Nerf TT / BO

[Kuciwalker]

I will agree that scouts have a higher skillcap than strikes, similary to Thor having a higher skillcap than a badger.

 

Ramalina's gist- that a scout dogfights with essentially no effort compared to a strike- is correct. The scout out turns the strike, after all.

 

The scout has a higher skill cap because it can do more things than the strike. But to beat a scout with a strike in a dogfight requires a skill differential in favor of the strike pilot- too big of one entirely, if you ask me.

 

I agree with this.

[tunewalker]

If any one watched the twitch stream even Bioware has seen scout burst as to high. If you guys think its fine, you are wrong plain and simple move on.

 

If you think Gunships need something nerfed, buffed what ever make another thread about it.

 

If you Think strike need something nerfed, buffed what have you make another thread.

 

This is about idea to balance TT/ BO that even bioware in their last stream has talked about.

 

This isnt a Scouts vs Gunships thread, This isnt a scouts vs Strikes thread. This isnt a Scouts vs Bombers thread.

 

This is a Scouts Burst is to high as in right conditions it can get 1 second or less kill times on other ships (And it can) or even if it doesnt get kills the enemy is severely damaged with out even getting time to respond to a ship that is already faster and more maneuverable.

 

Scouts will always have some of the highest burst. The CD's arent "Going away" they are getting toned down to a more reasonable level.

 

Say we nerf the left T5 Talent on TT to where it doesnt add magnitude anymore, guess what if you dont have it mastered it makes no difference. If you opted for the right upgrade instead (which currently no one does I wonder why) it makes no difference. It still allows for more burst then a strike or a bomber can get and more dps then a GS has, yet things are more reasonable.

 

Everyone calm the hell down, scouts by admitence of Bioware are to powerful right now especially their burst. Bioware said in the last twitch stream they LIKE the survivability of scouts, and find GS SOMETIMES 1 shotting them to be appropriate for what they can do with other survival such as speed and evasion, but even with that their burst is to strong.

 

You think GS are to strong..... make a different thread k Thanks.

Edited July 7, 2014 by tunewalker

[dancezwithnubz]

This is not at all related to railguns, or gunships, or anything else. Those things could probably use some small tweaks too. Your ideas are all terrible and ludicrous, of course- "how about we take away ion aoe?"

 

silly me, delivering shield shredding, debuff applying Ion railgun shots at 15km range is clearly underpowered and Ion Railguns should have a 50% base critical chance of dealing +200% damage...

 

Scouts, Bombers and Gunships are fine as they are. Buff Strikes.

Edited July 7, 2014 by dancezwithnubz

[Verain]

So because I'm calling you out for nerfbegging stuff that doesn't need to be nerfed, I'm in favor of tripling railgun damage? I guess it's true what they say, if you have nothing useful to say, make up a ludicrous strawman argument, name it sally, an ravish it in the privacy of your basement.

 

Scouts are not fine. That's the point. I'm p. sure you are a monoscout pilot, so how would you know? But at least you see the issue with strikes.

 

We have those threads for buffing strikes too, but... I don't see you in them.

[Ryuku-sama]

Yeah, but you'd be wrong. The fact is that scouts have a higher skill cap than strikes because they are capable of doing more things.

 

In fact you aren't even saying what you think you are.

 

To do as good in a strike than in a scout, one needs to be far more skilled. And beside, no ship have true skill caps, you can always become better.

Strike pilot need to keep everything in a specific range, time his only missile break, time his shield ability, use the best weapon in his arsenal AND fy a ship with a) no boost endurance, b) no speed, c) no turning (pick two of the three).

Scout pilot on the other heand need to time their burst CD with a 50% uptime so miss-timing isn't that bad, their TWO missile breaks and avoid to be hit in the ship with the HIGHEST evasion, BEST boost endurance, BEST speed and BEST turning.

 

What is the easiest???

[Verain]

To do as good in a strike than in a scout, one needs to be far more skilled.

 

He didn't argue this point.

 

And beside, no ship have true skill caps, you can always become better.

 

You are misusing skill cap. All ships have skill caps. The skill cap on a scout is higher than on a strike, because you have more things you are capable of. It doesn't mean that getting kills is easier on a strike.

 

You have two ships:

 

Ship A has a button that deals 1000 damage, a button that deals 500 damage, and a button that deals 200 damage. All buttons have a 2 second cooldown, but each cooldown is its own thing.

Ship B has a button that deals 1100 damage. It has a 2 second cooldown?

 

Which has a higher skill cap?

 

 

Ship A.

 

 

Which has to work harder to get kills?

 

 

 

Ship B.

[AceFirstCav]

The rest of the meta won't be helped until scout burst is addressed. It's the number one issue. Number two is strike power being too low. Once you've fixed those, you might- MAYBE- have some mild changes for a railgun.

You have an error there. At first it is need to get rid of possibility to deal high damage from extreme long range without any warning - also know as GS. Only after then you can nerf scouts as much as you like.

Because you have a huge amount of evasion that has a very high chance of making the railgun miss the first shot and there's your warning while the BLCs can easily 2-shot a GS on their own. And it's not just the GS, I'm having the same annoying problem on the Rycer, red hull before i even know he's shooting at me.

This really interested me. It is really possible to 2-shot (in Dominion without power ups of course) completely fresh GS? Whatever I tried, I never manage to shot down any GS with just 2 shots

And this time you should aplicate your favorite "L2P" on yourself. You are actually whinning here. I´m just kidding.

If any one watched the twitch stream even Bioware has seen scout burst as to high. If you guys think its fine, you are wrong plain and simple move on.

So if it is so obvious to all players and Bioware that scout need nerf, why would this thread even exist? Threads are usually intended to debate (so anyone can give oposite view) or for information (which is not this case) so your statement make no sense.

