Engineers forcing playstyle.

Game Discussion Balance
41

since he’s still buffing them, Engineers will remain a priority

True, but an engineer may put himself in a position where he’s difficult to get at, or he’s not going for the beacon cap so he’s lower value. To echo Jasan’s argument, when you’re fighting a gunship and you see a command ship turn up do you instantly think “zomg! a buff ship! better stop what I’m doing and kill that first!”. Presumably not, meaning if engineer buffs were lowered to the power of command buffs you wouldn’t drop what you’re doing and kill the engineer like you have to now.

42

Exactly. The role of the Engineer, as I see it, is to act as long-term support.

 

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say we have an Engineer, Command Fighter and Gunship all flying together. Who would you target first? Right now there’s no question - the Engineer. I would argue this is proof the Engi needs changing.

 

The answer should be “it depends what I need to do.” Let’s break that down.

 

1) I need long-term battlefield control:

In this instance, we focus-fire the Engineer. With him dead his allies won’t heal between fights and will be worn down over time. The downside is that the remaining ships can pump out high DPS.

 

But by the same token, taking out the Command Fighter is equally valid. Without him the enemy is more vulnerable to your weapons, they lose their primary tank (lack of diffusion shield makes it harder for this squad to hold beacons) and they also take a bigger hit to damage output since they lose any Valkyrie systems the Command had.

 

2) I need to halt the attack cold:

Here we aim at the Gunship. You bring that ship down and the enemy loses the bulk of its DPS. The downside is that the remaining ships are fairly good defensively, and so can fall back, heal and wait for backup.

 

You see how the dynamics can begin to take shape? Focus-firing “buff” ships is about sacrificing in the short-term for long-term gain. I don’t know about you, but when I picture a Beacon being held I don’t imagine Gunships and LR Frigates; I picture Guards, Commands, Engineers and debuff Interceptors all packed together shouting “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!” By contrast, I do see Gunships, LRs and Covert Ops on the offensive a lot, because that is where their strength lies.

 

Just tweak the Engineer’s healing so this dynamic is more readily visible and it’s good to go.

43

The only heal rebalance I’m looking forward to is the % based heals. That’s about it coz then the universe will expand normally again.

 

Anything done to them before that is liable as over-reacting

44

We need more balanced opinions, anyone else?

45

We need more balanced opinions, anyone else?

 

You mean players who have played engy and use other ships as well?

46

yes, I don’t forget that we have different Tiers where the opinions of those Tiers vary greatly. 

 

Though I do sense a lot of people not TEAMING UP and getting killed when they try everything solo. did they forget that they need to actually protect the engineers and ping accordingly of the enemy engineers?

 

In my corp, communication is king. Even if there is a swarm of engineers, we can break through them by focus fire. Im starting to feel that the people that complain are low levels and, sad to say, lack true pilot skills in this game. 

47

Since i am playing solo t2 most of the time, i am often forced to play engi frig because everyone else doesn’t want to play it.

you allways get focussed first and have to rely on your team quite often and since the current change you also have to be more offensive which often makes you die 2-3 times a match, even if you outskill your oponents.

when beeing close to allys, the heal is just as ridicoulus as ever and easlyly heals 2x-3x the amout of the standart shield regen and the hull heal is also to efficient.

 

i think the heals got nerfed in a wrong way, seeing how the game now is like. the range decrease forces even more players into a support role they don’t want to fly, but which is crucial to win a match. if there are only few engies, there will likely be a ball of frigs around them, the enemy can hardly outdps the heals most of the time and it is frustrating as hell for the engie player as well.

an engie should be staying behind the frontline imo (high range of heals, 3.5k-4k for blue ones i’d say) and the buffs should be a lot less efficient. 160/s shield and 80/s hull seems resonable (maybe based on ship size… not sure) if you take into account that the passive shield and hull mods only give a few points/s and are close to useless on most ships in the current meta.

this change would allow inti pilots to take down ships in heal range again, without having to rely on orion mod etc. the whole time (the intis will need a nerf then i gues… at least they will be somewhat killable without op regens as well).

