Funny, last I checked my power levels never go below 80 going full to broadside.
It doesn't even need to go that far. While it isn't immediately obvious, you can actually have more than 125 points in a power setting (I forget what the actual cap is, 150 or 175 or whatever)... it's just the excess past that point doesn't do anything but provide a buffer against draining. Run EPtW3, keep Aux2Bat up, and other other power-boosting or drain-reducing skills and you can easily stay over 100 weapon power at all times, even with seven beams going (eight, if you include the romulan one instead of a torpedo!). And you can stay at 125 for extended periods of time if you're an Engineer too and use their special skills.
Beams do fine, it's just you have to know what you're doing.
Unless you're sitting still facing your target head on, DHC's will have a much shorter time on target than beams. PvP sometime. You'll find just how much you need to maneuver.
As momaw stated, 90% of players are PvE exclusive. And I do PvP. Quite a bit more than I used to. And maneuvering is important, but still very VERY easily done by escorts. And guess what, they can STILL keep most targets in cannon arc easily. And that means that awesome firepower they possess is still kept for a long time on their target.
Beams do fine, it's just you have to know what you're doing.
I suspect that's a big part of the problem.
All these cruiser captains assume that their insane engineering stacking will pay off, without applying the least bit of thought to game mechanics.
I can tell you first hand that tanking has never been about min-maxing yourself into tremendous defensive stats, unless there's some sort of generous threat modifier. This game even offers generous threat modifiers if you're willing to spec into them, but most cruiser captains are too busy min-maxing for either full defense or for as much pew-pew as they can get.
Meanwhile, engineering stacking doesn't even offer the level of support necessary to make cruisers a PvP tank.
The only value in running something so defensively oriented is some sort of bunker build. Does PvP in this game even offer a place for bunker builds to shine?
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
Post some videos up on YouTube of how you're standing still in front of a Tac Cube or the Queen's diamond in an ESTF without ever moving and never getting 1 shot as you "tank" them. I'm sure everyone would love to see it.
That's easy, Put 50 base power in shields, 100 base power into aux. I once sat next to Queenie and survived her aceton assimilator thingy
Funny, last I checked my power levels never go below 80 going full to broadside. I have a full set of heavy phased polaron cannons fed side, Klingon side I have full sets of phased polaron beam arrays.
No difference at all in engagements on damage dealt, only thing that changes is the method to cause said damage. Nothing more.
If a player is using an energy drain debuff, use an energy buff. put points into warp core, etc. It's not difficult to figure out.
All of my toons are maxed in Warp Core Efficiency AND Potential. Only way drain doesn't kill me while using beams is if I use EPtW, Batteries or Engineer Captain specific abilities. This isn't even discussing use of BO. Using a single cannon/turret setup on the same character and ship, I can roll crf2 and not drop below 80 WITHOUT any captain/boff skills or batteries AND do more damage to boot.
And an escort running a 4x dhc and 3x turret build with even the crappiest player build will not drop below 80 without EPtW, Batteries or Engineer Captain specific abilities.
PvPers try to protect against drains and damage thrown by thinking people using skills. Sure, not-moving at all looks strange and very 'un-pvping' but then my shoo is smarter then STO AI so why not?
All of my toons are maxed in Warp Core Efficiency AND Potential. Only way drain doesn't kill me while using beams is if I use EPtW, Batteries or Engineer Captain specific abilities.
I would also throw in Energy Siphon on sci-heavy cruisers. But yeah, beam drain is not managable without additional skills or items. Cannon drain is perfectly managable without any skill at all. So yeah, we need some balance here.
Kick cannons, boost beams - but do something, Cryptic!
The only value in running something so defensively oriented is some sort of bunker build. Does PvP in this game even offer a place for bunker builds to shine?
Beams do fine, it's just you have to know what you're doing.
Beams do fine, you just have to give up a big chunk of survivability and exploit blatantly broken abilities in order to reach the level of performance that your weapons are rated for i.e. the level of performance that cannons can reach with next to no effort.
Because its the only place you could get away with stacking an engineering captain with an engineering heavy boff layout with an engineering console layout and actually achieve any success.
And that's only if PvP offers any objectives which a bunker build is beneficial for.
From PvE, the closest example might be raid tanking, but there's no equivalent to that here.
Simply put, you're crazy if you think you can get away with min-maxing for defense. Even in other MMOs, it only works in very specific circumstances. Tanking anything else requires a better balance of offense versus defense, or else your squishies end up doing the tanking. This is nothing new, though I'm not surprised the WoW-crowd struggles with it.
