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Torpedoes! Viable? Sugguestions
nativejoe
Member Posts: 40 Arc User
Torpedoes: Anyone notice that Torpedoes are not regarded as viable? Why?
Answer: They don't do nearly as much damage as anything else does. Here's why...
Most notably Because +beam consols Stack with Fleet Flow or particle gen consoles they add a incredible plasma burn boost that can't be comparable with ANYTHING torps, and cannons can do. I've seen dps from this synergy in surplus of 22k dps just from the plasma proc.
1.5 second global cool down. Cannons fire together, beams fire together, torpedoes Don't, They don't even work on auto fire, autofire when switching from forward to aft weapons will lock up and not fire, Sometimes they'll lock up just because projectile duty officers proc, Or a long cool down weapon fires, To add to the frustration if you try to spam space bar to counter act the lock up you won't fire ANYTHING at all, commonly making you overshoot your goal and further reducing the damage your dealing.
Omega kinetic shearing isn't as powerful as it should be or I just don't understand it's mechanics.
A 12k damage torpedo smashing into a shielded target will sometimes Trigger a Dot of 40 damage, 5.5k damage per tick, or sometimes NO Dot at all even tho damage is inflicted.It doesn't seem to stack to well, some torpedoes seem to never trigger it, and it should collectively make up prolly about 20% at least of a Pure torpedo boats damage. In reality on my Combatlog reader it makes up about 6%.
Our secondary Detonations on many torpedoes seem weaker then they should be.
Mines and projectiles should be grouped into 1 catagory for consols... Who is stacking Mine consols? Honestly? They can ONLY be equipped in the aft slot. I'd understand it more if you could make a "Mine boat" but they need to be Combined into 1 Consol. So We can Dps like everyone else. Cannons arn't split , there's no such thing as turret consols, Double beam banks, beam arrays, and omni beams all function off The same consols. Projectile specialists have to Make a choice to ignore their Mine counter parts at this point
which is a shame since there are a few cool choices.
Lack of Duty officer love... We got reduced cool down, and.... Pretty much thats it for our choices since theres 2 choices for Projectile people. To High yield, or to Not High Yield. in which case you Select Torpedo Spread. There are no interesting Combinations, Interesting effects to exploit, and any other flavor then hardboiled egg.
Intel tree looks like it would benefit Projectiles but in reality the benefits to torpedoes are about as noticeable as Tachyon beam on a 400,000 shielded target. None at all.
Besides Mine chasing distance modifiers and torpedoes have a 10% chance to confuse targets for 3 seconds there are no direct Benefits to torpedoes that are in anyway exclusive. we don't have anything Like fluidic caccoon which adds 25% more damage or the other insanities out there for beams and cannons.
Lack of Consol love: We don't get insane shield heals from valadores consols, Steal tons of power with plasmonic Leech, Or get things like integrity leech which heals when u fire energy weapons... Pretty much insert X here and we don't get it.
To combat this most projectile officers Try to offset these weaknesses by coupling the Projectile build with something else. Be it a spark of Science exotic damage, or Draining, and pets.
Pets have been Nerfed to the ground: My elite Frigates Barley do 500 dps a piece.
Science: I thought the Science trait would be alot more powerful then it is, But a 1000 damage gravity well still does 1000 damage as a crit. I don't know if this was intentional, but there is no crit severity to the damage so Science abilities that don't work off consols Get nothing at all. Tachyon beam doesn't scale up and is completely useless except in CCA and thats just to remove a buff. The only useful abilities are Gravity well, Tykens rift, Energy siphon and Feed back pulse. And they're not primarily useful for damage delt, but the other effects they inflict. (excluding feedback pulse) And the consols and abilities outside of that have 1-3 minute cool downs which is insanity since the "dps" that entire console is contributing is reduced to nearly nothing.
Draining is viable...however, The heavy investment in console slots you need to drain shield power down is Way higher then the pay out. infact when I tried it , I ended up breaking even on my damage from No drain at all. However a Drain with fleet flow cap consoles will benefit cannons or beams because of the plasma damage proc thus making going into beams / cannon drain builds much more viable because they'll see a dps increase. A significant one.
