Hardcap? NO. Similiar algorithm to damage increase as it is for damage resistance - YES.
But damage increase is not the only problem. All aspects should be reworked. You can have up to 5 superior romulan operatives traits, but you can only have one subtefuge trait. I think only one operative trait should be active, many consoles should be reworked, captains abilities, new RnD abilities (science trait is way too powerfull).
Currently all but one proffesions (TAC) are obsolete. Make the game so that all proffesions can have fun. Currently if you are not a TAC captain, you are obsolete, you cant play on elite because youre dps is too low, youre a handicap not a boost to your team. The game needs BALANCE.
How would they keep adding power creep (read: sell lockboxes) if they do this?
Interesting powers & gimmicks + purty ships ... , like they have done with more then a few of their ships thus far ... .
I'll also point out that this thread was based on some of the ideas from this thread (Least Successful Nerf of all Time) , in which playes commented that Cryptic took away their ability to enable all their Rep powers on one had , and gave us the Specializations, which all in all are more passives & they are even more powerful .
How on earth do you expect to see a balanced game like this , not to mention a game where somewhere along the line new players and old ones play side by side to have fun ?
Just firing 8 White Mk XI beams at close range at 125 weapons power is a minimum of 6k DPS - as in, base damage after 125 weapons power level of minimum. Fill out the rest of the gear to a typical player specification, and 6k becomes between 7 and 9k DPS.
This is your 1.5x average player point - we have only got as far as just putting 8 beams and some equipment on a Cruiser.
With current DR powercreep, a Fleet Galaxy Retrofit (you know, the ship dismissed due to its lack of Tac anything) has been taken to 40k DPS.
Even if you capped at ten times the average player it is still too harsh a cap.
No to nerfs! Nerfs are not about balance, they're usually just a way to upset players.
Yes to changing the game paradigm.
DPS ships good, BUT enemies have the ability to debuff their DPS. Only a sci can clear the debuff, and the more they do it, the more points they get towards earning special sci rewards.
Meanwhile, engineers keep the team alive, either tanking or healing. Change the mechanics so that Enineers CAN pull the threat from ships doing MUCH higher DPS than they are. As at the moment, they can't, the tac gets the aggro whether they want it or not. If engineer tanks can pull the damage, dps players can play glass cannons, dealing more dps offsetting the reduced DPS engineers and scis are able to do. Engineers receive points for their support activities towards unique engineer rewards just like the scis.
Make the game fun for EVERYBODY, rather than spoiling the fun of 1 group to make another group happy.
DPS dealers are your nukers, then you have your healers or tanks, and your crowd controllers/debuffers/ debuff strippers etc. Give non-dps builds and ships a reason for been.
DPS is not me but I know its a very important part of the game for some and a money maker for the game owner. I will most likely never catch up to the high dps players but its a goal I shoot for knowing that high dps is possible. Let them have their dps fun.
It renders as good as every good Console useless overnight
How would a 20-30K cap do that exactly ?
I agree that their combined usefulness might be limited , but not as a single unit , and certainly not all of them .
Besides, DPS isn't out of control at all: only for a handful of people..
So that is why the PVP-ers are saying that DR killed PVP and that is why we got the brilliant HP "fix" to PVE with DR , right ?
Weren't you one who said "finally someone who get's it !" ?
Or did you ignore what that player said about the power gap & power creep and just used that as a shallow justification to get your shinies back ?
This is not a problem of dps rather too many buffs stacking together when beam boats often comes with multi beta -50 all resistances and multi stacking fire at my mark -40 all res then enemy goes like -400 resistances from only tac slots what about sci and eng debufs?
I dont know how much negative resistances increase damage but all damage bufs crit and crit sev + negative resistances can achive 100k dps on multi target so we saw in 102kdps movie.
Solution? devs please bring back old "stronger buffs remain" to the game instead of stacking or even make them a private only debufs like resistance penetration/ignore avaible only for caster.
Also we need nerf to weapon power drain in marion config it suposed to slighty reduce power drain not completly negate it also zero power drain on weapons are also a bad idea reduced cost sounds more real. Also borg set with proc drain reduction -500! O.o even for 2 seconds its way too op it should reduce power drain of fixed value like 1 energy "8 beams drain 8 less energy" or 0,5 "8 beams drain 4 less energy"...