You think GS are to strong..... make a different thread k Thanks.

Well, there is a lots of threads regarding GS. In each of them GS supporters refer to use Scout if you have problem with GS. So here we have loop and anything related to Scout is also related to GS.

[Ryuku-sama]

He didn't argue this point.

 

 

 

You are misusing skill cap. All ships have skill caps. The skill cap on a scout is higher than on a strike, because you have more things you are capable of. It doesn't mean that getting kills is easier on a strike.

 

You have two ships:

 

Ship A has a button that deals 1000 damage, a button that deals 500 damage, and a button that deals 200 damage. All buttons have a 2 second cooldown, but each cooldown is its own thing.

Ship B has a button that deals 1100 damage. It has a 2 second cooldown?

 

Which has a higher skill cap?

 

 

Ship A.

 

 

Which has to work harder to get kills?

 

 

 

Ship B.

 

You forgot to factor survival. Ship A can survive easily or get its *** out of tight situation. Ship B is almost as squishy and can't get its *** out of tight situation.

[Slivovidze]

...

Did you just come into this thread to troll me, or what? You probably don't remember me so I will remind you that I main a Clarion and none of my ships have BLC or stacked evasion.

I don't know how you get red-hulled so fast on your Rycer so I can not ellaborate here. I haven't suffered from similar issue on none of my ships, from Nova through Spearpoint and Pike to the Clarion. Maybe you had a weaker moment and didn't notice incoming battlescout? I mean, there is no stealth so it isn't usual to get shot by something you are unaware of, if you know what you are doing. Unless that thing is a gunship. Maybe you got shot by a gunship.

If every top-notch pilot felt like there is a need for a nerf, then I wonder why did they find that out now, after 2 or more months of stable meta in this area. (Or am I wrong? Were there some changes increasing the burst recently?)

Sorry if I look like I am whining, but I am just trying to provide some arguements to keep the last serious gunship counter functional. I will be whining if some radical nerf actually happens and gunships will be let 100% loose.

 

Unlikely. You are likely thinking of a much lower skill of pilot than yourself. A good scout can score a kill in around a second at times, and under depending. TT/BO aren't a problem in the hands of terrible pilots.

Yeah and when a pilot knows they are coming, it is a good defense to not let them shoot you. That's how I survive them. I run. Of course they would outrun me, but fortunately this is a team game so I sometimes get them shot down by teammates or something.

 

The point is that the devs don't need me, or anyone, to come up with a specific cool idea about how to take part of the power of these systems and make it passive- that part is trivial. The point is that such a change needs to happen- the details are up for debate.

I'm afraid that figuring the actual ideal disposition is the least trivial part. I am arguing you here mainly because you just said "nerf" and when you say that, I imagine a nerfhammer smash that will put TT on par with Combat Command or worse. If you would say, don't let TT and CF be activated stimultaneously, you'd have a thumbs up from me. If you said, remove the extra crit magnitude or crit chance from TT, you'd get me worried, but I'd approve. If you'd just remove TT effect from secondaries (and thus pods) you'd still have my agreement.

But I dunno if you imagine TT providing half the accuracy buff and no crit buff, then I have a problem with your solution.

 

I won't try to keep it secret that from all classes I hate gunships the most and since it is well known that they can not be countered by bombers, they can not be countered by fighters and they can barely be countered by other gunships, I think the scouts are the last ones that can counter them reliably and I am afraid that if they got nerfed, gunships would completely overtake the control. Which is kinda my nightmare.

Since this thread is coming from a gunship pilot (I assume, never played against or with Verain), seems like the counter works well.

[SammyGStatus]

I won't try to keep it secret that from all classes I hate gunships the most and since it is well known that they can not be countered by bombers, they can not be countered by fighters and they can barely be countered by other gunships, I think the scouts are the last ones that can counter them reliably and I am afraid that if they got nerfed, gunships would completely overtake the control. Which is kinda my nightmare.

Since this thread is coming from a gunship pilot (I assume, never played against or with Verain), seems like the counter works well.

 

Most of the top pilots play other ships besides their main. It's the only way to understand THE GAME vs understanding THE SHIP. I've seen each of the Bastion dudes on different ships. While Verain may be a "GS Pilot", he also has enough matches and enough experience to understand the meta for attacking and defending against various ships in various situations. Only during the moments where defeat looks inevitable if we don't switch do we actually revert back to our heavy hitters. The win = most important in my books .

 

Now, for the counters::

 

Bombers - aren't supposed to counter GS - there role is area denial and a mobile defense post (the healy bomber @ least).

 

Strikes - I can take MOST GS pilots in a strike, so that's more on the skill of the GS pilot (I main a GS, but have gotten pretty adapt @ Star Guard). Strikes can't zerg as hard as a scout, but this comes into knowing the limitations of each ship class. The key here is to approach from an off angle or keep the GS distracted, then move in and start with Heavies a couple times before Missile locking. He'll either pop DField immediately, run, or BR away. If he runs, keep on him. If he BR's, keep on him. If he pops dfield, keep on him (I switch to quads during pursuit for the ROF but I could be doing it wrong). I use CF when I play strikes, and CF + Quads = dead GS before I can complete a missile lock. Again, depends on GS skill, but pursuit of a GS basically spells the end for said GS... The T3's have the ability to fight close range, but you should be able to still gun them down before they have the opportunity to engage you if you have them on the defensive.

