frankly if a team only has one healer or is stupid enough to have both of them with in 5k of each other when one of these ships is around they deserve to get frozen for 7 seconds and loose a teammate.
They don't need to be 5km from each other. If they are within 10k you can activate the ability half way in between them. Keeping your healers over 10k away from each other at all times just in case isn't at all realistic.
That being said, I agree with healing being a bit too good. I disagree that overpowered I-Win type abilities are the answer.
I'll thank you not to confuse me with that scoundrel. I'm far more reputable.
To do that, the ship would have only one engineering BOFF ability. As soon as EPtS dropped, the ship would get smoked. One of the universal BOFF slots almost has to be an engineering BOFF for survivability. Because of this, when you get down to it, the ship turns into an MVAE when used for science purposes.
Good luck getting to that point with the chrono set you can equip on this thing. Also let's not forget this thing has 4 Shield Gen Capability if necessary, and I also think you vastly underrate Team Healing. All you have to do is keep an Extends on this bad boy during EPTS's down time and you're golden. To say nothing of the fact that it can carry 2 TSS2s if need be as well. Which when auxed up has a very strong resistance, strong enough infact that if this Scort is fed say EPS power transfer, or a Shield battery, that it will equal the resistance and out stripe the regeneration of having EPTS2.
This ship is Exactly what the last remaining vestige of viable BOP ships brought to the table but better, because it's tougher. It's a Sci Ship with a cmdr tac, 4 tac slots, a 15 or better Turn Rate, and DHCs.
I'm not looking at it as a Pug Ship. I'm looking at Premade level, and this thing is rotten to the core. Am I going to get one? I'm going to try my damndest I think without breaking the bank.
So yes, Mavairo is finally going to open his wallet and p2w. Though in this case it's going ot be Pay To Faceroll Everyone Forever. *or at least until they gib sci So Hard that there is no point in fielding one ever*
Come to think of it, the best way to modify the set bonus might be to just change the radius. 5km is huge, it's same as CPB, and given the huge effect this console has it would make more sense to give it the same radius as PSW: 3km. I think with that change I would be OK with the set bonus, since you would either need some good coordination on the part of your team, or poor coordination on the enemy team, to really pull it off. As it stands, 5km is just the right size to hit most of the enemy team while leaving one or two stragglers to be easily picked off, and that's what makes it so powerful.
And hey Bort, I know there were several typos in the announcement. Was the 15 degree turn radius for the science ships one of them? And if not, why? This is grossly imbalancing, as before these ships there was a curve -- the more turn rate you had in a science vessel the less hull you had, and vice-versa. These time ships exist outside that curve and that makes them easily the best science ships in the game by a huge degree.
Come to think of it, the best way to modify the set bonus might be to just change the radius. 5km is huge, it's same as CPB, and given the huge effect this console has it would make more sense to give it the same radius as PSW: 3km. I think with that change I would be OK with the set bonus, since you would either need some good coordination on the part of your team, or poor coordination on the enemy team, to really pull it off. As it stands, 5km is just the right size to hit most of the enemy team while leaving one or two stragglers to be easily picked off, and that's what makes it so powerful.
And given the speed of both the Wells and the Destroyer, you can easily shut a healer down.
Any word yet by the way on what skill Hard Counters this abomination?
- All foes within a 5.0k of the position at which the power was activated, will be held in place for 7 seconds. ** This effect cannot be resisted.
- During this time, they will be untargetable and immune to ongoing damaging effects, as well as being immune to knockback and repel.
- Foes caught in this stasis field do not have their cooldowns affected - they will continue to tick down at the standard rate while held.
- Friendly targets are unaffected.
.
Are you ****ing kidding me!? I just saw there will be new duty officers that reduce cooldowns...
Seriously wtf! And what about testing? 3 since this was announced and it comes out today/tomorrow?... Way to keep us in mind there. The moment this goes live is the money to care about its impact.
Are you ****ing kidding me!? I just saw there will be new duty officers that reduce cooldowns...
