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Bug: Focused singularity beam
telbasta7386
Member Posts: 761 Arc User
For reasons that nobody can seem to pinpoint, the focused singularity beam attack granted from the tactical carrier warbird retrofit's console is not working as it should.
The ability seems to randomly be interrupted, usually after only 3-4 seconds of fire. For an ability that's supposed to fire continuously for 20 seconds, we're losing more than 75% of the attack's damage potential. On top of that loss, we're also getting kicked out of annihilation mode, losing 10 weapon power. The singularity beam also gets put on a 4 minute cooldown despite the incomplete use, and puts annihilation mode on a 30 second cooldown.
At the moment, this ability isnt even worth putting on my hotbar. Please, figure out what's causing the random interrupts and fix it.
The ability seems to randomly be interrupted, usually after only 3-4 seconds of fire. For an ability that's supposed to fire continuously for 20 seconds, we're losing more than 75% of the attack's damage potential. On top of that loss, we're also getting kicked out of annihilation mode, losing 10 weapon power. The singularity beam also gets put on a 4 minute cooldown despite the incomplete use, and puts annihilation mode on a 30 second cooldown.
At the moment, this ability isnt even worth putting on my hotbar. Please, figure out what's causing the random interrupts and fix it.
Post edited by telbasta7386 on
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For a number of matches the beam seemed to be working pretty well, and then it disengaged prematurely (after about 4 seconds) twice in a row in Crystalline Catastrophe. Considering that the FSB was practically the ship's raison d'etre prior to the addition of the hangar bay, this really needs to be looked into.
What am I doing wrong?
Or what am I not doing?
That said, the damage is still pretty lame, all things considered, as are the visual and audio effects. I want a sense of power from my super siege weapon, right now it's just a slightly snazzed up plasma beam array.
For the FSB to become active (light up) you first have to be in Annihilation Mode. You'll know if you're in the right mode because the 4 singularity exhaust ports at the back of the Ar'Kif will open up and spark.
You need to slot the Annihilation Mode power and activate it first before using the beam.
As for the topic, I can't say Ive experienced this in my Ar'Kif TCWR. The only times I've noticed the beam abort, the target has wandered out of its firing arc, but I'll pay attention next time, and see if I can spot the early deactivation. In case it matters, I have the 2 item set with Enhanced Plasma Infusion on my ship.
Player since July 2010. KDF Sci: 11,230 Accolade Points as at Jan 2015
Cryptic please fix this broken item you sold me.
I've also noticed on the Ar'kif, more than any other ship, extreme UI lag. Not sure why, but it frequently takes two or three presses to get abilities to actually trigger. There have been so many times when I've strung together a chain of abilities only to notice a few seconds later that only one of them actually worked. Or that the Scorpions I thought I deployed ten seconds ago were in fact not.
It's certainly not the smoothest ship to try to pilot. I renamed mine Beam Fail. Is the FSB bug ever going to be addressed?
I appreciate the attempt to help, however none of the above are the cause of the singularity beam issue.
Sitting stationary no target around except my current stationary target (a transformer in KASE for instance) the beam will just stop firing after a second or two most times. The target has not changed, pets have not been deployed, NO skills at all being used at the same time ie: no buffs no rapid fire no nothing... It is just a random beam termination caused by a bug.
Cryptic will fix this, otherwise it's petition time and possibly a credit card charge-back for what it cost me for the ship. Companies need to show a level of responsibility for the products they put out, they need to fix things in a timely manner (like fixing the broken singularity beam, or as you pointed out, the other bug which happens while cloaking with annihilation mode activated) or they need to be held liable.
Same problem here.
The problem of it ceasing can also be contributed to enemies placing effects or certain damage amounts on you (unsure on the damage part, but 100% sure on the debuff or other effects).
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
But an Ar'Kif without Focused Singularity Beam is like a Guramba without Javelin Disruptor... Lame.
