test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Turn critical hits into injuries?
sophlogimo
Member Posts: 6,507 Arc User
While levelling my new Age of Discovery captain, a thought occurred to me that I'd like to share: Changing the critical hit mechanic from "adds more damage" to "gives the target ship injuries. The higher the "damage" that the critical does, the higher the severity of the injury, and potentially the more injuries you receive. So say you score a critical hit worth 100,000 damage points, that does NOT any longer vaporize the enemy, but give that opponent lots and lots (and lots...) of injuries at once, which will diminish that enemy's abilities slightly.
Currently, there are those who can run queues alone, and this is essentially because of critical hits going wild and increasing the damage numbers to a point where one ship does the damage that the TFO's makers assume five ships do. You can do this by aquiring lots of gear and traits.
But with the above change, people would still wreck havoc on the enemy and see quite spectacular results, but in a more creative and varied way, while at the same time balancing damage numbers of players among each other nicely.
What do you think?
Currently, there are those who can run queues alone, and this is essentially because of critical hits going wild and increasing the damage numbers to a point where one ship does the damage that the TFO's makers assume five ships do. You can do this by aquiring lots of gear and traits.
But with the above change, people would still wreck havoc on the enemy and see quite spectacular results, but in a more creative and varied way, while at the same time balancing damage numbers of players among each other nicely.
What do you think?
Remember, STO is nothing but a cosmetics game, where only the rule of cool matters. The game mechanics are intentionally out of balance, don't try to "optimize" anything, as it would just frustrate you.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.
Yeah... not surprisingly at all, you didn't get my point.
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.
Oh man dude, yea that must be it.
I forsee this thread to be your best opportunity to make a fool out of yourself so far, lol, and that with your history. Not bad.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
The only interesting bit about injuries I've heard was someone on these forums mentioning that when they run over into the overflow bag it's possible to transfer them between toon and ship and collect them to fill up the injury cap with stuff that affects nothing. That sounds like a fun thing to do. I'd try it myself, but I never get enough injuries to do that unless I start dying on purpose.
Knock it off. — StarSword-C
Every injury requires a repair component to fix. How many components would you need to carry to cover the typical crits taken during a Task Force?
Players have no trouble beating enemies now, turning the extra damage from crits into injuries makes the whole server calculations for each NPC ship more complicated, as with the significant crit rate players have, a ton of them will happen. The enemies will die a bit slower, but also be crippled much more quickly.
PvP would become even less playable, but I suppose no one would notice.
If the final system that we'd end up has a notable impact, it means you're proposing a significant change in game mechanics and the gameplay experience of all players. Who is to say that people that liked the game before will still like it afterwards? If suddenly instead of worrying just about their hull, they also have to manage to repair components during combat, and not just between respawns. If that is in any way different than spamming the already existing healing abilities, you add a layer of complexity to the gameplay that wasn't there before and I haven't heard people asking for.
In the spirit of healthy discussion however, I am going to suggest that if a Critical Hit = Injury/Damage system should be implemented, it should not be an automatic thing. A Crit merely allows for a proc chance to do Injury or Damage. Any injuries/damage sustained should be treated as temporary debuffs to whatever random system (slowed movement, fire cycle haste, shield regen) or maybe even a system offline (one beam array, torpedo or even console offline, shield hardness reduced or one facing offline).
Repairs should be handled with a buffable stat like Subsystem repair. Traits like Repair Crews or Desperate Repairs might offer resistance, or at least accelerated recovery from the damaged system.
Ground injuries could be cleansed by Science officer heals like Vascular Regeneration. I imagine some trait can be used to resist them. The STO ground game is kind of bland compared to the space game. It's really a shame too because a total package game would have been nice.
Anyway, to sum up:
I doubt that Cryptic will overhaul the damage/injury system but that's how I suggest it be handled if they don't go with option 1.
