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Ideas for improving all torpedoes
evilmark444
Member Posts: 6,951 Arc User
So, some of the criticism towards the AP torpedo has been because it gets boosted by AP consoles, thereby giving it more synergy with AP builds. This got me thinking, to improve the existing torpedoes, which are generally considered a DPS lose, why not make it so energy specific console also provide their bonuses to all torpedoes? Example:
20% phaser console adds 20% damage to plasma torpedoes, as phaser damage (torpedo deals its normal plasma damage, plus additional phaser damage).
This would help close the gap on DPS, and bring all torpedoes in line with the new APs biggest advantage over other torpedoes. But that still leaves the arc concern, this however could be resolved by adding a brief, 3 or 5 second turn rate buff to torpedo abilities, enough time to turn, fire, and get back into broadside positioning.
These are just my ideas, I personally will continue to use at least one torpedo on all ships, regardless of effectiveness ... it just seems wrong not to have them.
20% phaser console adds 20% damage to plasma torpedoes, as phaser damage (torpedo deals its normal plasma damage, plus additional phaser damage).
This would help close the gap on DPS, and bring all torpedoes in line with the new APs biggest advantage over other torpedoes. But that still leaves the arc concern, this however could be resolved by adding a brief, 3 or 5 second turn rate buff to torpedo abilities, enough time to turn, fire, and get back into broadside positioning.
These are just my ideas, I personally will continue to use at least one torpedo on all ships, regardless of effectiveness ... it just seems wrong not to have them.
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Energy hybrd torpedoes aganst shields are actually a nice idea, but I'm wondering why generally we don't have a native 40-60% resistance of bare hull against energy weapons (of course able to improve that via armour consoles as usual up to 90-ish per enery type) and vice versa shields against torpedoes. Just mirror the torp->shield situation with energ->hull, it would make much more sense.
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1. Console Boosts - Any Tac consoles you use to boost torpedoes is a console boosting ~1/7 weapons instead of ~6/7 of your weapons.
2. Skill Points - Projectiles require a separate skill from energy weapons, so you're giving up on other aspects of your performance to boost ~1/7 of your weapons.
3. Bridge Officer Abilities - Having a torpedo means your CSV/FAW are boosting 1/7 less weapons, having torpedo skills means you're using ~1/12 or ~2/12 of your stations to just 1/7 of your weapons.
4. Travel time and slow fire rate - They're not hitscan, so it's entirely possible for a firing cycle to be wasted, which is a large impact on your DPS.
5. Shields negate 75% of kinetic damage - doesn't matter if there's just 1 shield point remaining, 75% of the damage will go poof.
The arc is a problem specifically for beamboats, but not a problem for cannon/DBB ships.
This is the one major flaw in torps in my opinion. They really should be developed as the hull crackers they are meant to be.
Now I don't know how to best do this, anything that is changed will upset somebody! I've thrown together a few suggestions, feel free to discuss, support or mock any of them!
1)Give hulls an innate resistance to energy weapon damage just as shields have with kinetic damage.
2)Make the kinetic resistance of shields drop significantly as they take damage. This removes the issue of a tiny 1% sliver of shield facing completely stopping a massive explosion just because it still has 75% resistance. A shield that's down to 10% should be barely able to stop a torp compared to a full facing.
3)Allow projectiles to cause injuries (lasting damage) to ships when impacting hulls. (possibly not favorable for PVP but in PVE it would be ok). A ship getting pummeled with torps should slowly start to fall apart.
4)Allow torps to have a higher crit rate or crit damage when impacting on bare hull.
A million times this. Especially given the rate at which so many factions regain shields, its nearly impossible to catch them with their shields entirely gone at the moment of torpedo impact.
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I don't know if that would help. The effect shouldn't be as notceable as a torpedo spread and then the shield resistence probably doesn't make it worth. But I might be mistaken.
1 and 2 are good ideas in my opinion. On-screen reference can even be used to justify that, torpedo impact on shields had a significant effect on them. Having their effectiveness educed (to what degree needs to be tested carefully of course) would make sense. and the innate energy resistance to hulls is sort of a no-brainer and I never got why they didn't have that. 3 and 4 aren't necessary or practicable in my opinion.