Seriously wtf! And what about testing? 3 since this was announced and it comes out today/tomorrow?... Way to keep us in mind there. The moment this goes live is the money to care about its impact.
Good job fooling us borticus.
Oh, that may be the fix for the subnuke doffs, darn, those cryptic devs move really fast, lol.
And I doubt bort is at fault here, seeing all those crazy double proc weapons I'd say Jorf is right...
Hear! Sons of Kahless
Hear! Daughters too.
The blood of battle washes clean.
The Warrior brave and true.
We fight, we love, and then we kill...
Hard to say who's at fault, but you can never go wrong with blaming Gecko.
im just going to assume the system guys built this abomination under duress, they still care right? its REALLY hard to keep my cool in the face of this canon disregarding, game breaking TRIBBLE thats going to ooze out of these lock boxes.
the 29th century time cops would have taken every step they could possibly take to prevent any of this future tech to end up in the past. regardless of the tholians removing it all, what a bunch of TRIBBLE. the time travel duty officers stuff show that there is plenty of this time travel tech available, that again the time cop guys would have retconned from history. i can never look at in 'a mirror darkly' again without being reminded that that wonderful episode is the inspiration for this box shaped disaster :mad:
Game-balance wise, it is impossible to tell right now without having tried it out. But there are worse things than an Omega 13 in this game, and they didn't break it either.
And that's the problem. We won't get to test it until its live where it's highly unlikely they'll change anything because its already out. This has happened with every released ship.
the 29th century time cops would have taken every step they could possibly take to prevent any of this future tech to end up in the past. regardless of the tholians removing it all, what a bunch of TRIBBLE. the time travel duty officers stuff show that there is plenty of this time travel tech available, that again the time cop guys would have retconned from history. i can never look at in 'a mirror darkly' again without being reminded that that wonderful episode is the inspiration for this box shaped disaster :mad:
No one has answered my question, "How can a single Department of Temporal Investigations stop whole fleets of Tholian, KDF and their Mirror counterpart timeships from leaving future tech all over space-time?"
And that's the problem. We won't get to test it until its live where it's highly unlikely they'll change anything because its already out. This has happened with every released ship.
And we never get to test stuff on Tribble anymore because people might decide they don't like something after trying it out, which would hurt sales.
Borticus, this might be a pipe dream, but any chance of you picking a group out of the pvp community to do some actual balance testing? If it's only a small group, that wouldn't hurt sales to any noticeable extent, but might result in some good balance feedback. When the QA team doesn't have any serious PvP'ers on it, that's a kind of feedback that you're simply not getting. They can tell you whether it's fun in PvE, or is over-powered in STFs, but not how it will function practically in high-level team PvP. There are a very small handful of people / fleets at the high end of PvP, and none of 'em work for Cryptic unfortunately.
"Approximately 13 seconds" is a reference to the Omega-13 from Galaxy Quest. We started out with a 13-second duration, but it felt far too long and it eventually landed at 7 seconds.
.
^^this settles it... now I definately must have this ship... just check my fleet name...
The thing you need to understand is that there is no such thing as perfect balance. Well, there is, like checkers, but in a video game perfect balance tends to make things boring. Some abilities and items are always going to be more powerful than others, and even without changing anything in the game, the more powerful abilities can vary as the metagame does.
I understand that just fine. There must always be situational counters in a videogame, ones that are viable, useful, and not all-encompassing in their strength. Perfect balance would be having a huge number of choices that are all situationally overpowered and, equally, situationally underpowered when faced with their counters. When you have something that is a much, much better strategy/power/weapon than everything else, it destroys much of the game because you can either use it or lose. It makes the game binary (STO kinda has this problem in space combat with damage and healing at the moment, with the tie-breaker Science BOff powers being a bit less useful than they could stand to be).
With regards to the Team-freeze ability these consoles offer, I have to ask, where's the counter? I don't think you really risk spreading out enough to keep from getting overwhelmed because you'll suffer too much loss of focus damage potential or too little cross-healing and become extremely vulnerable to being ganked. If you cluster up, it becomes extremely easy for just one guy on the other team to take 2-3 of your ships out of the fight, massively swinging the numbers advantage in favor of his team, which leads to likely much easier kills.