What you suggest however is something that makes things more difficult, because suddenly you have to deal with injuries in regular space combat even if you never die. It doesn't create any new exciting build options, it doesn't make the character more powerful. It just means that people have to reevaluate all their build choices (do I still need crit buffs if NPCs are getting injuries instead of more damage?), that they need to hoard more repair components, and that they need to manage additional aspects of their characters midcombat so they don't get screwed.
Can you why some people might not like this?
I would have preferred if instead of crit-hit making your weapons honestly deal more damage thru the critical damage bonus stat (crit-damage), that it would be how you procced your weapon/energy type's secondary/proc effect, like the plasma dot or the sub-system knock-off procs. That would actually improve other areas that feel quite lacking,a nd be to me a more fitting alteration. Yes the overall damage would drop, but it would also prop up the other weapon/energy types via making their procs more reliable to build around. The issue would be dealing with energy types like the antiproton type that has no true proc, but has a static semi-proc boost to critical damage, though even that could be altered to be a more like the other energy type's proc like effects in a form that boosts the critical damage of your weapon/s for a short duration after the proc that could be quite reliable even in this change such as this.
I don't think that would make much difference. It is just opposite sides of the same coin.
Certainly not a deterrent to continue to stack criticals for players.
But I can see what you mean: there needs to be a penalty for pushing ship systems to going beyond its normal capacity. It shouldn't be something a ship can do almost continuously.
Maybe it should be more like immunities, with lockout timers on the dang things.
Even better....bigger the critical hit...the longer the timer.
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
Completely false.
Your way is not the only way or the 'right way.' We simply don't share your vision of what would be 'more realistic,' 'more challenging' or even fun. This idea is none of that.
I have always seen interplay between the usage of abilities as more of a interesting method of making a game more dynamic, challenging, and fun as a form of mechanic. Interplay between ability usages makes the player actually look at the abilities they (and their enemies use) use differently, and change their approach, Where as making crits debuff/injure as interesting as it sounds does not really have much interplay on the player's side. As a player I could stack more crit to inflict injuries on another player/ship though those injuries might have little to no effect on that player/target, though in some cases they could also be quite debilitating to the player/target too, but where is the counter-play/interplay in that for the opposing side outside of stacking crit themselves? You would almost need to implemented a stat that protects against injuries inflicted by being critted as a form of counter.
Again, simply not true.
Suggestions are made all the time, just because someone doesn't like one specific suggestion does not mean they are not open to change. There are plenty of things about this game that I and many others would like to see changed and improved just not this.
Your assertion that anyone that disagrees with you is closed to change is not going to fly, sorry. Suggest something viable and we'll get on board.
I can assure you that I understand what you're saying. Again, I just fundamentally disagree.
It's obvious we're not going to change each others minds, so we'll just agree that we see things differently and call it a day.
OF course, lots of ships could carry up to a Lt.Cmdr level of Engineering power without being a Cruiser or otherwise being an Engineering focused ship, so nothing at all might change.
And it's only a time until Cryptic releases the first universal consoles or traits that grant injury healing in another manner. IF they did release tons of healing powers before, so that you don't need a healer in your team now, why would that behavior not repeat itself?
This honestly sounds like adding complexity just for complexity sake without adding any real depth to the game. The only super threat most enemies have in game is throwing high damaging attacks at you, and with all the tools we have in game, even that can be negated easily enough. Something like this would simply compound that problem and make NPCs even less of a threat than they are now. What we really need are meaningful mechanics, even if they're as basic as some of the ones in World of Warcraft or similar games.
This will also drastically increase the server calculations to the point of insanity. The Kemocite bugs several years back are a prime example of this. All it took was someone with Kemocite in a run and it could very easily cause even higher end computers to lock up due to the amount of calculations that had to be taken into account. There's only so many calculations you can expect a server to do before it starts to bog down and makes it no fun for anyone. With computer coding less is more as the more complex the code, the more data the computer/server has to read (they read every line in most cases). The more code there is, the more possibility there is for something to go wrong. This is true whether it's at the full on studio production level or small time modder level like what I do in some older games. In the example of Kemocite I touched on above, the problem was that it required far too many calculations. It used to calculate for every torp, and also at one point there was an issue in which duplicate procs could happen as well. Pretty much every time someone fired a volley of torps it was a nightmare.
