Read the whole thread, dude. It's already been discussed.
Please further nerf thermal cascade
- Thread starter Protein Carrot
- Start date
Read the whole thread, dude. It's already been discussed.
Thermal cascade heavy builds can take you to about 160%-180% heat and keep you there until you die unless if you heatsink and most ship builds run out of heatsinks in about 2-4 minutes depending on the rate of heatsink spam and how many you have. It bypasses all resistances in the game and the only way to combat it is to use heatsinks. Hull damage and shield damage are irrelevant in heat weaponry fights and the only thing that decides said fights is the integrity of your fsd/thrusters and the number of heatsinks you have. Also there is very little skill element involved using heat weaponry since the most common tactic is just spamming seekers in mass or using like gimballed cannons.
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This and the fact that only a minority even cares about pvp (less than 30% as several surveys on forum/reddit show);
Pvp will always be "unfair" in one way or the other, and the attempt to balance it tends to destroy the pve game. ...
Well, heat has less effect on PvE, because NPCs aren't as affected/concerned with heat buildup.
So who exactly was the meta built for?
Trying to balance the game for pvp has never had any major implications on the pve aspects on the game and the most serious one I can think of was the highly controversial heatsink nerf and even that barely did anything. If anything the pve community is the one that is the most harmful to the pve with the trivializing of npc's with the nerfs to the ai and the engineer mods with the only major difference to 2.0 being that the npc's no longer spin to win. The only way to actually find any sort of challenge in pve combat is to intentionally use weak ships or to go against like a wing of six anacondas or something (even that barely works with the big ships with mods).
It only "destroy" pve because npc don't follow the rules that players have to follow. If NPC used same builds as players pve players would see the problem, but because npc use stupid builds that no one would use there is no problem. The pve is fun and okey but because of the npc only small amount of the game mechanics can be used in pve and pvp is only way to use different and experimental strategies. Pve is really repetitive in elite. Pvp is always more exiting and players never act like npc, they do mistakes and want to win instead of being farmed.
Also Frontier have already made the pvp community mostly leave the game. The pvp and multiplayer have been mess since launch so many have left or never bought the game because the multiplayer doesn't work and balance is horrible. Most games that have this kind of problems fix these issues relatively fast, even Battlefield 4 got fixed but frontier doesn't even try to fix the issues that give their game really bad reputation and huge disadvantage to other games.
Heat is an interesting mechanic, but the way it's used to deal damage is wrong. Heat should never be a damage over time mechanic(dot)
It should be used as 'A stun' with the cap for any damage imposed by heat weapons stopping once the target reaches 95%. This is low enough not to cause module damage on it's own but high enough such that if the target keeps firing back then they will damage their own ship.
Basically, use the heat weapons to give the target a choice. Fight back and risk damage or get out of the way.
It should be used as 'A stun' with the cap for any damage imposed by heat weapons stopping once the target reaches 95%. This is low enough not to cause module damage on it's own but high enough such that if the target keeps firing back then they will damage their own ship.
Basically, use the heat weapons to give the target a choice. Fight back and risk damage or get out of the way.
Not everyone is an elite pilot (despite the title which only requires time and ships blown up). Most still struggle against the npcs. Heck I myself in my A rated anaconda will often flee if more than one ship starts attacking me. Not everyone has high level engineer upgrades. Again I don't even have. A single one. The npcs in pve cheat like crazy! Unlimited ammo, triple rail gun Eagles that can seemingly fire them forever and not melt. Unlimited chaff, shield cell boosters and a turn rate on some ships that makes you scratch your head. Or the aimbot like capability to nail you with plasma accelerators or rail guns and dumb fires from miles away. The npcs are quite a challenge to most. It's only the small minority that is able to out class them.
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Thread title: "Please further nerf thermal cascade"
Wow, lot of AA in this thread!
Sorry, Mr Carrot, but I might only possibly agree with your OP if your title was "Please further nerf thermal cascade AND INSTEAD SIMULTANEOUSLY DO THIS ........................................"
Because of the observations you yourself wisely went on to make in your later post:-
And which I attempted to make also in my thread entitled, "Heat Meta v Ultra-Resistant Shields: FDev's Damage Dilemma"
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...Ultra-Resistant-Shields-FDev-s-Damage-Dilemma
I'm afraid that I think nerfing thermal cascade further would be dreadful and I hope FDev refuse ... unless the 'AND INSTEAD DO THIS ......................................' part is completed. Elethiomel and one or two others have made suggestions but more are needed.
I am not a games designer and I have no suggestion of my own to make. I'm just a customer. But as a customer I think that if all I'm left with to counter ultra-resistant shields are thermal shock (borderline too weak) or the other (far too weak) specials, or torps or mines (too esoteric to be core gameplay) or SCB-busting rails (good but does nothing to base shield) then I'm condemned to being a Vigilante Tickler rather than a Vigilante Executioner.