That being said, there is a simple design rule: The more powerful something is the harder it should be to use. The reverse, where powerful abilities are easy to use, negatively effects the meta-game. Just because something is powerful doesn't mean it's overpowered, but for the record I agree that if something is flat out overpowered you cannot balance it based on making it hard to use.[ For example, an unstoppable combo that takes you from full health to dead in a fighting game, but needs to be executed perfectly is still poor design, even if only a dozen people are able to master it.
My point was, perhaps, framed poorly. Lemme try again? What I'm saying is gating an attack or ability behind an extremely difficult input does not have any bearing on whether or not it was overpowered. Lemme give an example (I hope this helps): If Ryu SF2:ST had an attack that let you instantly win the game if you hit QCF>P (just executing the input equals victory), it'd be hideously overpowered. It'd define the game and the only way to beat it qould be to take Ryu and try and execute it faster. If you changed the input to HCF>HCB>360>P+K, the attack would be just as overpowered for exactly the same reasons the first version of it was overpowered.
You really shouldn't, and can't, use input difficulty as a way of balancing abilities because it often just leads to abilities that are hard to execute but still game breaking. If an attack is too powerful for a simple input, it's still probably going to be too powerful on a hard input because of what the ability does on its own.
I hope that was a little clearer than my first post.
QCF = Quarter Circle Forward
HCF = Half Circle Forward
HCB = Half Circle Back
360 = Full Circle Motion w/ stick
P = Punch (any)
K = Kick (any) Hurleybird = Knows all of that, though.
My point was, perhaps, framed poorly. Lemme try again? What I'm saying is gating an attack or ability behind an extremely difficult input does not have any bearing on whether or not it was overpowered. Lemme give an example (I hope this helps): If Ryu SF2:ST had an attack that let you instantly win the game if you hit QCF>P (just executing the input equals victory), it'd be hideously overpowered. It'd define the game and the only way to beat it qould be to take Ryu and try and execute it faster. If you changed the input to HCF>HCB>360>P+K, the attack would be just as overpowered for exactly the same reasons the first version of it was overpowered.
You really shouldn't, and can't, use input difficulty as a way of balancing abilities because it often just leads to abilities that are hard to execute but still game breaking. If an attack is too powerful for a simple input, it's still probably going to be too powerful on a hard input because of what the ability does on its own.
Yes, agreed, but that's not really the same as letting the set bonus also target allies as a form of balance. You aren't simply making the ability harder to execute -- you're making it more difficult to get desired result when you execute it. Big difference.
Moving your timeship 5km away from any friendly and within 5km of the majority (but not all) of the enemy team is always going to be telegraphed to some extent. It's not just up to you and your team to execute it well, it's up to the other team not realizing what you're doing until it's too late. The better you play the harder it will be for them to detect it, and the better they play the harder it will be to set it up. You're taking a skill that previously couldn't be countered, and turning it into one that can be.
That being said, maybe the better idea is to lower the range to 3km, or hell, you could both lower the range and make it friendly fire at the same time. It is just a set bonus after all, not a standalone ability, it doesn't need to be insanely powerful when it's free.
This way it is still incredibly powerful in PVP because of the heal (although we really don't need any more heals / damage immunities in PVP at the moment) and retains its usefulness for PVE.
Sounds like a solution to many PVP issues that someone proposed a while back...
But of course none of this will happen. And then the devs will give us their "Wow. You are stacking APA and CRF? We never expected this. You are way outside of our planned scenarios."-look when they see that it is comparatively easy to TBR a healer and have a ship evasive to past him and cast that 5km stun bubble on him (but not the rest of the team) and then scoring a kill while their healer is disabled.
The only reason this won't be quite as easy (but just as annoying) as it sounds is the completely excessive selfhealing at the moment.
Every couple of weeks there is a "we need a pug queue" thread. Maybe we could have a queue with no P2W/Doffs/Lockbox ships instead?
