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Official Feedback Thread for the Temporal Operative Captain Specialization
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Member Posts: 520 Cryptic Developer
Please use this thread to post issues and feedback for the new Temporal Operative Captain Specialization
Temporal Operative Captain Specialization
Temporal Operative Captain Specialization
- Temporal Operative is a new Primary Specialization, but captains may also slot it as a Secondary Specialization and benefit from the first 15 abilities available.
- Abilities may be purchased in this Specialization even while it is inactive.
- With the introduction of a new Primary Specialization, the cap on Specialization Points has been raised up to a new maximum of 150.
- Players that exceed this amount will instead receive Dilithium Ore.
- Temporal Operatives lean heavily on Exotic Damage and Kit Module abilities, belying their roots as a science-heavy specialization.
- Advancing in the Temporal Operative Specialization will grant captains the ability to add the Temporal Operative Specialization to any existing Bridge Officers through crafting in R&D.
- For more details, please visit the Temporal Specialization blog at: http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/10017283-star-trek-online:-temporal-specialization
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Comments
Gravity Wells and Tyken's Rifts spawned by the 'aftershock' Gravimetric Scientists are moving for me on the current Tribble build. Anomaly Leash may be difficult to notice in most cases for Gravity Well, since Gravity Well will tend to pull its former target with it as it goes moving, and will often pull the target it's moving towards closer as well, but Tyken's Rift presents a very clear test case.
Please clarify. Is this limited to Torpedoes (only) or does it also include Mines? Should Mines have only a 10% chance, or is that something you might consider adjusting to be higher? Would you want to give Chroniton Torpedoes and Mines (any flavor) and additional boost to their chance to apply this Physical DoT for "thematic" reasons, since these weapons have historically been viewed (and rightly so) as being "weak" in comparison to other options?
Have you considered perhaps adding and increased chance for weapons to proc their native proc(s)? Something like a +1/1.8/2.5% chance to proc whatever the weapon type "does" as its proc? To be specific, I'm thinking specifically WEAPON procs here, as opposed to Consoles or even Set Bonus effects.
Due to the dependency of one on the other, you may want to consider making this a single Trait instead of two separate Traits.
When you say "slowly" ... how "slowly" are we referring to, in terms of Impulse Speeds (5-10)? Does this Trait also affect the rifts procced by Gravimetric Photon Torpedoes? Tricobalt Torpedoes and Mines (these really need help)? Particle Emission Plasma Torpedo cloud?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means
By what stretch of the imagination is 5k HP a "large" amount of Temporary Hit Points? This isn't going to do anything to prevent targetable Mines and Torpedoes from being shot down *routinely* by Beam Fire At Everything FOREVER (see: Voth and Borg d8). This isn't going to "solve the problem" that targetable Mines and Torpedoes have with being shot down all too easily/often/pathetically.
I would contend that the root problem lies in, of all places, the fact that it's really really HARD TO MISS things given the biases of the Accuracy/Evasion mechanic the game runs on. That makes it "too easy to hit" targetable Mines and Torpedoes ... which then brings up the disparities between their native HP (which can't be boosted by ANY Consoles, Tactical or not) and the "power" of the weapons that are shooting at them, which by Level 60 can be quite ridiculous.
Speaking just for myself ... and as a proposed alternative ... what about giving targetable Mines and Torpedoes a stack of Resist All Energy Damage and have each hit they take remove one of the stacks, until all the stacks are gone? That way, you've got something that is inherently scalable to the quantity of incoming damage and still fulfills the "temporary" Hit Points feel you were after. So targetable Mines and Torpedoes can still be shot down, but it takes a few more shots to do it, rather than just ONE SHOT. Also, keying the protection to Resist All Energy Damage promotes a "use Kinetics to defeat Kinetics" strategy such that these don't become unbalanced options.
Trick question. Can this somehow be used to "retroactively" avoid being destroyed (0% Hull)?
The 20 second penalty is "worse" than being defeated and respawning (with no penalty). 3 minutes is also a REALLY long time.
Why isn't this a sort of Photonic Displacer and "retreat" Teleport combo instead?
