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Thinking on the balance between Beams and cannons.
captainoblivous
Member Posts: 2,284 Arc User
The balance between beams and cannons has been debated for ages and lately I decided to give the game a break and give world of warships a try. It ended up inspiring an idea of mine.
One thing that always struck me as a bit odd is the way beams don't have the kind of damage drop off suffered by cannons. Surely it would take more energy to maintain a huge beam, rather than one pulse of energy from a cannon? Given that a beam is so huge compared to a blast from a cannon, wouldn't the energy dissipation from the beam be much greater than the cannon shot?
Anyway, my idea is thus; make beams the ones that need to be used close in for greater effectiveness, while reducing the damage drop off at range from cannons.
Now that wasn't the part that came from my playing WoWarships. I was thinking, if beams using bfaw were so effective and they had to get in close to really max the output from them, what if ships (especially larger ones) had secondary batteries able to fire automatically at anything that got too close? (Think 3km-5km max for secondaries.)
I think that might be able to balance out the bfaw vs cannon thing slightly. What do you lot think?
EDIT
Imo, there are things that sto could take from world of warships, especially the way they balanced destroyers, cruisers and battleships over there. Essentially, it's a big old game of rock/paper/scissors in that trying to take a cruiser up against a battleship is often a very quick way to get yourself sunk without doing much to the battleship, while a battleship would be nuts to try taking on a destroyer and said destroyer should be taken outside and beaten with a stupid stick if they ever thought about taking on that cruiser.
The way they handle torps is pretty nifty too, though those are early 20th century 'dumb' torpedoes rather than the tracking torps we have here.
One thing that always struck me as a bit odd is the way beams don't have the kind of damage drop off suffered by cannons. Surely it would take more energy to maintain a huge beam, rather than one pulse of energy from a cannon? Given that a beam is so huge compared to a blast from a cannon, wouldn't the energy dissipation from the beam be much greater than the cannon shot?
Anyway, my idea is thus; make beams the ones that need to be used close in for greater effectiveness, while reducing the damage drop off at range from cannons.
Now that wasn't the part that came from my playing WoWarships. I was thinking, if beams using bfaw were so effective and they had to get in close to really max the output from them, what if ships (especially larger ones) had secondary batteries able to fire automatically at anything that got too close? (Think 3km-5km max for secondaries.)
I think that might be able to balance out the bfaw vs cannon thing slightly. What do you lot think?
EDIT
Imo, there are things that sto could take from world of warships, especially the way they balanced destroyers, cruisers and battleships over there. Essentially, it's a big old game of rock/paper/scissors in that trying to take a cruiser up against a battleship is often a very quick way to get yourself sunk without doing much to the battleship, while a battleship would be nuts to try taking on a destroyer and said destroyer should be taken outside and beaten with a stupid stick if they ever thought about taking on that cruiser.
The way they handle torps is pretty nifty too, though those are early 20th century 'dumb' torpedoes rather than the tracking torps we have here.
I need a beer.
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Comments
Cannons are the superior single-target weapon, but single-target fighting is rare to non-existent. We're almost constantly bombarded with small fleets of enemies. There needs to be more reason to eliminate individual ships more quickly rather than spreading damage around until everything blows up at once.
Beams are the currently preferred weapon type because of Fire At Will, and BFAW is the go-to tactical ability because it really features no downside to using it while being the best choice for the type of combat we frequently see. You get to continue shooting at your current target plus you get to fire at other random targets, and the ability increases your damage on top of that. Add on the fact most NPCs don't really heal themselves, the spread out damage doesn't matter much because it adds up over time without being repaired. Considering you're firing the same weapon at multiple enemies, the ability really should feature a base damage reduction rather than an increase. The ability should be a little more efficient at clearing groups than simply destroying each individual ship with standard fire, but not to the scale it currently occupies.
An uncommon counter-argument (due to the apparent uncommonness of the playstyle itself) to this would come from Tanks. Because of the Threat system in the game, the most reliable way for Tanks to do their job is to deal as much damage as possible while multiplying their Threat values in various ways. BFAW is the perfect ability for Tanks because of its ability to hit pretty much everything all at once, therefore generating Threat from multiple targets and gathering attention, but if the damage output was significantly reduced then the amount of Threat generated would be significantly reduced as well. This kind of points towards the continuing issues of the overly-simplistic Threat system we have, but one potential way to address it without an update to Threat mechanics would be to introduce a duty officer, Captain passive, or maybe Reputation passive that massively increases the Threat generated when using area effect abilities such as BFAW. And again, this would be a tradeoff, requiring you sacrifice something to have this effect.
