I've been away from STO for a few months to perhaps more than a year and I've noticed something that I see others have as well. Cruisers are a problem. My two cents -- being a Trek fan first and foremost -- is that this is because the game is trying to balance them against ships grouped as escorts and science ships, when in the lore they're specifically not balanced, the cruisers are resource expensive, all out jacks of all trades that are damn good at most or all of them; "There's not a lot a starbase can do that a starship can't" as one character mentioned in praise of Kirk before the end credits.
For a game that means PvP is a non-starter and content that can challenge an Enterprise-like starship needs an alternate way for other types to complete content.
OR...
cruisers automatically get tougher content in single player story instances or much more innate "aggro" in team PvE play to counter their big gun, "Superman in the Justice League" role.
I'm sure MMO aficionados will take issue with this eight ways from Sunday, but as a Trek fan, my two cents devs; just an FYI from a member of the playerbase.
Edit: I've been here since beta. What's this "November 2012" nonsense PWE?
Well...I'm with you in regards to the PW account comment; I've been around since beta, myself.
I haven't given up on getting an adequate pvp experience. (Call me a dreamer.) That would be one reason for me to be against what I believe you are suggesting.
The other reason would be that I have little interest in seeing everyone flying around in a cruiser, which is exactly what would happen if they made cruisers superior to all other class of ships.
Honestly, I'd be okay with it if cruisers just sucked less. If they could take substantially more punishment without healing or running -- maybe only in PvE -- they'd actually be worth playing in STFs.
Engineer in a cruiser. No issues with staying alive or dealing damage. The game has changed since you last played. Don't take this the wrong way, but you need to take some time to learn the new system. Cruisers are not weak, not useless. They have their role, and they can do their job very well.
It is said the best weapon is one that is never fired. I disagree. The best weapon is one you only have to fire... once.
Just a random thought on this: One of the true advantages of a large ship is endurance. I don't mean sustainable damage (though that as well of course) but rather the ability to go long and far without assistance or resuply.
Ways to give cruisers some chops without disturbing the combat balance:
*Make the quantom slipstream drive a cruiser only ability.
*Add more functionality to cruiser interiors (working holodecks anyone?)
*Don't allow certain types of ship interior doff missions for non-cruisers. (i.e. your escort doesn't have a science lab; your sci ship doesn't get military assignments in the ready room, and so forth)
*Require Escorts to "put in" for supplies (e.g. dock at a starbase) at least once every few hours of gameplay or begin to suffer small penalties to their stats. While they do have replicators, these devices require large stores of basic ingrediants which small ships can't spare much room for.
I've been away from STO for a few months to perhaps more than a year and I've noticed something that I see others have as well. Cruisers are a problem. My two cents -- being a Trek fan first and foremost -- is that this is because the game is trying to balance them against ships grouped as escorts and science ships, when in the lore they're specifically not balanced, the cruisers are resource expensive, all out jacks of all trades that are damn good at most or all of them; "There's not a lot a starbase can do that a starship can't" as one character mentioned in praise of Kirk before the end credits.
Except in the show, cruisers weren't cutting it anymore. Which is why Escorts and more advanced, more firepower-heavy, yet smaller, more compact ships, like the Defiant, Sabre, Akira, Steamrunner, etc, came into being.
Its not suprising the game has issues when a cruiser has a 50%+ dodge chance and an escort 70%+.
No wonder escorts are so survivable.
And the Escort having 70%+ dodge chance means it has to be constantly moving at 23+ impulse, meaning it's not going to have the vast majority of it's firepower on a target for very long. Remember, it's firepower is pretty much limited to a 45* cone. A cruiser's firepower is not limited to a 45* cone, and while it's moving and getting it's 50%+ dodge, it's still putting down damage in a 360* field..
*Make the quantom slipstream drive a cruiser only ability.
Why would you do that when the only ship to use it in the canon wasn't a cruiser?
Except in the show, cruisers weren't cutting it anymore. Which is why Escorts and more advanced, more firepower-heavy, yet smaller, more compact ships, like the Defiant, Sabre, Akira, Steamrunner, etc, came into being.