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
With that said, here are the answers I do have:
Mines are Projectiles, and have the 10% chance to trigger the DOT. The other two are Borticus questions.
The speed is based on the rank of Anomaly Leash, and is 5 at rank 1 and 10 at rank 2. The explicit list is Gravity Well, Tyken's Rift, Subspace Vortex, Ionic turbulence, Chronometric Inversion Field, and Timeline Collapse.
If your question is "will it resurrect me while dead"; that answer is no.
For the rest of your feedback on that ability, and to some extent in general, I would suggest you go on Tribble yourself and look at how the specialization works - the blog didn't list everything in the specialization, just some of the skills you can unlock.
Fair enough. Still learning which Dev is responsible for what on my end of things.
With that said, here are the answers I do have:
Interesting. However, I saw mentioned in another thread elsewhere that what Tractor Mines and Gravity Well "do" isn't technically classified as a DoT (per game mechanics) for various reasons. That said, I have a hard time understanding why you (as Developers) WOULDN'T want to have Tractor Mines "hook in" to the DoT buffing mechanics you're building here for Temporal.
Good to know that there is finally going to be something that can buff up Nukara Mines, since their Damage (since it's a DoT) can really be buffed by hardly anything. Still not sure why they deal Physical Damage instead of Proton Damage, other than the fact that that was a Legacy Decision from long before featuring Tholian ships and weapons which did Proton Damage. Makes them sort of "odd man out" in a lot of ways, particularly since they don't get any "credit" for doing any Kinetic Damage. It would be nice to have something which can make this particular niche weapon more ... viable.
I went looking for Atrophied Defenses, but couldn't find the reference easily.
Oh and since you mentioned it, something that I've never been able to figure out about Mines with respect to "inheriting" effects from their caster ... does the Proficiency boost from Tactical Team apply to Mines after they've been cast? The tooltip shows a damage bump on Mines when you're just parked in space, but the question I've got is ... does the effect of Tactical Team get "locked in" on the deployed pets if Tactical Team is active when activating the ability? Or is it instead a case of needing to cast Tactical Team (for a truly paltry damage buff) seconds before the Mines impact and detonate so that the damage buff "counts" when the Mines actually (finally!) get around to doing damage? Given that Mines take an INCREDIBLY LONG TIME to deploy ... arm ... chase ... go boom ... and the duration of Tactical Team can easily expire before all of that completes, I was basically wondering if Tactical Team was even a factor that carried over into Mine performance AT ALL, since they're basically (suicidal) Pets.
And let me guess, I should probably be asking @borticuscryptic whether or not Mines count as "Pets" for the purposes of the Admiral Tactical skills on the new (basic) Skill Tree that buff Hangar Pets ... but that's a different topic.
Given how often Mines get "left out" of being able to partake of buffs and mechanics, I figured it was important to ask. Side note ... it would be really nice if @borticuscryptic could get rid of the Torpedo vs Mine divide in Tactical Consoles and Set Bonuses and just consolidate everything into being Projectile Consoles and Set Bonuses that applied equally to Torpedoes and Mines.
Sorry, that's a bit of wishful thinking that again belongs in a different topic.
The other two are Borticus questions.
VERY interesting that it's Impulse Speed 5 and 10 at the two ranks. As mentioned elsewhere, please ensure that this property carries over to Gravimetric Duty Officer proc spawns of these anomalies also.
Are you entertaining adding additional abilities to that explicit list? This certainly would appear to be something which ought to get specific mention in tooltips inside the game to help with clarity (which I presume is already the case, but I'm merely mentioning).
I didn't figure it would ... but I was asking more in the sense of "cheating death" rather than a "resurrection from the dead" sort of way (if the semantics matter), such that you didn't wind up dead in the first place.
The reason that I ask is that managing to reach that under 10% hull, without reaching 0%(!), isn't exactly easy when you're taking a heavy bombardment ... which pretty much corresponds to the time when you'd actually want to make use of a "get me out of here!" type of ability like this. My point being that the "opportunity window" for this ability seems on the face of things to be extremely narrow, which in turn would make it not all that useful (especially in the "get out of core breaching for free" sense).