 

the energy consumption of the regen mods is to high as well now, it reduces the survival chance on engies even further when beeing swarmed.

 

@JPhag: this might be true but plz tell me: how do you beat a ball of frigs? with frigs mainly i guess… heals beeing WAYS to effective has got nothing to do with piloting skills. having your incomming dmg. halfed by resists and those insane heals… well even good pilots don’t stand a chance if they are flying solo in a random team. you will need teamwork but most players seem to do whatever they like and don’t react on ping whatsoever. they even chose lr frig as cap if you tell them NOT to do so.

 

at least half of those randoms do insanely stupid things, such as not turning mods on/turning them on and off again, using the same weapon mod twice, flying in straight lines or warp into a ball of frigs… or sniper a guard frig… the list is endless. guess why the decent players at least try to atack solo? they know this is their only chance of winning, they might hope that another good pilot can eventually finish the healfrig off etc.

i often don’t even try to protect healfrigs (they suicide anyway…) but rather play a healfrig myself, beeing on the frontline myself and dealing damage myself, flying tons of roles my healfrig wasn’t build to… am i a bad pilot for at least trying to carry the match solo? i guess not, i just don’t have a choice if my team is bad. i want to win and i do what it takes, you would be surprised how many squads i can beat more or less solo in t2, but against really good squads (there are at least 2 of them in t2 i constantly face; same pilots flying same roles every match) you simply don’t stand a chance with a team that MIGHT contain 2 or 3 capable pilots. this number is often 0. if this number is zero the good players of that squad will try to take you out of the game by forcing you into fights all the time. 

if you have 3 players you fight with in a squad, things will be a lot easyer.

there are lots of low skill pilots in this game, i have even seen w/l ratios of 0.5 and less (how on earth…?) and yes they complain. they don’t understand the game and QQ all the time, i get this constantly. you are definatly right there.

 

BUT there are lots of good players who remember the times where heals were important, but not as op as nowdays and want to bring the actual skill back to the game. Skill does not mean to be able to recognise a heal symbol and shoting at it, it means beeing able to fight well without beeing permahealed by ridicioulus amounts. it means using your skills wisely and using cover in fast fights and not farming beginners which just left the heal aura. i want fight to be skill based and not dependant on healers, guards and covert ops abuse.

 

 

 

anyway how does it feel to fly the ships in team full of randoms now?

 

frigs: only healfrigs make sense as i wrote before. you will often end up getting focussed by everything, but still it seems like you are most usefull in a healfrig. guardfrigs are okay-ish. snipers? oh boy…

 

fighters: i mainly rely on gunships since they actually have the dps needed to kill healers decently from a rather safe distance. comands are fine if there are some healers in your team. you will often lack dps and have to rely on your team. tacklers are fail… at least in t2 they kinda suck. the intis which are supposed to get killed by tacklers often kill the tackler instead…

 

intis: recon and ecm only work well in a good team, you can’t carry a match with them. if your team sucks you only see youself outnumbered and outhealed. you often see ships you would like to kill but your team just isn’t there at all… if the enemy is not having heals those intis just work fine.

what about covert ops? well they are op, but even they have issues with heals. you are definately more usefull in a covops than any other inti tho, if there are no heals you are basicly an op version of a gunship. in the end you can’t carry a match with intits as solo player, you have to rely on the team to much. i used to be an inti pilot and i am still very good at flying them but i haven’t used them playing solo at all, even it can be very fun to play.

 

edit: why does the word n.o.o.b get turned into aces? is this a “bad” word in this forum?

48

True, but an engineer may put himself in a position where he’s difficult to get at, or he’s not going for the beacon cap so he’s lower value. 

 

2k distance away from the beacon isn’t my idea of ‘difficult to get at’, since I consider all moving interceptors as ‘difficult to get at’ to begin with.

49

The only heal rebalance I’m looking forward to is the % based heals. That’s about it coz then the universe will expand normally again.

 

Anything done to them before that is liable as over-reacting

Out of idle interest, why do you think that frigates are in need of such a massive buff? Frigballs not powerful enough yet?