 

Scouts - HARD COUNTER to GSs, and in the current meta, are the best way to pew pew ANYONE let alone a GS. The role of a scout seems to be get in quick, do as much as you can, ****, rinse and repeat. Even with a nerf to TT / BO, the CF would still apply (optional) AND the rate of burning engine power is still greater than a GS, so you can still peg him (or her) down quickly. BLCs = deadly on a scout and spell certain death to opposing GSs.... Quads and pods works super well with the TT / CF combo that it won't make much of a difference anyways as the GS will still fall under 2 seconds. I'd show math but my official actuary isn't taking requests ATM

 

GS - If you're designing a GS to fight GSs, you should definitely get rid of Wingman and go Running Interference. You're still in danger if the opposing GS has Wingman as you lose the evasion buff entirely as the accuracy of the GS increases.... I think maybe 5% higher than the buff provided by RI... key word is think - my circuits must be malfunctioning). But even on my T1, start with ion and go energy drain instead of slow. You're not going to lose if you get the first full ion off before the GS slugs you... but move (hell even strafe if that's all you can do).

 

Edit: With regards to nerfing TT, the uptime is ridiculous and it doesn't need the crit chance, especially when paired (properly) with CF.

Edited July 7, 2014 by SammyGStatus

[Slivovidze]

Well, I have just tried to put Engine Recharge on my Nova instead of TT, and, well... It wasn't that bad... I think that Progenitor's best gunships would take minutes to take down or would probably kill me somehow, but I managed to keep a threesome of above-average ones pretty much under control.

 

Not to mention that S2E with Engine Recharge is like... "I am everywhere!" fun build...

 

Well, guess I don't care anymore.

 

If it makes ya guys happy, nerf the damn cooldowns to the ground, heck, remove them from game. But I will be hella pissed if gunships become the only effective ship. Now there is at least some flying and fighting, and I would hate to play a space version of Sniper Elite multiplayer.

[Verain]

No one wants a gunship meta man, not even me. Removing them would leave scouts underbudget, no one is proposing that.

[Nemarus]

No one wants a gunship meta man, not even me. Removing them would leave scouts underbudget, no one is proposing that.

 

Can I just say how much I <3 the new kinder, gentler Verain?

 

There's been a lot of vitriol and noise in this thread, and he's responded to it with steady patience and class.

[Verain]

Ha, thanks!

 

But I'm still mean in this thread. Just not like, super mean.

[Ramalina]

Yeah, but you'd be wrong. The fact is that scouts have a higher skill cap than strikes because they are capable of doing more things.

 

He didn't argue this point.

 

 

 

You are misusing skill cap. All ships have skill caps. The skill cap on a scout is higher than on a strike, because you have more things you are capable of. It doesn't mean that getting kills is easier on a strike.

 

You have two ships:

 

Ship A has a button that deals 1000 damage, a button that deals 500 damage, and a button that deals 200 damage. All buttons have a 2 second cooldown, but each cooldown is its own thing.

Ship B has a button that deals 1100 damage. It has a 2 second cooldown?

 

Which has a higher skill cap?

 

Ship A.

 

Which has to work harder to get kills?

 

Ship B.

 

So first let's do a bit of mathematical education on this amazing thing called, "counting."

 

How many active abilities do gunships have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do bombers have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do scouts have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do strikes have? One, two, three, four.

 

So obviously every ship in GSF has the EXACT SAME SKILL CAP! Right?

 

I did this example mostly to demonstrate that both Verain and Kuci have a very imperfect understanding of what a skill cap actually is, though I think their intuitive understanding isn't all that far off even if they can't articulate it very well.

 

Skill cap is not entirely dependent on the number of controls you need to operate to do something. Depending on design, a three button ship could have a skill cap much greater than that of a ship using forty buttons.

 

Skill cap, is a slightly fuzzy term, or at least has multiple definitions. In one sense it's the aggregate 'size' of the number of skills required to operate a system 'multiplied' by the difficulty of each particular skill. Actually I'd prefer to say that it's the integral between the function under which skill development can occur and zero skill. Mathematically, the area or room available for potential skill development.

 

In another sense it's the point at which an increase in operator proficiency (skill) no longer produces an increase in system performance. This can happen for an overall system or for individual components.

 

Skill floor, the inverse, is the operator competence level below which system performance is effectively zero or less.

 

Having actually bothered to include good definitions of what a skill cap is you'll have to use context to try to figure out which I'm using from here on, as I'm too lazy to label each use in a post as long as this one is likely to be.

 

Scouts definitely have a higher skill floor than strikes, but that's true of all of the non-strike classes (yes, even bombers). The thing is, a higher skill floor does not imply a higher skill cap.

 

So let's get into the design aspects that cause this. Strikes are fairly well rounded ships, not the best at anything, but not terrible at anything either. All of the other ship classes are superb in one or more areas, but have serious deficiencies in one or more areas as well. Due to these weaknesses, if you screw up in your area of weakness in a non-strike ship, the consequences tend to be catastrophic. In a game play sense you are punished very harshly by the game design for certain kinds of mistakes. In a strike however, the consequences while still significant are less likely to be a total disaster. So for a lower skill GSF pilot there's a pretty clear difference in skill floors. In order from lowest to highest it goes strike, bomber, scout, gunship. I realize that suggesting gunships take any skill at all is considered heresy by some here on the forums, but they really are the most unforgiving ship class when it comes to mistakes, especially at the lower pilot skill levels.

 

The skill floor setup of GSF influences the design of the active abilities, which in turn partly influences how skill caps turn out. GSF doesn't hold the hands of new pilots and help them out a lot with training or manuals. The devs aren't completely without mercy though, so many of the cooldowns are compensatory cooldowns. These are the ones that automatically do for a pilot what a more skilled pilot could achieve through greater proficiency. For a beginner evading missiles is hard. In compensation you get an engine ability that if you activate it when you hear a certain sound the ship will evade the missile for you automatically. This is a lower skill requirement than being situationally aware and either LOSing the attacker, or maneuvering to get out of range or out of the targeting circle. The most vulnerable base designs (gunships and scouts) get rewarded with the greatest number and also the strongest compensatory cooldowns. It's a feature that makes those classes tolerable for beginner pilots. The compensatory active abilities are meant to be used as crutches to allow less skilled pilots to do what more skilled pilots could manage through greater flying skill.