But everything you change will always "upset" some people. But if you don't want to upset anyone it means this game cannot change or evolve ever, it always has to stagnate in it's status quo.
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Wasnt trying to completely fix torpedoes, as you've pointed out that takes more than what I've suggested, but such a change would eliminate point one and reduce point 3 by making torpedoe abilities more attractive for burst damage.
An additional tweak I'd like to see would put a 5 or 10 second cooldown on shield facings regen when that facing reached zero. Essentially, if a facing goes down it cannot regen or have capacity transfered from other facings for 5 or 10 seconds. Shield healing abilities (science team, etc) would still work. This would eliminate point 5 by giving a bigger window to ram torpedoes into bare hull. Also matches closer to what the various shows portrayed.
Torp boats can't even make use an AP style torpedo without using it unbuffed as it doesn't get bonuses from projectile/torp consoles. It's energy console or go home. It'd be great for boats that aren't using transphasic or plasma torpedoes to get around the shield if it ran off of normal torpedo consoles but then no one using AP would even look at it.
It would be interesting if energy weapons had to face hull-slamming like torps have to deal with shield-slamming.
However, the ship still gets the kinetic effects of the torpedo blast and it shakes and moves accordingly as a reaction to the kinetic energy it recieves, therefore, all torpedo must affect the crew in terms of injury and for some, death even if the ship's hull is still intact. Stuff in the ship fall on top of them or they are thrown off from where the are before the impact. This effect should be part of all torpedos regardless of type. Those that have a stronger blast should leave more affected crew, as well, as those that penetrate more of the shield. The effect may be calculated via the percent shield penetration proportionally with the damage.
Of course, a ship hit by a torpedo with it's shields down will cause a structural damage with hull beaches in some areas. The effect on the crew would be great but then the survival of the ship would be in jeopardy.
number 2 is something both starfleet command and bridge commander did(although they did it with damage in general), bridge commander specifically did it pretty well, if you were to hit an enemy's maxed shields with a quantum torpedo they would just shrug it off, but if their shields were around 60% and lower, they would take severe hull damage and torpedoes were vastly stronger at damaging the hull of an enemy compared to beams.
although torpedoes weren't as weak against shields like they are in STO.
your suggestions are pretty good, but i think cryptic is afraid of changing the mechanics and messing up the balance even more.
The slow travel time was probably supposed to be the balance to the lack of range based damage loss.
With modern energy kill times (even in PvE), it needs a looking at.
(Or run Surface Tension in a torpedo boat in the run with the Aquarius...)
It does not seem right to be effectively 'punished' for flying a ship with both torps and energy weapons as is often seen in ST episodes and films when playing a ST game, or for opting for a more difficult strategy more demanding of piloting skills, and instead boxed in to a park-n-shoot Pve.
The other issue that also concerns the use of torpedoes against shields, hull, crew is the pace of combat. Shields and hull can be brought down and up in an instant, the ability tray needs constant spamming to make effective use of its cool-downs so they don't idle to waste, and response times to scenarios are so fast that it feels more like playing pinball with a starship theme than a star trek ship simulator involving strategy, planning, gearing, coordination, team-work.
It makes the use of torpedoes that much harder to achieve properly when a ship has abilities upon abilities on very short cooldown cycles, again forcing an either all-out torpedo or beam boat, or cannon/turrets.
A hybrid of both in my experience so far doesn't even seem to be a strategy choice but a build-error, and that right there isn't right, especially when it appears in ST films so often that you'd expect it to be a valid gear choice in a game that's supposed to be ST, nevermind the lack of diplomacy, exploration, moral dilemmas, "options" and choices, etc.
Also, why is it that torpedoes fired by NPCs that impact you ship at long enough range seem to have little to no effect whatsoever if there's supposed to be no range drop-off? Is it simply an out-of-combat >10k exception? It feels unfair to outrun torpedoes that already have a 'lock.'
I would just up the defense value of HY torps. That way they become a real pain to shoot down unless you spec into accuracy or point defense systems or whatever. It would be reasonably balanced for PVP as accuracy is high there already but in PVE it would make torps last longer.