Right now Scim can give out 125 poer settings 250% damage multiply by omega 50% and tac fleet 40% and ambush from cloak with boffs for duration i forgot how much but this so stupid...
Another thing are aoe buffs they should give bonus to dps but 100% to self and 50% to team like tactical fleet or jemhadar dred console.
This is the simpliest way to reduce out of control dps in game without hurting newbies.
Its sad when i see myself killing tac cube and other players get killed by borg sphere and to give me a challange devs only brings more hp to cube and sphere even more distancing new players from me so im starting to look for pro players when new players get less and less help from power creep players.
- a hardcap is admitting a flawed game -- the players require developer's magic wand to face a challenge, rather than face tough mobs.
- it discourages ppl from playing, hit the cap, cant do better, get bored. At least now we can tinker and eek out minor gains.
- it discourages paying for the game. If I can hit hardcap in a mirror ship with blue gear, I won't buy that slick new t6 ship. Or whatever... I wont buy zen to to upgrade my t5 ship, I wont spend dil to upgrade from XIII gear, whatever.
- it will increase the boredom factor. At least as it stands we can tinker on ships and see gains.
- It opens a can o worms. why only cap damage? Once pandora's box is opened on a cap, why not cap hit points or power levels or .....
I could probably list issues all day long but lets leave it at those.
2x the average DPS displayed by the majority of the playerbase would not be enough to complete normal queues...
Sadly this is close to the truth.
I have almost stopped pugging since DR but from my experience in the old elites 5k dps was about average which means at 2x you would have a hard time doing an advanced and elite would not work at all. The best i have seen in a pug advanced was 23k dps and the worst was just over 1k with most being around 4-7k dps.
If they really want to make pve harder the ai need new abilites and more things like feedback pulse that discourge beam array faw spacebar smashing. Faw/csv should have a place instead of just being used because its more dps with no downside.
Anything the Devs do to try and hurt DPSers is going to hurt everyone else much more.
For example, lets look at the Pet nerf. Quite a few needed the DPS from their pets in order to do harder queues. When they get nerfed, those players are going to be hit hard. Now how hard are high DPS players going to be hit by that? On the current record DPS run, 107k, only 12k of his DPS was from his pets, and he didn't pop Fleet Support 3, which would have boosted him over 110k easily.
D'Angelo said STO has ~100k Characters. If I go look at the DPS league table, I see that there are:
~1,250 Players parsed at >10k DPS
Of those 1,250;
624 are >20k DPS
301 are >30k DPS
112 are >40k DPS
42 are >50k DPS
17 are >60k DPS
8 are >70k DPS
5 are >80k DPS
4 are >90k DPS
2 are above 100k DPS
Like any game, there are going to be very experienced players, and there are going to be players that have no clue what they're doing. If I go in as a new player, with very little play time, why would I want to get those that have put thousands of hours in to play at my level? Putting a cap on higher level players makes them want to not put any money in and possibly go look for another game.
RyanSTO, the one that did 101k DPS in his Scimitar, also did >40k DPS using a Fleet T5-U Exploration Cruiser Retrofit. Powercreep is nice and all, but it is all useless unless you know what you are doing.
Why? A possible cap prevents people to rise above the average. Some people like to wallow in averageness, but others want to know and go beyond the "safe borders".
I've never been queued for an STF and thought "wow this person is doing way too much damage"
Well , let's see ... , my fastest pre-DR experience was with a DPS crew in CSE that blew away the right corner (4 probes and a cube) in less time that it took me to blow up 4 of the BOP's (you know ... center and left) .
All in all ... I'd say it took them about ... 15-25 seconds .
You're welcome to not think that that is ridiculous .
I will disagree .
Moreover I'll say that I did not have fun playing with those guys , as the battle ended before it began .
Well , let's see ... , my fastest pre-DR experience was with a DPS crew in CSE that blew away the right corner (4 probes and a cube) in less time that it took me to blow up 4 of the BOP's (you know ... center and left) .
All in all ... I'd say it took them about ... 20-30 seconds .
