But hey if i sucked at playing id worry about a death penalty too..
Just because I may be concerned about people whom are not good at the game doesn't automatically make me bad at the game, some of us DO think of others when discussing this sort of thing, as it is I have a science in a science ship that out DPSes some tacticals in escorts, an eng cruiser that does the same but more often (and probably out DPSes my own Tac/scort) as well as the same eng in a healboat that is almost indestructible and a tac/scort that is capable of surviving an encounter with an elite tac cube.
But that isn't the point here, the point is that the vast majority of players CAN'T do that in fact a lot of players don't even know to use two EPtS and cycle them with at least 1 TT if not two of them on escorts so perhaps you should give those people a thought before proposing changes that would lead to them getting complained at more for building wrong and perhaps you should read the rest of the thread before posting.
By now this whole thread has become TL;DR so I only looked at the first couple and last couple of pages, so bear with me if this idea has already been suggested and shot down, but there is a more subtle way of dealing with the escort OP issue, at least in PUG STFs.
Instead of (or in addition to) an endless cat-and-mouse game of buffing and nerfing, the developers could make it worthwhile to use other types of ships by making escorts wait longer to join a PUG, by the use of quota-based gating. That is, a new policy that all STF PUGs can have no more than, say, three of any of the basic starship types (cruiser, science vessel and escort) in the mix before starting. Maybe even two each, so we don't end up having PUGs with three sci vessels. (Other types of starships, such as carriers and destroyers, wouldn't count toward these limits.)
Here's how it would work: Instead of simply taking the first five players off the top of the queue, the STF would also take into account the type of starship the player has active at the time he joined the queue. If there are, say, too many escorts among the first five, only the first two or three would be allowed into the first STF instance; the rest would go back into the queue for the next instance. Meanwhile, players running other ship types would go straight to the head of the line.
Furthermore, to prevent players from gaming theis new system, once they join an STF queue, they would be locked into the starship they have active at the time, and not allowed to switch to a different ship until they've either left the queue or completed the STF. (Otherwise players could just park in front of the starship selection guy, join the queue with a science vessel to beat the quota, and then immediately switch back to an escort before the mission actually begins.)
Here's how it would work: Instead of simply taking the first five players off the top of the queue, the STF would also take into account the type of starship the player has active at the time he joined the queue. If there are, say, too many escorts among the first five, only the first two or three would be allowed into the first STF instance; the rest would go back into the queue for the next instance. Meanwhile, players running other ship types would go straight to the head of the line.
The problem with this solution is that it appears to codify DPS chasing as the only legitimate play style choice, and further isolates cruisers and sci ships as undesirables that we only suffer in matches because Cryptic forces us to. Far from increasing diversity, this solution would drive home the idea that the proper way to play STFs is to finish them as fast as humanly possible, and woe betide the poor science ship who shows up specced for support.
No, the real solution here needs to start with people understanding the problem for what it is: not a balance problem, but a cultural problem. What I mean is, we have far, far too many players (at least on the forums) who feel like "fun" and "rewarding" gameplay means only two things - doing more DPS than other players, and finishing missions as fast as possible. I suspect the reason people gravitate towards those is because they feel like "being good at the game" must necessarily mean "being better than most people", and completion time and DPS are things that seem easy to objectively measure, so make excellent comparison points.
Whatever the cause, though, the effect is clear. It's not that there aren't chances for healers, tanks, and crowd control builds to be useful, it's that those chances are overlooked in the race to finish missions "the right way", i.e. "faster". Here's a great example of how toxic and stupid this is:
I was playing an ISE a while back, with a team of 4 escorts and one sci ship. One of the gens got blown early, so there was a bit of a scramble to burn everything else down - we made it, but I had noticed during the scramble that instead of frantically attacking gens and the transformer, the sci ship went and dropped grav well on the nanites, then repulsors to push them back. When the transformer blew, the spheres we still a good ways back, so, you know, yay, optional saved. Of course, the Sci player had drawn all the aggro, and to my shame I couldn't put enough team heals on him to save him, nor could I pull aggro off him fast enough, so the sci ship went down.