 

Now let's take the case of highly skilled pilots. A highly skilled pilot doesn't really need any compensatory active ability on any ship class in order to do reasonably well. There are even a range of active abilities that are not really compensatory in nature (most of them are considered utility type cooldowns) that a skilled pilot might choose instead of a compensatory cooldown. Despite not needing compensatory active abilities, many skilled pilots still want them because they tend to be the most powerful actives (they have to be if they're meant to compensate for a skill deficiency) and because they make successful GSF combat much easier ( in any given combat situation it's going to require a lot less skill and effort to succeed if you have a bunch of compensatory cooldowns ready to go).

 

I'm sure someone is going to mention stacking cooldowns as a skill once they count on their fingers enough times to verify that 4 = 4. It's not a very persuasive argument. Using a cooldown to eliminate your need to fly evasively, using a cooldown to reduce your need to aim accurately, and using a cooldown to reduce the amount of time you need to spend on target all at the same time does not take more skill than flying well enough to evade attacks, aim more precisely, and stay on target long enough to do equivalent damage at your normal DPS all at the same time.

 

Even allowing that cooldown stacking is a skill in its own right, which it is, doesn't imply that learning to stack contributes to a higher skillcap for scouts. The number of stackable cooldowns for normal builds is the same for strikes and scouts (this surprised me when I checked it out, I expected most of the scouts to have one more. The definition I used was an active ability that significantly improves or changes ship performance for more than 3 seconds. If you choose to change it so you can include retros as stackable then type one strikes and type 2 scouts pick up an extra cooldown, but it still balances class wise). At the highest skill levels a strike pilot is going to be just as zealous about properly using and stacking cooldowns as a scout pilot even though the payoff won't be as big. .

 

Tying all of this together we get to skill caps and a potential scout burst damage nerf. None of the ships in GSF have achievable overall skill caps. Humans are error prone enough that if you had the time and knowledge to program a perfect AI for each GSF ship configuration you would find that perfect play is a noticeable performance gain over the most skilled human player. As pilots we can't get to the point where developing a bit more skill in GSF would be useless.

 

It is distinctly possible though, that scouts have a skill cap and that it is routinely achievable by human players when it comes to doing burst damage. If you press BO or TT, press an offensive crew active (probably concentrated fire or wingman, but maybe bypass in a few edge cases), and can hold a target reasonably near the center of the firing arc indicator circle for about 1-2 seconds while firing, additional increases in pilot skill are meaningless because the target is almost always going to be dead. Basically when it comes to getting kills with burst damage scouts have the lowest skill cap (gunships with damage overcharge might be an exception). Not only do scouts have by far the lowest skill cap in this area, but the skill cap is so low that it produces balance problems because too many people are reaching the cap and the skill involved is extremely important in one game mode, and important in the other game mode. Another aspect of the problem is that in addition to a low skill cap relative to the other ship classes the actives that lower the skill cap also significantly increase the effect of successfully executing the skill (landing max burst DPS on target).

 

Scout boost endurance and maneuverability advantages also play a role in this (by lowering the skill needed to get a target centered and keep it there a second or two), but while they contribute to scout burst damage execution they really aren't where the problem lies.

 

So after grousing at length about scout builds that use cooldowns as substitutes for pilot skill, I feel I should point out that this isn't a universal or mandatory trait in scout builds.

Scouts don't require maxing out on compensatory abilities to do really well under a good pilot. A type two build with quads, pods, directionals, booster recharge, and say either lockdown, bypass or servo jammer for a crew active is a good example of a very high skill cap ship that can be really terrifying in the hands of a top notch pilot.

 

Still, saying that scouts in general have a higher skill cap than strikes is pure baloney. The most popular builds are a bit lower skill cap than a typical strike build, and the ones with the highest caps are about the same as the most difficult viable strike variants. The whole comparison is sort of pointless in any case since none of us are good enough to reach the overall skill caps for each ship. That does indeed imply that this entire post is also pointless, but I was bored and forum arguments with Verain and Kuci about things vaguely resembling theorycrafting are too much fun to pass up.

 

Hm, I'll toss in a few thread related bits just 'cause philosophically I don't approve of total thread derailment.

 

Noob scouts need BO and TT or something like them to be available so they can do some halfway decent damage while they're still learning how to aim.

 

BO and TT combined with offensive crew active abilities make landing large chunks of burst damage too easy and the amount of damage excessive when it comes to skilled pilots in heavily upgraded scouts.

 

Moderating scout burst damage enough to raise the skill cap out of reach of the better pilots without hurting the less experienced pilots is going to be tricky and the result will probably err to one side or the other rather than achieving perfect balance.

 

Edit:

Ha! See, I can be just as mean as Verain.

 

Or pretend to be.

 

As long as you ignore the emoticons.

[tunewalker]

what she? said.

[dancezwithnubz]

Ramalina wins this thread.

 

nicely argued.

[Verain]

So first let's do a bit of mathematical education on this amazing thing called, "counting."

 

How many active abilities do gunships have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do bombers have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do scouts have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do strikes have? One, two, three, four.

 

So obviously every ship in GSF has the EXACT SAME SKILL CAP! Right?

 

No. That is not what I said. I gave an example where the ships were IDENTICAL except for those abilities. In which case, what I said is correct.