When computers get a calculation(s) that they can't handle because it's too large, they do one of two things, they either crash out due to overload, or they start to assume. If hypothetically there was a hard damage cap in game of 100k dps, yet your build was capable of doing 150k dps mathematically, it wouldn't matter. The computer would simply assume that you're doing the hypothetical maximum of 100k dps and you would never see the benefit of that extra 50k dps. At that point it would simply be a race to see who could hit that hypothetical maximum the fastest and I don't exactly see that as being everyone's idea of fun. There would be large amounts of injuries getting added and taken away at each point that it would be ridiculous. Not only are you adding the injury status itself, it would also have to take into account the effects of the injuries as well and damage of the player and NPCs alike would fluctuate wildly to the point of insanity.
The problem with adding injuries to players and NPCs the way you're suggesting, it would only artificially slow down the queues by potentially damage capping the player. This would be tantamount to a time gate on the queue itself and there are already too many of those as is. Injuries overall were supposed to be the STO version of repairing broken armor in WoW, SWTOR, or similar games, in that it's meant to be an encouragement not to die. In the case of WoW, SWTOR and similar games it also serves as a money sink to remove excess in game currency from circulation. With STO the injuries are more of an annoyance than anything and don't even remove excess currency from the game either.
As far as "balancing damage numbers of players among each other" goes, if someone is able to get to 400k legitimately, or whatever the current number is now, I fail to see why they shouldn't be allowed to do so. Trying to have the match making system put players of similar skill and damage together is one thing, but to try to force equal result of outcome for different amounts of work will never sit well with anyone. Right now my strongest tank build was pulling 85k at my last parse while also allowing me to survive virtually everything the queues could possibly try to throw at me. Point being it's taken me several years to get to where I am now in game and it's not something that just occurs over night. It would be unreasonable for a new player who just started this week to think they should automatically be able to do the same amount of damage and survive as long as veteran players. Likewise I don't see why players with the ability to do higher amounts of damage etc should be punished if they got those numbers legitimately. This kind of system would essentially do that.
Finally something like this might work in games like Star Trek Bridge Commander where various items could be disabled or even outright destroyed, but in an MMORPG like this, permanently locking people out of things for an entire run will not end well. Locking folks out of one particular power as a mechanic of a fight is one thing, but an entire run is just excessive.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
While it is certainly not the height of Sea’s and my posting history we are around long enough to have learned to post by the rules and regulations of these forums.
This and your other “ideas” only aim at lowering the performance level of those players who play this game enthusiastically and did so for seasons. You on the other hand keep on requesting the rules of this game to be changed and even if your wishes get granted, like they did with S13, you and players like you do not embrace this change by bringing live to it. You rather take a break and abandon STO leaving those of us who do care about this title with a less enjoyable game to play.
I won’t comment on moderating actions but there was certainly one good part about your thread.
That was seeing that a moderator of these forums is not only good at his job here but is also enthusiastic about this game and has become a good player as result. Great post he made here.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
We already have the ability to be damaged as we can lose health in our shields and hull. Anytime they are below 100% integrity is by definition having been damaged. I said what I did above about not adding depth to the game because this would result in little more than additional debuffs that were easily removed. If you want an example of adding some depth to a fight, look at World of Warcraft or SWTOR for some examples. They have a few of your classic tank and spank fights, but most of the fights they have, there are additional mechanics that you have to deal with. It could be removing a damage shield from a boss, killing adds to prevent them from buffing the boss, having to temporarily run out of the group to prevent an AoE attack from hitting everyone making the attack worse, instead of just hitting you for piddly damage, a mechanic requiring the tank to face the boss away from the group due to a cleave, etc. There are hundreds of different combinations that can happen in a fight that it would be impractical and probably impossible for me to list them all. Point being it's something different with each fight by and large that keeps folks on their toes. That is what I consider depth.