Here's where it gets crazy - I sent him a message in team chat thanking him for helping save the optional, and the immediate response from the rest of my team was to assume that I was being sarcastic, and to heap additional scorn on the poor guy. One player was running a parser (I guess), and said something to the effect of "Yeah, newb, not only is your DPS only xxxx, but you blew up! Way to add nothing to the team!"
When I tried to clarify that I was honestly thanking him, and that he had been useful, I was told I was wrong, because DPS is all that matters, and had the sci ship been replaced with a tac escort, it wouldn't matter that the gen got blown early because we would have had enough dps to just blow through it. When I called them out for being *******s, their idea of "being nice" was to offer pointers on how to build proper STF escorts so as not to be a burden to the next team.
The discussion ended with the player who blew up the gen early blaming the sci player for the mistake, and the other two escorts point out that it was rude to bring a sub optimal ship to an STF, and waste their time. So, sci ship warps out, who can blame him? Time is running down because of all the arguing, so go to work on the second side, one of them blows a gen early AGAIN, guess what? Optional fail - the three other escorts warp out ******** about people not knowing the mission. Bad experience all the way around, and I'm sure led to more complaining about escorts being OP, other ships being UP, etc.
Here's thing, though - none of that had to happen. If instead of being fixated on DPS and speed as the only measures of "good play", if the other players had been able to recognize the value in what the sci ship was doing, everyone would have had fun, the mission almost certainly would have succeeded, and maybe one or two people would have realized it isn't really Escorts Online after all.
TL;DR: Maybe the problem isn't that non-escorts are bad, maybe the problem is that people don't value what those ships are good at, and feel like someone playing the game differently somehow diminishes the quality of the team.
The problem with this solution is that it appears to codify DPS chasing as the only legitimate play style choice, and further isolates cruisers and sci ships as undesirables that we only suffer in matches because Cryptic forces us to. Far from increasing diversity, this solution would drive home the idea that the proper way to play STFs is to finish them as fast as humanly possible, and woe betide the poor science ship who shows up specced for support.
No, the real solution here needs to start with people understanding the problem for what it is: not a balance problem, but a cultural problem. What I mean is, we have far, far too many players (at least on the forums) who feel like "fun" and "rewarding" gameplay means only two things - doing more DPS than other players, and finishing missions as fast as possible. I suspect the reason people gravitate towards those is because they feel like "being good at the game" must necessarily mean "being better than most people", and completion time and DPS are things that seem easy to objectively measure, so make excellent comparison points.
Whatever the cause, though, the effect is clear. It's not that there aren't chances for healers, tanks, and crowd control builds to be useful, it's that those chances are overlooked in the race to finish missions "the right way", i.e. "faster". Here's a great example of how toxic and stupid this is:
Irrelevant drawn out sob story aside, you couldn't be further from the core of the problem.
It has absolutely nothing to do with it being a cultural problem, and it has everything to with how the game is designed.
Nothing in the NPC content is designed around a) Staying alive long enough to dish out sufficient damage to break players, or b) dish out enough damage to warrant having a damage sponge in your team setup, or c) Nothing is designed to require controlling the situation, because any given situation is controlled by monstrous DPS outputs.
The way the three classes are set up lends it self to favor the Tactical Captain.
Attack Pattern Alpha.
This is an ability which stacks with everything else, as well as giving the player an increase of 50% Damage, 5% Crit chance, 50% Severity for 30 seconds.
Engineers gets, Rotate Shield Frequency, gee thanks I can now boost resists to my shields and regen em a bit against that enemy which is dead in the blink of an eye. Or the Science which debuffs targets resists, targets which take all of ~3 seconds for the team in an STF to drill down without said debuff.
The rest of the captain abilities are equally as daft, and further lends credence to the fact that there never should have been a multiple-class separation in STO.
Another side of the sphere is the way ships are set up. Ships which favor Tactical layouts have access to Attack Patterns with ridiculous modifiers towards increasing damage or reducing resistances on targets with shots fired. This is one of the single biggest proponents of the perceived imbalances often brought up on the forums, beyond that it also grants access to multiple tactical consoles which stacks to high heaven, as well as various weapon enhancing abilities. All things other classifications of ships have fewer of, thus further driving them down the ladder of desirability.
Itemization is completely off the rails, and is further driven out by every subsequent addition of a new ship iteration/tier, item pseudo brackets, and other gimmicky flip flop mechanics which can be stuffed in to this turkey. All things which drives the potential damage output of a player further beyond what content is designed to handle.