At the end of the day you don't want Borg HY plasma torps zooming at you at full impulse, but making them a bit harder to hit unless you came prepared to counter them would seem fair.
So while you would impact the dps- and pvp-crowds with a bare minimum, you would overthrow whats left of pugging.
Just a remark.
The only thing they could really do to be honest is make torpedoes as effective as energy weapons but that will never happen.
There are bosses in game where their shields never drop...so even then it wont help torps there. Then there are the things with no shields at all...that is where people rack up their high dps...they aren't going to want that to change.
Just gotta face it the devs don't seem to care about much else than money...and some of their biggest if not all of their biggest whales are the people who will fork out tons of money to get that perfect build...to get the next even more powerful ship. What does every max dps build do? Stack energy weapons and maybe a KCB...just isn't going to happen.
Don't get me wrong I love torps...just doesn't feel right to fly a ship without at least one...but these days I mostly just use Plasma or GP/EBM Photons...least they do decent damage and have good secondary effects.
As much as I hate to admit I'm sorta considering trying out this AP torp...I'm struggling with it though because it is a slap in the face to torpedo fans but at the same time there hasn't been a good torpedo in a long time that wasn't broken and finally fixed.
All energy ships would become an aberration like torpedo boats are now. There might be an energy equivalent to transphasic and plasma to bypass the hull resistance with most types relegated to hull slamming.
You would actually want a mix of energy and projectile weapons for effective play. Energy weapons to drop shields, projectile weapons to rip the hull apart. If you look at the load out of a freshly acquired ship it always has a mix of energy and projectile weapons even though actual gameplay mechanics favor all energy so you don't split your tac consoles for weapons you aren't using all the time.
Make the base firing arc 180 degrees and have it increase when a torpedo BO ability is used.
Hybrid tactical consoles that work similar to the beam/torpedo consoles.
Have a slightly lower dmg boost to energy than the Fleet Tactical consoles, but provide equal damage boost to analogue torpedo types.
Phaser/Quantum/Photon +30%
Disruptor/Hargh'Peng/Photon +30%
Plasma/Plasma/Photon +30%
Tetryon/Transphasic +32%
Polaron/Chroniton + 32%
Antiproton/Tricobalt +32%
or numbers to that effect.
This idea works for plasma and antiproton because we have plasma and AP energy weapons.
But there are no Photon beam banks, transphasic turrets, or Quantum DHCs. What consoles would boost those?
That alone would make torps a worth while have again. It would seem more fitting since even in the TV episodes weaker shields didn't protect against torpedoes near as good.
Let's not lock more two-in-ones behind fleet shenanigans.
The biggest problem afflicting the game as a whole right now is ability spam. Players and NPCs alike are constantly chaining heals and other abilities back to back all the time. For a weapon of opportunity, like torpedos, this is more than a little problematic because that window of opportunity is microscopic. If you go back and play a new character, there is a very notable place for torpedos in the game due to shield heals and weapon attacks being more rare/opportunistic.
Kinetic weapons are not treated equally to energy weapons. Multiple kinetic weapons cannot fire at the same time like energy weapons can. This punishes you for stacking multiple kinetic weapons - the energy drain mechanic that was supposed to counter-balance this for energy weapons has long-been rendered trivial. Furthermore, projectile weapon attacks only modify a single attack, whereas 4/5 energy weapon attacks modify all energy weapons for an extended duration.
Kinetic damage is harshly punished by shielding(torpedos used to absolutely wreck shielding in the shows), whereas energy weapons are able to do their full damage against both shields and hull. It is true, there is a damage falloff at range with energy weapons, but when compounded by the above it's a fairly moot point.
With all that said, I have a Photon Armitage that can absolutely obliterate swarms and a Plasma Vesta that can brutally ravage Bosses and Structures like no-one's business.
Personally speaking, I would like to see all weapon attacks redone from the ground up and broken into two categories - Energy Weapons(Cannons AND Beams):, Projectile Weapons(Torps AND Mines):. Furthermore, I would like to see some canon implementations of variant torpedo launcher types. Many ships(Galaxy and Sovereign were notable examples) were fit with "Burst-Fire" torpedo launchers - it wasn't a 'skill' it was a standard capability.