50

Out of idle interest, why do you think that frigates are in need of such a massive buff? Frigballs not powerful enough yet?

 

Silliest thing about heals in SCon is it’s flat rate instead of % based. And the heal amount itself I consider as frigate grade, so healing an interceptor or even a fighter is the most ridiculous thing you can see in this game. This is the OP factor here.

 

But the last patch (or two) rebalancing affected how engineer + guard frigates function and fly, not the heal itself so the devs kinda missed the target imho.

 

They’ve cut down visibility and heal range. These 2 do not solve immortal command / interceptors.

 

What it did do is reduce the frigate’s tactical contribution to the team, which is a legit function of flying that class and has little to do with immortal ships.

 

 

case study one: Detonation, Engineer

 

I used to be able to position myself to help both the runners and guard one of our bases behind me whilst being in warp line of sight of atleast one other friendly base. We had the range to work with, and the visibility to put up a fair effort at protecting myself and another frigate in close range so a little risky positioning is fine.

 

Tactical Contribution? Possible

Immortal heals? Possible

 

Now, with limited range and visibility I can only pick one element of the map to play with. The runners up-front. Or one allied base. Or close range protection of my heal squad. Or neither here nor there but within warp range of 2 bases.

 

Tactical Contribution? No

Immortal heals? Still possible

 

Tactical support got taken out. Massive heals remain. Hence:

 

The only heal rebalance I’m looking forward to is the % based heals. Anything done to them before that is liable as over-reacting

 

Fix hi-dose-flat-rate-heals, not how frigates fly

 

 

 

but plz tell me: how do you beat a ball of frigs? with frigs mainly i guess… heals beeing WAYS to effective has got nothing to do with piloting skills. having your incomming dmg. halfed by resists and those insane heals… well even good pilots don’t stand a chance if they are flying solo in a random team.

 

Heals are active modules.

 

You counter heals by denying them their use both directly and through energy attrition. You counter a cluster by making it difficult for respawning frigs to regroup with those that are still alive. Both do not require frigates to break a frigate ball. Buffed survivability from passives? Target painter stacks I think. If doesn’t - it should.

 

Easy? No

Doable? Yes

Doable by random team? F*ck No

 

The thing I take issue with frigate balls is how setting one up is wayyy easier than what it requires to deal with them. That is the imbalance with frigate balls.

51

the energy consumption of the regen mods is to high as well now, it reduces the survival chance on engies even further when beeing swarmed.

Have you tried slotting the energy emitter? That solves your energy problems right out, at the cost of an active ofc. I actually like that it forces a trade-off. One regen aura or two? Energy emitter, warp gate or shield booster? Decisions decisions. I really like that engineers are one of the few roles that actually have difficult fitting decisions, unlike most roles where you basically only have a couple of loadouts that are sensible.

You also might find the federation engineer is more forgiving on energy than empire, which I also like because before Empire engies were clearly dominant and now you have an extra reason to pick fed.

52

energy change is good. now if only they would buff the missile.

53

Ok, these are just some random numbers I pulled up:

 

T2 Frig survivablity - ~20000

T2 Fighter survivability - ~13000

T2 Interceptor survivability - ~8000

 

So, by these numbers, a healing module should restore 100% of stated regen values to a frigate, about 60% to fighters, and >40% for interceptors. This is what should happen.

54

Out of idle interest, why do you think that frigates are in need of such a massive buff? Frigballs not powerful enough yet?

 

Not in T2, at least. The nerf was kinda harsh on T2 engies, but didn’t solve the problem with T3 frigballs.

55

What is engineers role? Why do we need shield regen? Should engineers provide additional healing and why? I belive we need a good understanding of this first.

If we say that regen/healing is to make everyone who won the fight, but are low on health, wont be useless in the next fight. What regen do we need then? And how long should damage dealt stick around? Or should it be pointless to deal damage unless you cant burst down the enemy at once?