I will dispute this assumption. Those smaller, combat only ships weren't made because a cruiser couldn't do the job--the cruisers are still the most powerful ships--but because you can make a whole bunch of small warships (which are good for nothing else but fighting) for the same resources needed to field one capital ship.
Why would you do that when the only ship to use it in the canon wasn't a cruiser?
It was a science ship which are, in effect, light cruisers. i wouldn't mind them having it as well. It is primarily the escorts that are out of ballance because none of their natural limitations really means much in a game enviornment. This is just an example of how to midigate that.
I will dispute this assumption. Those smaller, combat only ships weren't made because a cruiser couldn't do the job--the cruisers are still the most powerful ships--but because you can make a whole bunch of small warships (which are good for nothing else but fighting) for the same resources needed to field one capital ship.
Tell that to the Odyssey.
Cruisers are big targets.
We can see the same thing happening in today's navy. 60 years ago, big-gun warships were the way to go. Battleships, cruisers..Who ever would've thought a destroyer or LCS (which didn't even exist back then) would form the backbone of the navy?
Cruisers lack the flexibility to do everything and they lack the specialization to do one specific task as well as a dedicated ship.
Starfleet realized this. Finally.
Even back in Kirk's day, the big, fancy cruisers weren't the backbone of the fleet. Hell, there were only 13 Constitution-class ships...What do you think made up the bulk of Starfleet?
Probably Mirandas and Oberths..
Cruisers shouldn't be the "Jack of all trades, master of all of them."..A specialized ship will always be superior at what it's specialized to do.
It was a science ship which are, in effect, light cruisers.
Intrepids are not science ships. Intrepids are fast-scouts. There's a reason it's faster and better armed (That part's debatable..) then it's "new" Science ship contemporary, the Nova-class. Intrepids are designed to travel relatively short distances relatively quickly, with the ability to handle light combat on the way. It's not a science ship.
It is primarily the escorts that are out of ballance because none of their natural limitations really means much in a game enviornment.
Survivability doesn't mean much in a game environment? I'm sorry, but a cruiser will always be more survivable then an escort. High-end escorts may be able to take some damage, but nowhere near what a cruiser or battlecruiser can. And if it's using it's naturally high defense, odds are it's going to fast to be doing any significant damage.
A cruiser can tank and deal damage at the same time. An escort generally has to pick one..
A Klingon battlecruiser is the only ship in the game that can generally do both at the same time.
In what conceivable imaginary universe could a 6 million ton flagships weapon be completly interchangeable with an 80 ton fighter/shuttles weapon and do the same damage? This is a game - only that - it is ballanced for play not for cannon.
Intrepids are not science ships. Intrepids are fast-scouts. There's a reason it's faster and better armed (That part's debatable..) then it's "new" Science ship contemporary, the Nova-class. Intrepids are designed to travel relatively short distances relatively quickly, with the ability to handle light combat on the way. It's not a science ship.
Correct me if I'm wrong but even Voyager which is a intrepid class ship is listed as a science vessel.
NO TO ARC
Vice Admiral Volmack ISS Thundermole
Brigadier General Jokag IKS Gorkan
Centurion Kares RRW Tomalak
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Correct me if I'm wrong but even Voyager which is a intrepid class ship is listed as a science vessel.
Doesn't mean Cryptic got it right making the Intrepid for STO. The boff layout for the Intrepid is just plain BS and not canon. Going canon would mean 1cmdr science (Chakotay, though Janeway was the science type, I'm partly relaying those skills from captain to commander), 1 Lt. cmdr. tactical (Tuvok), 1 Lt tactical (Paris), 1Lt engineer (Torres) and 1 ensign engineer (Kim). Now that would be an Intrepid I would use.
We can see the same thing happening in today's navy. 60 years ago, big-gun warships were the way to go. Battleships, cruisers..Who ever would've thought a destroyer or LCS (which didn't even exist back then) would form the backbone of the navy?
