No, this is not important enough to require developer attention
High DPS players are high DPS players for a reason- they learn, adapt and understand how to play the game and implement those things and incorporate what they learnt into their builds.
Low DPS players (not all low end DPS players btw) are the polar opposite,
So capping dmg because the better player excels and the bad player doesn't, so the bad player doesn't feel as bad, is not the answer. The bad player needs to do what the good player did and learn and understand how the game works. Isn't that the goal of Federation Humanity to better one self
No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
We do HSE regularly, but we form private queues. PUGging HSE is just asking for pain and trouble. Just because PUG queues don't pop doesn't mean we don't run the elites.
A lot of the most popular queues are also lacking elites.
No, this is not important enough to require developer attention
I'm going to say that no. Mainly because even from the very very very beginning of this game's life, the low end of the DPS attainable by players is functional enough to be successful. If you've got a team of players rocking out at 5k DPS, they can band together as a team, using team oriented tactics and defeat most everything in this game.
Lower than 5k DPS, may require some adjustment to tactics, but not even gear. What that might mean is the team can get together, and come up with an approach for that encounter that may require changing some BOFF tray selections (which is very customizable now in the current iteration of the game as you can have one boff with literally every BOFF power you need) and then the team needs to work on flying together better.
Since the bar is so low on how to beat an encounter, it then simply becomes a debate on how much chocolate is too much chocolate in your chocolate chocolate cake. It's still a chocolate cake.
What the game needs is content that is meant for high-performance players. Something that does not get nerfed when the 1-5k crowd cries about it.
That content exists. It is called "Elite queues", and almost all the super-duper-DPSers don't do them, except for Korfez now and then. I tried to queue up for Hive Onslaught Space Elite recently. Didn't pop ever. I even asked in the various channels. No one was interested.
Unfortunately most of the space missions that have an elite mode are miserably time gated making all the effort one puts into this game look more absurd the better one gets.
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No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
HSE can and does fail even with a coordinated team of high DPSers, even with builds made for HSE. So yes, we would stack things in our favor if we can.
You do not go into an endgame battle with the Collective with unprepared combatants that you'll need to babysit.
They have. There's very few encounters in the game where DPS is the core design element. Everything from Crystaline Entity to Hive Space all require more than just DPS.
But ... we all know how that goes.
And remember, almost every massive parse you see out there is from Infected Conduit space map. It's the testing mission most people use. But even among the Omega rep missions themselves, the other two missions have less of a DPS focus (Donatra cloaks a lot, and the Kang needs to be protected nominally). So even then, they weren't designing missions to be just DPS. 5 years after the Borg missions appeared, it's not surprising those particular missions can all be bullied. But since then most of the mission design done in this game has attempted to evolve.
What the game needs is content that is meant for high-performance players. Something that does not get nerfed when the 1-5k crowd cries about it.
That content exists. It is called "Elite queues", and almost all the super-duper-DPSers don't do them, except for Korfez now and then. I tried to queue up for Hive Onslaught Space Elite recently. Didn't pop ever. I even asked in the various channels. No one was interested.
Of course nobody does Hive Onslaught, it has nothing to show for it in rewards. Not even accolades. All the queues are the same rewards now, and pitifully short cooldown, so everyone just goes to the popular ones instead of waiting for anything rare. Because as you said, odds are the rare ones never pop.
If there was an ISE, all the "super-duper-DPSers" would run it. But none of the most popular queues have Elites.
Not that I would consider Elites to be "hard" on an objective measure, either. Certainly not for a team of 50kers.
We do HSE regularly, but we form private queues. PUGging HSE is just asking for pain and trouble.[...]
And you don't want the big endgame battle against the heart of the Collective be pain and trouble, right? Because it would be actually exciting if we didn't know if we'll succeed, and we can't have that.
There is a difference between a challenge and a waste of time. Hive Onslaught has strict DPS requirements. Meet them and win or don’t meet them and loose. The mission can be trivial for too powerful teams, fun and challenging for the right team, but it is simply impossible to win for too weak teams.
