On the heals of the changes to Romulan science consoles (Plasma Doping) already live on Tribble comes news from BorticusCryptic that further changes to the popular past time are about to be implemented:
I said we’d look into this on Monday, and we have! How ’bout that…
So, after a little deliberation and comparative mathing, we’ve come to the conclusion that comparing a DOT proc to a passive +Damage buff is a pain in the … well, it’s not a fair or accurate comparison, as it involves a random element of chance. Even taken over an extremely large sample size, the end result feels skewed by that random element.
The fact that these Consoles behave differently depending upon the weapon you are firing is also potentially confusing for players … “do I get more out of this if I use Plasma, or Not-Plasma?”
We’ve decided to address the various issues of these Consoles’ design, by rebuilding the Consoles’ effects at some point in the near future. The new design is intended to be fairly simple:
All Energy Weapons will gain a 2.5% chance to apply an instant amount of Plasma Damage, on hit.(amount of damage is TBD, but should be comparable to what you can currently achieve)
This new console effect will be built to benefit from +Damage abilities and consoles.
No more DOT, and no more differing benefits for different weapon types.
And now for a bit of bad news: We’re not going to be able to make this rebuild and get it tested before the changes that are currently on Tribble will appear on Holodeck.
This means that what you’re seeing right now, is what will go live with this build, probably later this week. I just wanted to let you all know that further changes will be coming. Changes that restore a state of equality between Plasma and Non-Plasma weapons, when using these Embassy Consoles.
-=-=-=-=-=-
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic – Systems Design
“Play smart!”
For most players, this change will be inconsequential. Very few casual players (1.) knew of the process to begin with, and (2.) didn’t invest heavily in the upgraded consoles.
Doping changes along with others to traits will have a negative to the upper echelons in the DPS League with SarcasmDetector posting this discussion:
Reset of the DPS League
With the upcoming nerfs to Enhanced Armor Pen (Delat T2 trait) and Embassy Console Plasma Burn; we the admins of the DPS channels and League are now faced with a conundrum.
These two nerfs are going to impact everyone’s DPS, some a lot more than others. We’re going to have a situation where most of the people in 75K channel will no longer be able to reach those numbers. Probably half the people in 50k and 30k will have to be moved down 1 channel.
It will still be possible to parse over 30k and 50k, there just won’t be an easy way to do so.
So in light of this the admins are discussing a couple of ways to deal with the situation, but we currently can’t come to an agreement.
The majority of the admins want to clear the DPS league of any parses over 30k DPS, then give people 2 weeks to requalify and re-upload a new parse without Armor Pen and Plasma Burn. After 2 weeks we’ll go through and compair the League table to the channel populations and remove players from 50k and 30k.
This to us, is the most fair thing to do for everyone in the channels; and maintains the integrity of the DPS league and channels. Additionally this would be the easiest solution to implement.
A few admins want to maintain the League as it is now, and kick people out of the channels on a case by case basis. A group of the high end DPSers will still be able to get very large numbers in record runs with a highly specialized team. They also expect more powercreep down the line that will counter balance the two nerfs to EAP and Plasma Burn.
This requires even less work initially, but requires a lot of micromanagement in the long run, and a lot of channel runs being filled by people who cannot meet the channels requirements. It should also be noted that there is no known powercreep on the horizon, and the first real chance for any significant powercreep to be introduced would be Season 10, which is likely a May or June release.
Since we the admins cannot come to a consensus on this matter, i’ve decided to take this public to get the opinion of both people from the DPS channels and from players who aren’t part of the channels.
Please let us know what you think and/or if you have any suggestions.
I dropped my doping consoles with the introduction of the Command Cruiser, to make room for all of the new toys. I did invest heavily in them, buying and upgrading 2-3 per alt , but did so knowing full well this ride would not last long. Having struggled to get to 30K DPS (it’s the pilot, not the build), this change doesn’t impact me personally.
I do take issue that we have one more example where Holodeck is being used as a petri dish for Cryptic to make mistakes in, at the expense of the paying public. Yes, this wasn’t working as intended. But at no time did Cryptic communicate that to the entire player base. Maybe if they had some sort of communication tool…?
Maybe it’s time to consider a reclamation capability for all gear, where outdated gear can be broken down into components where some could be reused. I’m not suggesting 100% recovery, but maybe 50%?
Conversations with the Lootcritter 
And again,… I did not participate in the dps run but i absolutely agree with ppl doing it, since it’s definitely “endgame”. Since sto has never really offered any pvp that was meaningful from a game perspective (especially not since they’ve taken dil rewards from it, which killed it for me as well) DPS’ing was and still is endgame . So every time they don’t act against all the bugs they “introduce” to the game, things like this happen. They mess up and the player base pays the toll. Rinse and repeat.
Same goes for the crappy crafting. Don’t get me wrong it’s way better than the old one but why in hell would you want to have random results (dmg mod anyone?) and make ppl craft like a 1k beams for the desired outcome? At least they said they are thinking about it.
Now your proposal would absolutely fit with crafting as well. Let us recycle gear we don’t need. Would be a nice addition to how we accumulate crafting mats. This way you could decide if you want to break gear to pieces or sell em to the vendor. It’s about time they pay for their mistakes and balance things out. If i mess up in rl for example i pay for my mistakes one way or the other. I am not asking for free stuff but for a way where i don’t feel like I’m getting pwned for someone else’s mistakes. So many ppl wasted so much dil on “endgame” it would only be fair to be able to get some of it back. 50% is not much, but better than nothing and having items taking up space in our inventory.
Regards
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