In defense of drain builds, ES2 and ES3 cycling with a TR2 can still make a tac cube/gateway/donatra have MUUUUUCH less bite.

With a high amount of skill in PI I never even notice the borg shield drain thing. As in it does nothing to me.

But yes relative value mechanics are ideal solutions for some problems that plague balancing between pve and pvp such as the flat unresistable damage that some boff powers posses. And their is even precedence for this with torpedo crew killing design. But the resists should also have an effect relative to the attack power being used.

So yes let Tachyon Beam drain a % of shields with a hard cap (so as to not drain a tac cube as fast) on the value. Then give PI the ability to reduce the drain by a percent of the drain so that at 99.9 PI skill your shields are only drained by say half.

So, Tachyon Beam math with proposed system would be as follows:
Rank 1: 3% +1% per additional rank as previously proposed

Skill Modifier of .5 (so rank 1 would go up to 4.5% at 99.9 skill, rank 3 to 7.5%)

PI math would be standard resistance formula every other game uses except for STO when it comes to resists of

PI / (PI + 100) = resist %

Great thing about that is it needs no hardcap and has no need for diminishing returns to be built in.

Although the skill mod should probably only be .25 as it would get a bit too strong with a .5 modifier.


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*Edit Addon*

Although one has to wonder, it does gain I believe 1% increase in power per 2 aux over 50 so with enough consoles and 'maxing it' you can hit about 260 skill in flow capacitors with 5 consoles plus deflector. That means you should be able to hit about 500 drain per tic which depending on resists in PvP could be significant. Over 600 with rommie passive active and that isn't even a top tier power. Combine that with say tractor doff, tachyon weapons & glider beside a Particle Burst and you may have a viable shield ripper. Meh I'll stick with my lolz DHCs for now.

its a high wire act. too little whats the point. to much OMG.

I completely agree with this, the restrictions imposed by trying to keep the PvP element of this game balanced is extremely detrimental to the PVE game. What I think PvE needs is a hardcore mode, See my PvP post PvP Hardcore Mode - An Idea

Okay...I need the shield stats for all STF ships to formulate an exact number.

But let's say:

Tachyon Beam

Drains Lesser of 3/4/5% or 300/450/600 enemy shields per pulse (10 pulses max)

40 second cooldown

Is "lesser of" the way to go? "Greater of" would probably still limit you to the 3/4/500 per pulse in pvp, while doing a theoretically noticeable amount to beefier pve enemies. If it's too OP against cubes and such like that, perhaps 1/2/3% or give the bigger enemies some resists?

It depends. I don't know the exact shield stats of NPCs, but I'm estimating with these stats that 5% of the Tactical Cube's shields is more than 500. Too much. That 500 is there to limit how powerful tachyon beam is. We don't need shields on the Cubes to be dropping too easily.

Maybe though...I just want it to be effective, but not broken in PvE. Players can skill in resistance, NPCs as far as I know, can't.

NPCs don't need to skill into resistance, they already have very high passive resistance. Also boss class NPCs have "cheat" power levels, as in, they have 125 power to multiple subsystems, and depending how much threat your team is generating, they can sometimes have 125 power in ALL subsystems.

Wow, polaron must really be useless in those cases.

Not really. By itself it can be, but if you combine it with ES or TR, it can be a good multiplier.