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No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
> The mission can be trivial for too powerful teams, fun and challenging for the right team, but is simply impossible to win for too weak teams.
I'm still miffed that it got nerfed. Back then you needed a high DPS tank and a couple of even higher DPS ships to complete it. The devs made it easier to finish it with just a DPS team.
I know it was a fix, but it really feels like a nerf.
Even then, it is still possible to fail it. Yesterday we had one fail when a Pickle decided it had enough of us and wiped 4 of us in one fell swoop with a lucky (or unlucky) torp spread and a Lance. We got to that point with 0 deaths so it was a bit annoying.
Of the elites I also enjoy Counterpoint Elite a lot. I find fighting the Terrans to be an absolute blast. That the map requires speed, DPS and ability counters make it very enjoyable.
I think the goal needs to be to fix overpowered abilities and also - just as important - fix underpowered abilities. [...]
That would be one (preferable) way of doing it, I agree.
Of course, that is a lot harder to do than other options, such as hard-capping the various stats, including dps, hps, speed, immunity uptime, resistance of hull and shield, etc.
And while I enjoy much of what the devs of the game deliver, as a team they do have certain weaknesses. Balancing is one of those. So I would propose to make it easy for them.
I think hard capping stuff however is a pretty dumb way to try to "balance" the game. It would lead to weird and unexpected behaviour during gameplay. It takes away considerably control, because suddenly the game decides: "Oh, you can't deal damage for the next few seconds to bring you back in line with DPS expectations".
You know how much people hate the part in Mirror Invasion where they closed all the portals and have to wait until the timer drops to 0 so the next phase of the mission begins? That's the same effect, except several times during combat in every combat.
And then, what are players to do if they can't add to their DPS. Of course they buff things like their healing capabilities or resist/immunity abilities so they cna last longer.
What does that help the low DPS player? Probably not at all. He still has low DPS, and the same healing as before. There is still a wide performance gap. And then you start capping "HPS" and resists and immunities and speed and everything and you could just remove most of the build choices - they are pointless as players are blocked by caps in every direction. You're back to needing to actually balance the different abilities and try to ensure that there are viable and diverse build paths still possible within your cap. The same thing you needed to do without the cap.
I think there is plenty of imbalance in the game, but I think this is one of the worst possible methods to try to fix it. Even if fixing imbalanced powers is more difficult, it's at least not likely to impact gameplay as weirdly.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
As a direct opposite to how Delta Rising made the game much more difficult when it was initially released, the introduction of season 11.5 with the new skill set seems to make the game a bit easy due to power creep.
I assume that Cryptic will make tweaks to balance out the game over time which is what they did when max level was boosted to level 60 with the release of DR.
DPS is beyond nerfing, it simply isn't an option at this point and as has been pointed out, you can't cap dps or damage per hit, which leaves you with very few options to level the playing field, the best of those that I can see: make dps impractical.
We can add consequences to having 'too much' dps, "too much" I think needs to be discussed at length between the dev team and the player base, they have to make it but at the end of the day, we have to play it if they want to make any money.
For example:-
- Add feedback pulse like effects to various enemies such as nanite transformers and gateways while nanites are in play, tuned right this would make builds doing tens to hundreds of thousands of dps far less effective as they'de spend most of the run in respawn, while people who are around the 'accepted dps mark' would likely have few to no issues with this as the combination of lower dps and more room for heals would allow them to resist what comes back.
- Less likely to implement than the previous option, add more skills and weapons to NPCs across the game, I've advocated this for years, if NPC ships had the same potential as their player counterparts then players would learn over the course of the game (many likely by imitation) how to build a capable ship. More to the point though, endgame NPCs could be loaded up with a mix of damage, healing and debuff abilities. I'd love to see a scramble sensors thrown out in a advanced STF with a 50k dps boat, team respawn anyone?
The game is built on handicapped NPCs with stupidly high hitpoints - that's the content. On top of that, the game does nothing to teach someone how to actually do good; instead, it just tells you to spend on stuff.