You're welcome to not think that that is ridiculous .
I will disagree .
Aaaand your suggestion to bring some balance / equal footing to the game would be ?
... you know besides offering cookie cuter builds ...
And now advanced and elite queues are dead which is 100x more ridiculous. A cap on DPS wouldn't change this at all. The enemies need retuning, not the players (who will always mostly be brainless mouth breathers)
I think if you're going to introduce some sort of "cap", it should not be a hard cap. That doesn't provide meaningful choices to the player. It diminishes them. Now, what a lot of MMO's do(including Neverwinter, their other game) is to introduce soft caps or "diminishing returns" caps on things like critical hit chance. Something like that I think is more appropriate.
- What is the average players' DPS? Is the average player a 2k DPS "person"?!?
?
About 1/3rd of players do 2k DPS. The next third takes us up to 7-8k DPS.
Basically, if you plotted players (X) vs DPS (Y), you have a relatively straight line up to about 5k, a bulge between 5-9k, and the tiny bit on the end being one massive spike.
I would sincerely hope that the devs learned from the queue changes not to listen to the small number of players crying for "more challenge" when they saw the queues empty out...
No, the majority DON'T want DPS nerfs, more challenge etc, they want to play a fun game, not a job of work. The majority spoke when they changed the queues, and if Cryptic nerf DPS will speak again, not on these forums, but in the game where it actually matters.
Stop thinking that the problem is with power creep dps, and realise that it's with underpowered engineers and scis. DPS is good when those who don't want to DPS also feel useful. Teams want high dps players, as well as healers, buffers, crowd controllers etc. The focus on dps is because we don't have this in STO, we just have DPS. All anybody cares about is the DPS people are dealing. Those who have it are happy, those who don't are jealous and cry for nerfs.
The simple truth is, those who are monsters in Scimitars are a small minority. Most players flying them AREN'T doing 100k plus. Nerfing wont hurt the high DPSers, it'll hurt the just about doing enough DPSers, and the not doing nearly enough DPSers far more.
Even a 20k cap on DPS would still have players doing 4x that of the majority.
The majority of players in this game do something like 3-5k. Then there are people in the 10-30k band and people in the 40k+ band, with even 100k being reached.
Basically the majority are doing 5% of the DPS that we know is possible.
The problem between this huge DPS variation has already been solved. There are normal, advanced and elite queues... problem is the people who only do 3-5k really want the advanced queues to be normal difficulty. Yes yes, they used to be able to do pre-DR elite... So could a non-hardcore group(people who aren't members of DPS channels) of players in quickly setup T3 ships. That's not elite, that's not even advanced. That's easy difficulty.
It's not like a good portion of 10k+ are doing anything extraordinarily special, it's just the 3-5k builds tend to be horrendously bad. Mixed weapon types, useless and/or redundant boff powers(3 of the same skill), weapon setups that are trying to stay canon, no shield heals, no tactical team, no tac consoles. Even when they do get into combat, you hardly see a single boff power being used.
Which is fine, that's what the normal queues were for.
With a hard cap, I no longer have any incentive to get better gear (= BUY gear/upgrades), or better myself as a pilot.
Besides, the whole fun of the game is the synergy of your Consoles, skills, etc.
Also, to you, Cryptic, and let me make this abundantly clear, you had me spend inordinate amounts of cash for all your sick upgrades, just so as to get me back on the wagon again. If you do a 180 now again, I'll leave 'fore you can say "Please, don't leave!" Fool me once, and all that.
Nah you dont need a cap, like a previous poster said, "You need people to feel useful in what there doing"
WoW style stf's would be better, rather than it all coming down to dps.
WoW style i mean like raids, stf's should be more like them, ie: Dps have a job, tanks take the agrro and sci's heal, rather than it just coming down to a timed dps race.
But you also need the AI's to have, well "I", atm they just have "A" with a TRIBBLE load of hit points.
And now advanced and elite queues are dead which is 100x more ridiculous. A cap on DPS wouldn't change this at all. The enemies need retuning, not the players
Obviously the enemies need retuning as well ... -- but my point was that you CAN'T tune an enemy to be player friendly when one player does 5K , the other 12K the other 10K and yet another 30K or more .
