Question regarding Recursive Shearing

doctorstegi · April 17

By all the power creep with stacking stuff everywhere, why can I not use recursive shearing when another player already used it on the same target?

darkbladejk · April 17

likely for a similar reason to tac fleets sharing lockouts.

doctorstegi · April 17

darkbladejk wrote: »

likely for a similar reason to tac fleets sharing lockouts.

Tac fleet is a team buff and a captain ability. Recursive shearing is a Bridge Officer Skill and a for yourself ability. I don't see how the 2 compare. Also with the changes that recursive shearing can go on for 10 seconds that means that somebody else is not able to use their bridge officer skill for 10 seconds on that target. There is no comparison in a delay to use a bridge officer skill as far as I know. I don't see a point in that at all, there is a lot more worrisome stuff out there where the whole group does insane damage. So I really wonder what the point is of this restriction.

spiritborn · April 18

IIRC it does effect the team by giving universal debuff on the target (rather then a "damage from this target" debuff) and they might not want too many of those.

legendarylycan · April 18

Well, if that were true, they'd also place stacking limits on the 9001 OTHER debuffs players can apply to enemies.

doctorstegi · April 18

spiritborn wrote: »

IIRC it does effect the team by giving universal debuff on the target (rather then a "damage from this target" debuff) and they might not want too many of those.

What universal debuff? What will you gain from my recursive shearing? I don't see anything about a debuff?

doctorstegi · April 18

legendarylycan#5411 wrote: »

Well, if that were true, they'd also place stacking limits on the 9001 OTHER debuffs players can apply to enemies.

Agreed there is so much more what stacks in the game into oblivion so all the DPS people can do their 2 Million DPS ISE runs. It really just occurred to me when I was running with a buddy of mine and we had both temporal ships with recursive shearing III. The fact when you want to use it on a boss and can't because somebody else put theirs on there first bothers me quiet a bit especially since we got that vanguard trait to make it run 10 seconds instead of 5. All the power creep in the game but they lock you out of one of your bridge officer skills for what exactly?

parmeggido · April 18

The most likely answer, is that Recursive Shearing is a 30% final damage boost against the target, from all sources, and multiple instances could end up feeding each other in a giga damage loop. It also, from what I remember, doesn't stack with the Agony Redistributor, which has basically the same effect, but deals the damage in an AoE. The Redistributor had to be nerfed because it was incredibly good, but is now back in a state where it shows up in a lot of high end runs again.

darkbladejk · April 18

doctorstegi wrote: »

darkbladejk wrote: »

likely for a similar reason to tac fleets sharing lockouts.

Tac fleet is a team buff and a captain ability. Recursive shearing is a Bridge Officer Skill and a for yourself ability. I don't see how the 2 compare. Also with the changes that recursive shearing can go on for 10 seconds that means that somebody else is not able to use their bridge officer skill for 10 seconds on that target. There is no comparison in a delay to use a bridge officer skill as far as I know. I don't see a point in that at all, there is a lot more worrisome stuff out there where the whole group does insane damage. So I really wonder what the point is of this restriction.

Note that I said similar, not the same. I will grant I should have explained better. An ability like Recursive Shearing takes alot of calculations to pull off and can potentially lead to massive damage spikes that cause lag. If for example you and I take sci builds into a run (don't know what you actually play) and we both drop recursive on a target and build up to 700k of damage it needs to deal, that's a massive spike of over 1.4m if they both pop off at once which could lead to massive overkill. In other words it could lead to a calculation overload from too much going on at once. While I agree there is alot of power creep in game, there is also alot of stuff that could make it far far worse. I'm not saying this is for sure one of them that could break the server, but if I had to speculate that's what I would say.

doctorstegi · April 19

darkbladejk wrote: »

doctorstegi wrote: »

darkbladejk wrote: »

likely for a similar reason to tac fleets sharing lockouts.

Tac fleet is a team buff and a captain ability. Recursive shearing is a Bridge Officer Skill and a for yourself ability. I don't see how the 2 compare. Also with the changes that recursive shearing can go on for 10 seconds that means that somebody else is not able to use their bridge officer skill for 10 seconds on that target. There is no comparison in a delay to use a bridge officer skill as far as I know. I don't see a point in that at all, there is a lot more worrisome stuff out there where the whole group does insane damage. So I really wonder what the point is of this restriction.

