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Game balance: Getting better or getting worse?
mneme0
Member Posts: 498 Arc User
Do you consider game balance to be getting better or getting worse? Give your thoughts on why you think so.
Game balance: Getting better or getting worse? 109 votes
Getting better.
14%
16 votes
Getting worse.
65%
71 votes
Neither way, particularly.
20%
22 votes
0
Comments
While I personally find the game to be quite easy, the number of threads I see from players having problems with featured episodes leads me to believe that a good portion of the community finds the game difficult.
I picked the most neutral option, because while I don't believe this game is difficult at all, my experience does not reflect the entirety of the player base. In all likelihood, it doesn't even represent the majority.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Until something is done to reign in top end performance in pve alone we cannot talk of balance. Even less can we talk of real balance until pvp is viable again. Although I'd suggest with the current rate of power leaping that STO really hasn't got long enough to go, I expect to see T7 and T6.5/6.75 ships within a couple of years as Cryptic try desperately to sell us power for the sake of power.
It's not as though content can reasonably outstrip the capabilities of Mk 12 gear and so long as that's true anything more than twice that power is really necessary, it's just for big numbers and run times at the end of the day and eventually, even that stops being fun.
The most recent introductions seem geared towards bolstering defense (the Strategist specialization mainly). Since most PVP seems geared towards extreme DPS "overwhelm the enemy before he does it to you", I see this as a good move that needs to continue. Hyper-offensive tac damage builds need to be counterable with hyper-defensive engineering builds. Fights that last less then a minute are not satisfying.
Or Cryptic could take a page out of the PWI book and just reduce damage and healing by 75% in PVP, while leaving control abilities as is. That'd make PVP more tactical, requiring more control and disabling of your opponent while slowly wittling him/her down. It'd make PVP and mass PVP meaningful, with long, protracted slugouts becoming the norm rather then lightning fast two-charge-one-goes-boom. With such artificially bolstered endurance, even lower geared players could have some fun as they're no longer oneshots.
PVE wise, the game is easy but fun, and the main reason I play it. I like to fly with friends and do things together. Playing casually for the fun of it should be an option. Elite queues however... couple more enemy boats should spam Feedback Pulse to discourage just max-firepowering through them. Reflect damage abilities are usually ideal as hard counters to extreme offense bias.
Ex-PWI player (Dawnglory): Ulsyr (BM 104/104/103)
Now on STO. More fun there.
- Aux-scaling hurting science, skill revamp boosting everyone but particularly Tacs. Whatever happened to making this a direct translation from the old system, and of taking care of unintentional stacking. I'm honestly asking cause I'd really like a response on this one. We are told one thing, yet another happens - and this far from the first time one thing is said but another entirely takes place.
- Immunities everywhere
- Do more damage translating into ever more sources of incoming healing from doing damage
- Temporary hit points everywhere
- More sources of instant heals & instant-resists
- DPS focused solo play type end-game
I miss the pre-Delta Rising STO. This now is something entirely different.
Can't wait for the next big spec + ship lineup to raise the bar again, that's gonna be soooo great.....
Now its all Beam Arrays, BFAWs and scimitars ...
Tell you what, this game needs 3 things:
GREAT buff for cannons, even greater buff for torpedoes, less immunities (no rock n'roll, no shield mastery, no deply contermeasures ... there were vapers, once upon a time T_T )
And maybe even a good nerf for some new enemies: I don't know what's the situation with end-game gears and elite missions, but being overkilled by a Terran Armitage Quantum Torpedo High Yield 2, with full hull and shields ... well, its not the best, considering I have 40% kinetic damage reduction !
Not to talk about Na'Kulhs with their immunities ... every new opponent makes the game more stressful for players with no end-game stuff !
I don't miss those days, I miss the days when we were in the sweet spot where escorts and properly built cruisers managed roughly the same performance in terms of kill times and dps, it just would have been nice if science were capable of the same feats.
That said, engineers in their cruisers never really were the best tanks, I learned this when I built my first truly successful science ship and made about 65k total hitpoints worth over 300k, it's debatable as to which is better over the long term but in terms of spike (which is basically all that's left in this game to worry about anyway) eng/cruisers don't hold a candle to sci/sci.
Personally, I think it would be really cool to add a feedback pulse even if it's only a 1:1 ratio of damage in vs damage out to things like to the regeneration nanites ability the Borg has, that would make ISA a LOT more interesting.
escorts sacrifice hull and shield capacity (and a lot of Healing abilities) to do their damage ... cruisers were not supposed to do as much damage as escorts.
this thing was clear when I started playing this game, many years ago.
Cruisers were supposed to help escorts by attracting fire away from them.
Science Vessels were supposed to help escorts with grav wells, gathering all the enemies for escorts to CSV them, or drain enemies shield with tachyon beam, or even hold them with tractor beams.
