Engineers Ships Rebalance REQUIRED.

[Voracity_T]

So it's been brought up in numerous threads now multiple times but at this point the engineering system seriously needs a full rebalance.

The powercreep in the current build is utterly stupid at this point and makes 90% of the game so incredibly easy. It allows cmdrs to horde vast amounts of wealth with seldom little risk to thier ships or wallet. Whilst making nearly every PvE activity utterly trivial.
On top of this it is causing serious imbalance in the PvP community in which now consists of Cutters, Vettes and FDLs with little to no chance of anything else being overly viable. To add insult to injury high skill builds are being actively penalized by the current system and has already resulted in many of the most skilled and knowledgeable pilots to jump ship because the skill bar caters to low skill reverski bank tanks.

I don't need to explain what the problems are individually as they have been discussed ad infinitum at this point, I'm just writing this in the hope that a developer pays attention and decides it might be more prudent for the long term health of the game to work these issues out. This should really have been sorted when it came to 3.0's engineering update however the key aspects of balance were left out and have thus resulted in what feels like a seriously broken aspect of the game.

It seems to simply be a case of tweaking some numbers and having those translate over to the current modules owned by CMDRs. Also I am aware that many legacy modules retain thier superiority over anything currently avalible and this is another aspect that needs to change. Rebalance means exactly that. To try to create a level playing feild for everyone without taking away the fun and progression earned through engineers.

Thank you for reading and if anyone at FDev is reading this, please take the time to get this sorted for the good of everyone. We realise there is a lot on your plate at this point however most of us would appriciate this particular aspect much more than many other additions.

o7 lads.

 

[TheGrimCorsair]

Dunno, Engineering seems perfectly balanced to simulate the experience of playing an MMO, getting your ultra-badass perfectly crafted gear built, and being able to roll 99% of the content in the game with it while blindly flailing at the keyboard 'cause you're the savior of the universe. If FDev wants something else out of Engineering, though, they sure ain't designed it.

 

[Hank]

When they put weapons engineering into the mix, the combat imbalance began and has widened the gap between good pilots; one with the God-like weapons and the other without. The "without" can be for many reasons: mats grinding and engineering unlocks being two that I don't care to do ... not then and or now

Sure its great to see two equally skilled pilots with amazing combat ships go head-to-head, but those skills/equipment can be put to bad deeds too.
If all pilots had to chose from (only) Class-A weapons or lower, combat would be consistently more equal where skill was a factor that determined the outcome.

 

[CMDR Cknarf]

“You make some good points, CMDR. We’ll look into making some changes.” — Fdev 2019

“Heavy duty boosters no longer add a maximum of 74%. They now add 174%. We have also added more optional internal slots to all ships.” — Fdev, presumably 202x

 

[Bigmaec]

“You make some good points, CMDR. We’ll look into making some changes.” — Fdev 2019

“Heavy duty boosters no longer add a maximum of 74%. They now add 174%. We have also added more optional internal slots to all ships.” — Fdev, presumably 202x

Also new module: Guardian Even More Shield reinforcements incoming as a surprise gift end of 2019.

 

[Starbucknaked]

Not being an avid PvPer I can't comment on what's viewed as imbalances there. Overall I feel that although PvE folks are probably are more "tolerant" of these (except for the weird heat/sensor rules for NPCs...), they should take care not to overbalance and introduce changes that negatively affect PvE.

The whole skill vs. gear thing is an eternal debate in all mutiplayer gaming. Never gonna end that. Just curious, what's considered a "high skill" build? What special skill are we talking about here? Some may well view the ability to mouse-aim your railgun shots as unbalanced (like in War Thunder...).

 

[CMDR Cknarf]

You’d think Fdev would take a look at the highest level of combat in the game, and balance from there. The changes would be far more drastic to people with the best possible stats(PvP folks), than they would be for average PvE focused players who generally require ‘good enough’ stats to engage NPCs. Right now, taking a G5 engineered ship to fight (non-thargoid NPCs) is beyond overkill lol.

One of the biggest complaints from the PvP crowd right now is hitpoint inflation. Shields are stronger than they have ever been, so is armor.

When two maxed-out combat ships go up against each other, it isn’t uncommon to see them duke it out for 20+ minutes, simply because ships are just so damn durable anymore.