So in Short: Torpedoes are in desperate Need of some Buffing, Bug control, traits,abilities, Duty officers, and The mine/torpedo consoles should be merged into one.
Feel Free to Add to this if you have Positive feed back, constructive criticism, etc
Please do not post if your here to take the conversation off topic, or to give short sided advice of " Then don't use torpedoes or mines", as this is a plea to bring them into viability. Not promote Scimtar Online/ disco ball online.
Answer: They don't do nearly as much damage as anything else does. Here's why...
Most notably Because +beam consols Stack with Fleet Flow or particle gen consoles they add a incredible plasma burn boost that can't be comparable with ANYTHING torps, and cannons can do. I've seen dps from this synergy in surplus of 22k dps just from the plasma proc.
1.5 second global cool down. Cannons fire together, beams fire together, torpedoes Don't, They don't even work on auto fire, autofire when switching from forward to aft weapons will lock up and not fire, Sometimes they'll lock up just because projectile duty officers proc, Or a long cool down weapon fires, To add to the frustration if you try to spam space bar to counter act the lock up you won't fire ANYTHING at all, commonly making you overshoot your goal and further reducing the damage your dealing.
Omega kinetic shearing isn't as powerful as it should be or I just don't understand it's mechanics.
A 12k damage torpedo smashing into a shielded target will sometimes Trigger a Dot of 40 damage, 5.5k damage per tick, or sometimes NO Dot at all even tho damage is inflicted.It doesn't seem to stack to well, some torpedoes seem to never trigger it, and it should collectively make up prolly about 20% at least of a Pure torpedo boats damage. In reality on my Combatlog reader it makes up about 6%.
Our secondary Detonations on many torpedoes seem weaker then they should be.
Mines and projectiles should be grouped into 1 catagory for consols... Who is stacking Mine consols? Honestly? They can ONLY be equipped in the aft slot. I'd understand it more if you could make a "Mine boat" but they need to be Combined into 1 Consol. So We can Dps like everyone else. Cannons arn't split , there's no such thing as turret consols, Double beam banks, beam arrays, and omni beams all function off The same consols. Projectile specialists have to Make a choice to ignore their Mine counter parts at this point
which is a shame since there are a few cool choices.Lack of Duty officer love... We got reduced cool down, and.... Pretty much thats it for our choices since theres 2 choices for Projectile people. To High yield, or to Not High Yield. in which case you Select Torpedo Spread. There are no interesting Combinations, Interesting effects to exploit, and any other flavor then hardboiled egg.
Intel tree looks like it would benefit Projectiles but in reality the benefits to torpedoes are about as noticeable as Tachyon beam on a 400,000 shielded target. None at all.
Besides Mine chasing distance modifiers and torpedoes have a 10% chance to confuse targets for 3 seconds there are no direct Benefits to torpedoes that are in anyway exclusive. we don't have anything Like fluidic caccoon which adds 25% more damage or the other insanities out there for beams and cannons.
Lack of Consol love: We don't get insane shield heals from valadores consols, Steal tons of power with plasmonic Leech, Or get things like integrity leech which heals when u fire energy weapons... Pretty much insert X here and we don't get it.
To combat this most projectile officers Try to offset these weaknesses by coupling the Projectile build with something else. Be it a spark of Science exotic damage, or Draining, and pets.
Pets have been Nerfed to the ground: My elite Frigates Barley do 500 dps a piece.
Science: I thought the Science trait would be alot more powerful then it is, But a 1000 damage gravity well still does 1000 damage as a crit. I don't know if this was intentional, but there is no crit severity to the damage so Science abilities that don't work off consols Get nothing at all. Tachyon beam doesn't scale up and is completely useless except in CCA and thats just to remove a buff. The only useful abilities are Gravity well, Tykens rift, Energy siphon and Feed back pulse. And they're not primarily useful for damage delt, but the other effects they inflict. (excluding feedback pulse) And the consols and abilities outside of that have 1-3 minute cool downs which is insanity since the "dps" that entire console is contributing is reduced to nearly nothing.