If BFAW were to receive a significant damage reduction, then Beams would also need a new ability to improve their damage output on a more sustainable level than Overload while remaining a focused attack. Overload would remain as a sort of finishing move.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
The point is to force beam users to get in closer, while making it a little more dangerous to do so by introducing a secondary batteries mechanic a la world of warships.
I'd also like to see a division between cruisers and battleships/dreadnaughts, rather than lump them all in together the way they are now. Give dreads crazy bonkers damage dealing, good secondaries and lots of armour, but at the expense of speed, agility and slower recycle times on their weapons.
I don't agree that bfaw should see a base damage reduction. Firing multiple weapons at multiple targets doesn't magically make each weapon do less. What it does is split your fire up, reducing the damage done to a single target but threatening more targets.
Btw, there is already a doff that has the effect you describe of increasing threat. It's actually a fairly old doff from the dominion lockbox I think which doubles threat generation whenever you use ap delta. It can be used on friendlies too. It's a trade off, buff the damage resist of yourself or a friend and debuff enemies who hit you as well as doubling threat generation.
Farshore, introducing a stat for negating damage falloff will simply buff beams more than cannons.
Actually, it should. You're spending about the same amount of weapon power to fire twice as many weapon emitters. Conservation of energy would require that the energy output of those emitters be about half what they would be if half as many emitters were used. Of course, this is a game, so the laws of physics don't need to necessarily apply, but the fact that BFAW suffers absolutely no damage reduction for use is kind of counter intuitive. How many games have AoE abilities that do just as much damage to every target it hits as a single-target ability?
Except it doesn't. You're still doing full damage to your current target, plus you're doing full damage spread across multiple other targets, essentially making BFAW a damage doubling mechanic before considering the ability increases the number of shots you fire (5 shots per salvo instead of the usual 4) and provides a damage multiplier. My suggestion was to make the ability what you just said it was, an ability that spreads your damage out, reducing it in terms of single target damage but hitting multiple enemies.
I'm aware of the AP Delta duty officer. The problem is attaching a threat multiplier to an ability that you might want to apply to a friend rather than yourself. Simple example, let's say a friend is getting shot by multiple enemies, and I want to help him out. I could throw AP Delta at him to bolster his defenses and cause enemies to become debuffed because they're shooting him, but if I'm also trying to draw aggro from him at the same time I've just shot myself in the foot. I could apply the ability to myself, but even with the threat multiplier it may take some time to draw aggro depending on how the fight has been going and the ability could end up being mostly wasted.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
You're assuming a single-target scenario and thinking too much along the lines of equipment mechanics for the game. The standard armament for a Sovereign-class cruiser is 12 phaser arrays plus torpedo tubes as an example, these are represented in the game by 8 weapon slots for simplicity. If you have an enemy on the opposite side of you, then a second weapon emitter must be in use to hit the target. Even if the 2 targets are in the same firing arc, the emitter is now firing 2 shots simultaneously rather than one, without costing any additional power or putting additional strain on the emitters to do so.
BFAW has 100% hit rate, Cryptic was having issues getting accuracy to work properly with the ability. Having the per-shot damage reduced makes perfect sense because of what I already pointed out: the Law of Conservation of Energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted. For the purposes of weapons in Star Trek, the antimatter core generates power which is then stored. Weapons take that stored energy and convert it into directed energy, which impacts the enemy target. In order for the weapon to hit 2 targets for the same amount of damage as it would normally when just hitting one, the weapon should need to use twice as much energy. BFAW does not do this.
As for game mechanics, again I ask, what game has AoE abilities deal just as much damage to each target as a similar single-target ability? These kinds of powers need tradeoffs. If the AoE ability does just as much damage as the single target ability but can hit more enemies, everyone will always choose the AoE ability unless there's some form of additional cost to the AoE, or it needs to be less usable for some reason like cooldowns. Since bridge officer powers in STO don't have a cost to them, and BFAW has the same cooldown as all other weapon abilities, there needs to be some other balancing factor to BFAW.
BFAW fires at 2 targets simultaneously. Both targets take full damage. This is not spreading out the damage, this is multiplying the damage by 2 then splitting it. BFAW does not represent a reduction in damage against your primary target, and if you're only fighting 2 ships then it does no represent a reduction in damage against that second enemy either. BFAW is multiplying your potential damage by 2 then adding even more to it.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.