 

[Starbucknaked]

Nerfing shield/hull will increase the difficulty of some PvE encounters, though not necessarily a bad thing...

Engineering is needed in PvE for efficiency since it's not always a series of 1-on-1 engagements.

What was Fdev's reason behind the hitpoint creep?

 

[Morbad]

Not being an avid PvPer I can't comment on what's viewed as imbalances there. Overall I feel that although PvE folks are probably are more "tolerant" of these (except for the weird heat/sensor rules for NPCs...), they should take care not to overbalance and introduce changes that negatively affect PvE.

The PvP/PvE dichotomy is a false one as both NPCs and CMDRs are supposed to be playing by roughly the same rules when it comes to combat (there are some exceptions to this, but they are relatively few). NPCs simply cannot reveal the imbalances that are omnipresent because they are deliberately handicapped in loadouts, tactics, and piloting.

I don't think combat vs. NPCs would be negatively affected by having them fully utilize the full spectrum of equipment out there and use more sensible tactics. However, this would reveal just how defective some mechanisms are...which would be a good thing, as it could prompt changes that would benefit combat in general, for everyone, irrespective of playstyle...except perhaps those who don't think they should ever be subject to it.

Engineering is needed in PvE for efficiency since it's not always a series of 1-on-1 engagements.

Neither is PvP.

Regardless, 'efficiency' in the sense I believe you mean, is synonymous with absurdity, as being able to gun down NPCs by the dozens against overwhelming odds is hardly engrossing gameplay. Even those that enjoy the current system would almost certainly enjoy more meaningful combat.

What was Fdev's reason behind the hitpoint creep?

Simple. People are idiots and tend to have a reactionary aversion to subtraction. Most players would rather see the thing they like inflated by 5%, even if it means everything else is inflated by 10% (resulting in a net loss for them), than see any of their numbers taken away.

You can see this in nearly every aspect of the game. Credits being a prime example; more of them, faster, but increasingly less relevance to them, is seen as progress by a large portion of the player base.

 

[dm06]

There are two type of complains:

• pilots use paper ships
• pilots use engineering to make ships stronger

 

[Starbucknaked]

Regardless, 'efficiency' in the sense I believe you mean, is synonymous with absurdity, as being able to gun down NPCs by the dozens against overwhelming odds is hardly engrossing gameplay. Even those that enjoy the current system would almost certainly enjoy more meaningful combat.

I'm not fully informed on the intricacies of how to balance, but if the goal is to shorten PvP fights, wouldn't that also make ganking worse? Though incentives for playing in open is a whole other can of worms.

On credits alone while I do agree that mining outshines other activities perhaps too much, when viewed against other types of grinding, engineering for example, it can be thought of mainly as a QoL improvement IMO. You mine and engineer so your ship gets better at combat. It's a means to an end. Combat already drops mats when you bother to pick them up, though bounty payout can be bumped up probably.

If say all ships and modules were available in CQC, would that appeal to PvPers more?

 

[Morbad]

When two maxed-out combat ships go up against each other, it isn’t uncommon to see them duke it out for 20+ minutes, simply because ships are just so damn durable anymore.

Old 1v1 duration (recorded in 1.0, 4.5 years ago):

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWlaqeTs47o


New 1v1 duration (recorded a few days ago):

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbkXyb20Bt4

I'm not fully informed on the intricacies of how to balance, but if the goal is to shorten PvP fights, wouldn't that also make ganking worse?

The goal is to have more dynamic combat, with lower barriers to entry.

Ganking wasn't any worse in the early game, but a lot of non-ganking gameplay is no longer anywhere near as viable, or as prevalent, as it used to be.

Time-to-gank will always be the same, if it wasn't, the player base would throw a fit because of how 'impossible' NPCs became. Ability to defend one's self, deter attack, or have meaningful combat that depends on more than having precisely the right gizmo for just the right opponent, is what we've been losing.

On credits alone while I do agree that mining outshines other activities perhaps too much, when viewed against other types of grinding, engineering for example, it can be thought of mainly as a QoL improvement IMO. You mine and engineer so your ship gets better at combat. It's a means to an end. Combat already drops mats when you bother to pick them up, though bounty payout can be bumped up probably.

