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Hacking & Biorepression


SiSL

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You taking thing too seriously pal.  I just want to make a joke about Zachman's note that giving feedbacks to improve the game make the reporter lose popularity due to the nerf bat. 

 

LOL, say it so :)

 

Digging abilities around dusty old skills brings up good and the bad :P Actually I feel it brings more ideas about healers being repressed than being direct target for future, you can blame me on that.  Ofcourse most mobs are not overviewed about how frequent usage of hack. I'm against "organics" using hack on players for instance or any mob ship not terran related including usage of rally (in other words, mechanics, as long as they are not aliens, may be they should stick to weapons & skills of one of three races they belong).

 

One thing left on Hack tho, to check if hack improvement stats (such as TA buff) actually doing anything and how tough to land one against higher CL's than player... 

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From what I remember in live, Hack did "lock ups" on any skill that was charging up for 30 seconds.  As in, if you were using Recharge Shields skill, it would be auto interrupted, and would take 30 seconds of a cooldown for it to come back online and work like normal.

 

For others that were not charging, it was just a 1 second global cooldown.  This was an easy way to notice that you were actually hacked, and then you'd look up to see if your reactor or engines got shut down (the two important ones for when in combat).  If it was reactor, you hit your shunt to reactor device.  If it were engine, you'd swap it out for another (which would come online after 2 or 3 seconds for TE using a Nova or similar with equipment engineering) 

 

These fights were also the reason they nerfed the ability to use more than one shunt to reactor device.  I used to use both a Warrior's Heart Gamma, as well as the Martyr's Heart until they nerfed it so that all shunt devices had a global cooldown.  Should be in old patch notes some where from Live.  However, reason I bring it up, is I continued to carry the Warrior's Heart Gamma in fights my reactor had a good chance to get hacked, so swap out and hit a shunt for a quick amount of juice, and became the only time I really needed a shunt, once Turbo Weapons got nerfed.

 

Hacks would also intermittently remove buffs.  The biggest one being the Shield ones, that either give you more shield, or the shield bubble from JD's.  If this occurred at a bad time, you were often one or two shotted by some bosses. (Remember this occuring for Bogeril bosses, like one the spawns by Zweijander Planet, and one of the Genrils)

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Wanted to ask what sort of sample size Dev's would be interested in, as in number of mobs/usages of a skill, for when I do testing of hack, biosupress, and befriend success rates

 

Was planning on 200 on same mob before moving on to another type, or level of the same mob.  Is that enough for a decent data pool for ya's?

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  • 1 year later...

Resurrecting....so I just found out about this emu last Friday.  I'm an old TE\TT mostly from live.  I don't remember ever using bio and hardly ever hack.  Are bio / worth putting points into now?  Or should I just focus on other core skills.

 

Enrage used at all?

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Not so sure about that one, but beware of being hacked.  Mob's hacking of players is more powerful than the original game, as it can also take your skills offline.

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  • 1 month later...

I had been away, busy with RL or other games for some time and came back to find the updated hacking ability.  I must say I don't like it.  In live many people would keep an Greasemonkey plus device on because hacking effectively uninstalled items, you kept your reactor and shield capacity at the time of hack but recharge was stopped, or your engine was uninstalled so no warping, etc., so with some equipment engineering buffs you could mitigate the harm to some extent, unless of course your Greasemonkey or whatever device you were getting the buff from got hacked.  For raids I remember equipment engineering buffs being handed out to help mitigate the damage of ones equipped device that provided the original buff being hacked. 

 

Point is there was some strategy to it, and if you took precautions it could be mitigated or avoided all together at the cost of a device slot of course.  With this present system it looks like you get loaded with debuffs that keep things from working for a set amount of time and no skill use to boot, makes this a really overpowered ability.  For a soloing toon to be unable to warp no matter what you do during that time and then also unable to cloak or to shield recharge or fold space or whatever your class does to escape is ridiculous.  I like that you guys were trying to be creative but in this case I believe you've overstepped the goal and taken what was an element of challenge that could be worked around by the experienced player and made it just no fun.

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I don't think that they should take away the mobs' ability to do this, instead allow one of the support classes to clear the hacking effects, via a line of devices.  I'd pick the JT.  If that's the case you can make the duration longer, for the disable effect, as the players can counter it via a support character, in addition to raising their Psionic deflect.

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I'm sorry to do this, but I like the balance the way it is for hacking. If your soloing (150) and are attacking a mob that is 8 to 16 combat levels above yous, their hack will stick almost every time due to their combat level unless you have a PSI buff above 50. I like the change to Hacking & Biorepression improvement made for us players, it hits about 50/50 and it was at about 20/80 for the higher mobs. Just don't bit off more then you can handle Soloing, if you get hacked and slapped in the face then get a friend or hunt lower level mobs.

 

That's all I have to say about that

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Well in response to Terrell, the equipment engineering either equipped or active buff, was what helped to clear the hacking effect in live, as the hack had a chance to nock off a couple random buffs and uninstall a couple random pieces of equipment, I think it was actually just 2.  So it seems like your proposed change is reinventing the wheel as the live game already had similar functionality.