Cruisers lack the flexibility to do everything and they lack the specialization to do one specific task as well as a dedicated ship.
Starfleet realized this. Finally.
Even back in Kirk's day, the big, fancy cruisers weren't the backbone of the fleet. Hell, there were only 13 Constitution-class ships...What do you think made up the bulk of Starfleet?
Probably Mirandas and Oberths..
Cruisers shouldn't be the "Jack of all trades, master of all of them."..A specialized ship will always be superior at what it's specialized to do.
Intrepids are not science ships. Intrepids are fast-scouts. There's a reason it's faster and better armed (That part's debatable..) then it's "new" Science ship contemporary, the Nova-class. Intrepids are designed to travel relatively short distances relatively quickly, with the ability to handle light combat on the way. It's not a science ship.
Survivability doesn't mean much in a game environment? I'm sorry, but a cruiser will always be more survivable then an escort. High-end escorts may be able to take some damage, but nowhere near what a cruiser or battlecruiser can. And if it's using it's naturally high defense, odds are it's going to fast to be doing any significant damage.
A cruiser can tank and deal damage at the same time. An escort generally has to pick one..
A Klingon battlecruiser is the only ship in the game that can generally do both at the same time.
OK, let's take that WWII naval anology. I was lucky enough to see the New Jersey when it was re-commishioned back in the early 80s at San Clemente Ils while NUWES (Navel Underwater Warfare Engineering Station) set up of the battleship so subs could tell by sound if it was "one of ours". While it was on OPS there, it also used the gunnery range (south Ils naval range for live naval bomb-bardment). Those 16" guns were and probably still are pretty impressive and if your in the sights of that monster, you are out for the count. 1 shot, your done. That was the battleship. Along with that, it was the perverbial "tank" with armor so thick that the ship, even weighing what it did, could "take a licking and keep on ticking". The offset was it was slow and it took "40 miles to turn that rig around".
Now, let's look at STO. The "big guns" are not on the battleship. In fact, they get the least effective weapons in the game, beams, and pretty much are delegated to that due to the fact that Cryptic did get it right with speed and turn rate. There was a mechanic to offset some of this effect, back before the dark times....., before the NGE type NERFs at F2P, which were antiprotons. (and everyone knows now how great APs are now that don't come with anything more than ACCX1, there even the cheapest wepons for dil now for tier at the Cryptic in-game vendors) Relying on crit to help some of the DPS offset for crusiers and it was decently balanced, back then. Escorts were more of the "glass canons" of the day and were given that "dodge" mechanic to balance out the 1-shot kills. But then came P2W and the C-Store.
Now, we have escorts that can and do run more and better hull resists that crusiers can. If you run beams, you pretty much need the power transfer console, some build guides state to run 2 of them in fact, due to power requirements of having just 6 beams installed, much less 8. My fleet escort can "tank" much better than my excel can do to nothing more than this fact, alone. It just can't "heal" as much is the ONLY limitation. But with existing STO mechanics, that really doesn't matter in the least as it has several "get the flock outta dodge" buttons allowing for it to head out, heal up, and come back in for the next pass. The crusier has NO CHANCE to keep up with that via turn-rate and speed restrictions. Along with those 4 dual heavys that can park in the back of a crusier (taking the crusier firepower down to 1/2 of the NERFed remaining DPS) and blow the crusier apart with basicly NO risk what-so-ever.
Not to even mention the "miss" mechanic that Cryptic installed on beams, yet another NERF patch, was WAY overdone and basicly cut the DPS output of beams by about 60% on my DPS meters anyway. Even if your running ALL ACCX3 beams, it really doesn't seem to make all that much of a difference.
The mechanics in this game are just screwed and anyone playing a crusier in PVP (or even PVE or that matter), for any other reason than a dedicated support profession (heal-ship) is well aware of the fact(s). I "get it", there are some escort players that like the "easy-kill" deal we have now for any unsuspecting crusier player that happens to wonder into PVP range. However, since these mechanics/NERFs have been installed, PVP gameplay is all but dead, die hard PVPers have moved on to other games, min/maxers have basicly given up, and we're left with Cryptic devs coming to the PVP forums making statements of "we could take PVP entirely out of the game and no-one would even notice".