See my examples in the first part of this post about different types of mechanics as it outlines what I consider adding depth to the fights. As I said above, adding what would amount to just extra cleansable debuffs is not my idea of fun. Additional mechanics similar to those named above is my idea of fun. Something that keeps folks on their toes like fights from WoW and SWTOR are good at doing. While adding additional debuffs would be factually an additional threat, if I can cleanse those debuffs easily and all but ignore them as was noted elsewhere in the post, then how much of a threat would those debuffs really be? Having to move out of your group due to an AoE attack that increases in damage with amount of people hit, or removing a damage buff from a boss so the tank doesn't get killed and the healer can keep him alive, are viable threats that you can't simply ignore.
Examples have been given above already of some meaningful mechanics. Point being with those mechanics they don't allow folks to just park and sparkle as we might say in STO. Not obeying those mechanics can very easily get you and your entire group killed if not careful enough.
If I may ask, have you ever actually sat down and opened up any of the files in a game, old or new and just looked at the coding? Have you ever sat down and looked at the file structure and just how many files and lines of code it takes sometimes to make a game function? As I explained previously, most computers read every single line of a code even if they don't actually use all of those lines of code. The more you add to the code the more the computer has to read. Also the more complex the calculations in said code, the more can go wrong. Less is more with computer coding and what you're proposing would add far more calculations per second to the mix. Did player get hit with a critical? If so then apply debuff A and reduce damage output by X. Player ability 2 has called for removal of debuff A, boost damage output percentage back to norm. Sometimes the players (myself included) underestimate the amount of calculations this game actually does in a second, especially in an active mission environment like ISA, HSE, UAA, or one's preferred choice of queue. What we see as pretty numbers on the screen takes alot of backend number crunching to produce. To give an example, let's assume there is a standard 5 man team of folks with 8 weapons each on their ship all firing on a target. Assuming standard firing rate and no firing cycle haste, that's 1 shot per second per weapon and 40 shots per second, just from the players the game has to account for and calculate damage for. Now start adding in damage buffs, cycle haste, and similar effects and the calculations get much more extreme.
This is why the Kemocite issue was such a big deal is it required far too many calculations too quickly which led to so much of the lag. Now let's assume for sake of thought experiment that each of those 40 shots was a critical hit and now the game is having to apply 40 separate debuffs to the enemy target, that's 40 debuffs each with a potentially different effect in a single second. The odds of all 8 weapons on all 5 players critting at once is extremely low, but is a possibility that would have to be accounted for as by sheer law of probability alone it will happen sooner or later.
I give you these examples not to berate you but to show that there is much much more calculations going on behind the scenes than what most folks realize.
Making some pretty bold assumptions there with that first statement there.
As I pointed out above several times, I don't mind mechanics and have given you examples of what types of mechanics work well in other games that I would like to see here. I simply disagree with your suggested idea and it's implementation. What you're proposing would simply add a passive mechanic that could very easily be powered through or outright ignored. By adding active mechanics such as removing a damage shield from a boss by dragging them through a fire, or in the STO case a plasma fire, you add an active mechanic that can't simply be ignored and that folks from the low to high end of the damage spectrum will want to take advantage of. In other words give an active in fight reason for things to be there.
Actually it's got nothing to do with "keep me my DPS" and more so me saying, if I'm only going to be allowed to deal 45k of my 85k dps to the enemy, give me a valid in fight reason for it instead of just a passive debuff. Give him a damage shield that I have to purge from him by dragging him through a fire or a gravity well type of thing. Let an add spawn in that drops a consumable device I have to pick up and smack him with to remove the shield. Point being give me an active reason as to why I'm not allowed to smack him with my full power instead of just saying, oh you have this debuff here. Simply using passive debuffs does nothing but place an artificial damage cap on the player and simply slows down the fight for the sake of slowing it down. Adding in the consumable device dropped by an add gives an active mechanic that folks can partake in. If the group keeps his shield down then they can get done faster. If they don't it will take longer. The same result is achieved and it makes folks feel like they've actually accomplished something vs having to play around a static passive debuff.