While I realize that the issue is marginal and difficult to solve (but not reproduce!) I cannot condone the fact that it is neither under investigation nor "patched" with a workaround of some sort.
Don't know what to tell you, it has been working 95% worry free for me.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
This issue was brought to QA's attention and we've managed to allocate some time to investigate. Currently, QA has been unable to reproduce the reported issue of the Focused Singularity Beam maintain prematurely cancelling.
Using the provided information in this thread, as well as our internal information we were unable to create an instance where the Focused Singularity Beam would prematurely cancel its maintain effect that was not expected behavior based on how the power was constructed and its intended behavior.
I would like to clarify the power and some elements to it which could result in the perceived effect of the beam cancelling via a bug rather than by intended design.
The Focused Singularity Beam functions as follows.
A maintained beam effect which has increasing damage over time utilizing a resource (Singularity power) which further requires the following.
- Annihilation Mode is active: This can be verified by the buff icon above your Starship HP portrait
- The target is within the forward facing 90' firing arc and remains this way during the maintained beam.
- The player has at minimum 10 Singularity power: 5 at time of activation and 5 per second the beam is active.
- Your weapons system is online and there is at least 5 weapon power during the maintain of the beam so that the system is not considered in an offline state.
Instances in which the Focused Singularity Beam may cancel prematurely include the following which are all intended behavior.
- If a player does not have 5 Singularity power to maintain the beam which is required every second of its maintain state
- If the player uses a Singularity ability such as Plasma Shockwave which will immediately drain all remaining singularity power resulting in no singularity power being present for the beam to use.
- If the weapons subsystem is knocked offline by a critter or player ability
- If the weapons subsystem reaches 0 power through use of player weapon fire the subsystem will be considered offline and the beam will cancel
- If the target leaves the 90' firing arc at any point during the maintain.
- If Annihilation mode is deactivated either through a buff removal power or manual deactivation by the player.
- If the player loses their target such as being affected by a perception debuff. (example: Subspace Rupture)
- While in combat a player may be furiously clicking buttons on their power tray during a time in which a lag spike occurs which in high latency/load conditions may result in the system registering a second click on the power thus resulting in a prompt deactivation while meeting all other requirements.
These instances in certain circumstances could cause the perception that the beam cancelled prematurely due to a bug.
If any player is still seeing issues with this power while meeting all the above requirements of the powers function, please obtain and report any information which could be relevant towards the reproduction of this. QA considers this not to be a bug at this time based on previous investigation and previously provided information.
Hopefully this has been helpful and again thank you all for supporting Star Trek Online and Cryptic Studios.
I share in the same problem. I've looked over all the requirements and caveats you've outlined, and as far as I can tell from multiple observations, the last one is the most likely.
As in, the Focused Singularity Beam being used in a high activity situation -where players would use it and hope to make it count- only to see it apparently backfire and break off during that time. I have experienced times when I clicked once, didn't see the beam fire, click another time to get it to start... and the beam fires belatedly and then ends and goes on 3 minute cooldown because I clicked a second time.
That - trying to overcompensate for lag and the effort backfiring - is obviously player error. But it's not always like that. Sometimes, it really does seem to just stop.
Another thing I wonder is if it's the beam that truly 'stops', or if its the beam's graphical FX that vanishes. No always, but on occasion, I've noticed my beam vanishing from view when my screen gets busy (I have 8 GB RAM and a NVidia GTX 560) but looking at my power tray I still see the still-declining 20 seconds cooldown.
If you want to try and reproduce it, I suggest doing it while running STFs. Infected Space Elite has good opportunities for the weapon to shine when trying to take down transformers fast, against the Gateway itself, and against the Tactical Cube at the end. That's where I noticed the Focused Singularity Beam feeling the less reliable.
Could be a case of that, considering once in awhile I can hear my annihilation mode make the sound of it activating (even though it is already activated), or turning off (even though it doesn't actually turn off) all on its own.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
And during this while, I'm generally not being targeted. I have my prow on my target. I start using the power with full singularity gauge. No other singularity power is triggered or used during the beam's discharge. Weapon power is at 100, so firing all my weaponry does not make it go down to zero.