The result is the vast majority of players can't fly straight to save their lives and even if they could, have very little to no knowledge anyway. I saw it countless times pre-DR or whenever it was I last was advising on builds and such matters, people had the equipment, but they didn't know how to use it.
That is where sub-10k DPS players are, what they lack is one of/both knowledge and piloting. They don't lack gear, a simple check on STO gateway while sat at Earth Spacedock will show that by and large a typical player gets more right in terms of equipment than they do wrong.
Now, your approach is nerf the DPSers who are using what is available correctly, instead of teaching and guiding the 10kers in how to utilise what they generally have already - and it won't work.
What the game needs is content that is meant for high-performance players. Something that does not get nerfed when the 1-5k crowd cries about it.
That content exists. It is called "Elite queues", and almost all the super-duper-DPSers don't do them, except for Korfez now and then. I tried to queue up for Hive Onslaught Space Elite recently. Didn't pop ever. I even asked in the various channels. No one was interested.
While it is true that we are lacking a lot of elite queues, you do have a point.
There are even some elites that don't require a ton of DPS, like VCE. You need tankiness there, but guess what? Nobody plays that anymore.
It's a travesty that the players only got themselves to blame for.
[...]
Not that I would consider Elites to be "hard" on an objective measure, either. Certainly not for a team of 50kers.
I agree. And yet, people apparently don't even want that little bit of more difficulty. They prefer to blast through everything in ways the content designers (that's a different team than those who are responsible of the power creep, as far as I understand) never imagined.
Again, of course not. Because blasting through 2 piece-of-cake missions in 5 minutes total will get them a greater reward. The reward structure incentivizes repeating fast missions, so that's what people will do.
No, there may be some issues with that, but the devs should work on several other things first.
Department of random thoughts:
1. A Mk XIV Gold weapon only spits out X DPS. Period. End of discussion. That, right there, is the start of your "damage cap".
2. At best, a starship can bring 8 weapons to bear - whether it's a 4/4 "standard cruiser, broadside mode" build or the much-more-loved 5/3 "Scimitar" style build so you can have 5x forward energy weapons and 3x Omni-type beams (KCB, Ancient AP, Crafted AP being the most common pick). Again, another "limiter" on the amount of DPS that can be generated.
3. And then there's the (usually) 5 tactical console limit and/or the 11 overall console limit - you can only stack so many modifiers into these slots.
Bammo - your DPS cap.
What doesn't help, IMO, are things like:
Diminishing returns only on resistances, everything else, including anti-resistance debuffs, are "straight stacking". I think the system goes something like: Target puts on +300 "points" of resistance, which results in a, say, 74.3% resistance level due to diminishing returns and resistance cap. Opponent(s) put on -300 "points" of resistance debuff, which results not in a reduction to 0% resistance, but instead gives a -225.7% resistance that is instead applied as a damage multiplier, easily doubling base damage.
Outside of Science's "50% crit hit rate cap" (and even this is only on the L15 crafting "particle manipulator" trait, you can still exceed 50% crit hit rates with extra traits, skills, consoles, whatnot), the only limits to how much extra CritH percentage and/or CritD bonus you can build into your ship are the aforementioned weapon modifiers / console bonuses / chosen traits / etc. When "tooltip base" 1,800 point Grav Well IIIs are regularly seen by my "casual and not hyper-optimized" self doing 18,000+ yellow number damage per tick that has the "critical" listing on it...
Did I mention the plethora of areas that multiply the damages involved, sometimes multiplying highly multiplied damage?
You want to "reign in" the damage cap? How's about starting by having all multipliers only affect the "base" number, no more of this "cat 1 bonuses only calculate from the original base, but cat 2 bonuses calculate from the results of all the cat 1 bonuses and cat 3 bonuses are tacked on individually from the most recent multiplier till you're in ungodly number range.
Honestly, I much prefer a D&D-esque damage scaling system (1-12 per hit at L1, 40-50, maybe 100, at L20) vs. the "final fantasy" system where you start doing 30 damage and wind up doing 5 or 6 digit hits...