Draining is viable...however, The heavy investment in console slots you need to drain shield power down is Way higher then the pay out. infact when I tried it , I ended up breaking even on my damage from No drain at all. However a Drain with fleet flow cap consoles will benefit cannons or beams because of the plasma damage proc thus making going into beams / cannon drain builds much more viable because they'll see a dps increase. A significant one.
So in Short: Torpedoes are in desperate Need of some Buffing, Bug control, traits,abilities, Duty officers, and The mine/torpedo consoles should be merged into one.
Feel Free to Add to this if you have Positive feed back, constructive criticism, etc
Please do not post if your here to take the conversation off topic, or to give short sided advice of " Then don't use torpedoes or mines", as this is a plea to bring them into viability. Not promote Scimtar Online/ disco ball online.
Post edited by nativejoe on
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Comments
The main reasons torps can be viable at end game are the utilitarian effects they have. We see this with things like the Bio-Molecular Photon Torpedo Launcher, with its Bio-Molecular Incubation mechanic. We see it with the Gravimetric Torpedo Launcher, with its anomalies it generates. Furthermore, we see it with the Neutronic Funpedo Launcher, with its powerful shield-ignoring radiation damage.
Viable torps are also tied in space sets for added bonuses, like the examples I mentioned.
Other than that, torps are really kind of meh. With some work, a player could conceivably make a transphasic torpedo boat work, building on its bleedthrough capability and capitalizing on making extremely damaging bleedthrough attacks.
So yes, most of us know torps aren't anywhere near as cool as they were at lower levels, but they have been making up for that with their secondary effects which make them useful for end-game content.
The last 'viable' PVE torpedo/mine build was prior to the great Tricobalt Nerf of 2013 (2012?). There a B'Rel could deliver a gate killing blow with a single volley.
This is not to say you can't do it. There are many with the skills necessary to make it work, although I have yet to find a single player who uses a torp-only build anywhere who's name I could remember, or who I've played with anytime during 2500+ STFs.
Forgot to mention the Vaadwaur Tricobalt Cluster Torpedo launcher. That is also an extremely fun weapon, and the subspace ruptures the mines generate also provide excellent secondary effects.
The main thing I see torps in STO needing is more secondary effects, space traits, and reputation traits that make torpedos more dangerous.
I still use Omega Kinetic Shearing for the Kinetic DoT (that also ignores shields), and with abilities like Torpedo Spread, it actually is useful for helping cook enemies underneath their shields when multiple stacks of it start adding up.
The primary issues are:
-The massive shield negation penalty. (Torpedos have always been a great way to knock out shields in most Trek that I can remember - onscreen and in games. It's not like energy weapons are weak against hull to create a good mechanical gameplay dynamic.)
-Conflicting firing rate cooldown. (Only one tube can fire at a time; requiring you to alternate 2+ tubes in proper builds.)
-Attack skills only modify a single weapon/shot. (4/5 -including SS - energy weapon attacks modify all corresponding weapons for multiple firing cycles.)
With that said, the only torpedo types that don't really have a good build these days are Chronitons(proc needs to be 100% or better damage/quicker fire rate) and Tricobalts(could probably see some use if disables were made worthwhile again).
From personal experience, I'd say the two top contenders are probably Plasma and Transphasic builds. Transphasics are actually a pretty good synergy choice for minelayer builds. Plasma has a lot of great launchers(Particle Emission is fantastic and functionally interchangeable with Gravimetric Photons), but they all work best in conjunction with Gravity Well.
Photons and Quantums have seen a comeback with the introduction of recent reputation launchers. They're quite a bit more flexible for mixing with normal builds.
