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Power Creep. what to do?
vetteguy904
Member Posts: 3,864 Arc User
lets have a cogent discussion on power creep and how to try to back it down.
I think that it is pretty well established that FAW is one of the main culprits.
IMHO attack patterns stacking is also a problem, as well as the spire consoles.
one thing we could suggest is to have faw beam damage be reduced to 50% of normal.
that would be consistent with the intent I believe.
as far as attack patterns stacking I think this too would be a reduction to power creep, as well as the elimination of tactical attack patterns enhancing exotic and radiation damage. to offset, perhaps a science version of APA could be introduced that effects ONLY exotic damage.
lets not turn this into a flame fest. the idea is to brainstorm who to pare back powercreep without crippling the 70% who are "average" DPSers
I think that it is pretty well established that FAW is one of the main culprits.
IMHO attack patterns stacking is also a problem, as well as the spire consoles.
one thing we could suggest is to have faw beam damage be reduced to 50% of normal.
that would be consistent with the intent I believe.
as far as attack patterns stacking I think this too would be a reduction to power creep, as well as the elimination of tactical attack patterns enhancing exotic and radiation damage. to offset, perhaps a science version of APA could be introduced that effects ONLY exotic damage.
lets not turn this into a flame fest. the idea is to brainstorm who to pare back powercreep without crippling the 70% who are "average" DPSers
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No. By now its a combination of powers, traits and weapon affixes.
But even then, there are enough different consoles doing roughly the same thing that people would still get nearly the same dps.
THe thing you describe as powecreep, is what icall:
The GODDAMNED NATURAL EVOLUTION OF AN MMO!
Every MMO increases the players power over its lifetime, thats part of the whole appeal.
"look how loaded and awesome my old char is by now!"
This naturally makes content more trivial over the time, especially if said content is seldomly updated and when it is its updated with the finesse of a hammer.
And you know what?
I am happy that 2 guys can carry 3 baggage captains in an advanced qeue.
I am happy i do not have to spend more than 3-4 minutes pr char everyda when running an event like crystaline entity.
+ the games community is a bigger problem, because everytime they introduce a set of npc's with nasty abilitis and actually decent dps, the community goes "its too hard".
+ The nakuhl red alert crushed teams before getting nerfed. The Voth crushed teams before getting nerfed. The iconians crushed teams before gettign nerfed...
so i find your argument to be invalid because the problem you describe really is just a common trait of long standing mmo's.
The best thing to do is to just deal with it.
I know that sounds snide, and I'm sorry for that.. it's not meant to. It's a legitimate truth. Power Creep is part of every MMO and is always more prevalent in 'Free To Play' games. Why? Because the game depends on revenue from people buying 'shinys' and lets face it.. power sells.
Fire At Will is a powerful ability, so are Attack Patters, but a lot of the power comes from powerful traits and consoles as well. We have one of these threads every week now, and they always go no where except into the 'lock bin.'
Power Creep is here to stay, we can argue about it all we want, it won't change. The abilities that people complain about are staples of just about every build right now. Part of that is because of their power, but also because of lack of variety (Seriously, if you're a beam user, what choice do you have other then FAW? None.) Fire At Will and Attack Patterns aren't going anywhere, I'm sorry.. but it's true.
The best way to deal with power creep is build your captain the way you want, and don't worry about what everyone else does. The biggest impact this has on you is that if you que for an event, you might finish it quickly and get free rewards. It could be worse.
How about no. This wouldn't hurt the top dps crowd. They will just find something else to compensate like always, its what they do for fun but it will hurt people at the lower end like myself so no. Well not that the devs would actually do it.
You want damage Hard Caps? Let's say the absolute maximum DPS you can do is capped to 50k (Advanced requires around 18K-ish DPS to steamroll and Elite about 35k-40k) this means the 75k+ players will be performing their absolute maximum @50k dps AND will be able to.cut off the now Useless consoles/powers that have no additional effect allowing them.to slot other powers /skills to improve survivability or just throw in gimmicks to have more fun with a build BUT the lower dps crowd will not change and the lower dps crowd (60-70% of the players) won't be able to slot all.that extra stuff because they haven't hit that hard cap and will still cry foul!
Let's look at diminishing returns instead. Let's say Cryptic does this and gives a diminishing return that cuts current Damage stacking by half (so 100% becomes 50%) well let's say a "Elite" players weapon damage dps is 80k and the average guy is rocking 20k (both are stacking tactical consoles for damage boosts) well that 80k player just dropped to 40k (wow his damage went way down! Now he won't steam roll the game woot!) But hey look at 20k dps guy...he's now down to 10k and can't do Advanced content anymore....hmm ain't that funny? BUT LOOK AT 80K DPS GUY!! He can still do Advanced AND Elite just fine!!!!
