All right, so this one is going to take some explanation. The latest update to Star Trek Online has arrived along with the patch notes, which is to be expected. What was not, however, was one particular line where the weapon proc from Advanced Beam Arrays now grants a scaling buff to Advanced Beam Critical Severity, instead of Bonus Damage. Why is this a big deal? Because this particular weapon was part of the loadout in the Discovery-era Enterprise — the very same one that caused a furor among players for being stuffed inside of a lockbox.
Not only is the nerfing to the weapon upsetting to players, but so is the timing: The nerf appears to have arrived just after this particular lockbox sale wrapped up, leaving some among the community to assume that this is a bait and switch and Perfect World’s plan all along.
According to a post from a Cryptic developer in a different thread, it was less about waiting until all the money was raked in and more about making sure the weapons array worked for those who have less DPS-focused ships:
“The change made was targeted at making the relative effectiveness of these beams not scale so wildly with where you are on the scale from a new character to a fully optimized Borg killer […] The intent isn’t to decrease their effectiveness at the high end, where we don’t believe there was a significant problem. The intent of this change is to address the fact that they had unhealthy amounts of effectiveness on less dps focused builds, while ensuring they stay useful to higher-end characters.”