Detecting big-time "anti-old-school" bias here. NX? Lobi. TOS/TMP Connie? Super-promotion-box. (aka the two hardest ways to get ships) Excelsior & all 3 TNG "big hero" ships? C-Store. Please Equalize...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Comments
Low DPS players (not all low end DPS players btw) are the polar opposite,
So capping dmg because the better player excels and the bad player doesn't, so the bad player doesn't feel as bad, is not the answer. The bad player needs to do what the good player did and learn and understand how the game works. Isn't that the goal of Federation Humanity to better one self
A lot of the most popular queues are also lacking elites.
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Lower than 5k DPS, may require some adjustment to tactics, but not even gear. What that might mean is the team can get together, and come up with an approach for that encounter that may require changing some BOFF tray selections (which is very customizable now in the current iteration of the game as you can have one boff with literally every BOFF power you need) and then the team needs to work on flying together better.
Since the bar is so low on how to beat an encounter, it then simply becomes a debate on how much chocolate is too much chocolate in your chocolate chocolate cake. It's still a chocolate cake.
Unfortunately most of the space missions that have an elite mode are miserably time gated making all the effort one puts into this game look more absurd the better one gets.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
You do not go into an endgame battle with the Collective with unprepared combatants that you'll need to babysit.
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They have. There's very few encounters in the game where DPS is the core design element. Everything from Crystaline Entity to Hive Space all require more than just DPS.
But ... we all know how that goes.
And remember, almost every massive parse you see out there is from Infected Conduit space map. It's the testing mission most people use. But even among the Omega rep missions themselves, the other two missions have less of a DPS focus (Donatra cloaks a lot, and the Kang needs to be protected nominally). So even then, they weren't designing missions to be just DPS. 5 years after the Borg missions appeared, it's not surprising those particular missions can all be bullied. But since then most of the mission design done in this game has attempted to evolve.
These.
---
The fatal assumption you are making is you think DPS comes from gear - it really doesn't.
If there was an ISE, all the "super-duper-DPSers" would run it. But none of the most popular queues have Elites.
Not that I would consider Elites to be "hard" on an objective measure, either. Certainly not for a team of 50kers.
There is a difference between a challenge and a waste of time. Hive Onslaught has strict DPS requirements. Meet them and win or don’t meet them and loose. The mission can be trivial for too powerful teams, fun and challenging for the right team, but it is simply impossible to win for too weak teams.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
I'm still miffed that it got nerfed. Back then you needed a high DPS tank and a couple of even higher DPS ships to complete it. The devs made it easier to finish it with just a DPS team.
I know it was a fix, but it really feels like a nerf.
Even then, it is still possible to fail it. Yesterday we had one fail when a Pickle decided it had enough of us and wiped 4 of us in one fell swoop with a lucky (or unlucky) torp spread and a Lance. We got to that point with 0 deaths so it was a bit annoying.
Of the elites I also enjoy Counterpoint Elite a lot. I find fighting the Terrans to be an absolute blast. That the map requires speed, DPS and ability counters make it very enjoyable.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
You know how much people hate the part in Mirror Invasion where they closed all the portals and have to wait until the timer drops to 0 so the next phase of the mission begins? That's the same effect, except several times during combat in every combat.
And then, what are players to do if they can't add to their DPS. Of course they buff things like their healing capabilities or resist/immunity abilities so they cna last longer.
What does that help the low DPS player? Probably not at all. He still has low DPS, and the same healing as before. There is still a wide performance gap. And then you start capping "HPS" and resists and immunities and speed and everything and you could just remove most of the build choices - they are pointless as players are blocked by caps in every direction. You're back to needing to actually balance the different abilities and try to ensure that there are viable and diverse build paths still possible within your cap. The same thing you needed to do without the cap.
I think there is plenty of imbalance in the game, but I think this is one of the worst possible methods to try to fix it. Even if fixing imbalanced powers is more difficult, it's at least not likely to impact gameplay as weirdly.
I assume that Cryptic will make tweaks to balance out the game over time which is what they did when max level was boosted to level 60 with the release of DR.
