Just a quick post to illustrate why the skill, “Ramming Speed”, a skill all classes get at level 23, is seriously out of whack in Star Trek Online. The damage ramming speed does depends upon the speed you are going. Combining a few skills together, you get the result below.
Ramming Speed!
The Crystalline Entity fleet action, found in the level 15-19 Alpha Centauri sector block, is similar to a simple public quest in Warhammer Online. The table on the right of the picture is more or less based on the damage you’ve dealt the entity over the course of the battle.
Under normal conditions, it takes twenty of you to take the Entity down, over several minutes. However, Ramming Speed allows you to bypass all that. In the chat window you can see that someone has used Ramming Speed to deal 295,126 points of damage with a single attack. The rest of us had managed to whittle the entity down to about 40 percent health, doing I suppose maybe 3% of the damage each. Then a single Ramming Speed obliterates the Entity, and easily takes the top spot. The higher you are on the chart, the better your reward.
Sounds wonderful fun, right? The problem is, you now have goldfarmers and greedy players rapidly switching from instance to instance of the Crystalline Entity fleet action, looking for one that is active (As there is 5 minute wait for it to start again after killing it), and vapourising it, thus getting bags of blue and purple gear at the expense of everyone else. The only hope for the folks that are of the intended level of the Fleet Action is to somehow kill the Entity before one of these farmers finds your instance.
Not ideal. Ramming speed is ridiculous, doing the same amount of damage it would take 20 players several minutes to do, instantly. The justification for it being so powerful is supposed to be that you die as well, but as there is no death penalty and you respawn within seconds, that is not very much of a drawback.
At the least, the Crystalline Entity should be made immune to such a cheap tactic, but really, bringing ramming speed’s damage right down is the only sensible long term solution. As it stands it is a goldfarmer’s favourite tool.
Ironically, I did not do the Fleet Action there after they fixed/changed it.
Now it really took some time to bring it down, and it was healing up a lot. People started yelling to people not to die and to avoid things and so on… was quite nice!
At 29%, I remembered your advice, set Engines to full and rammed the thing to finally make an end. I guess this is not what you intended, but your report saved our ass!
I only did around 59.000 damage though! But either someone rammed the thing, too, or it was already near dead, as it was all over after that.
The high damage of Ramming Speed seems to be an issue of the way the Entity reacts to damage. It is pretty resilient to beams/energy, but kinetic energy weapons like torpedoes and, well, ramming speed hurt it definitely much much more. Maybe they will tweak this a bit to make it a bit more vulnerable to Energy and less to Kinetic damage.
Not really the intended result of my post…. I was more hoping you’d join me in condemning such behaviour, and demanding speedy action to fix it. It’s pretty much an exploit, if a well-known one, and not at all fair on the other 19 people in the instance. You were lucky to find an instance where someone wasn’t already doing it.
I am pretty sure it will be fixed. I just did not get the idea to use this skill that much before you posted it.
Now that I abused it in PvP and basically everyone else does so, too, I am pretty sure that they will bring it back in line sooner or later.
BTW: Polaron, Transphasic etc… and Antiproton and Tricobalt are apparently not even in the game yet… suck big time. They really finish this game AFTER launch. I think they are too confident that the ST background will keep people occupied, the idea that MMOs could be finished after release crippled every MMO so far.
Ramming Speed is the tip of the iceberg only. :/