I presume you've considered alternative "trigger conditions" for making Continuity (Space) take effect. If you're open to alternatives, I'd consider switching from a 10% hull or under requirement over to something more like "any single attack that deals over 50% of your current hull HP in damage" so that it's more of a reactive "OHSH----glad we're not still in the middle of THAT!" when things get too hot.
Also, I don't know if you can do anything about making projectiles in flight that haven't already impacted for damage "auto miss" (or just "go dumb") so you don't have stuff "chasing you across the map" to still hit you after you jump/retreat to 8 kms away from your former position. Might need a Countermeasures inspired Placate effect (or straight up NPC aggro wipe) to cover your disappearance/reappearance.
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
Sometimes, if you want to bury the hatchet with a Klingon, it has to be in his skull. - Captain K'Tar of the USS Danu about J'mpok.
Now onto the feed back for the specialization as a whole as I found the time to test everything. I took Borticus criticisme of my prevous feedback to heart so i'll try to review each talent one by one and first expose my issue with them, then propose a fix.
On a high level design my first feedback is this specialization is just way too niche, way WAY too niche. It's basically only usefull for science captain chasing dps from exotic damage and that's it. It's a bad spec for tac captain, a bad spec for engie captain , a bad spec for drain focus science captain and even a bad spec fr crowd control captain (when your grav well got a 20 km diameter you really don't care if it moves) . If I were to redesign the pilot specialization to to be like the temporal spec then it would be a one trick ponny that's useless for anyone not a tac captain flying a pilot escort with DHC . thansk the heaven the pilot spec you gave us months ago is not like that, I do not know if that change in design philosophy was a concious choice or not but it is a little worrying
Enough babling more bullet point from now on. Please do note that there is a lot of talent to review so don't expect me to recap what they do that'd be too long, and don't start whining that my post is too long either, détails are what makes or break a spec
Temporal main passive
What is wrong: ground is fine, space is too niche
How I would fix it: instead of a straight up partgen bonus it should check particule gen, drain expertise and control expertise and the stats with the highest value should be the one boosted by 50 point. So a sci captain with 300 controlx, 100 drainx and 100 partgen will get a 50 point increase to control and not partgen. the main passive would become usefull for all flavors of science captain
Imminent Decay and Entropic Rider
What is wrong: ground and space verssion of the same thing, basicaly it doesn't exist. On a dps parse the damage from those things is indistinguishable from statistical white noise. Utterly irrelevant for all intent and purposes
How I would fix it: Borticus seem reluctant to increase physcial damage proc and abilities because of pvp concern (it bypass both shield and damage resistance) at least according to post he made here and on reddit so as an alternative i'd propose attaching a small debuff to the dot, something like a 10% damage ouput reduction.
Atrophied Defense and Decayed Defence
What is wrong: most dot power in game are not actually classified as dot by the game as borticus explained, simple thing like tractor beams is not dot or grav well. there are very few real dot in the original tac/engi/sci power list, so basicaly a 10 point damage resist debuff when casting a dot is a clerverly desguised way of saying a 10 point damage resistance debuff when using a temporal power because the vast majority of dot are temporal powers, very few exist out of it . this is wrong, it should NOT require a temporal ship to use the temporal spec
How I would fix it: change it to give a damage resistance debuff on foe affected by our ground and space hzard, would work on a variety of tac/engie/sci/spec powers/
Entropic Amplification
What is wrong with it: same as above, player and game engine don't view the sames things as dots
How I would fix itI found a clever idea for this if i'll forgive a bit of self indulgence, i'd resign it entirely.
It would increase the lifespan of our anomalies by 10/20%.I think this is a good idea because it fit the temporal them quite well, it synergize well with other talent in the tree and it's usefull for all science captain, drain, damage or crowd control focued one
Decay Amplification
What is wrong:same as above dots and all that
How I would fix it:this once caused me some headaches because most ground hazard zone are pretty hard to use because mobs move out of them so duration or damage increased to ground hazard seemed pointless, then it hit me: Is is technically possible for you guys to have talent that changes how the AI react to certain triggers? if you can then I would change this this to:
Increase the time before an AI ennemy attempt to move out of your harmfull hazard by 2/4 sec, if you can pull it off every ground science captain will love you forever. I do try to keep my proposal temporal themed mind you.