Some sort of balance , some sort of cohesiveness needs to exist .
Against. You can't limit what makes this game go. And no NERFING of the Scimatar and I don't even own one.
A cap would avoid the need to nerf the Scimi , or any other power in the game .
It would put a line in the sand ("this far and no further") and have more then one ship reach that line (with a skilled pilot & good gear) .
... and I did suggest to raise the cap every year or so to "make the game go" as you put it . But that would be make the game go under controlled circumstances .... where the enemies would also then be controlled to match & challenge , not be a trololol or zzzzzzzzz.... fest
Comments
Meaning we should comb through tons of data looking for near-exploit, costly builds that someone else, without a life, dreamed up?
In this "pay to win" world, I think the OP's idea deserves consideration by Cryptic
But damage increase is not the only problem. All aspects should be reworked. You can have up to 5 superior romulan operatives traits, but you can only have one subtefuge trait. I think only one operative trait should be active, many consoles should be reworked, captains abilities, new RnD abilities (science trait is way too powerfull).
Currently all but one proffesions (TAC) are obsolete. Make the game so that all proffesions can have fun. Currently if you are not a TAC captain, you are obsolete, you cant play on elite because youre dps is too low, youre a handicap not a boost to your team. The game needs BALANCE.
Interesting powers & gimmicks + purty ships ... , like they have done with more then a few of their ships thus far ... .
I'll also point out that this thread was based on some of the ideas from this thread (Least Successful Nerf of all Time) , in which playes commented that Cryptic took away their ability to enable all their Rep powers on one had , and gave us the Specializations, which all in all are more passives & they are even more powerful .
How on earth do you expect to see a balanced game like this , not to mention a game where somewhere along the line new players and old ones play side by side to have fun ?
Just firing 8 White Mk XI beams at close range at 125 weapons power is a minimum of 6k DPS - as in, base damage after 125 weapons power level of minimum. Fill out the rest of the gear to a typical player specification, and 6k becomes between 7 and 9k DPS.
This is your 1.5x average player point - we have only got as far as just putting 8 beams and some equipment on a Cruiser.
With current DR powercreep, a Fleet Galaxy Retrofit (you know, the ship dismissed due to its lack of Tac anything) has been taken to 40k DPS.
Even if you capped at ten times the average player it is still too harsh a cap.
Nice! Well, not so much, I think the powercreep is ridiculous, but still, a Galaxy did that!
Yes to changing the game paradigm.
DPS ships good, BUT enemies have the ability to debuff their DPS. Only a sci can clear the debuff, and the more they do it, the more points they get towards earning special sci rewards.
Meanwhile, engineers keep the team alive, either tanking or healing. Change the mechanics so that Enineers CAN pull the threat from ships doing MUCH higher DPS than they are. As at the moment, they can't, the tac gets the aggro whether they want it or not. If engineer tanks can pull the damage, dps players can play glass cannons, dealing more dps offsetting the reduced DPS engineers and scis are able to do. Engineers receive points for their support activities towards unique engineer rewards just like the scis.
Make the game fun for EVERYBODY, rather than spoiling the fun of 1 group to make another group happy.
DPS dealers are your nukers, then you have your healers or tanks, and your crowd controllers/debuffers/ debuff strippers etc. Give non-dps builds and ships a reason for been.
How would a 20-30K cap do that exactly ?
I agree that their combined usefulness might be limited , but not as a single unit , and certainly not all of them .
So that is why the PVP-ers are saying that DR killed PVP and that is why we got the brilliant HP "fix" to PVE with DR , right ?
Weren't you one who said "finally someone who get's it !" ?
Or did you ignore what that player said about the power gap & power creep and just used that as a shallow justification to get your shinies back ?
I dont know how much negative resistances increase damage but all damage bufs crit and crit sev + negative resistances can achive 100k dps on multi target so we saw in 102kdps movie.
Solution? devs please bring back old "stronger buffs remain" to the game instead of stacking or even make them a private only debufs like resistance penetration/ignore avaible only for caster.
