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Suggestions for the next round of Buffs and Nerfs!
praxi5
Member Posts: 1,562 Arc User
Feel free to throw you suggestions in for things I've forgotten, or tell me why my suggestions are wrong/need revisions.
BUFF
NERF:
FIX:
BUFF
- EDIT: Engineers. So many Eng Captain powers have been replicated by BOff abilities. Further, there's no need, beyond player desire, to bring an Eng into 97% of the game's content.
- Disables in general in PvE (Photonic Shockwave, VM) aren't very useful or helpful. The duration is either too short or are resisted entirely.
- Tetryons: Theoretically, the proc is nice with heavy Flow Caps, which many people use (due to Leech). In actuality? Most NPCs have their (facing) shields ripped away before the Tet proc has a chance to do much of anything. Boss level mobs have such high Shield HPs that the Proc really just isn't noticeable, and procs that help with ShieldPen/bypass are more desirable (Pha, Dis, AP, Pla).
- Polarons: Same problem as Tet, basically. You're not going to be shutting anyone down with Pol alone (even with buffed Flow Caps) and the proc is largely not noticeable. Other procs are far more beneficial and noticeable (save for Tet).
- Transphasics: The lowered base damage in exchange for innate ShieldPen no longer makes sense, due to all of the (readily) available global sources of ShieldPen making other torps just as good at what Trannies do, but better.
- Aceton Beam: Just... no. Even with the Trait from the T6 Excelsior, you're wasting a BOff slot by slotting it.
- Boarding Party: Too easily swatted down with AoEs, too little of an effect.
- DEM: Too long of a CD for a marginally useful effect. Largely replaced by other sources of ShieldPen. When used in combination with those, it's nice. But on it's own? Nah.
- Tachyon Beam/Charged Particle Burst/Tyken's Rift: All need disproportionately large amount of FlowCaps to do anything meaningful, compared to something like the PartGen requirement for TBR (for example).
- Photonic Shockwave: Meh effect, lol damage.
- Photonic Officer: Too high of a CD to be useful.
- Torpedoes as a whole.
- Mines: Remember these? No? It's because no one uses them, for a reason.
- Dispersal Patterns
- Re-Route Power to Life Support: This one needs a ground-up rework. It's... counterproductive.
- Command Boffs: Great on ground, meh in Space. A few nice abilities, but overall, Intel and Pilot are far more desirable. Command is half the reason (imo) that the T6 Excelsior was Dead on Arrival.
NERF:
- NPC HP. This should happen first and foremost. They were increased as a result of ever greater Power Creep, allowing players to put out huge amounts of damage. As a result, Cryptic's metrics regarding Time to Completion were totally thrown off. To counter that, they buffed NPC HP to artificially inflate the time it takes to complete a mission - and the amount of time it takes to earn a certain amount of Dil, by extension. Now that the biggest post-DR DPS inflaters have been reigned in, it's time to bring down the HP. Perhaps, in exchange, give NPCs a TacTeam?
- Weapons Overcapping: AFAIK, the Devs have stated that Weapons Overcapping shouldn't be a thing (correct me if I'm wrong). If it isn't then it needs to be nerfed and not benefit Beams. If it is "allowed" to happen, then grant the benefit to Cannons as well. It makes no sense that Beams get a bigger advantage here than Cannons.
- Immunities: Up to 42 seconds out of every 60? Ridiculous. Suggestion: Perhaps a 30-45 second lockout, between immunity availability. (You can use Rock and Roll, and then have the Pilot Spec immunity proc - but you'll only get the immunity for the RnR duration) Exception: Pilot maneuvers, since they are an integral function of that ship class.
- All Hands on Deck: Maybe controversial. But this game was balanced around cooldowns. I think many can agree that AHoD's CD reduction is a slap in the face of that. All things being equal, a player using AHoD vs a player not using AHoD provides a pretty hefty advantage (disproportionately big, compared to other traits). Suggestion: Maybe make it only reduce Sci BOff CDs, and not Captain CDs?
FIX:
- Torpedo Mods: @OdenKnight (I forget his forum handle) has done extensive testing to show that torpedo mods are not granting the appropriate damage buffs. Torpedoes are being robbed of damage.
- CSV: On paper, it has the potential to be better than FAW. In reality, it's not close.
- Cannon Range/Damage Drop-Off: It made sense back in the day, not so much now - especially when Beams have so much more going for them. Either dial it back, or remove it entirely.
- Tac Consoles: @jarvisandalfred has done testing on these and shown that they're not providing anywhere near the amount of the buff that they should be.