THAT was those ships role !
Not flying around with 8 beam arrays dealing 999k dps !
I made some questions around in these days: I found that dual beam banks are now the best weapon around.
What happened to the "Escorts are glass cannons" ?
Escorts, now, are just glass, no more cannons
Cannon escorts are still glass cannons, i fly one, she isn't just glass and i have 1 (one) hull heal, almost everything else is DPS boost.
The rule unfortunately in the game now is glass doesnt matter when the enemy is "dead and cant hurt you anyway".
She isn't glass "long enough to matter".
As i have said before, BFAW rules DPS totals because enemies absorb more FAW damage before they die, dropping one shield facing and obliterating hull kills enemies "faster" and does less "total" dps getting it done.
That is what cannon escorts do, and why they constantly score lower in total dps in most situations, they are however "more" effective killing machines.
This leads to a false superiority surounding peoples view of FAW, they just dont bother to look long enough or hard enough to see it.
Warp core explosions are most of her issues with enemies, not their dps.
This BFAW supremacy ideology has at least in small part become normal thinking because people default to it because "everyone's doing it".
I bet a decent percentage of people who hail the mighty FAW supremacy have never actually flown a cannon escort at all, they require a more accurate hand than just flying 360's clicking FAW with autofire active.
Aside from the power creep which certainly has gotten worse the technical difference between ship types and how they fly hasn't changed since release day.
Yet people persist in saying they have.
I never said that it was right for cruisers to massively outperform everything else as they do now and the way escorts did at one point, given your join date I'm sure you're aware of all the threads asking for balance between DHCs and beam arrays, I can say with some certainty that the vast majority of posters in those threads never dreamt of, nor desired, the current state of affairs. As one of those posters I still complain about the current culture of dps pretty much anywhere it comes up.
In the same way I felt DHCs being used on cruisers way back when was the result of serious imbalance in weapons I feel now that beam arrays being used on escorts is a symptom of a serious imbalance in weapons. However I'm not sure how this one can be rectified without making the game even more laughably easy, or undoing a stupid amount of power creep.
While i agree that flanking and managing arcs isn't mandatory whatsoever, if your going to get the most out of that cannon rig on some npc that has a decent amount of shield and/or hull your going to fly it that way.
Still doesn't change the fact that people think ships have different roles now, they dont, the mechanics of enmity while tanking and healing have always been the real issue with STO, not DPS, that's just made it worse.
I would also add that while managing firing arcs "is" dead simple while playing solo, that isn't always the case when playing content with other players who aren't on the same page, tractor beam repulsor comes to mind, such a lovely pita skill.
You fire up a flank alpha on say a Pres Gran's flank and suddenly it's in your face, pushed there by someone else who was in "it's" face.
Its called "Nerf" and its one of the most powerful tools a Developer has to keep a game interesting and challenging.
There's a point (which we're LONG PAST) where as a designer you need to throw up your hands and say, "yup, Players, you've won. You've beaten the game. And now like ANY good game we're gonna reset some stuff."
1. Plasmonic leech needs to be trimmed. With a chainsaw.
2. Inspirational leader would still be 'must have' if it capped at 2 stacks.
3. BFAW needs its brains blown out (increase the rank of each skill by one grade AND cut the damage in half each time you hit a single target an additional time with the same weapon).
4. Energy over-capping is just absurd and need to be gutted and buried.
5. Self modulating fire trimmed.
6. Certain ridiculous Boffs.
You could cut any and all of things by a good 20% and you'd still use them, that stand that tall over the field of alternatives. Honestly you can just stroll through the exchange and sort prices highest to lowest to see every out-of-scale over powered component of the Uber-DPS machine. I mean it's not even secret what the broken stuff is.
Good games, HEATHY games trim and tune all the time. Monthly. Some bi-weekly. Its is a sign of sickness that this stuff has gone un-adjusted so long in STO. That's the smell of rot coming from the current meta.
The only way Cryptic would ever consider any of this is if they knew it would prompt people to buy even more power creep in the z-store, see the ships section, and lockboxes.
Surely you mean "to make them even more OP compared to the newest NPCs"?
No, I mean to bring them up to speed. For average joe gamer who doesn't min/max or do research on what's OP while still somewhat easily obtainable, each new set of enemies is tough at first but if they grind out the new rep and get the new space set then it becomes manageable. For the powergamers it doesn't matter, it's easy regardless because they know how to game the system.
I'm not sure I'd say the "average Joe gamer", even a build of basic standard (ie most pieces of equipment and boff skills contributing something to the build (up to mk 12, rep or not, fleet or not, that sort of thing)) is capable at least of completing all the content in the game in a reasonable time-frame. I'd suggest anyone who doesn't meet that standard will find it near impossible regardless of what gear is given to them.