You are assuming that there is still a timecop organization some time in the future that cares about this. You are also assuming that this showup of damn useful ships precisely when the Federation is in its greates trouble is not intended, or seen as a predestination paradox (as in, it was always supposed to happen so that the Federation as we know it will survive).
Canon-wise, there is absolutely nothing disturbing about this lockbox.
Game-balance wise, it is impossible to tell right now without having tried it out. But there are worse things than an Omega 13 in this game, and they didn't break it either.
im convinced its your goal in life to be wrong about absolutely everything.
No one has answered my question, "How can a single Department of Temporal Investigations stop whole fleets of Tholian, KDF and their Mirror counterpart timeships from leaving future tech all over space-time?"
it would be as simple as 1 man getting passed an assignment, he would quite literally have all the time in the world to complete this assignment. preventing 1 person from doing 1 thing could likely have stopped the chain of events that would have led to all this stuff featured in this lock box. under NO circumstances would they allow 29th century hardware to exist and be retrofitted for use 400 years in the past. the fact that these ships exist mean the time cop guys still exist. there is no justifying this, its impossible.
So you cannot imagine that it might be, for instance, a predetermination paradox? Why not?
if those 29 century hulls became the new standard in the 25th century, it would have an incalculable effect on ship development from that point on, challenging starfleet in the future in such a way that it would look nothing like the 29th century they were from.
it would be like a US navy carrier group going 400 years into the past to be used by the 13 colonies
i don't think this predetermination paradox apply to things that would change literally everything. that more like 1 man was supposed to go back and be his own grandpa or something.
1. You guys are making the mistake of talking to Sophie again. Things aren't that heated, but you should know that it never ends well. It's only a matter of time, so nip it in the bud.
2. We're PvPers, not RPers. Who cares whether or not these things make sense with Trek canon? Keep the discussion on topic to balance implications.
It seems pretty much that Star Trek technology achieves a plateau somewhere around 2200, after which progress is slowed down a lot when compared to early 21st century rates. Hence the Enterprise-F uses the same energ sources as the NX-01 enterprise, and the same overall warp and sublight technology, even weapronry is quite similar in its basic tech.
In a predetermination paradox situation, obviously the components that can be salvaged (and were thus not taken by the Tholians) are not that far advanced that they would chance the 29th century where they came from.
Nope. More like sending back a Nimitz class carrier back into the 70s. Not a big deal, actually.
plateaued? oh hell no. the advances in warp speed alone discount that. the NX topped out at war 5 was only going 125 times faster then C, cruiser at warp 4 was only 64 times. voyager at warp 9.975 was going 1,554 - 1,721 times faster then C. and weapons? in TWOK phaser strikes did thermal damage and maybe cut into and breached the hull, in the 24th century they could dissolve a large portion of a ship per hit.
the time difference between enterprise and the next generation is only about 200 years. theirs a 400 year difference between 2409 and the 29th century. daniels said they tinkered with time travel devices in high school, they can travel through time and manipulate it at will. sorry, no plateau at all, acceleration is more like it, with more and more species being added to the federation over time.
they would have prevented the tholian attempt to subvert their ships in the first place, they can do that because they are 400 years more advanced then the tholians that for no plausible reason were able to steal them to fill up these lock boxes. its would not be ok for the tholians to have all that tech the striped ether, it wouldn't be ok for anyone in a past era to have it. they would have prevented it, because they were around, otherwise they would not have had ships to steal.
1. You guys are making the mistake of talking to Sophie again. Things aren't that heated, but you should know that it never ends well. It's only a matter of time, so nip it in the bud.