The anomlies, radiation damage , and other effects are basically Flat bonus damage. There isn't a way to significantly make them scale up on damage. I personally have every reputation torpedo, Every mission torpedo, and just about every varient of drop or craftable. bottom line is they Cannot stack damage as well as the other platforms, utilize or synergize ... which means You will run aground in dps pretty quickly, and not see any meaningful increases thereafter.
As for the sets.... those are incompatible with truly maximizing you dps. You can wear pure sets and never top 20k dps... and this is for Pure torpedo boats. Not hybrids.
When I realized how powerful the neutronic torp was, It has become a staple on all of my ships.
Yes Thats a excellent Rainbow torp combination. infact the best for fwd in all likly hood. Excluding Lobi torps.
But Again the potential damage there does not scale very effectivly, and isn't anywhere near the potential of Beams or cannons.
At the end of the day tho, Even the best torp boat is caught flailing helplessly trying to catch up to others. 70k is the top best miraculess Walking on water, perfect run possible rng jesus bestowed blessing , etc run for a torpedo boat. Beams= meh at 100+ Top being 163,000 dps Cannons can similarly achieve Mass damage of 80k+
And lets also note here. The BEST torpedoes are Bound to character and enslaved in the reputation system. The best cannons and Beams, people are trading between their main and alts at will... super boosting dps across the entire account o.o
This ignores alot of the issues I put up. The fact that torpedoes are AOE, And 95% of torpedo boats have gravity well, It should in all reality using this logic be Torps ahead. But there are so many draw backs that its simply not true. a torpedo boat has to hit gravity well, torpedo spread, and aim their ship at that spot. a Beam boat just has to hit FAW and does double to quadruple the damage the torp boat will do.
Oh, you just care about maximizing DPS. Well, carry on then.
I care about utility as well. But chiefly I'd like to get into doing Elite matches. But that won't be happening unless we can 1. educate the public about mechanics, tactics etc 2. Can up my personal dps Hive for instance requires 50k dps against shielded targets... something I am whoa-fully short of... 3. I'd like to advocate for torpedoes because there is no reason they should be as gimped as they are in star trek online...even speaking canonically, and since Beam boats, and cannon buffs can now Out damage us against unshielded targets I feel every edge torps had has been taken, and now is the time to speak up about it.
It's not 100% about being a elitist number hungry dps fiend. But if thats the standard the matches set for us with the time gates in elite modes... then I think I'm in the right, to point out torp boats weaknesses that have been compounded by the Expansion
Thats the general consensus I hear every single day.
Neutronic torpedo is powerful. but It's not something that I think is going to remain *as* powerful for long because of whats left of the pvp community. And sometimes the damage can get a *Bit* buggy... Winner of the bug is what I witnessed in ISA about 3 weeks ago. A Single Nuetronic Torpedo hit the begining borg cube for a little over 17.5 million, instantly killing it before the four of us even catapulted forward. It was a semi-fleet run , the bug shot was fired by a pugger that averaged 14k dps the remainder of the match.
Don't give up... the Torpedoes arn't "Doomed" they're just severly under powered and have potential cut offs. This doesn't mean u can't hit 30k dps, it just means you'll have to invest serious time, effort, thought, and sacrefice hundreds of thousands of dilithium and hundreds of millions of energy credits to get there. and Even when you get there, to absolute perfection, your going to be doing about half the damage of a Energy weapon user
They are held back by a LOT of old balance designs, which really don't apply as well anymore in the game.
Like the 1 second shared CD between torpedoes. It should be removed. If they are worried about a neverending spam of torpedoes, then the solution is simple: Make the minimum CD always be 1 second on an individual basis.
So...with how things are now: Transphasic torp 1 fires, and goes into CD, transphasic torp 2 goes into the 1 second global CD before it can fire.
How I feel it should be: Transphasic torp 1 fires and goes into CD, transphasic torp 2 can fire immediately or at the same time.
Same thing would apply for mines: Remove the long shared-CD between em. They already have a long CD on their own, they don't need to be held back by that either.