That all bodes so well for a MMORPG, now doesn't it?
Cruisers lack the flexibility to do everything and they lack the specialization to do one specific task as well as a dedicated ship.
Starfleet realized this. Finally.
I grew up with Next Generation, and something that really stands out is the fact that the Enterprise was always being sent into unknown circumstances. The vast majority of the episodes involve some variety of "We don't know what's going on, go find out". Exploring the frontiers of known space. Going to investigate ships and colonies that disappear. That sort of thing. And it's equally possible that they might need to fight, map, research and analyze, build, move, or evacuate, whatever they find there.
A cruiser is exactly the right ship for this.
When your mission parameters are "Go and check out this new inhabited planet that we know nothing about", you need to be flexible to do most things, be it observation, diplomatic negotiations, a show of culture, logistical support, medical aid, and occasionally beating back the natives with a pointy stick. Yes, a science ship will out-science a cruiser and yes, an escort will out-shoot a cruiser, but these specialized ships require that you know ahead of time what the mission is going to be like. Specialized ships receive a mission package with details, they go and do it, and then they come back. Cruisers are constantly moving around in space finding and assessing the situations that specialists, if required, are then tasked on.
A decent analogy for real life would be: cruisers are the police. They roam around keeping an eye on everything. They have a weapon, but if things get really crazy they call in SWAT. They have a knowledge of first aid, but if things get really crazy they call in an ambulance.
Part of our problem with the game is that our culture teaches us that SWAT guys are really cool. How many video games are there about serving and protecting, versus how many games are there about reckless hotshots wearing balaclavas and carrying stuff that's either fiction or a stupidly expensive prototype. Given the choice between shooting through a mob of bad guys or spending two weeks charting a star cluster, which are more gamers going to choose? Which task is a cruiser going to be better at?
Cryptic just caters to their audience on this point. More players want combat and heroics, so guess what: We get combat and heroics. Which is what escorts are best at. In fact it's the only thing they're good at. The weaknesses and limitations of escorts in a non combat situation never comes up because the game barely acknowledges non combat gameplay and every ship and captain can address it equally well.
A cruiser can tank and deal damage at the same time. An escort generally has to pick one..
A Klingon battlecruiser is the only ship in the game that can generally do both at the same time.
Look at the difference in the volume of bitter complaints between Federation cruiser captains and KDF cruiser captains.
Comments
I haven't given up on getting an adequate pvp experience. (Call me a dreamer.) That would be one reason for me to be against what I believe you are suggesting.
The other reason would be that I have little interest in seeing everyone flying around in a cruiser, which is exactly what would happen if they made cruisers superior to all other class of ships.
Honestly, I'd be okay with it if cruisers just sucked less. If they could take substantially more punishment without healing or running -- maybe only in PvE -- they'd actually be worth playing in STFs.
No wonder escorts are so survivable.
Cruisers are practically pointless. The breen ship removes the "practically".
If and when they ever get crusier healing/DPS/tanking fixed in PVE and PVP, I might give the game another try.
Ways to give cruisers some chops without disturbing the combat balance:
*Make the quantom slipstream drive a cruiser only ability.
*Add more functionality to cruiser interiors (working holodecks anyone?)
*Don't allow certain types of ship interior doff missions for non-cruisers. (i.e. your escort doesn't have a science lab; your sci ship doesn't get military assignments in the ready room, and so forth)
*Require Escorts to "put in" for supplies (e.g. dock at a starbase) at least once every few hours of gameplay or begin to suffer small penalties to their stats. While they do have replicators, these devices require large stores of basic ingrediants which small ships can't spare much room for.
Except in the show, cruisers weren't cutting it anymore. Which is why Escorts and more advanced, more firepower-heavy, yet smaller, more compact ships, like the Defiant, Sabre, Akira, Steamrunner, etc, came into being.