Note that I said similar, not the same. I will grant I should have explained better. An ability like Recursive Shearing takes alot of calculations to pull off and can potentially lead to massive damage spikes that cause lag. If for example you and I take sci builds into a run (don't know what you actually play) and we both drop recursive on a target and build up to 700k of damage it needs to deal, that's a massive spike of over 1.4m if they both pop off at once which could lead to massive overkill. In other words it could lead to a calculation overload from too much going on at once. While I agree there is alot of power creep in game, there is also alot of stuff that could make it far far worse. I'm not saying this is for sure one of them that could break the server, but if I had to speculate that's what I would say.

That makes sense then. I figured it shouldn't be the amount of damage you deal with it since there is other ways where you can hit really hard with and that isn't nerfed or otherwise. But yeah I can understand the lag issue but that's then a bad engine or bad programming however you want it. I think just its stupid you are locked out of your own bridge officer skill for up to 10 seconds. I'm fairly new with the recursive shearing skill since I use my Verne for science or unconventional system triggers. But I fly a Temporal now with energy weapons and that is the one what bothers me as soon as you got another guy using the same thing on the same target.

darkbladejk · April 19

doctorstegi wrote: »

But yeah I can understand the lag issue but that's then a bad engine or bad programming however you want it. I think just its stupid you are locked out of your own bridge officer skill for up to 10 seconds.

Addressing this part specifically for this as there's a particular point that needs to be me mentioned. Just to reiterate the point before I explain, I am not saying definitively that lag or potential server issues is 100% for sure why the restriction exists. That was pure speculation.

Now with that out of the way, something causing lag doesn't automatically equate to a bad engine or bad programming. There are certain complex calculations that are going to cause lag no matter how good your engine or programming is. Especially when you need to run alot of complex calculations at once and spit them out in less than a second. Your engine and how something is programmed can have an effect to a degree but there's far more to it than that. There's also hardware limitations that need to be taken into account as well. Think of it kind of like loading/unloading an 18 wheeler's trailer and having the truck pull said trailer. It's going to be much easier for the truck to pull a lighter load or no load vs pulling a heavier one. If you try to get the truck to pull too much at once, it won't matter how efficiently you packed the trailer. That truck isn't going to move, and if it does move then it won't be fast, and it will take far more to stop that truck too. The same thing is true with computers, you can have near perfect programming and a great engine which will definitely help, but you're also going to be limited by the hardware as well.

Another thing with computers and/or programs is when they need to represent a calculation that goes beyond their limits they start making assumptions. The largest number a 64bit computer can handle is 9223372036854775807, however the calculator that comes with the computer itself can represent numbers up to 10^9999. Found that 9223372036854775807 out the fun way when I accidentally left a modifier open in a Space Engineers mod I was working on and briefly had a cargo bay that could hold that many kilos of stuff. But anyways let's suppose that I somehow managed to exceed that weight in the game, this would cause an overflow and likely cause a crash because the game physically can't handle it. In the logs it would likely appear as an overflow event occurring and potentially cite the result of 9223372036854775807 even though the actual number was higher. Although mathematically higher numbers exist, physically the computer couldn't represent it so it would assume the max. This can run into issues in games because let's assume hypothetically speaking I had a container exceed that limit and the computer was able to handle it once by assuming the max result. However if I ask it to handle something beyond that limit 5 times over all at once, that's just asking for trouble. Even if I could get it to cooperate and keep running it would be like redlining an engine. You can do it for while but eventually it's going to break down. Mechanically speaking you might also have an engine that can do 200 mph or higher, but it's not going to get there instantly.

Point being overall is it's not just the engine of the game itself and the programming that matters, but what you're asking the engine and programming to do, along the hardware it's hosted on. Assuming my speculation is actually correct for sake of discussion, that doesn't mean STO's engine or programming is bad (not saying it's perfect either), it would mean that it's a combination of factors. Those factors being age of the game and the hardware it's hosted on being subjected to heavier and heavier demands placed on it. Eventually it's going to give out. Thus the restriction would be meant to try and prevent that.

Question regarding Recursive Shearing

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