 

I did this example mostly to demonstrate that both Verain and Kuci have a very imperfect understanding of what a skill cap actually is, though I think their intuitive understanding isn't all that far off even if they can't articulate it very well.

 

No, my understanding is absolutely correct. You are strawmanning my SIMPLE EXAMPLE and improperly expanding that. Scouts don't have a high skill cap because they have an extra button. I never said that. They can do more things. That's what I said. Don't put words in my mouth.

 

Skill cap, is a slightly fuzzy term, or at least has multiple definitions.

 

NO IT DOES NOT

 

Skillcap is the limit beyond which skill doesn't buy you anything else.

 

That's the skill cap. If a hypothetically perfect being was playing class X, he would be at the skill cap for class X. If the same being was playing class Y, he would be at the skill cap for class Y. If we now reduce the skill from infinite to finite, at some point as the skill of our hypothetical being decreases, he would be at the skill cap for X and not Y, or Y and not X.

 

It has nothing to do with the power level of X and Y. It is disjoint.

 

 

 

 

So, my example- in which you take two similar ships and give them different abilities- shows the skill cap is higher on the ship with more buttons, because in that example, that was the only difference. In fact, if you have a piano of missile breaks, then your skill cap is EVEN HIGHER because now you can break missiles from seven coordinated sons of seven coordinated sons.

 

But it's not just about buttons. I gave a stripped down example with just that as the difference, to show that the more powerful ship in there was the one with the higher skill cap, because it required more skill to play at its max. Obviously it would be easier to do more damage with it- that was unrelated. That was the point.

 

 

In one sense it's the aggregate 'size' of the number of skills required to operate a system 'multiplied' by the difficulty of each particular skill. Actually I'd prefer to say that it's the integral between the function under which skill development can occur and zero skill. Mathematically, the area or room available for potential skill development.

 

This is partly correct, but if you are going to crap on me for a simplified example and your best analogy references calculus, you lose the analogy thread forever. I'm not sure if the "difficulty of each particular skill" is exactly that, but this is close.

 

In another sense it's the point at which an increase in operator proficiency (skill) no longer produces an increase in system performance. This can happen for an overall system or for individual components.

 

This is about right, yes.

 

Scouts definitely have a higher skill floor than strikes, but that's true of all of the non-strike classes (yes, even bombers). The thing is, a higher skill floor does not imply a higher skill cap.

 

Bombers have a higher skill floor than strikes, because they can cast some spells and then have those things do something. Again, not saying bombers have no skill, but if you fly a bomber to a node and drop two drones you are contributing more than a strike under similar circumstances.

 

 

 

In a simplified system, where things are identical and there are simply more things to track in one system, then it has the higher skill cap. GSF isn't quite that simplified, but a LOT of the stuff going on is similar.

 

 

And- importantly- this has NO relation to how good a class is.

 

Strikes are fairly well rounded ships

 

No. Saying this does not make it true.

 

Strikes are not "balanced"

Strikes are not "well rounded"

Strikes are not "generalists"

Strikes are not "jack of all trades, master of none"

Strikes are not "middle of the road"

Strikes are not "in between other ship classes"

 

not the best at anything, but not terrible at anything either

 

A strike is probably the worst ship at a node. A strike is the worst ship for dealing with missiles. A strike is easily the worst at peeling ships off of a node.

 

Strikes are terrible at many things.

 

 

Strikes have more hull and shields than scouts, but less maneuverability and speed. Strikes have heavy lasers and scouts don't. Strikes have concussions and scouts don't. These things don't make strikes halfway to a damned gunship- they made them a medium range fighter with very bad evasion but moderate tanking ability.

 

It's basically like a polearm fighter in heavy armor.

 

All of the other ship classes are superb in one or more areas, but have serious deficiencies in one or more areas as well.

 

Strikes are merely not superb in any area. They retain as many or more deficiencies.

 

In a strike however, the consequences while still significant are less likely to be a total disaster.

 

This is just BARELY true. Like, yes, you can tank a slug railgun better than a gunship. That's not a balanced ship- that's a ship that has more base health and shields.

 

Even allowing that cooldown stacking is a skill in its own right, which it is, doesn't imply that learning to stack contributes to a higher skillcap for scouts.

 

This is trivially incorrect. If you can bring more damage to bear in a smaller window, then either:

 

1)- You are balanced around this, and being able to do it or not determines whether you can perform at the level you "should" be at, or not.

2)- You are just flat out overpowered, and being able to do this allows you to exceed what you "should" be able to do.

3)- You are just flat out underpowered, and being able to do it allows you to perform at the level of others, if only for a brief time.

 

So yes, a cooldown is going to raise the skillcap versus not having a cooldown- whether the ship is balanced, or not. Because using the cooldown correctly ups your performance, and using it incorrectly lowers it. If gunships gained a 5 button that was blaster overcharge, their skill cap would rise, because now you can use it wrong. It gets easier to play a gunship, of course- in that example, I just buffed them by giving them an extra cooldown without taking anything away.

 

It's orthogonal to the power of the ship. If I took the engine component away from gunships, gunships now have a LOWER skill cap- it's now easier to play one at their best level. This is a massive nerf, of course, and it's MUCH harder to play a gunship in this world, but it's easier to play the gunship perfectly without a barrel roll giving you all those options and ways to not die.

 

[The number of stackable cooldowns for normal builds is the same for strikes and scouts (this surprised me when I checked it out, I expected most of the scouts to have one more.

 

They do have one more, actually. Only the Clarion has a system component, after all, and the two button is much more meaningful on a scout than on a strike. Meanwhile, the 1 button offers the strike much less gameplay than it would for a scout.