The goal posts for those ends are constantly being extended to account for the inflation of payouts for busywork and vice versa.

I was just as happy when my the best combat ship my CMDR could get was an A/D rated Viper III. Every inflationary step after that has been simply keeping up, not any sort of actual progress.

If say all ships and modules were available in CQC, would that appeal to PvPers more?

To a portion of CQC fans, sure, but that's an extremely narrow view of PvP.

I'm a PvPer, not just when I have my CMDR get in one of his duelist oriented builds and go looking for some 1v1-me-bros, or cruise around a CG until someone interdicts him, but all the time. Every single thing my CMDR does accounts for the possibility of direct CMDR on CMDR hostility in some way. I can be out exploring, or mining, or running missions to support a minor faction, or scouting canyons for potential race sites...still part of my PvP experience, because my CMDR can, and occasionally does, encounter hostile CMDRs in these situations.

I like some CQC every now and then, but I couldn't have 99% of the PvP experiences I've had in it, no matter what ships or equipment were available.

 

[Starbucknaked]

I'm a PvPer, not just when I have my CMDR get in one of his duelist oriented builds and go looking for some 1v1-me-bros, or cruise around a CG until someone interdicts him, but all the time. Every single thing my CMDR does accounts for the possibility of direct CMDR on CMDR hostility in some way. I can be out exploring, or mining, or running missions to support a minor faction, or scouting canyons for potential race sites...still part of my PvP experience, because my CMDR can, and occasionally does, encounter hostile CMDRs in these situations.

I understand what you are saying now. Can it be restated like this? "Balance things so that there is less stats gap between dedicated combat ships and those that aren't?"

For example, make things so that if a miner is equipped with some self-defense, assuming equal pilot skills, it should have a chance of winning, no matter how slight, against a bounty hunter build?

 

[Morbad]

I understand what you are saying now. Can it be restated like this? "Balance things so that there is less stats gap between dedicated combat ships and those that aren't?"

For example, make things so that if a miner is equipped with some self-defense, assuming equal pilot skills, it should have a chance of winning, no matter how slight, against a bounty hunter build?

There is already a chance of winning, often more than slight, but there isn't any real way to make it a fair fight unless all ships are the same, which would mean all ships could do everything, which I think would be boring, not to mention completely implausible. I'm also not convinced this would do anything to mitigate any percieved ganking problem. Give everyone the same ship and most of those mining at any given time are generally going to be less capable in combat than most of those ganking at any given time, and those looking for prey will also be more likely to travel in groups.

Regardless, I don't have a problem with a specialized vessel being good at what it's built to do, I have a problem with the inflation required for ships specialized for non-combat roles to endure combat for significant periods of time, and how the mechanisms involved in this multiply the defenses of combat vessels to extreme degrees (which in turn requires overspecialized counters).

For non-combat specialized ships to compete in combat scenarios, combat would have to have strategic and logistical considerations that have continually been stripped out of the game and are now almost wholly absent. Many supposed QoL improvements have made it practical for a pure combat build to be moved to and used to full effect, anywhere, on very short notice.

 

[Voracity_T]

It's not about making combat ships massively weaker to shorten fights as much as it's abut creating a more level playing feild between ship and weapon capability, the current system leans very much on overkill thus increasing the boundaries between set parameters.

So an FDL with a base 560MJ (Prismatic) of shield, and a FAS (Biweave) with 153m base. Initially it looks like a fairly big avantage to the FDL, however due to the regen on the Biweave it would be a tolerable difference, IE the FAS has a good chance of winning due to it's combination of high hull, and high shield regen, it is not an impossible advantage to circumvent due to the FDL having lower hull and lower regen. However when you start adding stacking percentages into this, even just HD boosters, the FDL is getting an enourmous increase to it's defensive potential, 1 HD yeilding 973MJ on the FDL, and 266MJ on the FAS, again, a much bigger difference, but not unbeatable, but after this stage is where the %net stacks start to weigh in. One more HD booster and we go up to 1387MJ for the FDL and 378MJ for the FAS. So on and so forth.

Same for weapons, same for armour.