- Math, tooltips, and numbers: They are beyond confusing. Sometimes 10% is 10%, sometimes 33% works out to 4%. We need to have all of this clarified so that it makes sense to users. Example: The Sustained Radiant Field console says it gives a 10% damage boost, but it's actually not 10% at all. The 4% damage boost from Nukara Aux: Offense is significantly more than that - anywhere other than STO and Cryptic Land, 10% > 4%.
Post edited by praxi5 on
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Comments
Cannons and cannon abilities need serious reworking starting with drop-off range and including more haste/recharge reductions which would benefit cannons like all those weapon power reductions benefit beams.
Both of my above requests could be easily fulfilled by simply firing the current producer. As I understand it he likes the current OPness of BFAW and refuses to let the engineers balance the powers. Although it could be someone else so feel free to correct me.
I really don't get what people are saying about cannons being useless or less useful than beams.
Oh and edit: Completely disagree with Nerf No. 4. I bought the command cruiser on my second account just for the trait. While it may be OP for tacs who are now able to use Attack pattern alpha more often, for Sci's this starship trait means that subnucleonic beam and scattering field can actually make a difference more than once during an entire mission.
Possible thing that may need to be added to the nerf list: shield-ignoring weapons and modifiers. 100% shield ignore is just too much and shouldn't exist in the game imo.
IMO, these two abilities should be agro attention grabbers, thats all. Not necessarily to clear out an entire mob in the same time it would take you to take out a 1 with BO or CRF.
Their use would be to grab the attention of a mob in order to steal agro from a teammate that may be on the ropes.
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While FAW itself doesn't quite make sense to me (an AoE that does more damage than single target, even when you're only firing at a single target? k), many people smarter than I have convinced me that the beast that it currently is is a result of a smatter of things combined together: Overcapping, range/damage drop off, CSV not working, etc.
While I think that it is OP in it's current form, I think that's more of a testament to how broken other things are, rather than how OP FAW itself is.
want to buff this or that? sure thing. but the constant nerfs are getting a bit trite.
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DHCs are currently bugged and do not receive the extra CrtD when using Cannon Scatter Volley. That's a lot of missed DPS.
IMO there should be less NPCs per map with lower HP but higher heal and resist rates. Shift the meta from AOE spam to CC and burst damage.
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Could you be more specific? Because I keep seeing logs of torpedoes (from other players) dealing insane amounts of damage, which makes me think they're fine.
STO Screenshot Archive
Some torpedoes aren't receiving the extra mods they have like [Dmg].
But that's already stated in the FIX section of the OP. Even after that being fixed, would they still need a buff?
STO Screenshot Archive
Yes, Engineers need a buff. You know what us Engineers need?! A native, Engineer-profession only, hull debuff ability (so, SIC and DEM don't count, as Tact Captains can use that too).
Added.
Yes. They've still got innate disadvantages when compared to Energy Weapons. For example, Energy Weapons are nearly instantaneous. Cannons have a bit of travel time, but not as much compared to Torps. Buffing Torpedo speeds would help a lot. Many times, Energy users have completely wiped out mobs before my Torp Spread even has a chance to get there (beginning of ISA, for example). There's also the issue vs Shields - even the tiniest sliver of shields resists the vast majority of Torpedo damage. And then there's the fact that so many Traits effect Energy weapons only, while Torps get the shaft.
Not a bad idea. Sci has the excellent AoE Sensor Scan, Tacs have FoMM, Eng has... well, nothing.
RSF can be emulated by things like Fleet Shields. You won't get the regen, but you get the (arguably more desirable) ShieldRes.
Nadion Inversion's resistance to Weapons Drain can be emulated via the T6 Avenger (Arbiter) Trait, the Nandi Trait, as well as the KCB + AssMod console.
EPS Power Transfer's power buff is can do done via MACO Shields (to a lesser extent) or Leech.
Miracle Worker has a few substitutes, the most readily available being the Regenerative Integrity Field (Samsar console).
EngFleet is laughably useless.
All of these combine to a meta where Engineers can be sidelined, and you really don't have a reason to use one (most of the time) - and sometimes, they can even be seen as a liability or hindrance, since a Sci can give huge Res bonuses to both Shields and Hull to the whole team, as well as being a force multiplier.
I totally agree with you on every point .
Back in 'the day' when Cannon Escorts were king (Escorts online anyone?) I still used Beams because it's just what I like. Over the years, Beams got more and more buffs and eventually surpassed Cannons. I would like to see Cannons brought up to Par as a real attempt to create parity in builds. Overcapping is absolutely not a problem, it's a valid skill and a good thing to build around, it should just benefit all weapon types equally.