On to part 2 and tier 2 of the temoral spec:
Inevitability:
What is wrong:again with the niche thing, ground is fine so why the restriction to exotic damage abilities again?
How I would fix it: I'd change the space part to: 10% recharge increase for all science and temporal bridge officer power ( a little flavor in the spec is ok, requiring certain ship or station is not), all other bridge officer power get 5% increase.
Uncertainty
What is wrong with it ground is fine, space is severely underpowered, it's obvious when there is a different talent in the pilot tree called attack apttern expertise that does the same things and does it much better. 6K hp for casting a single attack pattern for the pilot spec versus 911 hp for casting an exotic damage abilities . I mean seriously? I would need to cast no less that 7, yes SEVEN different exotic damage abilities to get as much temp hp as a single APB, and then that temp hp would only last 10 sec versus 15 sec for the pilot spec, and APB has a 15 sec cooldown too. with the temporal spec once I have casted my 7 exotic damage abilities, no idea on how to even have that many , then what? those abilities have huge cooldown. This talent is so so weak it's hard to believe
How I would fix it the 10 stack limit is pointless, remove it or reduce it and rebalance the amount of tempHP gained per abilities used ; 5 stack limits and 3KHP per abilities used seems like a better start
Temporal rebuke and decaying rebuke
What is wrong:First this thing has a pretty low chance to activate and a pretty huge cooldown so much less usefull than what the tooltip imply, I hate misleading tootip. The 10% chance to activate I can live with, the 30sec internal cooldown I cannot. it makes the entire things poinless . If I have half a dozen bugs swaming me in bug hunt and trying to gnaw my legs why do I care if one of them gets teleported away? how does that help me with the remaining 5 of them? worse the one teleported is now outside the radius of my aoe damage. this thing does nothing to help my survivability and it nerf my offensive capability, pretty bad all around. and of course the damage from the dot of it is just as weak as the firts talents I reviewed
How I would fix it If a talent is going to mess with my aoe damage capabilities to increase my survivability then it should be a real genuine increase to my staying power. Removing the cooldown is te bare minimum for that. making the power give you some temp hp as well would be better same fix as before regarding the dot, since foes are teleported away how about some perception debuff so they can't instantly retarget you?
Temporal cross wiring
What is wrong with itYou know what I am going to say.... too niche and all that ,why is a drain focus science captain not allowed to benefit from this? It's not like like drain boat are op meta right now you know, no reason why a good old tachyon beam shouldn't trigger this.
Who I would fix it: every power that scale with either partgen, drainx or controlx should trigger the haste proc, simple and much less discrimatory toward non damage focused sci captain.
Anomaly Leash
What is wrong: not much, I love that idea, just a bit slow
How I would fix it flight speed changed to 7/15
Phasic artillery
What is wrong: good idea, not enough meat on it. 6k temp hp is just peanuts on elite difficuty, targetable torpedoes will still be shut down in seconds, 2 hit from the grav well of a both dreadnaught will vaporise those 6k hp in 2 thick of damage. I don't see this changing targetable torpedoes from being kicked out of the meta on higher difficulty .
How I would fix it: Brute force methode would be to increase the temp hp, something more fun but with more work would be to give targetable torpedoes some cloaking ability, every few second it would activate a phasic cloak for a couple second and it would disapear and the temp hp is renewed, the amount of temp hp would have to be determined by testing but the idea would be fun and scary too if some npc where to use it. a big ball of plasma suddenly claoking as it fly toward you would be a good scare the first time we meet npc with the temporal spec
An extra 4k hitpoints isn’t going to do anything useful to targetable torpedoes. Apart from the bugs that make destructible torpedoes next to useless the biggest problems with them is the slow speed which is the opposite of how they are in the Star Trek Show. In TOS the Enterprise couldn’t out run the High Yield Plasma torpedo which move faster-than-light. In the game the torpedo is the very opposite being so slow most things die before it hits. (then when it does hit it does zero damage due to bugs)
Anyway extra range on mines and/or extra speed on mines and destructible torpedoes would be far more useful then hit points. Or perhaps hitpoints and defense.
