it for game balance purposes.
Since we're skirting around the subject. How do you as devs feel about Chroniton Mine Barrier? Is your aim to make all kits as equally appealing as the Enemy Neutrilisation kit? If not, is there a specific level of performance you are aiming for?
In the short term i'll throw a few things out there:
Grenades as a whole need looking at, especially the grenade satchel kit.
-Plasma Grenade: Please consult with the people responsible for NPC movement AI and ask if there is any work going to be done on fixing how NPCs react to ground fire hazards. If no work is planned, please remove the plasma fire hazard component in the short term. (maybe raise the DoT dps by 25% as compensation) As it currently stands, plasma grenades are negative dps powers due to the way they break ai scripts and cause NPCs to scatter out of efficient to kill clusters. They can also cause erratic behavior, such as worker drones in cure ground going into disable transformer mode immediately at their spawn.
Combat Supply:
Is very very impractical. To use it, you need to run to it, clicky it, open your inventory, drag the item to your device tray, open the powers manager, and drag the device to your power tray. All this to replicate the effect of devices we can buy for insignificant EC cost.
You could achieve an identical level of power from having a buff that meant anyone using a stim, powercell or shield charge within 30 yards of the combat supply box didnt consume a charge of their consumables.
It would probably be easiest to change this to work like the candy in Winter Colony Invasion, but instead to give a random 2 minute long 10% buff.
The ground game has the least customizability when it comes to your captain.
Think about it.
You can give your boffs the same amount of equipment (well no secondary weapon) and train them in 4 powers of your choice.
Your captain on the other hand is stuck with a pre determined set of available powers that are pre arranged. I don't get the option of picking the powers I want I have to pick the kit that has some powers I want and some I may not have speced into or that don't really fit my strategy.
If there were kit "powers" and kit "devices" it could at least add more variety. Maybe the kit you wear is more like a harness for equipment, granting you mostly passive buffs to specific skill sets and access to some click powers. Then each harness comes with a pre determined number of slots for your kit devices, like turrets or grenade or even tricorders and hypos(for sci).
Along that vein why is it only tacs can use grenades? Grenades are pretty standard equipment in a combat force, seems odd than engineers and scientists cant figure them out but can use the wide array of energy and melee weapons just fine.
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And again, only 1-2 - you don't get to haul along a full eng or sci kit on your tac, for instance.
Thank you for noticing the problem with quantum mortar.
I find that whether or not it does damage is essentially 3% the fact that it's on the field at all, and 97% dumb luck if an NPC or anything you want to die happens to be where it's trying to bomb at the time.
Do not change anything about Chroniton Mine Barrier! I've found the damage and activation time are about appropriate for its cooldown. However, are there any DOffs with powers that affect this ability? Some abilities have several DOffs that affect them. Consider adding something in this respect.
The visuals of Tac kits could use some work. They appear big and bulky, and kind of exaggerated for their function. (Seriously, I'm talking about you, Close Combat Specialist). Science kits are sexy as TRIBBLE. Engineer kits are in between, depending on the kit. I've grown fond of Enemy Neut Mk X.
Finally, I had a brief thought about adding a Universal kit as a piece of a future set. But I realized that would require Universal abilities, as well. Then, when the Dyson Sphere space set included two warp cores, my faith was revitalized. However, including three kits, plus a weapon, shield, and armor as a 6-item set would be slightly obnoxious. Plus, there's bound to be an idiot who would accidentally buy the wrong one and blame someone else.
Summary: don't change Chroniton Mine Barrier and alter the visuals for Tactical kits.
Star Trek Online Captain since September, 2012
As for me the one skill I have the most trouble with is Ambush, I've never seen it do anymore damage than a regular shot even when i'm both flanking and immediately coming out of cloak via Stealh Module.
The best solution for kits, right now, is to ala carte them, let us pick and choose the powers we want to use. Improve them, change cooldowns, whatever, the current kit system isn't very much fun. Often I find that on a kit I have at least 1 power I almost NEVER use, runs contrary to the rest of the of the powers, or is just utterly useless (fixing that would help).
Worse, many of the powers on a single kit are actually spread across multiple skill sets. Not just 2, but sometimes 3 or more, and there's not enough skill points to make them effective. It also means once you spec into a kit, you can never, EVER change because if you do, you'll find half the powers are too weak to be useful. Kit swapping is a dream.
Let us pick the powers. Whatever you do to the powers, let us pick from the branch already.
As for specific powers, I think a lot of the problems is that non-single player combat is much too fast for the animations going off right now and have changed the point of certain powers. I run a medical kit on my main Sci, and she almost NEVER heals anyone else, she heals herself and as a result ends up being the tank in many ground encounters. There's no time to tag someone, heal them and then flip back to the target, especially when auto fire is set.
That's the other thing, powers can't really be queued up to go off as soon as one animation is done. It will blink, then not go off if the previous animation is still in progress. And if you have autofire set on the primary fire, it wont' interrupt or queue up behind it. There have been times I've tried to fire off a secondary fire, or a grenade, or whatever and instead of it going off, the primary activates AGAIN because it didn't trigger due to the primary's animation. Rolls do the same thing, which is why I disabled them totally.
Shorten the animations, make them either interruptible or queueable and whatever else you do with kit powers is fine.
Got to remember that their abilities are also influenced by their skills and traits.
If the wrong skills and traits (and reps) are being used, ofc they'd seems lousy and useless.
Saying that engs need more defense and shieldbuffs. Bah. Pity the fool I say.
An Eng is also to be remembered as being a support class.
Their purpose is not to storm ahead and rambo everything.
Certain obstacles needs to be tactically solved.
Aggro. Pull back. Raise shield. Aggro more. Roflstomp with orbital bombardement/beam of death. Root, disable guns, add drones, medical towers, stick of levitation, rock of evil twins.
So many options. No reason to die. Healingkits? Pfffh. Only needed against the thollie captain in the cave of doom on new romulus.