STO has fallen in a classic trap, of having to keep it's "baseline" of lvl 50 the same, without introducing the classic new +10 levels per update, while simultaneously introducing new gear to acquire. However at this point in the game, more levels isn't the solution, and would only further break the game.
The solution has to happen in the player classes and the way BOFFs and ships are set up, it is a massive undertaking.
Just because not everyone plays the optimal combination doesn't mean that it suddenly is not OP any more.
Since S7 launch I see hybrids of secorts, cruiser, and carriers. the new situation in STF drove me away from my armitage there. escorts were never op, it's just people who didn't understand the cruisers and the good builds for it.
I'm a tac captain, but also have sci and eng toons. I do agree the sci abilities suck because they have been plagued with nerfs and long cooldowns thanks to PvP players that cry foul if they can't counter sci skills, and swear their DPS can beat anything.
Comments
Just because not everyone plays the optimal combination doesn't mean that it suddenly is not OP any more.
Just because I may be concerned about people whom are not good at the game doesn't automatically make me bad at the game, some of us DO think of others when discussing this sort of thing, as it is I have a science in a science ship that out DPSes some tacticals in escorts, an eng cruiser that does the same but more often (and probably out DPSes my own Tac/scort) as well as the same eng in a healboat that is almost indestructible and a tac/scort that is capable of surviving an encounter with an elite tac cube.
But that isn't the point here, the point is that the vast majority of players CAN'T do that in fact a lot of players don't even know to use two EPtS and cycle them with at least 1 TT if not two of them on escorts so perhaps you should give those people a thought before proposing changes that would lead to them getting complained at more for building wrong and perhaps you should read the rest of the thread before posting.
In short read and think before you post.
Instead of (or in addition to) an endless cat-and-mouse game of buffing and nerfing, the developers could make it worthwhile to use other types of ships by making escorts wait longer to join a PUG, by the use of quota-based gating. That is, a new policy that all STF PUGs can have no more than, say, three of any of the basic starship types (cruiser, science vessel and escort) in the mix before starting. Maybe even two each, so we don't end up having PUGs with three sci vessels. (Other types of starships, such as carriers and destroyers, wouldn't count toward these limits.)
Here's how it would work: Instead of simply taking the first five players off the top of the queue, the STF would also take into account the type of starship the player has active at the time he joined the queue. If there are, say, too many escorts among the first five, only the first two or three would be allowed into the first STF instance; the rest would go back into the queue for the next instance. Meanwhile, players running other ship types would go straight to the head of the line.
Furthermore, to prevent players from gaming theis new system, once they join an STF queue, they would be locked into the starship they have active at the time, and not allowed to switch to a different ship until they've either left the queue or completed the STF. (Otherwise players could just park in front of the starship selection guy, join the queue with a science vessel to beat the quota, and then immediately switch back to an escort before the mission actually begins.)
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
The problem with this solution is that it appears to codify DPS chasing as the only legitimate play style choice, and further isolates cruisers and sci ships as undesirables that we only suffer in matches because Cryptic forces us to. Far from increasing diversity, this solution would drive home the idea that the proper way to play STFs is to finish them as fast as humanly possible, and woe betide the poor science ship who shows up specced for support.
No, the real solution here needs to start with people understanding the problem for what it is: not a balance problem, but a cultural problem. What I mean is, we have far, far too many players (at least on the forums) who feel like "fun" and "rewarding" gameplay means only two things - doing more DPS than other players, and finishing missions as fast as possible. I suspect the reason people gravitate towards those is because they feel like "being good at the game" must necessarily mean "being better than most people", and completion time and DPS are things that seem easy to objectively measure, so make excellent comparison points.
Whatever the cause, though, the effect is clear. It's not that there aren't chances for healers, tanks, and crowd control builds to be useful, it's that those chances are overlooked in the race to finish missions "the right way", i.e. "faster". Here's a great example of how toxic and stupid this is:
I was playing an ISE a while back, with a team of 4 escorts and one sci ship. One of the gens got blown early, so there was a bit of a scramble to burn everything else down - we made it, but I had noticed during the scramble that instead of frantically attacking gens and the transformer, the sci ship went and dropped grav well on the nanites, then repulsors to push them back. When the transformer blew, the spheres we still a good ways back, so, you know, yay, optional saved. Of course, the Sci player had drawn all the aggro, and to my shame I couldn't put enough team heals on him to save him, nor could I pull aggro off him fast enough, so the sci ship went down.