This is why my idea just adds the consoles damage type to the torpedo.
I actually just thought of an extension of this idea, if they remove the proc from energy weapons and add them to the coresponding consoles then energy type balance would be fixed as well.
It would be very simple to fix, as you said.
Energy Weapons effective vs shields but weak against hull
Projectiles effective against hull but weak vs shields
The funny thing is that 1 has already been in the game. Projectiles would be fine with their higher damage per shot because unlike energy weapons, they have reload times, while energy weapons can shoot all the time with zero extra effort.
1. Get rid of the base bleed-through for energy weapons, except for the various abilities and traits and add 5-10% absorption to shields for energy damage. So energy weapons attack shields only with base characteristics.
2. Split torpedo damage as both energy and kinetic. After all, a bomb is just massive amounts of energy...more so in Star Trek when you are talking about PHOTON and PLASMA explosions. I'm not sure on what the split would be, maybe 20% energy damage and 80% kinetic damage or 30-70 (30-70 would mean a 4K torpedo hit would cause 1,200 of energy damage). This way energy weapons are still more effective on shields but torpedoes can still have viability. If the torpedo is strong enough it can cause serious damage to shields.
3. For shields vs torpedoes you don't change the shield resistance (there is some logic that a kinetic impact wouldn't affect shields to a great degree) but torpedoes causing energy damage would fix some of that. Also, when a torpedo hits bare hull it would cause the same amount of damage as before because you are getting both the energy and kinetic damage combined again.
4. Add innate energy resistance to starship hulls...which of course changes the last sentence of torpedoes causing the same amount of damage on bare hulls after combining their energy and kinetic damage. But you get the idea.
5. Energy procs would be available on torpedoes for certain types making synergy between gear better. For example, if you were to make photon torpedo energy damage a variant of phaser damage then a photon torpedo would have the same procs as their energy counterpart - knocking down a subsystem. Maybe reduce the proc to 1% rather than 2.5% or keep it the same. How many times have we seen in ST the ability to target a system with a torpedo as well as with directed energy weapons?
The question remains as to what kind of console would enhance the energy damage of torpedoes or what type of energy damage each torpedo would have. For plasma torpedoes the answer is obvious since there are consoles which enhance plasma energy damage. But what about photon's or tricobolts? Either a new set of consoles or make the All Energy damage increase consoles the only types that affect a torpedoes energy damage or just find a way to sync each torpedo with an energy type and share the buffs. No new starship skills need to be introduced as the energy weapon skill would also enhance a torpedoes energy damage portion, perhaps by a lesser extent than it would for energy weapons. In this way you can enhance different aspects of your torpedo damage. You could buff the hell out of the energy component and leave the kinetic damage as is or vice versa or somewhere in between. I'm also not sure how tac abilities like HY would work in this scenario - would they increase both energy and kinetic damage or just kinetic? Perhaps the latter makes some sense mechanic wise since it may be easier to mitigate percentages with buffs/nerfs to even things out.
In my opinion this would both add viability to torpedoes as well as flexibility in how they are used. It would allows me to construct a torpedo for a specific purpose and add more flexibility to my builds and playstyle.
This would follow a very simple process used by most captains in ST. Federation: fire directed energy weapon - was that effective? Then fire a torpedo. Klingon/Romulan: fire the hardest we have on the first shot - then fire torpedoes. But seriously, name one instance in star trek, or any science fiction for that matter where a bullet was more effective than a nuke?
It's also an issue if your team is strong, or if you are strong.
By the time I gave up on torpedoes, they'd only manage one hit (while the target's shields are still up) and then the target would die to my beams before the second torpedo reached them.
Then when I joined the DPS channels (this was in the era of 2-3 minute ISEs) practically everything other than Transformers or Gateways would die before my torpedoes could hit.
Would be my first question to the devs...cause the average isn't what it used to be.
Average @50; 100% Energy Damage...
Average @75; 150% Energy Damage...
Average @100; 200% Energy Damage...
Average @125; 250% Energy Damage...
That's before getting into what you can do with EIC or OSS.