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
Beams do fine, you just have to give up a big chunk of survivability and exploit blatantly broken abilities in order to reach the level of performance that your weapons are rated for i.e. the level of performance that cannons can reach with next to no effort.
(fixed)
Aux2Bat isn't even required, it's just that it's a bit more weapon power anyway (since it's not like you'll ever be using Aux above 25) and, well, is brokenly useful with Technicians. EptW3 x2 (or EptW3/EptW2 on a ship without enough slots) is perfectly fine too if you can't pull that off, and even if you can't spring for three Technicians you can probably get at least one Warp Core Engineer. Then there's other things like the Omega Weapon proc, and...
Yeah, Cannons are easier to get going, but so what? That's the whole point of an escort. If you can't make beams work in a cruiser, it's because you're bad at the game, not because they don't work. That, and there's more to flying a cruiser (or being an Engineering captain for that matter) than layering pointless defenses. This isn't space WoW, there's no pure tanks, you have to consider for and plan for your offense too.
It is because you are both making false assumptions about what over-capping power does, along with the rest of the community.
I will keep it simple. Three beams, 135 power (so 10 over cap) this is how your shots will be. Beams are A, B, C, shot 1, 2, 3, 4.
A1 @ 125
B1 @ 115
C1 @ 105
Now the 10 power jumps back into the system
A2-4 @ 115
B2-4 @ 105
C2-4 @ 95
OR
Possibility not sure
A, B, & C 3-4 @ 95
This is why it does nothing for DHCs. This is why it does little for cannons compared to what it does for beams. And this is why power drain is so much stronger. Power overcapping will never allow two weapons to fire at 125 power.
But how does one test this? Over cap with various energy types and parse the results.
I had some time to think about this. Just some quick questions for you...
You have the 10 power going back into the system after the first shot of A1-C1. I thought that the power did not go back until a weapon's power cycle was finished. So after Beam B finishes its firing cycle of one shot per second, after the 5 second mark the 10 power is supposed to return. Weren't we told (and taken with a grain of salt) that when a weapon (Beam A) fires at, let's say 100 weapon power, every shot (Beam A-1 to Beam A-4) from that weapon would be at that weapon power level, and the next weapon (Beam would fire at the reduced power level? That's how it works for cannons, isn't it? If it is, are you suggested that there is a separate drain mechanic (not meaning the -10 per beam weapon) for beams?
An unequipped Spiral Wave disruptor (in my inventory at ESD) lists its damage as 237 and the DPS as 189.6. 237 divided by 1.25 equals 189.6. A Beam's firing cycle is 4 seconds and its power cycle is 5 seconds. If that Spiral Wave did 237 damage per shot, it would have a total damage (in its firing cycle) of 948. When you divide that by 5 seconds for the power cycle, you get the same as the listed DPS, 189.6. The method you listed (with A2-4 firing at 115 weapon power), suggests the the rating of the (unequipped) Spiral Wave disruptor is actually 222.75 with a DPS of 178.2. Since the unequipped weapon damage and DPS is supposed to be the baseline (minus skills and consoles, that is); shouldn't the ingame tooltip be reflecting this?
"I'm not big on telepaths myself. I'm not big on guns either. But if everyone else has them, I want to make sure I can get my hands on the biggest one I can."
I did some testing yesterday with power transfer rates and I learned the following:
1: Power transfer rate has no effect on drain when power below 125 (my power went from 123 down to 73 as expected), this the community established and was thus expected
2: Having run this I ran EPS power transfer and fired off 3 volleys at 3 second intervals (at about 150 power) and about 50% of my shots were fired at 100-105 power, 3: I repeated the same test with EPtW and found about 50% of shots were firing at 93 power, so I investigated further.
I proceeded to put 2 EPS Flow regulator Mk XI (Purple) on my ship (+150% power transfer rate) and repeated the above tests
1: As above
2: 50% of shots around 115-120
3: 50% of shots around 100-105
I ran a fourth test after this to see what EPtW and EPS power transfer would do with the extra transfer rate, the result was all shots fired between 115-125.
My conclusion is that Bareel's understanding of overcapping is correct however the community's understanding of power transfer vs drain is not quite right and that power transfer has an effect on overcapping.
I would like to ask members of the community to run the same tests and prove or disprove my results
Yeah, Cannons are easier to get going, but so what?