As a side note.. All Hands On Deck cannot be nerfed. Why? Because it's a trait on a C-Store ship, even Cryptic doesn't go that far. Cryptic does not nerf abilities that are sold for cash. You will never see nerfs to things like Reciprocity, All Hands On Deck, etc. If it's acquired through the C-Store, they don't touch it which is as it should be. There are legal issues with advertising something one way, accepting cash for it and then changing it after the fact.
Paid for items can't be nerfed the same way Embassy Consoles can. This will not, and should not happen. Rather it's overpowered or not, nerfing items people paid cash for is WAY too far.. period.
Cannons need help too. They travel too slow, that's for sure. There's too much down time with the DHC's with the "P-Pow, P-Pow, wait... wait... wait... wait... ah finally!!! P-Pow P-Pow" They also need more punch, less punch lost over distance, and a 60 degree arc instead of 45.
Torpedoes have been spoken as being 4 entire marks behind a comparable energy weapon, and I'm hard pressed to disagree. They suffer too much of a shield penalty as it is and they need help. They need more explosive power, they need to hit for more damage (not too much more, just make it useful). They need to hit for more damage to shields and as they start going down, also the hull (again not too much, but come on, give me a break here, not NOTHING at all).
1 - Bring phasers back as was before, remove the stupid immunity, only "trekkies" still using phasers, all game now already using antiprotons and even who does pvp the energy type doesnt matter more, is just science abilities and anothers exploits.
if i have good memory, elachi energy type had this immunity too for a short time when it was released.
NERF:
1 - nerf the players cryptic, they all r exploit with anything new be released or broken with ur fast and bad patchs.
Beams should out perform cannons when using AOE abilities. due to having a better firing arc. Base dmg wise against a single target cannons should be stronger than beams due to the limited firing arc so should get a bonus for having this penalty.
Cannons are still very powerful using rapid fire or scatter volley. However piloting a cannon escort takes far more skill than a beam escort due to all the firepower is within a 90% arc its not as easy to rotate shield facings and keep decent firepower when the majority of it is in the front and you have a fragile ship.
Also this is a Star Trek game, beams are the primary weapon on every Federation starship bar the Defiant which also has beam arrays equipped.
Also why else should beams be stronger. Simple beams run along an emitter array where power is channeled through those emitters across that array discharging a sustained blast.
example of beams and some torps
you didn't actually read the thread did you? Because nothing you said makes sense here.
Torpedo travel speed was fine when everything moved at a snails pace, but now both players and NPCs move a lot faster, so yeah I totally agree torpedoes need a travel speed buff.
Did you even read anything I said or...?
Where did I ever say to nerf Beams? I said that Overcapping should benefit either all Energy Weapons, or none at all. That is to correct an issue that it is giving a huge benefit to something and not other (obviously not WAI), or is something that shouldn't be happening at all in the first place (again, not WAI). Maybe instead of blaming me for trying to "**** everyone over", you should take a minute to learn how the game works.
This is not canon, this is not a TV show, this is not a game - it is a game. The game is obviously not going to accurately reflect the things shown in the shows. Gameplay > canon, sorry.
Also, I do use Beams on my Tac, so your assumption is incorrect. I'd prefer to use DHCs on my Avenger, but Beams are just so much more desirable that I can't be bothered to use Cannons.
Maybe i should have quoted Isegn
Isegn wrote BFAW, seriously. Anything related to it should be nerfed into the ground, thankfully those godawful plasma consoles already were.
Agree on science. Disable improvements would need to be balanced against players, so inertial dampeners might be the way to go there.
I thought the mechanics for cannons and beams were the same, except cannons could not benefit as much from flow caps due to a shorter firing cycle. That sounds tough to fix, so I say let it alone. Couple things that would help mitigate it:
-drop all cannon abilities (and mines) one rank. This has been asked for for a bit.
-reduce the damage drop-off at distance for cannons. The firing arc already reduces aoe potential and as you close in, your hit-able targets usually decrease. There should be more parity at range.
Ahod-I don't run it. I think the captain bit is stupid op... but I agree with Sorrows. C-store ship trait. Gonna have to live with it. When's the engi. ersion of ahod and recip coming anyways? I am not a fan of all these cd reductions, but I think that ship sailed with atb (which at least cost doff and boffs and required some timing to make it really effective).
First, I'll tag @darkknightucf in here for you, since that's Marshall@Odenknight.
