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Please remove quad-cannon and omni-beam limits on ships
jkwrangler2010
Member Posts: 263 Arc User
Can we please remove the limits on quad-cannons and omni-beams. There is no reason anymore to only limit these weapons to one type per ship. If someone wants to run all three types of phaser quad-cannons and four-types of phaser omni-beams, we should be able to.
Also, please allow us to reroll older space sets and weapons from mission rewards and the lobi store. There are still a lot of weapons that are locked from being rerollable. While the weapons are older, it would allow for more variety for builds. That would provide more options and add balance to the game. A dev on a stream once said they don't want everyone to just go after one particular weapon because it's a high dps meta. But that is what happens when weapons can't be rerolled.
Also, please allow us to reroll older space sets and weapons from mission rewards and the lobi store. There are still a lot of weapons that are locked from being rerollable. While the weapons are older, it would allow for more variety for builds. That would provide more options and add balance to the game. A dev on a stream once said they don't want everyone to just go after one particular weapon because it's a high dps meta. But that is what happens when weapons can't be rerolled.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Comments
Absolutely no way on the Omnis. It makes zero sense to do this, literally breaking the laws of physics, and it's already bad enough this game is becoming AFK Online as it is. What they should do is scratch Omni's from existence and allocate each hardpoint 'canon' specific arcs instead. They can then increase the hardpoint count as per canon.
I don't have a strong opinion on the quad cannons. Leemwatson said they are the highest DPS in the game... I am not particularly aware of that being the case, but if it's true, then perhaps if one wants the visuals of all quad cannons, a new type of quad cannon could be introduced that's not as powerful. Perhaps "high efficiency quad cannons" that have the DPS of standard dual cannons while having quad visuals.
The only thing it would do would be to allow people to run two complete sets that include an omnibeam, and the final set bonuses tend to be no different in omni-containing sets than they are in sets without omnis, so they would not upset the balance either. It would make the beam-using part of the playerbase happier with no real downside (and it would end the confusion of what omni can go with what other one that is seen so often in chat).
Omnibeams do make sense considering that a lot of the placements seen in the shows have very wide angles with small odd-shaped blind spots and the game cannot possibly take those into account without some new cutting-edge game engine (and even then, it would probably make combat very choppy since it would be in essence doing ray-tracing for every omni on the map constantly to see if the target is in arc).
TOS had its track phasers and the capacitors to slosh the power between ventral, dorsal, and tail hardpoints, the movies (even with the arc restrictions of the sponson turrets) had their dorsal/ventral paring on the saucer section, and TNG had their strips which acted almost like track mounts as far as the beam origin point was concerned.
Quad cannons on the other hand are kind of like the cannon equivalent of the beam lance, style-wise they should go on ships that are literally built around them, not as just another weapon to drop into front hardpoints (and perhaps some as specialized consoles, rather than hardpoint weapons, like a lot of the lances are).
Just pointing out the Kinetic cutting beam isn't a true omni beam, it is not buffed by skills like beam overload, fire at will, etc.
I think it should be the other way around because of sets. Cannons are not all arbitrarily limited so you can only have one total from sets on a ship, but omnis are. Why limit sets to only one with an omni but have no limit on cannon-based sets at all like they do now?
Well, to get started the reason for the broad limitation is that cannons and beams were balanced against each other and towards two different styles of gameplay: front and broadside. Removing the omni-beam restriction completely voids that core gameplay concept as a 4/4 omni-beam boat could cover all but rear arcs of fire equally well. You can achieve that now with a 5/3 (plus borg cutting beam) or 5/2 layout, but that still leaves 4/4 ships to favor broadside builds. Eg. there's a still a game to be had working out viable weapon setups for given ships and having that affect your playstyle in some huge ways.
The set consideration is entirely secondary to preserving a tent pole design element of STO builds. They kept omni's restricted and only incrementally added the two categories to allow for new toys to add some flexibility in beam builds (eg. set omnis) without invalidating old omnis. (something that might have been done with turrets in retrospect if the opportunity had been as directly presented.)
Now would it kill anyone to limit omnis to two total, regardless of set status? No but that may require revising how a fairly large category of weapon is coded under the hood per restrictions and so falls to the zero-sum razer of game development. Is this going to be as impactful as something else the devs can do with that time? Ex. making new content. And honestly the answer to that is no, having access to two set omnis is a very minor build QoL feature that in turn removes an element of constraint pushing folks to use standard omnis that they might otherwise not touch outside economy builds. We can complain about not liking it but objectively it's getting us to use more content within beam builds (without the limitation pushing folks out of them. The set bonus consideration for the vast, vast majority of builds isn't going to override all other considerations for whether to use beams.)
And that includes engaging with the R&D system for accessible standard omnis. That puppy doesn't need to be kicked further by effectively removing a major demand for R&D content, eg. trading off one minor QoL improvement for a small ecosystem function hit.
If there's a problematic imbalance to address with the performance of beams vs. cannons (at a total population level, not just the furthest possible excesses of the particular build paths "meta" runs down), handle that directly through core balancing. Playing in the rarified space of set bonus omnis (1 vs. 2) seems to me a very tangential way of dealing with underlying concerns while poking content schemes that don't need to be poked.
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Also, assuming that all beam builds are broadside is an error, dual beam banks exist for the purpose of building beam-forward builds similar to cannon builds, and such builds are unnecessarily handicapped by the current restrictions. It also needlessly complicates things so new players often get an unpleasant surprise when trying to build with them.
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