Also we need nerf to weapon power drain in marion config it suposed to slighty reduce power drain not completly negate it also zero power drain on weapons are also a bad idea reduced cost sounds more real. Also borg set with proc drain reduction -500! O.o even for 2 seconds its way too op it should reduce power drain of fixed value like 1 energy "8 beams drain 8 less energy" or 0,5 "8 beams drain 4 less energy"...
Right now Scim can give out 125 poer settings 250% damage multiply by omega 50% and tac fleet 40% and ambush from cloak with boffs for duration i forgot how much but this so stupid...
Another thing are aoe buffs they should give bonus to dps but 100% to self and 50% to team like tactical fleet or jemhadar dred console.
This is the simpliest way to reduce out of control dps in game without hurting newbies.
Its sad when i see myself killing tac cube and other players get killed by borg sphere and to give me a challange devs only brings more hp to cube and sphere even more distancing new players from me so im starting to look for pro players when new players get less and less help from power creep players.
People who can't do anything on the other hand..
2x the average DPS displayed by the majority of the playerbase would not be enough to complete normal queues...
- a hardcap is admitting a flawed game -- the players require developer's magic wand to face a challenge, rather than face tough mobs.
- it discourages ppl from playing, hit the cap, cant do better, get bored. At least now we can tinker and eek out minor gains.
- it discourages paying for the game. If I can hit hardcap in a mirror ship with blue gear, I won't buy that slick new t6 ship. Or whatever... I wont buy zen to to upgrade my t5 ship, I wont spend dil to upgrade from XIII gear, whatever.
- it will increase the boredom factor. At least as it stands we can tinker on ships and see gains.
- It opens a can o worms. why only cap damage? Once pandora's box is opened on a cap, why not cap hit points or power levels or .....
I could probably list issues all day long but lets leave it at those.
Sadly this is close to the truth.
I have almost stopped pugging since DR but from my experience in the old elites 5k dps was about average which means at 2x you would have a hard time doing an advanced and elite would not work at all. The best i have seen in a pug advanced was 23k dps and the worst was just over 1k with most being around 4-7k dps.
If they really want to make pve harder the ai need new abilites and more things like feedback pulse that discourge beam array faw spacebar smashing. Faw/csv should have a place instead of just being used because its more dps with no downside.
Yep, RyanSTO (ezriryan on here) did it just a few days ago.
Ok, there are maybe 5 players in total who could actually do it, but that is the fact - powercreep is so vast a Galaxy can now do 40k DPS.
Yet the average player couldn't get 1/10th of that from a Galaxy Class.
I find a bit of a long fight challenging and rewarding.
Where is the fun in point weapon, press fire, and watch explosion.
Is this a game or is it how fast can you make something explode MMO.
Anything the Devs do to try and hurt DPSers is going to hurt everyone else much more.
For example, lets look at the Pet nerf. Quite a few needed the DPS from their pets in order to do harder queues. When they get nerfed, those players are going to be hit hard. Now how hard are high DPS players going to be hit by that? On the current record DPS run, 107k, only 12k of his DPS was from his pets, and he didn't pop Fleet Support 3, which would have boosted him over 110k easily.
D'Angelo said STO has ~100k Characters. If I go look at the DPS league table, I see that there are:
~1,250 Players parsed at >10k DPS
Of those 1,250;
Like any game, there are going to be very experienced players, and there are going to be players that have no clue what they're doing. If I go in as a new player, with very little play time, why would I want to get those that have put thousands of hours in to play at my level? Putting a cap on higher level players makes them want to not put any money in and possibly go look for another game.
RyanSTO, the one that did 101k DPS in his Scimitar, also did >40k DPS using a Fleet T5-U Exploration Cruiser Retrofit. Powercreep is nice and all, but it is all useless unless you know what you are doing.
Why? A possible cap prevents people to rise above the average. Some people like to wallow in averageness, but others want to know and go beyond the "safe borders".
Well , let's see ... , my fastest pre-DR experience was with a DPS crew in CSE that blew away the right corner (4 probes and a cube) in less time that it took me to blow up 4 of the BOP's (you know ... center and left) .
All in all ... I'd say it took them about ... 15-25 seconds .
You're welcome to not think that that is ridiculous .