Ultra-resistant shields are skill free, input free, completely passive and effectively wipe away all of the attempts to balance SCB's that took months. They're so overwhelmingly better than 1.5 hull tanking that it's laughable.
TTK should not be of insane duration and there should actually be some chance of it ending with a 'K'.
So while I have sympathy with your position I want the alternative in place either before or simultaneous with any further nerf, thank you!
Truetickler
Wow, lot of AA in this thread!
Sorry, Mr Carrot, but I might only possibly agree with your OP if your title was "Please further nerf thermal cascade AND INSTEAD SIMULTANEOUSLY DO THIS ........................................"
Because of the observations you yourself wisely went on to make in your later post:-
And which I attempted to make also in my thread entitled, "Heat Meta v Ultra-Resistant Shields: FDev's Damage Dilemma"
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...Ultra-Resistant-Shields-FDev-s-Damage-Dilemma
I'm afraid that I think nerfing thermal cascade further would be dreadful and I hope FDev refuse ... unless the 'AND INSTEAD DO THIS ......................................' part is completed. Elethiomel and one or two others have made suggestions but more are needed.
I am not a games designer and I have no suggestion of my own to make. I'm just a customer. But as a customer I think that if all I'm left with to counter ultra-resistant shields are thermal shock (borderline too weak) or the other (far too weak) specials, or torps or mines (too esoteric to be core gameplay) or SCB-busting rails (good but does nothing to base shield) then I'm condemned to being a Vigilante Tickler rather than a Vigilante Executioner.
Ultra-resistant shields are skill free, input free, completely passive and effectively wipe away all of the attempts to balance SCB's that took months. They're so overwhelmingly better than 1.5 hull tanking that it's laughable.
TTK should not be of insane duration and there should actually be some chance of it ending with a 'K'.
So while I have sympathy with your position I want the alternative in place either before or simultaneous with any further nerf, thank you!
Truetickler
And if we gave you a fully modded anaconda that was min maxed you would never have to worry about dying ever again in 2.1 completely regardless of your skill as a pilot. The resistance stacking boosters and hrp's multiplied the survivability of all ships by such a vast margin that it's pretty amazing.
You can tell that something is a bad game mechanic when even the people that have taken the time to engineer heat ships still hate it.. Heat for me has been the strategy I use only against hostile PVPers (who are also using heat). Half of my PVP time is spent having friendly 1v1s with people and with those the conversation mostly goes like this:
Me: "Fancy a 1v1?"
Them: "Sure, you're not using any of that heat #$£% are you?"
Me: "I am at the moment, but I'll get my other ship and we can actually fight using skill"
Them: "Cool, let's do it"
This is all well and good... but it would be nice to be able to use skill in more hostile engagements too....
Me: "Fancy a 1v1?"
Them: "Sure, you're not using any of that heat #$£% are you?"
Me: "I am at the moment, but I'll get my other ship and we can actually fight using skill"
Them: "Cool, let's do it"
This is all well and good... but it would be nice to be able to use skill in more hostile engagements too....
digitalscream
Banned
Guys, this situation isn't going to get any better any time soon. There's no way they can nerf the thermal shock/cascade effects without essentially removing them from the game, and I can 99% guarantee they won't do that. The simple fact is that nobody in FD plays PvP (at least, nobody with any kind of clout in the decision-making process); that's the only conclusion which can be drawn.
I wanted to love Engineers; I really did. It had so much potential, and I've spent loads of time getting my ship optimised. Unfortunately, combat in Elite has essentially become lots of this:
...followed by a bit of this:
This is by design. It's what FD wanted - it's their solution to the meta-build problem; the theory is that by turning combat into rock-paper-scissors, there will be more variety in ship builds out there. Any solution other than getting rid of the thermal special effects (or nerfing them to the point where they're more or less useless) only serves to increase the number of options in the rock-paper-scissors game *; every ship build will still be beaten by as many builds as it can beat, and the pilots' relative skill levels remain irrelevant.
DB has already said that he wanted power and heat management to be right up there among the most important bits of gameplay, and here we are.
I didn't have a rage-quit moment...I've just realised that I haven't logged in for more than half an hour every few days in the last week or so to refresh the mission board and see if I can get some Exquisite Focus Crystal missions. In fact, I'm spending more time coming to this forum looking for patch notes or updates which might mean the game is fun again.
Elite: Text Adventure
* - There's one exception to this: getting rid of all the special effects. The rest of Engineers actually works pretty well without them.