 

First option: If we gave engineers a large area of effect of heals (maybe 4-5k range) that restores a small % of eneryones health each second, like 1-2%, we would get damage that sticks for a fair amount of time, but theres a point in surviving. Such a small amount of heal wont be much of a effect in combat, so you dont have to kill the engineer first, the point with killing the engineer would be to cut the recovery of the entire enemy team (if theres only one engineer). Please dont forget that we have passive shield regen on the ships.

 

Second option: Another idea would be: give engineers a huge heal rate at very short range to add more tactics into the game while at the same time make it very high paced, say 20% of max hp/second in a 700meter area, but only if the engineers drone is still alive. This would give intersting situations like: do we kill the engineer to stop their recovery? Do we kill the drone and then keep focusing the priority targets? We wouldent need to focus fire to the same degree that we do now, and the engineer dont have to die first every single time.

 

Third option is to generally keep them as they are, high heals for everyone who are somewhat in the generally area of the engineer. And everyone is very hard to kill without high amounts of damage in short periods, untill you kill every enemy engineer. Killing the engineer would be the tactic every game unless hes to far away to heal whatever you are shooting at. This also make a team with a LIVING engineer pretty much a free win, so if your team dont have one or he died, you lose.

 

The third option is how i see the current situation, do we want this? I dont. Or do you think the current situation is in another way?

 

Im not saying this is how the “mass shield generator” and the “nanodrone cloud” could work, im saying this is how the engineers could work. Modules and special modules can be changed/removed/fine tuned untill they gives the intended results and we could even remove engineers team heals all together, giving them a new purpose in battle.

 

My opinion is that healing that outdo or repairs a big portion of incomming damage in any form for more than about 10 seconds is antifun and should massivly reworked or outright removed.

Id rather see the engineers with SOME kind of heals, but that healing not being their main purpose om the battlefield.

I want there to be a point in dealing damage, even if it dont outright kills the target, and move away from massive burst damage and insta-killing.

56

(very long post)

 

If engineers had their roles changed so healing gets a smaller role in the game, we’ll see lots of half-damaged ships flying around, which can be pretty exciting. That said, it either means that the death rate is going to be much higher, or players will start to stack resistances and the command fighter will become the new engie (i.e. “kill on sight”, as someone else pointed out). 

57

I’ve started stacking thermal resists simply because there’s hardly ever an engineer around and I find myself under laser spam more often than I would like.

 

That and I wanted to be able to take a torpedo to the face and laugh.

58

players will start to stack resistances and the command fighter will become the new engie (i.e. “kill on sight”, as someone else pointed out). 

 

I dont see how you have to kill the command ship in order to kill the other ships, sure they they reduce damage taken, but wont reduce a third (<-=random number im 100% sure of) of damage taken, unlike the engineers, and comman ships dont bring back nearly dead players either.

I belive the biggest threat would be of fairly mixed classes depending on the situation after such a change. And by the way, do you know how resistances work? They dont get more effective when you stack them, hp point wise they always have the same effectiveness, percentage wise, they arent effective to stack.

 

(formula ->pre resist damage*(100/(100+resistance))=damage taken)

59

I know how resistances work. Hence, I know they can be freaking hard to deal with, especially when you’re facing down ships with massive resist levels like Guards, which can have resists of every type to shields or hull at least once, plus their phase shield which adds another 100 points. A Guard packing a crapload of thermal resists could have (if using mk2 thermal modulators) about 240 thermal resist, which results in about 30% damage.

That’s exceedingly effective when facing high thermal damage weaponry. That’s nukes, torpedoes, disintegrators, plasma arcs and webs etc…

60

I know how resistances work. Hence, I know they can be freaking hard to deal with, especially when you’re facing down ships with massive resist levels like Guards, which can have resists of every type to shields or hull at least once, plus their phase shield which adds another 100 points. A Guard packing a crapload of thermal resists could have (if using mk2 thermal modulators) about 240 thermal resist, which results in about 30% damage.

That’s exceedingly effective when facing high thermal damage weaponry. That’s nukes, torpedoes, disintegrators, plasma arcs and webs etc…

You are completely right, however, this doesent mean that you have to kill the command ships first, hence a engineer change would make the priority target much more dependant on the enemys position than the class, atleast compared to how it is now.