2. We're PvPers, not RPers. Who cares whether or not these things make sense with Trek canon? Keep the discussion on topic to balance implications.
im only responding because its not balance related. being an actual star trek fan that cares about the integrity of the canon, and its far more intact then people give it credit for, does not make me an rp'er.
whats being said should be as important to cryptic as the balance implications of all this, but it looks like all that maters in the end is how desirable they can make a thing and how much money they can extort from those that want it and cant control themselves.
thats all fanfic level theories. we know the way they act in canon, they are dead serious about all this stuff. if they were ever put in a position were they thought they might have to lend ships to a case in the past, they would simply remove the situation that put them in that position from time it self. they never did anything other then act as proxies or directly intervene them selves to change 1 incident a certain way. the fact that they exist in their current state means they did not need to donate ships to the past.
we know next to nothing about the specifics of future tech, every time they were featured with the show's crews they went out of their way to not expose them to anything they didnt have to. how long have we used guns? they advanced considerably during this time, its a same thing for starship fundamentals. there is no indication that there was some tech dark ages between the 25th and 29th century. we have only seen what has happened in the first 200 years of the federation, there is nothing concreet past that. 400 years later who knows what fundimentals they use.
Comments
They don't need to be 5km from each other. If they are within 10k you can activate the ability half way in between them. Keeping your healers over 10k away from each other at all times just in case isn't at all realistic.
That being said, I agree with healing being a bit too good. I disagree that overpowered I-Win type abilities are the answer.
Don't worry my VM still says "Hai"
Good luck getting to that point with the chrono set you can equip on this thing. Also let's not forget this thing has 4 Shield Gen Capability if necessary, and I also think you vastly underrate Team Healing. All you have to do is keep an Extends on this bad boy during EPTS's down time and you're golden. To say nothing of the fact that it can carry 2 TSS2s if need be as well. Which when auxed up has a very strong resistance, strong enough infact that if this Scort is fed say EPS power transfer, or a Shield battery, that it will equal the resistance and out stripe the regeneration of having EPTS2.
This ship is Exactly what the last remaining vestige of viable BOP ships brought to the table but better, because it's tougher. It's a Sci Ship with a cmdr tac, 4 tac slots, a 15 or better Turn Rate, and DHCs.
I'm not looking at it as a Pug Ship. I'm looking at Premade level, and this thing is rotten to the core. Am I going to get one? I'm going to try my damndest I think without breaking the bank.
So yes, Mavairo is finally going to open his wallet and p2w. Though in this case it's going ot be Pay To Faceroll Everyone Forever. *or at least until they gib sci So Hard that there is no point in fielding one ever*
And hey Bort, I know there were several typos in the announcement. Was the 15 degree turn radius for the science ships one of them? And if not, why? This is grossly imbalancing, as before these ships there was a curve -- the more turn rate you had in a science vessel the less hull you had, and vice-versa. These time ships exist outside that curve and that makes them easily the best science ships in the game by a huge degree.
And given the speed of both the Wells and the Destroyer, you can easily shut a healer down.
Any word yet by the way on what skill Hard Counters this abomination?
Think that answers that question.
If you get frozen along with your healer, you can't be harmed either and your healer's cooldowns continue to recharge.
Seriously wtf! And what about testing? 3 since this was announced and it comes out today/tomorrow?... Way to keep us in mind there. The moment this goes live is the money to care about its impact.
Good job fooling us borticus.
One power.
Tractor Beam Repulsors.
All you need to do is herd people into tight enough balls and you mitigate 3 ships out of 5. the remaining 2 will die in seconds flat.
Hard to say who's at fault, but you can never go wrong with blaming Gecko.
Something about OP being the new balanced? :rolleyes::(
Oh, that may be the fix for the subnuke doffs, darn, those cryptic devs move really fast, lol.
And I doubt bort is at fault here, seeing all those crazy double proc weapons I'd say Jorf is right...
Hear! Daughters too.
The blood of battle washes clean.
The Warrior brave and true.
We fight, we love, and then we kill...
So... Have the power share a cooldown with Tractor Beam Repulsors?
im just going to assume the system guys built this abomination under duress, they still care right? its REALLY hard to keep my cool in the face of this canon disregarding, game breaking TRIBBLE thats going to ooze out of these lock boxes.
the 29th century time cops would have taken every step they could possibly take to prevent any of this future tech to end up in the past. regardless of the tholians removing it all, what a bunch of TRIBBLE. the time travel duty officers stuff show that there is plenty of this time travel tech available, that again the time cop guys would have retconned from history. i can never look at in 'a mirror darkly' again without being reminded that that wonderful episode is the inspiration for this box shaped disaster :mad:
Don't forget the Magnetromic Generator, Graviton Pulse, the Graviton Gun, multiple tractors, chroniton torp procs, and warp plasma too then.