I wanted to love Engineers; I really did. It had so much potential, and I've spent loads of time getting my ship optimised. Unfortunately, combat in Elite has essentially become lots of this:
...followed by a bit of this:
This is by design. It's what FD wanted - it's their solution to the meta-build problem; the theory is that by turning combat into rock-paper-scissors, there will be more variety in ship builds out there. Any solution other than getting rid of the thermal special effects (or nerfing them to the point where they're more or less useless) only serves to increase the number of options in the rock-paper-scissors game *; every ship build will still be beaten by as many builds as it can beat, and the pilots' relative skill levels remain irrelevant.
DB has already said that he wanted power and heat management to be right up there among the most important bits of gameplay, and here we are.
I didn't have a rage-quit moment...I've just realised that I haven't logged in for more than half an hour every few days in the last week or so to refresh the mission board and see if I can get some Exquisite Focus Crystal missions. In fact, I'm spending more time coming to this forum looking for patch notes or updates which might mean the game is fun again.
Elite: Text Adventure
* - There's one exception to this: getting rid of all the special effects. The rest of Engineers actually works pretty well without them.
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wouldn't this
go very well with
?
shields, SCBs, boosters - all sources of heat.
go very well with
?
shields, SCBs, boosters - all sources of heat.
Limit rngineer mod to 1 per ship; then you have to make a hard choice on exactly which bonus you want most, better FSD range, a heat gun or super-thrusters, but you cant have all 3.
Engineers is devastating for this game. It's a boring grind that isn't reliable added, and adds seemingly stupid mechanics to combat - sorely bias's the game towards people who've bought it and done the really dull grind - and makes things stupidly complex whilst leaving a load of mechanics around the game that don't seem to do anything any more.
I have seen very little in favour of engineers apart from getting a leg up over other people - but that's not really fun. No developer is going to pull a feature set though. Sitll, it's convincing me further not to get the next season pass and just play this game until it gets too difficult not to have bought the update and then go play something else.
I have seen very little in favour of engineers apart from getting a leg up over other people - but that's not really fun. No developer is going to pull a feature set though. Sitll, it's convincing me further not to get the next season pass and just play this game until it gets too difficult not to have bought the update and then go play something else.
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FDev had the chance to make an epic game out of a wonderful old game.
By introducing this unbalanced stuff, they're leaving "feel good" territory and entering "RNG world".
I am aware that it is problematic to nerf this stuff, but they went from "you'll have a hard time without running silent with rails" to "you'll die every time as long as you're not in a cascaded 4 wing".
This is not a game function, this is a flaw.
By introducing this unbalanced stuff, they're leaving "feel good" territory and entering "RNG world".
I am aware that it is problematic to nerf this stuff, but they went from "you'll have a hard time without running silent with rails" to "you'll die every time as long as you're not in a cascaded 4 wing".
This is not a game function, this is a flaw.
I understand what you are saying but right now there isn't really a way around building ultra shield tanks since if you go with a hull tank your ship can get disabled incredibly fast by some combination of high yield cannons, super pen rails or just plain missiles and doubly so if you get hit by a corrosive debuff.
The only way to properly utilize hull tanking right now is to go with a silent running build and just hope that your opponent doesn't have any emissive weapons because if your opponent has even one and missiles it basically means that that is an unwinnable fight by even the most skilled of pilots because 1-3 missile hits will destroy all your weapons and a couple of super pen volleys will destroy most of your internals.
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digitalscream
Banned
Actually, I think that Engineers adds a fair bit to the game in and of itself - it takes ships with serious design flaws and makes them far more useful (eg the Vulture and Courier), as long as you're sensible with your choices. It also gives a significant boost to explorers with the FSD boosts (thus reducing the need to rely on jumponium all the time), so it's not just combat folk that get a happy time from it.
The problem is with the special effects, and that's all. Everything else can be worked around, but they unbalance the whole thing so badly that it's made the whole thing a nightmare. It wasn't so bad when they were rare, but since FD caved and gave everyone the ability to just grind for effects (especially now that it's easy to get hundreds of materials for very little effort, and you only need one of them for level 1 mods to grind your rank with an Engineer) it just became the ultimate I Win button.
Ships like the vulture and the courier have significant disadvantages not because of an oversight or anything but because that is a part of the balancing process. The vulture has significant power issues because that was the only thing balancing it due to the fact that the vulture is actually a pretty fast ship with A thrusters and it has very good firepower and good shield values and a good amount of utilities and so on. The couriers bad heat efficiency is because it is an insanely good shield tank with a small profile that has excellent flight characteristics.
The fact that the engineer mods are upgrades instead of sidegrades homogenizes ships by making them all more like each other and makes them have less of an identity while also making everything harder to balance alongside the fact that the mods are dictated by rng.
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digitalscream
Banned
Indeed, but it gives you a choice with those ships - for example, you can partially fix the Vulture's power problems by giving it a bit of a heat problem. For some people, that's a better tradeoff; let's face it, even with its power issues solved, beating a non-thermal FDL still requires a lot more skill on the Vulture pilot's part than the FDL's.