Still like the idea???? Everyone is soo laser line focused on the uber DPS crowd they don't see how much they would cripple themselves while mildly inconveniencing the higher Dps players.
So first you say to nerf the skills and items that probably 90% of 'average' DPS users use. But don't want to cripple said 'average' DPSers?
FAW isn't getting anyone into 100-150k ranges. FAW is the bare minimum and base damage. Its the 5000 zen starship traits and 900 million EC ships and 200 million ec captain traits and 300 million ec Doffs and 400 million ec perfect Epic weapons that boost you to the higher numbers.
These items that the 1%ers have. None of them make a massive DPS jump, which is why when the 'average' DPSer buys one thing, there is no noticeable difference. It's when you combine all these things that makes the 100k+ players.
So if you want to slow/stop/nerf power creep, don't target one skill that 100% of beam users use, target 20 different skills/doffs/consoles/traits that when combined, make the difference.
Yes. And they get tiresome. There's nothing in this thread that couldn't have just been posted by the OP in THIS THREAD.
I'm also extremely disappointed in the OP. Taking swipes at Fire at Will and Attack Patterns is the easy path. I was hoping they would have been a bit more up to date and forward thinking and ask for the skill revamp to be nerfed instead, since the 11.5 skill revamp has been the most recent example of power creep.
It is natural that characters in a MMO get stronger and stronger. In other MMOs though you often have new areas to move to while the old areas are naturally not a challenge to you any more. STO doesn't have that, we're always in the same areas. You never "meet" a group of thirties that team up to beat that boss, there's just not enough room and the leveling is so fast you only see max level characters everywhere. I think that might skew vision for starters.
Then there's the lack of anything that doesn't ultimately require you to simply shoot hordes of trash mobs, making everything that's not AoE damage a suboptimal choice. Suggestions to make things more interesting have been posted by the community for years but while we see new enemies we always see the same basic gameplay over and over again - sometimes with an added timegate which slows things down but doesn't affect gameplay in the slightest.
The skills itself are flawed in their basic conception. Our AoE abilities don't come with a single downside. They get flat damage boosts, deal the boosted base damage to all targets they hit, remove inherent disadvantages of weapons (ever noticed CSV removes the 'projectile travel time' from your attack?) and have thus a higher damage output in ('felt' number) 95% of all encounters. I can't think of a another game putting AoE abilities equal or even above single target abilities and at the same time hardly ever adding anything that would require single target combat in the first place.
The real "creep" comes from added traits you can purchase for zen (store or lockbox) that give more and more passive damage increase, on top of the skill revamp which just added more damage and autoheal to plaers for no effort, just because, further skewing the balance towards pure damage dealers.
STO operates under the premise that everyone must be able to beat all content by themselves without support from a class they might not have chosen. In other MMOs you can manage to pull through stuf alone when you are very dedicated but most content requires you to pick up some assistance. Now throw our STO players which are designed to be completely autonomous in every content together in a group content and it gets ridiculous.
People rant about the "trinity", but it makes this kind of game work and would avoid the over reliance of a single character skill tree and thus would force players to either build more balanced or team up for certain content, creating balance.
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Boost HP, shields, and weapon damage for NPC ships????????
Imagine putting your T6 100K DPS ship against an enemy shuttlecraft where after 10 minutes of pounding you only dropped it's shields to 90%. Meanwhile you are struggling to maintain your hull above 25%.
for every OP trait or ability we get, and Enemy group gets it too (LOL Barrel-Rolling Cubes!)
And all of them get to spam FAW too (That would hurt alot when the Tholians start spamming their Refracting Tetryon during CCA...and by hurt , I mean my Graphics Card)
Don't the enemies in ISA have Fire at Will? The tac cube and the gateway?
because i have been working a low level toon, and have not even looked at the skill trees other than a couple posts on here.. I Simply used the common examples I have seen in the forum. I had HOPED there could be a discussion, but the DPS and power creep fans are too busy preening themselves and slapping down threads like this. Since you brought it up, what changes to he skill tree would you suggest?
Even though the discussion has merit, one or multiple new topics each day is a bit overkill.
One of the problems with this thread is that there is one, just like it, already active.
Also, going off of second/third hand experience as a determination to create a thread to discuss "a problem" isnt a very good preface of legitimacy.
As far as "power creep" goes, are you suggesting that low scoring DPS players are intentionally avoiding "power creep"? Why is it that there are stagnant players DPSwise, when the "power creep" is ramping damage up so drastically?
At what level of damage are you suggeting "power creep" is the root cause, not expert level of in game knowledge, and experience?