Then there's the debuffs on the enemy side of things. If crits give ship injuries to players and enemies alike, then this will reduce enemy effectiveness as well. Thus putting you right back where you started in terms of how threatening the enemies are. In the extreme worst case scenario you would have players not capable of functioning and enemy npcs that can't function and it would be a stalemate in which nothing gets done.
This gets into what I've said already, if it's something that removes functionality from a player for the entire run it will never sit well with players. in SWTOR there are medical droids or portable droids at different points during missions where people can repair their gear for a cost in credits. If heaven forbid the group wiped and someone's piece of gear broke they can easily repair. The penalty for failing is the repair bill. Too many repair bills and folks will cease the attempt either from frustration or running out of cash. With the repair bills in SWTOR it at least serves to remove some excess currency from the game without being too extreme. In STO the injuries are easily repaired on the fly or at a shipyard and cost next to nothing to fix, so aren't even effective at removing excess EC.
Again adding an active reason, such as a boss temporarily knocking out one of your weapons for 30 seconds one thing, a passive debuff not allowing it to be used at all is something else. As to reduced effectiveness in game of the various parts, it would need to be done in a way that the player could still function. Disabling a piece of gear or reducing output too much would easily render any ship in game at a severe disadvantage if not outright cripple them, which is no fun for anyone. Yes games should have their own challenge, but they should be fun as well, and I simply don't see the fun factor in what you're proposing for a game like STO.
At that point you're adding an entirely new class of ability at that point to deal with only one specific thing and I don't see most folks wanting to incorporate yet another type of ability into their toolkit and potentially send their builds back to the drawing board yet again. Most of the issues with this have been dealt with already above and I see no need to repeat them again.
I do however have to address the big elephant in the room with your last statement, since when have engineering heavy ships never had a purpose? That's news to me and quite a few other people. Currently my 3 strongest ships are engineering heavy ships. I have the Jem'hadar Vanguard Dreadnought cruiser, which has a Commander Engineering seat, along with a Lt Commander Engineering/Command seat and a Ensign Uni. That means potentially 8 of my powers are engineering based, though only 7 the way I have it setup. Yet despite that fact it's the ship I pulled 85k with as a tank. Then there's my Tucker Tactical miracle worker cruiser which has a Commander Engineer/Miracle Worker seat, Ensign Engineer seat, and Lt Commander Universal, which I pulled 81k using tetryons with and is just barely behind my Jem'hadar dread. Again a ship with 8 potential engineering based powers, 5 at the absolute least. Then finally my Cardassian Keldon which has a Commander Engineering, Lt Engineering/Intel, and Lt Commander Universal/Intel seat. Potentially 9 engineering powers, and that ship clocked 60k last time I parsed it.
Virtually any t5u or t6 ship can be made to do great damage and more than enough damage to clear 99% of the content in game. In fact I have yet to see a t5u or t6 ship I can't make into some sort of tank. Not all ships are going to play nicely with all types of builds. For me more engineering heavy ships are what is best, where as for one of the other guys in here that focuses more on DPS a more tac heavy ship may be best. Simply because it may not lend alot of tools to certain build types doesn't mean the ship has no purpose in game, it simply means the build type you're trying to use it for is not the purpose it was made for. I say all of that not to be arrogant as to my ability, but to make the point, gear is important yes, but in this game it's about 20% gear, skills, setup etc, and the other 80% is the pilot.
Overall I simply do not see this idea adding anything of value into the game as it would amount to just a passive debuff. Give folks meaningful mechanics and you will see more interaction with NPCs and so on, and fights will be more meaningful. I understood what you were saying overall, I simply do not agree with it.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
Can I get some of what you're smoking because it MUST be some great s**t!
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."