And that's the problem. We won't get to test it until its live where it's highly unlikely they'll change anything because its already out. This has happened with every released ship.
No one has answered my question, "How can a single Department of Temporal Investigations stop whole fleets of Tholian, KDF and their Mirror counterpart timeships from leaving future tech all over space-time?"
Borticus, this might be a pipe dream, but any chance of you picking a group out of the pvp community to do some actual balance testing? If it's only a small group, that wouldn't hurt sales to any noticeable extent, but might result in some good balance feedback. When the QA team doesn't have any serious PvP'ers on it, that's a kind of feedback that you're simply not getting. They can tell you whether it's fun in PvE, or is over-powered in STFs, but not how it will function practically in high-level team PvP. There are a very small handful of people / fleets at the high end of PvP, and none of 'em work for Cryptic unfortunately.
Seeing as how you post here more than the majority of us, what does that make you? Your as much a know it all as any of us are sophie
^^this settles it... now I definately must have this ship... just check my fleet name...
I understand that just fine. There must always be situational counters in a videogame, ones that are viable, useful, and not all-encompassing in their strength. Perfect balance would be having a huge number of choices that are all situationally overpowered and, equally, situationally underpowered when faced with their counters. When you have something that is a much, much better strategy/power/weapon than everything else, it destroys much of the game because you can either use it or lose. It makes the game binary (STO kinda has this problem in space combat with damage and healing at the moment, with the tie-breaker Science BOff powers being a bit less useful than they could stand to be).
With regards to the Team-freeze ability these consoles offer, I have to ask, where's the counter? I don't think you really risk spreading out enough to keep from getting overwhelmed because you'll suffer too much loss of focus damage potential or too little cross-healing and become extremely vulnerable to being ganked. If you cluster up, it becomes extremely easy for just one guy on the other team to take 2-3 of your ships out of the fight, massively swinging the numbers advantage in favor of his team, which leads to likely much easier kills.
My point was, perhaps, framed poorly. Lemme try again? What I'm saying is gating an attack or ability behind an extremely difficult input does not have any bearing on whether or not it was overpowered. Lemme give an example (I hope this helps): If Ryu SF2:ST had an attack that let you instantly win the game if you hit QCF>P (just executing the input equals victory), it'd be hideously overpowered. It'd define the game and the only way to beat it qould be to take Ryu and try and execute it faster. If you changed the input to HCF>HCB>360>P+K, the attack would be just as overpowered for exactly the same reasons the first version of it was overpowered.
You really shouldn't, and can't, use input difficulty as a way of balancing abilities because it often just leads to abilities that are hard to execute but still game breaking. If an attack is too powerful for a simple input, it's still probably going to be too powerful on a hard input because of what the ability does on its own.
I hope that was a little clearer than my first post.
QCF = Quarter Circle Forward
HCF = Half Circle Forward
HCB = Half Circle Back
360 = Full Circle Motion w/ stick
P = Punch (any)
K = Kick (any)
Hurleybird = Knows all of that, though.
Yes, agreed, but that's not really the same as letting the set bonus also target allies as a form of balance. You aren't simply making the ability harder to execute -- you're making it more difficult to get desired result when you execute it. Big difference.
Moving your timeship 5km away from any friendly and within 5km of the majority (but not all) of the enemy team is always going to be telegraphed to some extent. It's not just up to you and your team to execute it well, it's up to the other team not realizing what you're doing until it's too late. The better you play the harder it will be for them to detect it, and the better they play the harder it will be to set it up. You're taking a skill that previously couldn't be countered, and turning it into one that can be.