Beams have lower rated DPS. If they require significant investment to get them to work at their rated damage (I feel it's important to stress that herculean efforts are required merely to get massed beams to do what they are supposed to do, not to amplify their damage), and other weapons do not, then massed beams is a bad weapon system.
In practical terms, if I can get maximum damage out of my cannons and turrets with just tying up my ensign slots on EPTW1, and you require tying up 2 LT slot and 2 LTC slots with Aux2Batt and EPTW3 to get maximum damage out of your beams, guess which ship has more resources available for everything else like "staying alive" and "helping team mates".
That's the whole point of an escort.
Why does everybody ready "cannon" and assume "dual cannon". Turrets are cannons. And cannons come in singles, too, which have a 180 degree firing arc and are probably the most underappreciated (not to mention cheap) weapon class. Battle cruisers with single cannons is a powerful combination.
This isn't space WoW, there's no pure tanks, you have to consider for and plan for your offense too.
Which is why I don't use massed beams. Planning for offense means doing maximum damage with minimum investment. Presently I have exactly 1 beam array, and that's more for style than anything else (Galor with one its iconic golden spiral waves). Cannons, turrets, and Rapid Fire is simply more efficient.
Why does everybody ready "cannon" and assume "dual cannon".
Because on any ship you'd possibly use single cannons/turrets on, you could just use beams and do more damage because there's no piddly turrets in the equation. And the ways you'd eke out cannon damage on a cruiser are the same ones you'd use for beam damage (excepting FAW/CRF).
Cannon cruisers are fun, it they're inferior in raw numbers Uh, sorry?
Because on any ship you'd possibly use single cannons/turrets on, you could just use beams and do more damage because there's no piddly turrets in the equation. And the ways you'd eke out cannon damage on a cruiser are the same ones you'd use for beam damage (excepting FAW/CRF).
Cannon cruisers are fun, it they're inferior in raw numbers Uh, sorry?
CSV and CRF are less iffy, and generally more efficient damage dealers than beam abilities.
As for turrets, they eat less power than beams, can have higher effective DPS under many circumstances, and work much better with DEM than beams do.
-are much more fun
-are much easier to use
-do basically the same dmg or about the same sometimes more depending on your flight style
-avoid this stupid broadsiding stuff which is totally not canon
-are much cheaper if you have no access to fleet weapons
-with scatter volley and rapid fire are better than fire at will. They allow you to really focus the targets you want and dont hit still healed gates and transformers normally and give you aggro and stuff
Believe me you'll like your cruiser much more with a cannon build. Its sad because i really like the faw lightshow but in the end its not really effective. Just switch to cannons until cryptic actually fixed the beam situation.
Most of my laters builds are turret beam arrays with a dual beam. and I'm fine. top counter drain from beam overload i use main EP to weapons. I still do damage. the truth of the matter is THIS THREAD IS BS
Most of my laters builds are turret beam arrays with a dual beam. and I'm fine. top counter drain from beam overload i use main EP to weapons. I still do damage. the truth of the matter is THIS THREAD IS BS
Troll troll troll.
Even without a basic understanding of the basic mechanics it is pretty apparent that beams have issues. I suppose you also believe FAW is working as intended too.
Even without a basic understanding of the basic mechanics it is pretty apparent that beams have issues. I suppose you also believe FAW is working as intended too.
Glad you're fine. That makes well only you.
U ARE NOT AN ESCORT. you are a support ship, dont expect to top the charts or vape players who know how to counter beams. heck i can kill bad escorts in my voquv.
the fundemental problem with these threads is that the people complaining dont understand theyre role. they want to vape everything in sight because theyre on screen heroes did with beams. not gonna happen. get over it. or role something that packs a punch. trust me i shelved my eng a long time ago.
U ARE NOT AN ESCORT. you are a support ship, dont expect to top the charts or vape players who know how to counter beams. heck i can kill bad escorts in my voquv.
the fundemental problem with these threads is that the people complaining dont understand theyre role. they want to vape everything in sight because theyre on screen heroes did with beams. not gonna happen. get over it. or role something that packs a punch. trust me i shelved my eng a long time ago.
Tells others to "know their role", and yet shelved his Engineering cap.
Perhaps you should consider what the role of Engineering actually is?
U ARE NOT AN ESCORT. you are a support ship, dont expect to top the charts or vape players who know how to counter beams. heck i can kill bad escorts in my voquv.
PVP is fundamentally broken and PVP players are in a small minority. So any and all points about "well, in PVP things are like this" are irrelevant and will be ignored.