Onto the meat of things: Engineers. I play engineers a crapton. In space, here's what I'd like to see:
I'm not suggesting all of those are needed; but changes like that would make them feel more on par with other career abilities.
On a related note; there's a game meta issue, including a few tank-specific ones and related bugs, that prevent Engineers from becoming too popular in space, but that's an even bigger post than this one.
I'd talk about ground, but I'm not enough of a ground-pounder to speak to that.
DEM. It's not as terrible as people think, especially now that there's cheap marions around.
Power Drains - this is because some things (cough Elite Tactical Cubes cough) reduce incoming drains to about 5.5% of the original drain. I would also swear that months ago I heard a systems designer say he found what the deal with Tachyon beam scaling to utterly bonkers levels on borg NPC's was, but there's been no fix for that yet.
Torpedoes would be mostly find if they got a lot of bug fixes. Reminds me a lot of FAW vs CSV, actually.
---
NPC HP - I've spoken before about queue balance, and here's most of my thoughts on it. A TL;DR is that there's various problems, including inconsistent difficulties (some advanced being harder than some elites and vice versa). Another thing about queue difficulty is this interesting bit about hive: Tank's can't reliably aggro anything past the initial phase of Hive, thanks to the same bug that seems to usually affect Warp Shadows (and does affect the Sensor Interference Platform if it isn't killed). Vessel one of two and two of two are both taunted onto an invincible enemy (a second Houston), and the Queen swaps alliances after being invincible, so who knows what's mucked up in her AI; point being, neither one respond to threat the way any other in-game target normally does.
Weapons Overcapping: I'm just not sure what the intended state of this is, I'll be honest. I do know why it affects beams more than cannons; and that's because it's based on firing cycles. I can explain that more if needed, but this is just an oddity in firing cycles so far as I'm concerned; and an issue of weapon balance.
All Hands on Deck: This is significantly stronger on Tactical Captains than any other class. Why, you ask? Because Engineers have a trait that resets Miracle Worker (said trait is on a lower cooldown than AHOD can practically get MW to, but isn't affected by AHOD), and Science Captains already have a trait that lowers the cooldown on Photonic Fleet. Not to mention a few class disparities that already exist. For Engineers, it's basically just 'handy' (this is also a feature of how underwhelming most engineering class abilities are); for Tactical Captains, it's incredibly strong, even allowing the creation of a whole new build type off of it - and that's just one power that Tac Captains have. A Class balance would probably fix any balance issues; and this isn't any more overpowered than Supremacy or EWC for normal purposes, nor more than APDP or Reciprocity for tanks.
Math. Oh, god, math. While there's no tooltip that I know of that understates what it does, the math is very new player unfriendly, and as a matter of fact, I was told that even the understanding that the very knowledgeable players have of it isn't quite right - the analogy of quantum mechanics vs newtonian physics came up to compare the category model vs the actual code. But these issues go beyond just damage; hull resist is a nightmare of it's own, and both of those pale in comparison to oh god threat. At least we can parse out damage and hull resist to get a decent model going.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
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Mines are probably adequately tuned for PvP, but against PvE enemies with a rudimentary AI, they are so OP.
Subnucleonic Beam - There is a trait in Iconian Rep as well as Subnucleonic Carrier Wave, an Intel ability, that provides SNB-like capability. The Iconian Rep one in particular is powerful because all a player needs to do to apply it is keep Pew-Pewing and it will proc. All while SCI Captain's SNB is applied to 1 target and has a long CD. Subnucleonic Carrier Wave is a BOFF ability. It's AOE and strips the 3 longest timer BUFFs of nearby enemies.
Of course, this is more of a PVP thing. Because NPCs hardly run any buffs, if at all. If NPCs actually ran a range of buffs, then buff stripping ability would have merit in PVE.
Even if engineers got +5 to max power with EPS (that stacked) it would be incredibly useful.
even a raise from 2.5% to 3% would make it more worthwhile.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
It used to be affected by subspace decompiler which extended its disable. That is a better option IMO because it's the same way Polaron and Tetryon work.
In fact I think it would be beneficial for all proc chance to be doubled to 5% so that the different weapon types would be more reliably different from each other.
That being said, procs have almost no affect on damage so arguing over how useful phasers are is a moot point because all weapons have the same base damage. If I hear one more person whine about Phasers not being OP I'm gonna scream.
Phasers aren't OP because the PROC doesn't do anything useful given how fast the subsystem disabled comes back online- IF you get lucky and get it to go OFFLINE.
Most other energy weapons have a proc which is modestly useful in comparison.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."