 

Much more importantly, the scout can DO things the gunship can't. The scout can meaningfully peel someone off a node- the strike has a much harder time of this, to the point where the peeled enemy has to screw up to get pushed off. The scout can snapshot with BLCs or clusters, the strike has much weaker tools. This means that this is a task that a scout can be good at, but a strike really can't. The skill cap is higher on the scout, because he has this ability. It's not a button, it's an ability he gets by being what he is.

 

It is distinctly possible though, that scouts have a skill cap and that it is routinely achievable by human players when it comes to doing burst damage. If you press BO or TT, press an offensive crew active (probably concentrated fire or wingman, but maybe bypass in a few edge cases), and can hold a target reasonably near the center of the firing arc indicator circle for about 1-2 seconds while firing, additional increases in pilot skill are meaningless because the target is almost always going to be dead.

 

Yes. But, the argument I make isn't about a skill cap. It's about scouts do too much damage when their cooldowns are up. So make the cooldowns not do that anymore to fix the problem..

 

It's much simpler than you are making it.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Verain

[Kuciwalker]

So first let's do a bit of mathematical education on this amazing thing called, "counting."

 

How many active abilities do gunships have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do bombers have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do scouts have? One, two, three, four.

How many active abilities do strikes have? One, two, three, four.

 

So obviously every ship in GSF has the EXACT SAME SKILL CAP! Right?

 

Verain was illustrating with a simple, contrived example, not arguing literally from the number of buttons.

 

I did this example mostly to demonstrate that both Verain and Kuci have a very imperfect understanding of what a skill cap actually is, though I think their intuitive understanding isn't all that far off even if they can't articulate it very well.

 

No, it demonstrates that you fail to understand the argument. There is a very natural relationship between the effective volume of the input space and the skill cap. Scouts have more maneuverability and speed which means they have more options which means they have a larger input space which means they have a higher skill cap.

 

This relationship is not perfect but it holds under a wide variety of conditions and pretty clearly applies to GSF.

 

Skill cap, is a slightly fuzzy term, or at least has multiple definitions. In one sense it's the aggregate 'size' of the number of skills required to operate a system 'multiplied' by the difficulty of each particular skill. Actually I'd prefer to say that it's the integral between the function under which skill development can occur and zero skill. Mathematically, the area or room available for potential skill development.

 

stahp.

 

The easy measure (MEASURE, NOT DEFINITION) of skill cap is the performance delta between the median player and the Xth percentile player (choose X = 99, 99.9, whatever) over some appropriately selected population. This measure is imperfect but will work really well most of the time.

 

You aren't going to be able to give a formal mathematical definition of skill cap because you can't come up with a formal and non-circular definition of skill. This is fine because we all have a fairly consistent intuitive notion of skill.

 

edit: there are also two competing notions of "skill cap" floating around, the one I'm appealing to represents the maximum "amount of skill" that can effectively be devoted to a ship; the alternative is just the maximum possible performance of the ship. Both are useful notions but neither was captured by your attempted formalization. Moreover, in a reasonably balanced game both notions will correlate strongly with each other.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Kuciwalker

[Asbetos]

Did you just come into this thread to troll me, or what? You probably don't remember me so I will remind you that I main a Clarion and none of my ships have BLC or stacked evasion.

 

No, trolling you personally or anyone else for that matter was definitely not my intention. Yes, I do remember you and I do know that you main a Clarion, that's why I was surprised by your post.

 

I don't know how you get red-hulled so fast on your Rycer so I can not ellaborate here. I haven't suffered from similar issue on none of my ships, from Nova through Spearpoint and Pike to the Clarion. Maybe you had a weaker moment and didn't notice incoming battlescout? I mean, there is no stealth so it isn't usual to get shot by something you are unaware of, if you know what you are doing. Unless that thing is a gunship. Maybe you got shot by a gunship.

 

It doesn't happen often, and I've noticed it only from 1 pilot, but it did happen. I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference between a slug hit and a BLC and/or Cluster hit.

 

If every top-notch pilot felt like there is a need for a nerf, then I wonder why did they find that out now, after 2 or more months of stable meta in this area.

 

That's the thing, it's been discussed quite a bit for quite a while around here, its just that only now it got it's own topic.

 

Sorry if I look like I am whining, but I am just trying to provide some arguements to keep the last serious gunship counter functional. I will be whining if some radical nerf actually happens and gunships will be let 100% loose.

 

As has been said, no one wants to destroy it, just tone it down to more acceptable levels so it is actually a gunship counter, not an EVERYTHING counter.

[Ramalina]

 

No, my understanding is absolutely correct. You are strawmanning my SIMPLE EXAMPLE and improperly expanding that. Scouts don't have a high skill cap because they have an extra button. I never said that. They can do more things. That's what I said. Don't put words in my mouth.

 

Ok, I was a bit sloppy in reading your example, but while I'm cool with complexity correlating with higher skill cap, a more complex design doesn't always mean the skill cap is higher. A collection of functions that very obviously have little or no use do not contribute to a higher skill cap more than a single useful function that is very challenging to employ well.

 

"Do more things," may or may not increase skill cap. It really depends on what those more things are.

 

NO IT DOES NOT

 

Yes it does. The term isn't in the mainstream to the point where it shows up in authoritative dictionaries yet (or at least not the ones I have), but if you look for less authoritative sources like online slang dictionaries, or if they disagree you can go out and see how it's actually being used in what you might call the source communities. Since in this context that means online gamers the wonders of search engines make primary research absurdly easy to do. My first definition is supremely clunky, and is not competitive in any sort of analogy contest. The second one is a lot tighter. On the whole we (including Kuci) seem to agree on what skill cap can mean, I threw in the definitions because I didn't think you were really clear on what it meant in your example, and that the context made it possible to misinterpret as complexity = higher skill cap, which is not strictly speaking true, despite a strong correlation in many cases.