What I am doing is firing all my other weapons along with it, as well as using powers on line 7 of my power tray, which are all bound to be activated by spacebar.
This supports the following statement from Mezirath:
The code for the singularity beam really needs to be made more robust in regard to its 'accidental' deactivations. This is what is causing us the most grief. My suggestion would be to make this power non-manually-deactivable just like other abilities such as Tachyon Beam.
Besides, it's such a rare case that we'd ever want to deactivate it midfire that it probably won't really inconvenience players to make it non-deactivable upon fire. Furthermore, if we really want to stop firing, we can just move our nose out of the 90 degree firing arc, or drop target with the ESC key.
I agree with this.
Joined January 2009
http://i.imgur.com/s4Np53C.jpg
Notice:
1) Singularity charge no where near depleted
2) I'm facing the target, 45 degree weapons were just fired or are in the process of firing; FSB has a 90 degree arc
3) No debuffs or other effects against me
4) Tac cube is my target, no other targets on the map
5) I am not the Tac cube's target, and do not appear to be under fire at all
I've been experiencing this issue for months now. I've gotten pretty adept at clicking the icon once and patiently watching the result. If I were accidentally double clicking the icon, the beam would go into cooldown immediately. That is not usually the case. It tends to be anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds, although 3-7 seems the most common.
There are certainly cases where the beam deactivates and I am certain that it should have (attacks, debuffs, target TBR'd out of my arc, etc.). However, in the vast majority of failure instances, I have no idea what happened.
Can a dev or anyone else take a look at the screenshot above and tell me why the beam cut out after ~4 seconds? What game mechanic explains it?
Here's one of them, taken 2 seconds after the beam stopped firing prematurely: http://i.imgur.com/lK7Nn3v.jpg
I'm attacking the entity from slightly underneath and it is moving to my left. However, all my 45 degree weapons were firing when the beam failed and continued to fire after; there was no interruption. Also notice, once again, that my singularity charge is not depleted and there appear to be no debuffs or other effects against me. Weapon power is full; Tholians hadn't disabled my weapons.
So what enemy effect or game mechanic explains it? Unless I'm missing something, which I'd be happy to entertain, I'm pretty confident that the beam's astonishingly high premature failure rate is indeed due to a bug.
She activates the Annihilation Mode, builds maximum singularity, then activates the Focused Singularity Beam. In every case, the beam will fire for just a brief moment -- one to three seconds -- before stopping. It acts like it's been interrupted, but the conditions for firing appear to be constant:
It's a little annoying as I just got her to play the game with me and the one ship she purchases doesn't appear to have a working feature. We could be doing it wrong, of course, but the beam *does* fire ... it just stops firing within 1-3 seconds for no visible reason and, for three days running, never works as advertised.
Do the devs have any suggestions on how we can test this or troubleshoot it ourselves since they can't repeat it?
Joined January 2009
Honestly there are A LOT of ships from the c-store and fleet versions that are carrying one glitch or another. I dont see how this case in particulary will have more attention than others.
And i am talking as another owner of the c-store version. Ironically i "only" experienced this bug a few times, and yes it is really annoying, but what annyoes me more is the shield graphics going off for some strange reason. That is really irritating , forces me to stay all the time looking at my ships ui to see the shields state. I really think that is really more important than the singularity beam itself. But nobody seems to care, apparently.. lol. In the end, the singularity beam is almost useless, i usually kill my target in 10 seconds without the singularity beam. Using the singularity beam, even if i can hold it for 8 seconds, it takes me almost the same time.
XO of Training
Tier 5 Starbase, Tier 3 Embassy, Tier 3 Dilithium Mine, Tier 3 Spire
Join us at www.dtfleet.com
Do not buy this thing. I love my ar'kif, but I seriously regret giving away money for something so unreliable.