Yeah, but if you think of how powerful the TB would have to be to be effective against NPC level shields, even those points in PI wouldn't stop enough of it.

Well then I guess we should just remove half of the Sci boff abilities because of how different they need to be for balance in both PvE and PvP.

Or they could simply make the PI skill be the balancing factor which is really just a database change and the entire reason the skill was created in the first place. For someone who posts so much hereticknight you sure do have a glum view of 'they won't fix it anyway' pertaining to nearly everything.

Except that EVERY science drain ability is reduced by power insulators. So u buff tachyon beam and buff power insulators but OH NO! Now turns rift, charged partial burst, target subsystems etc etc are now even more useless!

I get around 650 or so per tick (x that by 10 since theres 10 ticks) on my tachyon beam 3. Maybe you're just not specd right?

I think the point he was getting at is they have a means to boost the base of Sci powers across the board for better PvE performance and adjust the resist effects of power insulators to keep Sci from being OP in PvP.

This won't work in reality unfortunately for a couple of reasons:

1. They insist on "balancing" things around 99 skillpoints rather than what people can achieve if they actually made an effort to boost let alone max a skill.

2. They insist on resists working better vs Boff powers than spam and gear based powers. There's a reason why spec'd tet glider and those Lobi shield strippng mines are better than boff powers. Not to mention base Tykens vs Tykens w/Doffs and draining pets.

Sci's unfortunately have more and more needed borderline OP Doffs to boost their Boff abilities and or gear/pets. Imo, it's like this b/c they feel they make $ off rare very rare doffs (the ones only available via doff packs) and the pets/ships' consoles/gadgets.

Edit: Not sure what it's returns are anymore, but the TB (tractor beam) drain doffs used to be good. Iirc I used to be able to get over 1k w/the Tractor/Tach beams and doffs. I never found the Tach Beam turnrate doff all that effective vs ships w/quality innate turnrates. But, I haven't tested that in awhile either.

He's arguing to make all of those stronger, and then balance them around what PI does now so they are more useful not less.

He's arguing for a BUFF to Sci powers like Tachyon Beam.

I'm not sure if what he's suggesting would actually accomplish that, but basically in a roundabout way he's arguing for a separation of PvE and PvP numbers for BOFF powers (and probably captain abilities).

This is something that should have happened a long time ago in this game, but hasn't.

Ultimately you can't balance something like Sci, and have a full suite of functioning powers that are both effective and useful vs. NPCs with 250k to 2 million hull and tens of thousands of shield points and also be balance to face a player with 45-60K Hull and 9k to 22K shields.


You mean you get 650 per tick before the opponent's PI is calculated.

Which even vs. just 6 ranks is about 370ish and plenty of pieces of endgame equipment all add PI (+24 PI for Borg MK XI Deflector, +17.5 for OMEGA Deflector, +19.7 for the Romulan ZPE Conduit for example)


From the re-design on the skill tree we can infer this is because they do not balance the game around extreme ends of either the low or high performance spectrum and seem to balance towards the larger breadth of players in the middle.

Balancing around the max upper end would most likely see them simply adding diminishing returns to Sci console skill stacking. I wouldn't like to see that happen, personally.

This part I agree with, I can only assume as you do that it's a monetary driven motivation.

It's not that I have a glum view of them not fixing anything, it's more along the lines of I have a glum view of how they chose to do this game. I actually agree with the fact that the masses of HP and shields are silly. Doing that with the NPCs made it so that they cannot really balance that with the PvP portion.

As was stated, there's a pretty big difference between an NPC with 300k hp and 25k shields and a player with 58k hp and 10k shields. You can't really design a weapon to fight one without making it imbalanced for the other.

It's stupid yes, but that's how they've chosen to do things, and as a result, it makes things awkward when adjusting/using certain powers.

Well it's only silly the game was intended to be a full fledged PvP game.


On the other hand for PvE, this would be one of many PvE MMOs where "endgame" or even "trash mobs" had off the scale HP/Resistances/Immunities and usually couldn't (or at least were not designed to be) solo'd by any player.


Anyone who has played any other Cryptic games can tell you that what they design are PvE games.


That doesn't mean PvP should be abandoned, but it never gets anything more than half measures at best - and when it does get some attention it generally upsets the larger PvE playerbase.


This is why I think they should separate the numbers and effects for PvP & PvE, and then focus on properly balancing PvP with a completely free hand and input from the PvP die hards who generally have a better idea of how most things work in PvP than the devs do.

Here's the problem w/that. The resists perform too well @ 99 skill points since it's balanced around 99 skill points. Not matter how many points are put into Flow Caps for example the returns are such the resists skill points needed are much less. What I'd like is actually a greater return the more you invest in something w/the exception of resists which need "diminishing returns" to prevent not only immunity but in theory gains from being attacked w/Sci abilities. Resists aren't really diminishing if for example each time 25 points is added you get 10% so it's 10% of 100, than 10% of 90, than 10% of 81 etc, conversely for Sci Skill it would be base + 10% compounded.

This brings up another issue, Sci Skills and their counters have bad Tier assignments. Flow Caps, it a T1 skill and it boosts weapon procs as well a great number of skills. Power insulaters is a T2 and it resists nearly all skills. It's too easy to spec into either of those given the power of them.

The only true way to fix it is a complete remake of the mechanics in all honesty as the possible variables get too large to properly balance them at all ends of the spectrum but beyond that little detail...

Resist skills are applied to each ability with an independent effect. Just like skills boost powers by different amounts depending on the skill and ability in question. In other words they can increase PIs effectiveness against Tachyon Beam without changing how it works against any other power. Just like they have several times in the past with things like syphon drones and something else I'm forgetting.

Which once more proves why Cryptic desperately needs to separate your beloved PVP from PVE so **** can stop sucking ass in PVE.