 

Skillcap is the limit beyond which skill doesn't buy you anything else.

 

Yeah, we agree on that, you have it as definition one, I have it as definition two.

 

...stuff clarifying what you were trying to get at in your example

 

This is about right, yes.

 

Thanks for the clarification, it is appreciated. We seem to agree more or less on what a skill cap means, but maybe it needs a language whiz to write a definition that's more elegant than the ones we're flailing around with.

 

On the clarifications, I do agree that power and skill cap are disjoint.

 

A clarification of my own, what I was getting at in the next section is that skill caps and skill floors are also disjoint. A lot of the class comparison here was a matter of illustrating that while trying to reduce the probability of class specific QQ whines in responses. It would have been clearer if I had done that separately, but I'm a bit tired and that makes my writing a bit sloppy unless I devote extra editing time to it.

 

some stuff I basically don't disagree with

 

No. Saying this does not make it true.

 

Strikes are not "balanced"

Strikes are not "well rounded"

Strikes are not "generalists"

Strikes are not "jack of all trades, master of none"

Strikes are not "middle of the road"

Strikes are not "in between other ship classes"

 

A strike is probably the worst ship at a node. A strike is the worst ship for dealing with missiles. A strike is easily the worst at peeling ships off of a node.

 

Ok, I get that you really dislike strike performance as they are right now. You're not doing much other than making baseless assertions and wild exaggerations here though. Stat wise, the strikes really are pretty much second best at everything. Performance wise that imposes disproportionate pain for the ranking because interactions are very powerful in GSF, but they're not nearly as bad as you make out on the forums when you're lobbying the devs for strike buffs (and I'm impressed by how that's been pretty much every post you've made lately where you make any mention of strikes).

 

Bombers, in case you missed it, are the worst at defending against missiles by a wide margin. Really unless it's a type 2 scout with clusters, missiles aren't an issue for strikes, and even then you can just tank the first two hits unless they're landing a lot of blaster fire too. Fly defensively and you can probably tank the third cluster missile as well, though you'll be in trouble at that point if you can't break off the engagement somehow. Or maybe you can't, but I can often enough that most of the time I don't regard cluster missiles as worth the 'waste' of a missile break.

 

Strikes are fairly decent at nodes. They're good at holding a node, though they'll prefer one of the more covered nodes if good gunships are around. In fact against a bomber they're pretty much the only kind of ship that has a chance of lasting long enough for reinforcements to arrive other than another bomber. They're also better at cleaning bombers off of nodes than anything other than another bomber. Gangs of gunships can be faster at clearing open nodes than gangs of strikes, but not by a huge margin. The list of scary things for a strike at a node is 2+ gunships working to cover high and low, BLC type 2 scouts with good pilots, minelayers, and being outnumbered by more than 3 to 1. I wouldn't characterize that as terrible at nodes. I'd much rather have a strike for defending a contested node than a type one scout, even at a significant upgrade disadvantage. With a type two scout flipping an enemy node is easier if it's not heavy on mines and turrets, so offensively I'll concede a clear node advantage to certain scout builds in certain conditions.

 

Strikes are terrible at many things.

 

When it comes to topping the scoreboard counting each column as a thing, I'll grant you this.

 

Strikes have more hull and shields than scouts, but less maneuverability and speed. Strikes have heavy lasers and scouts don't. Strikes have concussions and scouts don't. These things don't make strikes halfway to a damned gunship- they made them a medium range fighter with very bad evasion but moderate tanking ability.

 

It's basically like a polearm fighter in heavy armor.

 

Not always a bad thing, though I think you may be underestimating how well a strike can run away (depending on build). From the hoplites to the age of musketeers guys with polearms were a force to be reckoned with on Europe's battlefields for a more than a thousand years. Strikes are similar in that alone they're not nearly as formidable as they are in groups. Lone knights can work well on a regular basis, lone pikemen working well tend to be special cases.

 

Strikes are merely not superb in any area. They retain as many or more deficiencies.

 

True, being deficient in every area compared to the best class for a particular thing, strikes flat out win the most deficiencies contest if your standard of comparison is, "not the absolute best in this category." Still, they'll always be better at any other class in at least one category and usually in more than one. The exploitable differences aren't as big as one might like, but they are there.

 

It works the other way too. The strike doesn't have a huge Achilles heel style weakness. You don't have classes that strike fear into the heart of a strike pilot, you have classes that strike frustration and annoyance into the heart of a strike pilot.

 

 

This is trivially incorrect. If you can bring more damage to bear in a smaller window, then either:

 

1)- You are balanced around this, and being able to do it or not determines whether you can perform at the level you "should" be at, or not.

2)- You are just flat out overpowered, and being able to do this allows you to exceed what you "should" be able to do.

3)- You are just flat out underpowered, and being able to do it allows you to perform at the level of others, if only for a brief time.

 

So yes, a cooldown is going to raise the skillcap versus not having a cooldown- whether the ship is balanced, or not. Because using the cooldown correctly ups your performance, and using it incorrectly lowers it. If gunships gained a 5 button that was blaster overcharge, their skill cap would rise, because now you can use it wrong. It gets easier to play a gunship, of course- in that example, I just buffed them by giving them an extra cooldown without taking anything away.

 

It's orthogonal to the power of the ship. If I took the engine component away from gunships, gunships now have a LOWER skill cap- it's now easier to play one at their best level. This is a massive nerf, of course, and it's MUCH harder to play a gunship in this world, but it's easier to play the gunship perfectly without a barrel roll giving you all those options and ways to not die.