That said, special torps and mines should keep their CDs as-is, especially shared CDs. Perfect example being the Breen Cluster torp. It's not hard for me to possibly break 100,000 total damage from a cluster on a really good hit, and this is with a non-tac as well. If I could spam clusters at point-blank range with almost no break between them, it'd be a hugely overpowered thing.
But normal mines and torps should at least have the shared CDs removed between them. For mines at least reduced to say about 5 seconds or so at most for a shared CD if we HAD to keep it.
As for shields...well, there's a lot more that can be said about those alone, and hell, almost deserves it's own thread.
In the time it takes a HY torp to hit a target's hull an 8-beam cruiser can do just as much damage if not more, plus the beams don't suffer a loss of damage when hitting any shields.
Torpedoes need to be made a viable option for killing exposed targets, some way to make them a way better choice for shooting at bare hull than using energy weapons.
I don't know really, something needs to be done so that they are the clear best choice when you are trying to kill something once its shields are down.
Also a lot of the best torps uses rely heavily on having accompanying abilities like grav wells or tractor beams to give reasonable results. You almost need twice as many abilities to make a torp boat work as you would with a DHC or beam boat.
Suggestions? These are a few I though up but they are not ideal:
a) Give them an increased (or possibly 100%?) Crit rate when impacting bare hull. They hit shields and loose any potential but if they hit the hull they should be devastating.
b) Add in a proc effect to allow them to cause injuries to ships when they hit. These would having degrading effects on ships and would slowly stack up on the big boss level ships once they have enough holes blown in them.
c) Increase their flight speed to target.
d) Make all torps untargetable.
e) Allow torp buffing abilities like HY or TS to last a similar time to the equivalent energy weapons abilities (CRF, BFAW etc) so they can buff any shots within that time period.
f) Allow ships with multiple torps slotted to fire them all at one time. In other words remove the global cooldown that stops this.
g) Reduce the damage an energy weapon can do to hull, making a torp a better option for a final killing move.
first of, i'm flying a sci torp boat with gw, so these changes would affect me very much. currently on the breen carrier, with ts3 and grav/neutron/emission torps in the front, 4 fleet tac consoles crith/torp damage;
my current experience is, enemy shields are irrelevant. i often see enemies blowing up with all white shields, so a) wouldn't come into play for me that often. it'd be a nice thing to have, but only against the borg installations without shields i'd expect a notable difference.
b) would be a nuissance in pvp, i guess... i'd rather see that as a long-duration debuff, if at all; might be way overpowered, though, if you are on the receiving end of a torp every 2-3 seconds
c) nice to have, but except hy i think it's not neccessary; the hp sponges live long enough for the torps to reach them
d) hell no. let me rephrease that: HELL NO! i want to shoot down those 1-hitting borg hyper plasma torps down before they hit me. also, it's fun to see an enemy firing hyper plasma torps while you fire them as well, and have them cancel each other out
e) that will hurt. a lot. especially combined with f); imagine a gw3 holding like 10 borg spheres being on the receiving end of 4 (or 10+ with f) ts3 barrages with aoe torps, combined with attack pattern and tactical team.
f) imo, this one alone would probably make torp boats viable all by itself. especially with the doff 49% chance of reducing the cooldown of each torp slot by 5 seconds
g) would probably have too many ppl complaining about the nerf - and rightfully so. no need to hurt most players and invalidate their builds - as nowadays the enemies have a lot of hull to chew through.
another thing i'd like to see is the "seeking" torpedo types (rom hyper plasma, cluster torps) becoming 360° weapons - after all, they demonstrate their ability to reverse course by 180° when they retarget after their original target blows up.
that'd also allow a pure torp ship with such devices in the rear - if we manage to avoid getting hit by them ourselves, or dev kindness in having them path around us.
i also approve of the combining the +torp and the +mine to a +projectile console idea that someone else mentioned
What is less viable is a pure torp boat -- it takes a great deal of effort and know-how to even make one that can do enough dps to function.
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
Every DPS parse I've looked at tells me I'm losing damage using one, though.