The percentage method of buffing modules when they go through engineering is where the problem has always been IMO. It adds much more weight to the initial percentage difference causing massive disparity between the resulting numbers. It was somewhat more tolerable before 3.0's engineering fix because not every ship would have the highest possible numbers due to the amount of time required and the random nature of the buffs.
Now the percentage is fixed it causes the initially, somewhat better aspects, to be so much better they have resulted in a META with seldom little able to be used outside of select scenarios.

It seems more realistic to have fixed numbers per module, that way the gaps between things can be tailored far more easily keeping everything under a reasonable boundary and not reinforcing a META style of play outside of Fixed having more damage than Gimbal, and them being better than Turrets.

 

[Starbucknaked]

Many good points here. Regardless of PvP or PvE I feel that all players are more likely than not to support tweaks that increase tactical options, rather than channeling everyone toward a few builds, i.e. over-specialization.

 

[Old Duck]

Regarding PvE, I engineered my ships to compensate for weaknesses and illogical defaults like the very short damage falloff for lasers. I purposefully did not over-engineer my ships because I didn't want to rob myself of the challenge and realism. The last thing I want is my Anaconda to fly around with the same maneuverability as my Eagle!

Now PvP combat throws a wrench into my approach, so I don't do PvP combat.

What I do not want to see is Frontier read the OP and say to themselves, "The player base thinks NPCs are too weak, so lets give all NPCs G5 godships equal to the PvP gankers!" That's the day I quit. Oh, wait...

 

[Haresus]

It wouldn't be too hard for the devs to just add a higher tier of enemy pilots ("Super Elite"), or buffing Elite NPC pilots in general. Give them some engineering, for example. That would at least give Engineered pilots a bit of a challenge against NPCs.

Not even going to try and pretend to have an educated opinion on PvP balance.

 

[Morbad]

The percentage method of buffing modules when they go through engineering is where the problem has always been IMO.

Proportional increases aren't the problem, it's how large these increases are. Engineering should have been a set of trade-offs, with modest aguments that had clear downsides, rather like the CQC system in ultimate effect. Rather we got huge, cumulative upgrades, with virtually no downsides at all.

It seems more realistic to have fixed numbers per module

Flat bonuses skews things in favor of the lower baseline figures and results in proportionally a larger increase for them, and virtually no improvement for equipment with higher starting values. This is largely how HRPs work now, and is why I have a Viper III that has 50% of the hull integrity and better resistances than my FAS, despite being one sixth it's size.

A small flat value, plus a small multiplicative one, with diminishing returns as needed, would seem to be the most optimal way for augmentation to work, IMO.

What I do not want to see is Frontier read the OP and say to themselves, "The player base thinks NPCs are too weak, so lets give all NPCs G5 godships equal to the PvP gankers!" That's the day I quit. Oh, wait...

I mostly just want them to be able to shoot straight and not cycle through the same three stupid tricks until they explode.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdr5f_IseIU


Of course, some NPCs that could compete on even terms with the best setups CMDRs can muster would also be nice. As it stands, the closest equivalent we have are ATR, which will still lose a 1v1 with plenty of combat focused CMDR vessles (well, the hull focused ones anyway), but are virtually never encountered alone and have weapons that CMDRs cannot get (reverberating cascade burst lasers), and movement abilities that players cannot duplicate (teleportation that is sorta similar to a wing beacon drop, but on to their target, which needs no waking to accomplish). Otherwise, even the best NPC loadouts and basic tactics are still anemic.

Here's an example, where I simply designate targets for my CMDR's NPC crew and let her use the mothership to fight the fully Engineered NPCs of a wing assassination mission:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIyxdgsJWSY


Simply being able to assess targets better and having sensible loadouts would make high-end NPCs vastly more challenging and entertaining...and help reveal some issues that could then be fixed.

It wouldn't be too hard for the devs to just add a higher tier of enemy pilots ("Super Elite"), or buffing Elite NPC pilots in general. Give them some engineering, for example. That would at least give Engineered pilots a bit of a challenge against NPCs.

Most NPCs of Master (possibly even lower) rank or above are already Engineered to various degrees, you just don't see weapon specials very often except on the opt-in encounters like wing missions, CZ spec ops, or very high rank USSes.

 

[Sup3rfluiD]

class 3 rails anyone? or c4 frags