 

 

You seem very wedded to the idea that

more complexity = higher skillcap

is a hard and fast equality. Or at least that's how your posts are coming across to me. You also seem to be very selective in where you perceive complexity. Very quick to see things like more cooldowns, but under weighting or even completely missing more subtle piloting things like the number of course corrections needed to successfully lock torps versus the number of course corrections needed to lock clusters if both are locking on a maneuvering target.

 

This is where our core disagreement is. I'm quite confident that other factors such as task difficulty can outweigh complexity when it comes to moving the skill cap around depending on their relative magnitude. I think I'm also seeing piloting complexity in strikes in places where you're not, and not seeing 'more things' in scouts where you are. I'm seeing the same things being harder to do in a strike.

 

If evaluating skill cap I'd rate the use of three trivially easy to use abilities with minor effects as having a lower influence on skill cap than one monumentally difficult task with at least a moderate effect. Sure more things are more things, but to move the net skill cap a long way you need a sufficiently large absolute measure of skill, something that can take a lot of trivial tasks to do unless there are really strong interactions between them.

 

 

They do have one more, actually. Only the Clarion has a system component, after all, and the two button is much more meaningful on a scout than on a strike. Meanwhile, the 1 button offers the strike much less gameplay than it would for a scout.

 

Much more importantly, the scout can DO things the gunship can't. The scout can meaningfully peel someone off a node- the strike has a much harder time of this, to the point where the peeled enemy has to screw up to get pushed off. The scout can snapshot with BLCs or clusters, the strike has much weaker tools. This means that this is a task that a scout can be good at, but a strike really can't. The skill cap is higher on the scout, because he has this ability. It's not a button, it's an ability he gets by being what he is.

 

Ok, I'm calling ******** on your trying to have it both ways here. First power is orthogonal to skill and being overpowered or underpowered doesn't make a difference in skill cap. A few paragraphs later more powerful components that make it easier to perform a given task somehow increase the skill cap compared to tools that are harder to use. I'm not an absolute slave to consistency but that's going far enough that I think it's worth mention.

 

I'll also point out a few other flaws in the argument from my point of view. A strike really can do snapshots. With clusters it's virtually the same as for a scout, with HLC's it's harder than with BLC's but that doesn't make it something that strikes are incapable of, it means that by your definition of skill cap, "Skillcap is the limit beyond which skill doesn't buy you anything else." the skill cap for strikes at close ranges is higher than for BLC scouts. When the scout's aim is good enough that being closer do dead center no longer has any benefit (BLC accuracy passes 100% after all modifiers) the strike using HLCs is still getting gains for each additional degree closer to dead center of improved aim.

 

Is it bloody stupid hard to do when you first try it? Absolutely! It is a learnable skill though, and a 'thing', and there's room to pour a LOT of skill increase into it to increase effectiveness because the skill cap for using HLCs that way is sky high. It's also pretty damn effective once you start hitting regularly. It's not popular, because the skill floor is also sky high, but that's an independent factor.

 

In general I see strikes and scouts as mechanically basically the same class. For most of the things the class does the scout versions have better tools for making maximum performance easy, strikes have traits that make them a little bit more forgiving of getting hit by bad things. It's all flavors of: fly fast, maneuver hard, shoot stuff with blasters and missiles, try not to die. There's a huge set of shared tools and similar traits. There are unique aspects too, but not that many of them and the number of unique bits is about the same in each class.

 

Yes. But, the argument I make isn't about a skill cap. It's about scouts do too much damage when their cooldowns are up. So make the cooldowns not do that anymore to fix the problem..

 

The thread you made is about scout offensive cooldowns increasing damage too much.

 

The argument you made in the quote that my second post is responding to is about relative skill caps of scouts and strikes. It's a low priority off-topic digression, but it is about a skill cap.

 

So I have to leave for a business trip in a few minutes so I can't clean up this post as much as I'd like, but I wanted to try having a go at a non-circular definition of skill for Kuci.

 

The ability to gather input, process input, and use the results to choose and enact a response from a set of possible responses that comes as close as possible to producing a result that is considered optimal for achieving a specific outcome.

 

So for an example on a landing airplane the skill of throttle control while flying on the glideslope: read cockpit instruments, calculate deviation from glideslope and throttle response that best reduces deviation, adjust throttle to that setting that best reduces both average and maximum deviation in the near future. Specific outcome in this case would be reaching and maintaining zero deviation from glideslope.

 

If I were to take a whack at using this to define a total skill development based definition of skill cap I think I'd use something like: a product of the range of adjustability of: input gathering, processing accuracy, response range, response choice, and action (can't think of the perfect word, but basically quality of the enacted response compared to the response specified by your computational process, so did you make a perfect 90 deg turn or did you miss and only get 87 degrees as an example) multiplied by the resources required to adjust these settings to a state that gives an output better than what the intial settings would have produced for a given execution of the skill.

 

That's a hideously unwieldy attempt at a definition of skill cap, but I'm trying to point at range of adjustability times effort/input level needed to adjust for an improved or 'good' outcome in any given trial.

 

If that makes any sense. If you can turn that mess into something nice and tight I'd love to see it. Or point out all the places where it's total non-sense, whichever.

 

Since I'll be away for awhile I'll also admit that while I love trying to push the envelope on what can be done with a strike, I fly scouts as a relaxing easy-mode vacation sort of thing, so maybe there are vast complexities to scoutiness that I just haven't explored the class enough to find. So don't get overly bent out of shape by any of this.

 

Have a good week guys.

 

Edit: So about 5 hours after I left, I came up with a less unwieldy definition.

 

Skill cap:

The magnitude of the range of operator inputs that have a meaningful effect on system performance.

Edited July 13, 2014 by Ramalina