And the Escort having 70%+ dodge chance means it has to be constantly moving at 23+ impulse, meaning it's not going to have the vast majority of it's firepower on a target for very long. Remember, it's firepower is pretty much limited to a 45* cone. A cruiser's firepower is not limited to a 45* cone, and while it's moving and getting it's 50%+ dodge, it's still putting down damage in a 360* field..
Why would you do that when the only ship to use it in the canon wasn't a cruiser?
I will dispute this assumption. Those smaller, combat only ships weren't made because a cruiser couldn't do the job--the cruisers are still the most powerful ships--but because you can make a whole bunch of small warships (which are good for nothing else but fighting) for the same resources needed to field one capital ship.
It was a science ship which are, in effect, light cruisers. i wouldn't mind them having it as well. It is primarily the escorts that are out of ballance because none of their natural limitations really means much in a game enviornment. This is just an example of how to midigate that.
Tell that to the Odyssey.
Cruisers are big targets.
We can see the same thing happening in today's navy. 60 years ago, big-gun warships were the way to go. Battleships, cruisers..Who ever would've thought a destroyer or LCS (which didn't even exist back then) would form the backbone of the navy?
Cruisers lack the flexibility to do everything and they lack the specialization to do one specific task as well as a dedicated ship.
Starfleet realized this. Finally.
Even back in Kirk's day, the big, fancy cruisers weren't the backbone of the fleet. Hell, there were only 13 Constitution-class ships...What do you think made up the bulk of Starfleet?
Probably Mirandas and Oberths..
Cruisers shouldn't be the "Jack of all trades, master of all of them."..A specialized ship will always be superior at what it's specialized to do.
Intrepids are not science ships. Intrepids are fast-scouts. There's a reason it's faster and better armed (That part's debatable..) then it's "new" Science ship contemporary, the Nova-class. Intrepids are designed to travel relatively short distances relatively quickly, with the ability to handle light combat on the way. It's not a science ship.
Survivability doesn't mean much in a game environment? I'm sorry, but a cruiser will always be more survivable then an escort. High-end escorts may be able to take some damage, but nowhere near what a cruiser or battlecruiser can. And if it's using it's naturally high defense, odds are it's going to fast to be doing any significant damage.
A cruiser can tank and deal damage at the same time. An escort generally has to pick one..
A Klingon battlecruiser is the only ship in the game that can generally do both at the same time.
Correct me if I'm wrong but even Voyager which is a intrepid class ship is listed as a science vessel.
Vice Admiral Volmack ISS Thundermole
Brigadier General Jokag IKS Gorkan
Centurion Kares RRW Tomalak
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Doesn't mean Cryptic got it right making the Intrepid for STO. The boff layout for the Intrepid is just plain BS and not canon. Going canon would mean 1cmdr science (Chakotay, though Janeway was the science type, I'm partly relaying those skills from captain to commander), 1 Lt. cmdr. tactical (Tuvok), 1 Lt tactical (Paris), 1Lt engineer (Torres) and 1 ensign engineer (Kim). Now that would be an Intrepid I would use.
OK, let's take that WWII naval anology. I was lucky enough to see the New Jersey when it was re-commishioned back in the early 80s at San Clemente Ils while NUWES (Navel Underwater Warfare Engineering Station) set up of the battleship so subs could tell by sound if it was "one of ours". While it was on OPS there, it also used the gunnery range (south Ils naval range for live naval bomb-bardment). Those 16" guns were and probably still are pretty impressive and if your in the sights of that monster, you are out for the count. 1 shot, your done. That was the battleship. Along with that, it was the perverbial "tank" with armor so thick that the ship, even weighing what it did, could "take a licking and keep on ticking". The offset was it was slow and it took "40 miles to turn that rig around".