We can add consequences to having 'too much' dps, "too much" I think needs to be discussed at length between the dev team and the player base, they have to make it but at the end of the day, we have to play it if they want to make any money.
For example:-
- Add feedback pulse like effects to various enemies such as nanite transformers and gateways while nanites are in play, tuned right this would make builds doing tens to hundreds of thousands of dps far less effective as they'de spend most of the run in respawn, while people who are around the 'accepted dps mark' would likely have few to no issues with this as the combination of lower dps and more room for heals would allow them to resist what comes back.
- Less likely to implement than the previous option, add more skills and weapons to NPCs across the game, I've advocated this for years, if NPC ships had the same potential as their player counterparts then players would learn over the course of the game (many likely by imitation) how to build a capable ship. More to the point though, endgame NPCs could be loaded up with a mix of damage, healing and debuff abilities. I'd love to see a scramble sensors thrown out in a advanced STF with a 50k dps boat, team respawn anyone?
The result is the vast majority of players can't fly straight to save their lives and even if they could, have very little to no knowledge anyway. I saw it countless times pre-DR or whenever it was I last was advising on builds and such matters, people had the equipment, but they didn't know how to use it.
That is where sub-10k DPS players are, what they lack is one of/both knowledge and piloting. They don't lack gear, a simple check on STO gateway while sat at Earth Spacedock will show that by and large a typical player gets more right in terms of equipment than they do wrong.
Now, your approach is nerf the DPSers who are using what is available correctly, instead of teaching and guiding the 10kers in how to utilise what they generally have already - and it won't work.
While it is true that we are lacking a lot of elite queues, you do have a point.
There are even some elites that don't require a ton of DPS, like VCE. You need tankiness there, but guess what? Nobody plays that anymore.
It's a travesty that the players only got themselves to blame for.
"Let them eat static!"
1. A Mk XIV Gold weapon only spits out X DPS. Period. End of discussion. That, right there, is the start of your "damage cap".
2. At best, a starship can bring 8 weapons to bear - whether it's a 4/4 "standard cruiser, broadside mode" build or the much-more-loved 5/3 "Scimitar" style build so you can have 5x forward energy weapons and 3x Omni-type beams (KCB, Ancient AP, Crafted AP being the most common pick). Again, another "limiter" on the amount of DPS that can be generated.
3. And then there's the (usually) 5 tactical console limit and/or the 11 overall console limit - you can only stack so many modifiers into these slots.
Bammo - your DPS cap.
What doesn't help, IMO, are things like:
Diminishing returns only on resistances, everything else, including anti-resistance debuffs, are "straight stacking". I think the system goes something like: Target puts on +300 "points" of resistance, which results in a, say, 74.3% resistance level due to diminishing returns and resistance cap. Opponent(s) put on -300 "points" of resistance debuff, which results not in a reduction to 0% resistance, but instead gives a -225.7% resistance that is instead applied as a damage multiplier, easily doubling base damage.
Outside of Science's "50% crit hit rate cap" (and even this is only on the L15 crafting "particle manipulator" trait, you can still exceed 50% crit hit rates with extra traits, skills, consoles, whatnot), the only limits to how much extra CritH percentage and/or CritD bonus you can build into your ship are the aforementioned weapon modifiers / console bonuses / chosen traits / etc. When "tooltip base" 1,800 point Grav Well IIIs are regularly seen by my "casual and not hyper-optimized" self doing 18,000+ yellow number damage per tick that has the "critical" listing on it...
Did I mention the plethora of areas that multiply the damages involved, sometimes multiplying highly multiplied damage?
You want to "reign in" the damage cap? How's about starting by having all multipliers only affect the "base" number, no more of this "cat 1 bonuses only calculate from the original base, but cat 2 bonuses calculate from the results of all the cat 1 bonuses and cat 3 bonuses are tacked on individually from the most recent multiplier till you're in ungodly number range.
Honestly, I much prefer a D&D-esque damage scaling system (1-12 per hit at L1, 40-50, maybe 100, at L20) vs. the "final fantasy" system where you start doing 30 damage and wind up doing 5 or 6 digit hits...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]