That being said, maybe the better idea is to lower the range to 3km, or hell, you could both lower the range and make it friendly fire at the same time. It is just a set bonus after all, not a standalone ability, it doesn't need to be insanely powerful when it's free.
Yup, favorite fighting game back in the day was One Must Fall 2097. The RPG elements were way ahead of their time.
This way it is still incredibly powerful in PVP because of the heal (although we really don't need any more heals / damage immunities in PVP at the moment) and retains its usefulness for PVE.
Sounds like a solution to many PVP issues that someone proposed a while back...
But of course none of this will happen. And then the devs will give us their "Wow. You are stacking APA and CRF? We never expected this. You are way outside of our planned scenarios."-look when they see that it is comparatively easy to TBR a healer and have a ship evasive to past him and cast that 5km stun bubble on him (but not the rest of the team) and then scoring a kill while their healer is disabled.
The only reason this won't be quite as easy (but just as annoying) as it sounds is the completely excessive selfhealing at the moment.
Every couple of weeks there is a "we need a pug queue" thread. Maybe we could have a queue with no P2W/Doffs/Lockbox ships instead?
Now there's a thought!
i know i know, engies are still the best, sci is misunderstood, and tacs give up everything and the whole world for the damage they do, right, Mav?
a history of sto pvp: 2010 - 2011
a history of sto pvp: 2012 - 2013
im convinced its your goal in life to be wrong about absolutely everything.
it would be as simple as 1 man getting passed an assignment, he would quite literally have all the time in the world to complete this assignment. preventing 1 person from doing 1 thing could likely have stopped the chain of events that would have led to all this stuff featured in this lock box. under NO circumstances would they allow 29th century hardware to exist and be retrofitted for use 400 years in the past. the fact that these ships exist mean the time cop guys still exist. there is no justifying this, its impossible.
if those 29 century hulls became the new standard in the 25th century, it would have an incalculable effect on ship development from that point on, challenging starfleet in the future in such a way that it would look nothing like the 29th century they were from.
it would be like a US navy carrier group going 400 years into the past to be used by the 13 colonies
i don't think this predetermination paradox apply to things that would change literally everything. that more like 1 man was supposed to go back and be his own grandpa or something.
2. We're PvPers, not RPers. Who cares whether or not these things make sense with Trek canon? Keep the discussion on topic to balance implications.
plateaued? oh hell no. the advances in warp speed alone discount that. the NX topped out at war 5 was only going 125 times faster then C, cruiser at warp 4 was only 64 times. voyager at warp 9.975 was going 1,554 - 1,721 times faster then C. and weapons? in TWOK phaser strikes did thermal damage and maybe cut into and breached the hull, in the 24th century they could dissolve a large portion of a ship per hit.
the time difference between enterprise and the next generation is only about 200 years. theirs a 400 year difference between 2409 and the 29th century. daniels said they tinkered with time travel devices in high school, they can travel through time and manipulate it at will. sorry, no plateau at all, acceleration is more like it, with more and more species being added to the federation over time.
they would have prevented the tholian attempt to subvert their ships in the first place, they can do that because they are 400 years more advanced then the tholians that for no plausible reason were able to steal them to fill up these lock boxes. its would not be ok for the tholians to have all that tech the striped ether, it wouldn't be ok for anyone in a past era to have it. they would have prevented it, because they were around, otherwise they would not have had ships to steal.
im only responding because its not balance related. being an actual star trek fan that cares about the integrity of the canon, and its far more intact then people give it credit for, does not make me an rp'er.
whats being said should be as important to cryptic as the balance implications of all this, but it looks like all that maters in the end is how desirable they can make a thing and how much money they can extort from those that want it and cant control themselves.
we know next to nothing about the specifics of future tech, every time they were featured with the show's crews they went out of their way to not expose them to anything they didnt have to. how long have we used guns? they advanced considerably during this time, its a same thing for starship fundamentals. there is no indication that there was some tech dark ages between the 25th and 29th century. we have only seen what has happened in the first 200 years of the federation, there is nothing concreet past that. 400 years later who knows what fundimentals they use.