Now, let's look at STO. The "big guns" are not on the battleship. In fact, they get the least effective weapons in the game, beams, and pretty much are delegated to that due to the fact that Cryptic did get it right with speed and turn rate. There was a mechanic to offset some of this effect, back before the dark times....., before the NGE type NERFs at F2P, which were antiprotons. (and everyone knows now how great APs are now that don't come with anything more than ACCX1, there even the cheapest wepons for dil now for tier at the Cryptic in-game vendors) Relying on crit to help some of the DPS offset for crusiers and it was decently balanced, back then. Escorts were more of the "glass canons" of the day and were given that "dodge" mechanic to balance out the 1-shot kills. But then came P2W and the C-Store.
Now, we have escorts that can and do run more and better hull resists that crusiers can. If you run beams, you pretty much need the power transfer console, some build guides state to run 2 of them in fact, due to power requirements of having just 6 beams installed, much less 8. My fleet escort can "tank" much better than my excel can do to nothing more than this fact, alone. It just can't "heal" as much is the ONLY limitation. But with existing STO mechanics, that really doesn't matter in the least as it has several "get the flock outta dodge" buttons allowing for it to head out, heal up, and come back in for the next pass. The crusier has NO CHANCE to keep up with that via turn-rate and speed restrictions. Along with those 4 dual heavys that can park in the back of a crusier (taking the crusier firepower down to 1/2 of the NERFed remaining DPS) and blow the crusier apart with basicly NO risk what-so-ever.
Not to even mention the "miss" mechanic that Cryptic installed on beams, yet another NERF patch, was WAY overdone and basicly cut the DPS output of beams by about 60% on my DPS meters anyway. Even if your running ALL ACCX3 beams, it really doesn't seem to make all that much of a difference.
The mechanics in this game are just screwed and anyone playing a crusier in PVP (or even PVE or that matter), for any other reason than a dedicated support profession (heal-ship) is well aware of the fact(s). I "get it", there are some escort players that like the "easy-kill" deal we have now for any unsuspecting crusier player that happens to wonder into PVP range. However, since these mechanics/NERFs have been installed, PVP gameplay is all but dead, die hard PVPers have moved on to other games, min/maxers have basicly given up, and we're left with Cryptic devs coming to the PVP forums making statements of "we could take PVP entirely out of the game and no-one would even notice".
That all bodes so well for a MMORPG, now doesn't it?
I grew up with Next Generation, and something that really stands out is the fact that the Enterprise was always being sent into unknown circumstances. The vast majority of the episodes involve some variety of "We don't know what's going on, go find out". Exploring the frontiers of known space. Going to investigate ships and colonies that disappear. That sort of thing. And it's equally possible that they might need to fight, map, research and analyze, build, move, or evacuate, whatever they find there.
A cruiser is exactly the right ship for this.
When your mission parameters are "Go and check out this new inhabited planet that we know nothing about", you need to be flexible to do most things, be it observation, diplomatic negotiations, a show of culture, logistical support, medical aid, and occasionally beating back the natives with a pointy stick. Yes, a science ship will out-science a cruiser and yes, an escort will out-shoot a cruiser, but these specialized ships require that you know ahead of time what the mission is going to be like. Specialized ships receive a mission package with details, they go and do it, and then they come back. Cruisers are constantly moving around in space finding and assessing the situations that specialists, if required, are then tasked on.
A decent analogy for real life would be: cruisers are the police. They roam around keeping an eye on everything. They have a weapon, but if things get really crazy they call in SWAT. They have a knowledge of first aid, but if things get really crazy they call in an ambulance.
Part of our problem with the game is that our culture teaches us that SWAT guys are really cool. How many video games are there about serving and protecting, versus how many games are there about reckless hotshots wearing balaclavas and carrying stuff that's either fiction or a stupidly expensive prototype. Given the choice between shooting through a mob of bad guys or spending two weeks charting a star cluster, which are more gamers going to choose? Which task is a cruiser going to be better at?
Cryptic just caters to their audience on this point. More players want combat and heroics, so guess what: We get combat and heroics. Which is what escorts are best at. In fact it's the only thing they're good at. The weaknesses and limitations of escorts in a non combat situation never comes up because the game barely acknowledges non combat gameplay and every ship and captain can address it equally well.
Look at the difference in the volume of bitter complaints between Federation cruiser captains and KDF cruiser captains.