I will disagree .
Moreover I'll say that I did not have fun playing with those guys , as the battle ended before it began .
Aaaand your suggestion to bring some balance / equal footing to the game would be ?
... you know besides offering cookie cuter builds ...
What they need to do is first balance out weapon mods (critD, critH, Acc and DMG) and then implement diminishing returns on those mods.
Next expand Space Traits amongst factions and then prevent or limit stacking.
And now advanced and elite queues are dead which is 100x more ridiculous. A cap on DPS wouldn't change this at all. The enemies need retuning, not the players (who will always mostly be brainless mouth breathers)
You're welcome to disagree though
About 1/3rd of players do 2k DPS. The next third takes us up to 7-8k DPS.
Basically, if you plotted players (X) vs DPS (Y), you have a relatively straight line up to about 5k, a bulge between 5-9k, and the tiny bit on the end being one massive spike.
No, the majority DON'T want DPS nerfs, more challenge etc, they want to play a fun game, not a job of work. The majority spoke when they changed the queues, and if Cryptic nerf DPS will speak again, not on these forums, but in the game where it actually matters.
Stop thinking that the problem is with power creep dps, and realise that it's with underpowered engineers and scis. DPS is good when those who don't want to DPS also feel useful. Teams want high dps players, as well as healers, buffers, crowd controllers etc. The focus on dps is because we don't have this in STO, we just have DPS. All anybody cares about is the DPS people are dealing. Those who have it are happy, those who don't are jealous and cry for nerfs.
The simple truth is, those who are monsters in Scimitars are a small minority. Most players flying them AREN'T doing 100k plus. Nerfing wont hurt the high DPSers, it'll hurt the just about doing enough DPSers, and the not doing nearly enough DPSers far more.
The majority of players in this game do something like 3-5k. Then there are people in the 10-30k band and people in the 40k+ band, with even 100k being reached.
Basically the majority are doing 5% of the DPS that we know is possible.
The problem between this huge DPS variation has already been solved. There are normal, advanced and elite queues... problem is the people who only do 3-5k really want the advanced queues to be normal difficulty. Yes yes, they used to be able to do pre-DR elite... So could a non-hardcore group(people who aren't members of DPS channels) of players in quickly setup T3 ships. That's not elite, that's not even advanced. That's easy difficulty.
It's not like a good portion of 10k+ are doing anything extraordinarily special, it's just the 3-5k builds tend to be horrendously bad. Mixed weapon types, useless and/or redundant boff powers(3 of the same skill), weapon setups that are trying to stay canon, no shield heals, no tactical team, no tac consoles. Even when they do get into combat, you hardly see a single boff power being used.
Which is fine, that's what the normal queues were for.
Daizen - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Selia - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
^^ That sums it up nicely.
With a hard cap, I no longer have any incentive to get better gear (= BUY gear/upgrades), or better myself as a pilot.
Besides, the whole fun of the game is the synergy of your Consoles, skills, etc.
Also, to you, Cryptic, and let me make this abundantly clear, you had me spend inordinate amounts of cash for all your sick upgrades, just so as to get me back on the wagon again. If you do a 180 now again, I'll leave 'fore you can say "Please, don't leave!" Fool me once, and all that.
WoW style stf's would be better, rather than it all coming down to dps.
WoW style i mean like raids, stf's should be more like them, ie: Dps have a job, tanks take the agrro and sci's heal, rather than it just coming down to a timed dps race.
But you also need the AI's to have, well "I", atm they just have "A" with a TRIBBLE load of hit points.
Obviously the enemies need retuning as well ... -- but my point was that you CAN'T tune an enemy to be player friendly when one player does 5K , the other 12K the other 10K and yet another 30K or more .
Some sort of balance , some sort of cohesiveness needs to exist .
A cap would avoid the need to nerf the Scimi , or any other power in the game .
It would put a line in the sand ("this far and no further") and have more then one ship reach that line (with a skilled pilot & good gear) .
... and I did suggest to raise the cap every year or so to "make the game go" as you put it . But that would be make the game go under controlled circumstances .... where the enemies would also then be controlled to match & challenge , not be a trololol or zzzzzzzzz.... fest