“Entropic Rider (Space)
Your Energy Weapons gain 2.5% chance of afflicting foes with a Physical DOT (10% chance with Projectiles)”
That balance seems massively unfair against projectiles builds. An energy based captain will have up to 8 chances of 2.5% per volley so 20% per volley. A torpedo based captain will have 10% per volley and have longer times between the volleys.
The saddest thing is a player spouting random profanity that an ability has been adjust in a way they don't like (read "less blatantly powerful") will probably get a response when other people are working ten times as hard to look at the overall play environment and not just pure player ego-stroking will get to listen to crickets for their efforts.
*well more shield/hull HP might hurt zahl go down fighting tricks, on the other hand it may benefit them (totally depends on how you want to approach things and time between enemies and/or enemies damage (esp. relative to the most optimal dps point/s in time of the map))
Also kemocite has a 100% chance with torps and 10% chance with energy weapons.
I am sorry to be rude but this is blatantly false. First a torpedoes volley is 1.5 sec or 1 sec with the right console that everyone serious about a torp build will have . A cannon volley is 3 sec and a beam volley is 4 sec long . Secondly 8 chance of 2.5% doesn't equal 20% chance that's not how it work. the real chance of a proc happening is 1-( 0.975^8) that's 18.4%. Third I am sure those terran cruiser will over a million HP are really scared about that 200 damage per sec proc, like scared out of their boot they are I am sure. Maybe making sure that proc actually do something should be the first order of buisness here?
I am not sure that this is a good idea. Esp. since the threshold of drain is so sensitive. I am not as sure about ctrlX. Though things can go berserk with lots of ctrlX.
To put it simply, it didn't work. It would not function with a bunch of Exotic Damage abilities, and there was no reasonable way to make it function correctly.
When something's broken, you fix it. Sometimes that means completely re-designing it.
The new version is actually far better in some situations (tuning values aside). For example, you can't heal your shields if you're already full, but you can always stack TempHP.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
Based on testing I just did, the torp cooldown doffs proc for every torpedo you have equipped each time they do proc. Thus if you have short cooldown torps mixed with long cooldown torps, the long cooldown torps will have their cooldowns reduced more than if you had long cooldown torps in the short cooldown torps place.
So well procs favour torps mixed with energy and builds with short cooldown torps in them. But well a single or dual torp (with energy) build is heavily disadvantaged anyway.
Timeline Stabilizer seems to affect cooldown of torps, but then reverts it when its over. For example if a torp fires and timeline stabilizer is used and the torps cooldown ends the torp will fire again based on the timeline stabilizer reduced cooldown. This next torp will then fire with a timeline stabilizer reduced cooldown. But then when the timeline stabilizer ends the current torp cooldown will lengthen in duration a bit.
I still don't have access to them.
Honestly when I first read about that talent, err soemwhere, I first reaction was just about how op it was, one you stack stacking grav well+subpsace vortex+resonance beam+plasma emission torpedo cloud you can reach some really high dps number as these abilities usually hit a huge numbers of enemies ,even if your grav well only crit for 4K damage when it hit 12 ennemies at the same time, the damage piles up really quickly. when you can do 100K dps of pure exotic damage then 10% of that mean 10K shield Healing, since usually shield Healing number are given per facing, then that mean around 40K shield Healing per sec for as long as the exotic ability last, overpowered doesn't even begin to accuratly describe it .
I am usally very anti nerf, but on that one i'll stand with borticus, it couldn't stay as it was. Also boritcus didn't mention it but I am pretty sure that something like 50 or 60 instances of exotic damage being applied every sec by the player and having to calculate the Healing from it would probably do some pretty bad tings to the server
Thank you for clarifying this. I say so because one Personal Trait and one Starship Trait do not work with Tricobalts, TDD, or any targetable torpedo: Self-Modulating Fire and Weapon System Synergy.
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.