Season 9 Dev Blog #14

Raider Upgrades



Raider Improvements

Back in December we hinted at some imminent improvements for Klingon Raiders in the 2013 Breen Plesh Brek Heavy Raider (2013’s Winter Event Ship!) blog. I’m here today to give you more specifics on the improvements we’ll be making and which ships they will affect.

Improvements for raiders come in three parts: Raider Flanking, Increased Hull Hit Points and Improved Ambush damage. The reasoning behind these changes is that we didn’t feel that Raiders were living up to their designed role of stealthy assassins. Raiders have the stealthy part down, but we felt they were missing the “assassin” part. We wanted to play this up a bit by allowing strategic gameplay to be a means of delivering increased burst damage.

Raider Flanking

As mentioned in the Breen Raider blog, striking an enemy’s rear quadrant will grant the Raider +25% additional damage. This allows the Raider to leverage its high impulse speed and turn rate to quickly get into position to deal additional damage to their enemy. It can take some practice, planning and a touch of luck to consistently strike an enemy’s rear arc, but this bonus damage has the potential to quickly make up for Raiders’ reduced number of weapon slots.

It should be noted that this damage bonus is significantly reduced against players and it doesn’t apply to mines and summon powers like the Scorpion Fighter device, Gravity Well or Tyken’s Rift. It does apply to all energy weapons, all torpedoes (that don’t spawn mines) and damage powers like Tractor Beam and Photonic Shockwave.

Increased Hull Hit Points

Klingon Raiders sacrifice hull and shield strength for universal bridge officer seating, impulse speed and turn rate. Perhaps they sacrifice a bit too much hull strength for all these benefits. To address this we’ll be increasing their hull hit points by roughly 10%. This change is being implemented to better balance out Raiders when compared to other starships like Raptors and to also make the risk of taking damage while cloaked more in line with the reward of Ambush and Raider Flanking bonus damage.

Increased Ambush Damage

To further balance out the risk vs. reward of cloaking attack runs, we chose to give a modest boost to Ambush damage. So, when a Klingon Raider exits cloak they will receive a larger damage buff (for a short time) than they did before.



Q&A

Q: Which raiders will be affected?

A: Below is a list of Klingon Raiders that are affected:

B’Rolth Bird-of-Prey
Qaw’Dun Bird-of-Prey
QunDun Bird-of-Prey
Norgh Bird-of-Prey
Ning’tao Bird-of-Prey
Ch’Tang Bird-of-Prey
Ki’Tang Bird-of-Prey
Hegh’ta Bird-of-Prey
B’rel Bird-of-Prey Retrofit
Fleet B’rel Bird-of-Prey Retrofit
HoH’SuS Bird-of-Prey
Fleet HoH’SuS Bird-of-Prey
Fleet Norgh Bird-of-Prey Retrofit

Q: The Aquarius Destroyer isn’t on the list. Why?

A: Many players feel that the Aquarius is a Raider. It does share some similarities between one: some universal seating, 4/2 weapons and reduced hull. It however lacks Cloaking and was never designed to be a Raider. It is considered to be an Escort or Destroyer. Whether it lives up to this ship class’ expectations is a separate discussion. I think most of us can agree that it doesn’t. However, there are no plans at this time to improve this particular starship.

Q: The Breen Plesh Brek Heavy Raider isn’t on the list. Why?

A: The Breen Raider was implemented with the above changes in place, with the exception of the Ambush bonus, as they don’t have Cloaking. The Plesh Brek was intended to be a prototype for the improvements listed in this article.

We hope you enjoy these exciting new changes to Raiders!



Phil “Gorngonzolla” Zeleski
Systems Designer
Star Trek Online


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