And "Supporting" other players and nothing else, i.e. being a healbot, is boring, thankless, and unnecessary. Every ship in a team needs to be doing good damage or they are slowing the team down. If you want roles, the role of cruisers is to achieve DPS by merit of never retreating while the role of escorts is to achieve DPS by hit and run tactics and massive alpha strikes.
-are much more fun
-are much easier to use
-do basically the same dmg or about the same sometimes more depending on your flight style
-avoid this stupid broadsiding stuff which is totally not canon
-are much cheaper if you have no access to fleet weapons
-with scatter volley and rapid fire are better than fire at will. They allow you to really focus the targets you want and dont hit still healed gates and transformers normally and give you aggro and stuff
Believe me you'll like your cruiser much more with a cannon build. Its sad because i really like the faw lightshow but in the end its not really effective. Just switch to cannons until cryptic actually fixed the beam situation.
I hate my cannon cruiser. It's boring. It's dull. It's not the pretty pew pew of the beam one. Yes, it can focus it's damage more, yes it's cheaper (due to single cannons being pathetic in this game), but overall, it's not a better ship.
Beams are much better at grabbing attention and keeping it, AND you can aggro whole groups and then let your team pick them off one by one. With cannons, not so easy.
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.
I hate my cannon cruiser. It's boring. It's dull. It's not the pretty pew pew of the beam one. Yes, it can focus it's damage more, yes it's cheaper (due to single cannons being pathetic in this game), but overall, it's not a better ship.
Beams are much better at grabbing attention and keeping it, AND you can aggro whole groups and then let your team pick them off one by one. With cannons, not so easy.
Hmm, my own KDF focuses on carriers but don't you have a KDF battlecruiser too? How would you compare it to Fed cannon cruisers? What would you think of fed space whales going the route of KDF battlecruisers?
Hmm, my own KDF focuses on carriers but don't you have a KDF battlecruiser too? How would you compare it to Fed cannon cruisers? What would you think of fed space whales going the route of KDF battlecruisers?
My Tor'kaht is a god in PvE. And does well in PvP too. Comparing my KDF BC to a fed cannon cruiser is like comparing a dinghy to a Battleship. There is no comparison. If it came down to my Tor'kaht vs my Imperial, even my Imperial running cannons (which I would never dishonor her by doing so), my Tor'kaht would win very easily. Even if my Imperial had DHCs it would not be able to utilize them as well as my Tor'kaht. To say nothing of my Odyssey.
But it's a goes without saying when talking about the vast superiority that KDF battlecruisers have over Fed cruisers. It's almost not worth even trying to compare them. KDF battlecruisers are just that much better.
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.
I agree my fleet Tor'kaht is a beast, and even putting beams on it the ships owns. You can really tell the difference between cruisers that are made for war (KDF), and the ones that are made for exploration (FED).
Comments
I draw all the aggro from sci and engis, all day long.... so wtf?
yes, give beams some beef
Beams do fine, it's just you have to know what you're doing.
As momaw stated, 90% of players are PvE exclusive. And I do PvP. Quite a bit more than I used to. And maneuvering is important, but still very VERY easily done by escorts. And guess what, they can STILL keep most targets in cannon arc easily. And that means that awesome firepower they possess is still kept for a long time on their target.
Pretty much.
All these cruiser captains assume that their insane engineering stacking will pay off, without applying the least bit of thought to game mechanics.
I can tell you first hand that tanking has never been about min-maxing yourself into tremendous defensive stats, unless there's some sort of generous threat modifier. This game even offers generous threat modifiers if you're willing to spec into them, but most cruiser captains are too busy min-maxing for either full defense or for as much pew-pew as they can get.
Meanwhile, engineering stacking doesn't even offer the level of support necessary to make cruisers a PvP tank.
The only value in running something so defensively oriented is some sort of bunker build. Does PvP in this game even offer a place for bunker builds to shine?
That's easy, Put 50 base power in shields, 100 base power into aux. I once sat next to Queenie and survived her aceton assimilator thingy
All of my toons are maxed in Warp Core Efficiency AND Potential. Only way drain doesn't kill me while using beams is if I use EPtW, Batteries or Engineer Captain specific abilities. This isn't even discussing use of BO. Using a single cannon/turret setup on the same character and ship, I can roll crf2 and not drop below 80 WITHOUT any captain/boff skills or batteries AND do more damage to boot.