 

As to Syberfly, the situation that led me to come here and comment on the revamping of the hacking system was from mid level character leveling.  I'm not talking about soloing level 55+ or soloing a raid boss here.  I find that low to mid level mobs, those that are designed to be level grinding run of the mill mobs have this ability and I find it overpowered.  Now a combat class may be able to put their nose to the grindstone and just kill whatever hacked them but many of the trader and explorer classes cannot just kill a thing before dying themselves when the abilities granted them for survival are taken away. 

 

Here, the way it is now if you are hacked, you cannot fly away, you cannot use skills, all you can do is try to kill the mob with whatever weapons are still firing before it kills you.  In live I was not aware of any situation in which a trained ability was ever disabled for a duration of time like this.  Individual character skills just like mob skills could be interrupted while being activated and that would result in a cool down timer triggering.  Now because a hack uninstalled ship components you would loose any buffs to skills received by those devices but only until they were reinstalled.

 

I would like to see the system more closely resemble what it was like in the live game here.  I know many things have been updated and changed that take us away from what pure live play was like and I'm ok with much of that.  But as I had said in my previous post, I think that this particular change crosses the line into the realm of it not being fun, not improving the game play experience. 

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For the JT being able to clear the hacking, I was thinking only in terms of the disable effect, not to reinstall your equipment.  For mobs used during low to mid level grinding, I think making it less devastating should be considered.  I was thinking about high end content.  The disable skills debuff, is something that's listed in the game docs, available on N7 Portal, but was never used in the original.

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Moche, I do understand what you are saying, and I do remember in Live that you could take equipment out and then back in to get rid of the hack. But in my opinion that was an exploit in the game that they never corrected. I think if your hacked your hacked and should not be able to remove gear and put it back in to break the hack. That being said if your grinding mobs for to level a lower toon, your still farming mobs above your own combat level and would still get hacked. The Combat jobs from the ones I have done the hack does not stick as much due to your combat level being closer to the mob. I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one. :D 

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Ok, not to beat a dead horse or anything here but just to clarify.  The hacking effect in live was an instant effect skill that many mobs had through all levels as it is here and as it should be.  What I was trying to relay was that after the instant effect a random any two devices were uninstalled, they were listed in your system message box iirc.  I'm not aware of a need to swap gear or anything else as a work around, hack , or exploit.  After the hack those items would start to reinstall.  To mitigate the effect of the downtime for the reinstall people would try to keep either an equipped or activated 'equipment engineering' buff on them so that the gear would reinstall faster.  This was not a hack at all but strategy because it usually required a device slot to do it.  This was the balancing effect as most people would rather have something else to help augment damage output, power recharge, scan range, or damage resists, etc. but would instead use a greasemonkey to recover from hacks when facing mobs known to use that skill.  As for the ability to render all player skills inaccessible being mentioned in the original design docs, I'm sure it was but there were many things in the design docs that didn't make it in for one reason or another, in this case I can imagine it may have been left out for balance reasons as the TE would absolutely own other classes in the PVP arenas if he were able to disable all their skill use. 

 

In any case, I'm definitely voting for a redesign of the hack skill to something more similar to live.  The increased hit rate of hack and biosupression is probably a very good thing as those were 2 skills largely ignored by most TE's I knew until post 150 when the other skills were already paid for during live.

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Watching the discussion, but wanted to point out Hack was never truly an instant effect. The charge up was very very fast, but it was not instant. The original skill description files with the client indicate a charge up.

 

On the other hand if you had max skill and used the lower level hacks it would certainly appear to be almost instantaneous.

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Right you are sir. I may have done a poor job with my description there. What I was trying to convey, was that when you were the recipient of the hack it is my recollection that the effect on you was instantaneous. As opposed to the debuffs that presently appear in ones buff display. I was not meaning that the skill use was.

Also because I realized that we like to have some proof of our positions on any issue before implementing a change, I'd like to point everyone to the device description of the Greasemonkey Plus, I'm not able to post the link atm, but the description specifically states that it is designed to decrease the recovery time of a hack on your systems. At this time that description is very much inaccurate.
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The items were uninstalled as a result of a hack, the Greasemonkey (if i'm thinking of the right item line) reduces install time of items, correct? So that makes it correct, even if a little strangely described.

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Unless I'm totally mistaken or my individual client is borked, that doesn't seem to be the case Kyp.  What's happening now is that the hacking skill from the mob creates a timed debuff on your ship that is unmitigatable where you cannot use skills or have use of equipment.  In the live game years ago what we'd have was a hacking effect that uninstalled 2 random pieces of gear and then the gear started reinstalling immediately so that reducing your equipment install time via certain gear use or activated buffs could make getting hacked a very short ordeal instead of the present system where we sit unable to warp or use skills until a debuff timer expires. 

 

To experience what I'm talking about you could do an experiment where you swap gear on your ship either in a station or just floating in space and measure how long that takes with your equipment engineering buff, then go find a mob that hacks equipment and measure that time.

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WHat you are seeing is diff. buffs from multiple mobs around you.

Some are hacking, which is uninstalling your device/items.

 

Others are using "comms hack", which is disabling your skills for 10-30s (based on the level).

 

The next content patch will bring some fixes, watch out for PSI resistance....

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