Here's where it gets crazy - I sent him a message in team chat thanking him for helping save the optional, and the immediate response from the rest of my team was to assume that I was being sarcastic, and to heap additional scorn on the poor guy. One player was running a parser (I guess), and said something to the effect of "Yeah, newb, not only is your DPS only xxxx, but you blew up! Way to add nothing to the team!"
When I tried to clarify that I was honestly thanking him, and that he had been useful, I was told I was wrong, because DPS is all that matters, and had the sci ship been replaced with a tac escort, it wouldn't matter that the gen got blown early because we would have had enough dps to just blow through it. When I called them out for being *******s, their idea of "being nice" was to offer pointers on how to build proper STF escorts so as not to be a burden to the next team.
The discussion ended with the player who blew up the gen early blaming the sci player for the mistake, and the other two escorts point out that it was rude to bring a sub optimal ship to an STF, and waste their time. So, sci ship warps out, who can blame him? Time is running down because of all the arguing, so go to work on the second side, one of them blows a gen early AGAIN, guess what? Optional fail - the three other escorts warp out ******** about people not knowing the mission. Bad experience all the way around, and I'm sure led to more complaining about escorts being OP, other ships being UP, etc.
Here's thing, though - none of that had to happen. If instead of being fixated on DPS and speed as the only measures of "good play", if the other players had been able to recognize the value in what the sci ship was doing, everyone would have had fun, the mission almost certainly would have succeeded, and maybe one or two people would have realized it isn't really Escorts Online after all.
TL;DR: Maybe the problem isn't that non-escorts are bad, maybe the problem is that people don't value what those ships are good at, and feel like someone playing the game differently somehow diminishes the quality of the team.
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
Irrelevant drawn out sob story aside, you couldn't be further from the core of the problem.
It has absolutely nothing to do with it being a cultural problem, and it has everything to with how the game is designed.
Nothing in the NPC content is designed around a) Staying alive long enough to dish out sufficient damage to break players, or b) dish out enough damage to warrant having a damage sponge in your team setup, or c) Nothing is designed to require controlling the situation, because any given situation is controlled by monstrous DPS outputs.
The way the three classes are set up lends it self to favor the Tactical Captain.
Attack Pattern Alpha.
This is an ability which stacks with everything else, as well as giving the player an increase of 50% Damage, 5% Crit chance, 50% Severity for 30 seconds.
Engineers gets, Rotate Shield Frequency, gee thanks I can now boost resists to my shields and regen em a bit against that enemy which is dead in the blink of an eye. Or the Science which debuffs targets resists, targets which take all of ~3 seconds for the team in an STF to drill down without said debuff.
The rest of the captain abilities are equally as daft, and further lends credence to the fact that there never should have been a multiple-class separation in STO.
Another side of the sphere is the way ships are set up. Ships which favor Tactical layouts have access to Attack Patterns with ridiculous modifiers towards increasing damage or reducing resistances on targets with shots fired. This is one of the single biggest proponents of the perceived imbalances often brought up on the forums, beyond that it also grants access to multiple tactical consoles which stacks to high heaven, as well as various weapon enhancing abilities. All things other classifications of ships have fewer of, thus further driving them down the ladder of desirability.
Itemization is completely off the rails, and is further driven out by every subsequent addition of a new ship iteration/tier, item pseudo brackets, and other gimmicky flip flop mechanics which can be stuffed in to this turkey. All things which drives the potential damage output of a player further beyond what content is designed to handle.
STO has fallen in a classic trap, of having to keep it's "baseline" of lvl 50 the same, without introducing the classic new +10 levels per update, while simultaneously introducing new gear to acquire. However at this point in the game, more levels isn't the solution, and would only further break the game.
The solution has to happen in the player classes and the way BOFFs and ships are set up, it is a massive undertaking.
Since S7 launch I see hybrids of secorts, cruiser, and carriers. the new situation in STF drove me away from my armitage there. escorts were never op, it's just people who didn't understand the cruisers and the good builds for it.