And an escort running a 4x dhc and 3x turret build with even the crappiest player build will not drop below 80 without EPtW, Batteries or Engineer Captain specific abilities.
PvPers try to protect against drains and damage thrown by thinking people using skills. Sure, not-moving at all looks strange and very 'un-pvping' but then my shoo is smarter then STO AI so why not?
I would also throw in Energy Siphon on sci-heavy cruisers. But yeah, beam drain is not managable without additional skills or items. Cannon drain is perfectly managable without any skill at all. So yeah, we need some balance here.
Kick cannons, boost beams - but do something, Cryptic!
Why do you assume that anyone thinks about PvP?
Beams do fine, you just have to give up a big chunk of survivability and exploit blatantly broken abilities in order to reach the level of performance that your weapons are rated for i.e. the level of performance that cannons can reach with next to no effort.
(fixed)
And that's only if PvP offers any objectives which a bunker build is beneficial for.
From PvE, the closest example might be raid tanking, but there's no equivalent to that here.
Simply put, you're crazy if you think you can get away with min-maxing for defense. Even in other MMOs, it only works in very specific circumstances. Tanking anything else requires a better balance of offense versus defense, or else your squishies end up doing the tanking. This is nothing new, though I'm not surprised the WoW-crowd struggles with it.
Yeah, Cannons are easier to get going, but so what? That's the whole point of an escort. If you can't make beams work in a cruiser, it's because you're bad at the game, not because they don't work. That, and there's more to flying a cruiser (or being an Engineering captain for that matter) than layering pointless defenses. This isn't space WoW, there's no pure tanks, you have to consider for and plan for your offense too.
I had some time to think about this. Just some quick questions for you...
You have the 10 power going back into the system after the first shot of A1-C1. I thought that the power did not go back until a weapon's power cycle was finished. So after Beam B finishes its firing cycle of one shot per second, after the 5 second mark the 10 power is supposed to return. Weren't we told (and taken with a grain of salt) that when a weapon (Beam A) fires at, let's say 100 weapon power, every shot (Beam A-1 to Beam A-4) from that weapon would be at that weapon power level, and the next weapon (Beam
An unequipped Spiral Wave disruptor (in my inventory at ESD) lists its damage as 237 and the DPS as 189.6. 237 divided by 1.25 equals 189.6. A Beam's firing cycle is 4 seconds and its power cycle is 5 seconds. If that Spiral Wave did 237 damage per shot, it would have a total damage (in its firing cycle) of 948. When you divide that by 5 seconds for the power cycle, you get the same as the listed DPS, 189.6. The method you listed (with A2-4 firing at 115 weapon power), suggests the the rating of the (unequipped) Spiral Wave disruptor is actually 222.75 with a DPS of 178.2. Since the unequipped weapon damage and DPS is supposed to be the baseline (minus skills and consoles, that is); shouldn't the ingame tooltip be reflecting this?
1: Power transfer rate has no effect on drain when power below 125 (my power went from 123 down to 73 as expected), this the community established and was thus expected
2: Having run this I ran EPS power transfer and fired off 3 volleys at 3 second intervals (at about 150 power) and about 50% of my shots were fired at 100-105 power, 3: I repeated the same test with EPtW and found about 50% of shots were firing at 93 power, so I investigated further.
I proceeded to put 2 EPS Flow regulator Mk XI (Purple) on my ship (+150% power transfer rate) and repeated the above tests
1: As above
2: 50% of shots around 115-120
3: 50% of shots around 100-105
I ran a fourth test after this to see what EPtW and EPS power transfer would do with the extra transfer rate, the result was all shots fired between 115-125.
My conclusion is that Bareel's understanding of overcapping is correct however the community's understanding of power transfer vs drain is not quite right and that power transfer has an effect on overcapping.
I would like to ask members of the community to run the same tests and prove or disprove my results
Beams have lower rated DPS. If they require significant investment to get them to work at their rated damage (I feel it's important to stress that herculean efforts are required merely to get massed beams to do what they are supposed to do, not to amplify their damage), and other weapons do not, then massed beams is a bad weapon system.
In practical terms, if I can get maximum damage out of my cannons and turrets with just tying up my ensign slots on EPTW1, and you require tying up 2 LT slot and 2 LTC slots with Aux2Batt and EPTW3 to get maximum damage out of your beams, guess which ship has more resources available for everything else like "staying alive" and "helping team mates".
Why does everybody ready "cannon" and assume "dual cannon". Turrets are cannons. And cannons come in singles, too, which have a 180 degree firing arc and are probably the most underappreciated (not to mention cheap) weapon class. Battle cruisers with single cannons is a powerful combination.
Which is why I don't use massed beams. Planning for offense means doing maximum damage with minimum investment. Presently I have exactly 1 beam array, and that's more for style than anything else (Galor with one its iconic golden spiral waves). Cannons, turrets, and Rapid Fire is simply more efficient.
Well I did some further testing and got the following results from ACT
(Starting power 123, 6 beams arrays, 5 cycles under each set of conditions)
Base (no EPS consoles, no buffs) 1668
EPtW1 (No consoles) 1824
EPtW1 (1 console) 1943
EPtW1 (2 consoles) 2185
EPS (No consoles) 1979
EPS (1 console) 2233
EPS (2 consoles) 2419
EPS+EPtW1 (No consoles) 2190
EPS+EPtW (1 console) 2458
EPS+EPtW (2 consoles) 2892
So at this point I think its safe to say that Power transfer rate when overcapping has a fair impact on DPS using arrays.
Because on any ship you'd possibly use single cannons/turrets on, you could just use beams and do more damage because there's no piddly turrets in the equation. And the ways you'd eke out cannon damage on a cruiser are the same ones you'd use for beam damage (excepting FAW/CRF).
Cannon cruisers are fun, it they're inferior in raw numbers Uh, sorry?
CSV and CRF are less iffy, and generally more efficient damage dealers than beam abilities.
As for turrets, they eat less power than beams, can have higher effective DPS under many circumstances, and work much better with DEM than beams do.
-are much more fun
-are much easier to use
-do basically the same dmg or about the same sometimes more depending on your flight style
-avoid this stupid broadsiding stuff which is totally not canon
-are much cheaper if you have no access to fleet weapons
-with scatter volley and rapid fire are better than fire at will. They allow you to really focus the targets you want and dont hit still healed gates and transformers normally and give you aggro and stuff
Believe me you'll like your cruiser much more with a cannon build. Its sad because i really like the faw lightshow but in the end its not really effective. Just switch to cannons until cryptic actually fixed the beam situation.
Troll troll troll.
Even without a basic understanding of the basic mechanics it is pretty apparent that beams have issues. I suppose you also believe FAW is working as intended too.
Glad you're fine. That makes well only you.
U ARE NOT AN ESCORT. you are a support ship, dont expect to top the charts or vape players who know how to counter beams. heck i can kill bad escorts in my voquv.
the fundemental problem with these threads is that the people complaining dont understand theyre role. they want to vape everything in sight because theyre on screen heroes did with beams. not gonna happen. get over it. or role something that packs a punch. trust me i shelved my eng a long time ago.
Tells others to "know their role", and yet shelved his Engineering cap.
Perhaps you should consider what the role of Engineering actually is?
PVP is fundamentally broken and PVP players are in a small minority. So any and all points about "well, in PVP things are like this" are irrelevant and will be ignored.
And "Supporting" other players and nothing else, i.e. being a healbot, is boring, thankless, and unnecessary. Every ship in a team needs to be doing good damage or they are slowing the team down. If you want roles, the role of cruisers is to achieve DPS by merit of never retreating while the role of escorts is to achieve DPS by hit and run tactics and massive alpha strikes.
I hate my cannon cruiser. It's boring. It's dull. It's not the pretty pew pew of the beam one. Yes, it can focus it's damage more, yes it's cheaper (due to single cannons being pathetic in this game), but overall, it's not a better ship.
Beams are much better at grabbing attention and keeping it, AND you can aggro whole groups and then let your team pick them off one by one. With cannons, not so easy.
Hmm, my own KDF focuses on carriers but don't you have a KDF battlecruiser too? How would you compare it to Fed cannon cruisers? What would you think of fed space whales going the route of KDF battlecruisers?
My Tor'kaht is a god in PvE. And does well in PvP too. Comparing my KDF BC to a fed cannon cruiser is like comparing a dinghy to a Battleship. There is no comparison. If it came down to my Tor'kaht vs my Imperial, even my Imperial running cannons (which I would never dishonor her by doing so), my Tor'kaht would win very easily. Even if my Imperial had DHCs it would not be able to utilize them as well as my Tor'kaht. To say nothing of my Odyssey.
But it's a goes without saying when talking about the vast superiority that KDF battlecruisers have over Fed cruisers. It's almost not worth even trying to compare them. KDF battlecruisers are just that much better.