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a few ways to make cruisers more potent
ursusmorologus
Member Posts: 5,328 Arc User
Fundamental problem is that small ships and large ships have roughly the same number of weapons of roughly the same power. As a result, the ship that is able to get the enemy into a compromising position firstest/bestest is going to win. This is a major design flaw, IMO, and should be balanced by something else.
For example, cruisers are supposed to be big and slow AND STRONG, so if you get close to one you should suffer harsh consequences. But with beam weaps there are no harsh consequences--the escort just laughs while taking the damage, and unloads the concentrated focus-fire. So one way to fix it, is to increase the pain of beams, but if you do that escorts will just swithc weapons and back to the same problem.
One option, is to synch cone size and weapon range. Maybe a beam and torpedo still has 10k range, but the dhc only has 5k range. If you want to do sharp-damage spike, you have to run in to shoot, if you make it you'll probably win but you better make it. Probelm with this is cloaking, there is no risk of getting shot on approach so it will make cloaks OP. But its an option to consider.
Another option is to make weapons consume power according to DPS. This is simple and avoids some other problems, but it also suffers a bit since an escort with beams is more dangerous than a cruiser with beams due to its flanking ability.
Another option, and one that actually reflects differences of ship hull, is to vary the size of the power core by ship class. For example, give cruisers 50 more power than escorts, and give frigates 20 less than escorts. Then the larger ships could move more power into weapons and shields than the smaller ships. It would instantly make larger ships "big" and significantly harder to kill than small ships, while still preserving the agility advantage. This is probably my favorite option, since it is easy to implement and doesn't flatten the curve too much. Carriers would be a little tricky--maybe use ~20 power for each hangar pet, to soak up excess, but it seems like it would scale up and down pretty well (it would also make shuttles less ridiculous, they should not be able to power up a battleship weapon and shield but they do it just fine).
Long-term, weapon counts should probably be adjusted so that larger ships have way more turrets than smaller ships. But these are some short-term fix options.
For example, cruisers are supposed to be big and slow AND STRONG, so if you get close to one you should suffer harsh consequences. But with beam weaps there are no harsh consequences--the escort just laughs while taking the damage, and unloads the concentrated focus-fire. So one way to fix it, is to increase the pain of beams, but if you do that escorts will just swithc weapons and back to the same problem.
One option, is to synch cone size and weapon range. Maybe a beam and torpedo still has 10k range, but the dhc only has 5k range. If you want to do sharp-damage spike, you have to run in to shoot, if you make it you'll probably win but you better make it. Probelm with this is cloaking, there is no risk of getting shot on approach so it will make cloaks OP. But its an option to consider.
Another option is to make weapons consume power according to DPS. This is simple and avoids some other problems, but it also suffers a bit since an escort with beams is more dangerous than a cruiser with beams due to its flanking ability.
Another option, and one that actually reflects differences of ship hull, is to vary the size of the power core by ship class. For example, give cruisers 50 more power than escorts, and give frigates 20 less than escorts. Then the larger ships could move more power into weapons and shields than the smaller ships. It would instantly make larger ships "big" and significantly harder to kill than small ships, while still preserving the agility advantage. This is probably my favorite option, since it is easy to implement and doesn't flatten the curve too much. Carriers would be a little tricky--maybe use ~20 power for each hangar pet, to soak up excess, but it seems like it would scale up and down pretty well (it would also make shuttles less ridiculous, they should not be able to power up a battleship weapon and shield but they do it just fine).
Long-term, weapon counts should probably be adjusted so that larger ships have way more turrets than smaller ships. But these are some short-term fix options.
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I think that the weapons still do more and less damage at ranges 0 - 10K. So the closer you get the more damage you do. If players would STOP turning every ship into a DPS boat then the game would work as intended. Cruisers are suppose to be big giant floating rocks and if you arm them right they still do that.
A cruiser, if built right, can still sluff off a escort run... and that is what they should do. If you turn it into a DPS beam boat like most players do these days, then it is just a matter of who throws out more DPS. An escort should pass over the cruiser with all buffs depleted, the cruiser then snares them and rips them in-half while the escort tries to make a break for open skies.
A sci ship is suppose to heal players. I can't tell you the last time I got a sci ship to actually throw me a heal. Even the Vesta captains seem to focus on DPS. I can tell you that when I play my sci toon I am an honest to god support player. I keep my team in the fight and only throw a few shots around if everything is taken care of.
The failure of those to keep a cruiser in a fight is a lack of understanding core concepts on their own parts. So I personally don't agree with changing cruisers at all. If anything I think escorts should have even weaker shields and hulls.
Eisaak
Surely it isn't hard to do, and would do a lot to help ease the pain many cruiser pilots experience. It also wouldn't make cruisers overpowered, nor step on any other classes toes, so to speak, and it would be such a small change that nothing else in the game would need to be changed or looked at.
failing that tiny bit of an upgrade, maybe they could actually make the crew mechanic work decently, that would help cruisers be the 'tanks' they should be by keeping the hull regen component higher for longer, at the moment its laughable and an aspect of ships i completely ignore.
just throwing that out there.
Make some missions that reward for being the best tank and some missions for beig the best science power user and the complaining will drop off a bit.
There are 18 science bridge officer skills currently in the game (not including captain skills) only 3 of them heal either shields or hull. One of which is Science team which no-one in their right mind would take into any end game elite mission as you need tactical team on as much as possible or 2 hits from most things will cause your sudden explosion.
So to put it another way healing is at most 1/6th of a science captains focus, the rest should be debuffs.
As for the OP, I do agree that a cruiser should be more deadly the longer it is in a fight, perhaps some form of stacking weapon power drain resistance should happen like with a science ships sensor scan.
The longer you're firing weapons the more efficient your crew gets managing the power drain granting you a slow build up to weapon power drain resistance (up to say 75% resistance) which means the longer you're in a fight the less trivial firing multiple beam or cannons will become and thus indirectly the more damage they will do.
This could stack by 1% per second up to 75s. Against escorts doing hit and run (what they're supposed to do) it will do very little. Against escorts bogged down by disabling abilities it will help keep and slightly increase pressure on the escort till it pops or manages to flee.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
An Engineer can heal much better than a Sci in space combat....a Sci provides the team with the debuffs and roots that makes taking the other team down easier, or so it is supposed to work in theory. A strong Gravity Well III with full aux can pin down an entire group...allowing the team escorts to take out ships with AOE and precision strikes.
A sci captain could be a decent secondary healer...when I am in a group I usually throw out a hazard emitter every once in a while -- especially if I see someone suffering from plasma burn -- but other than that I do my best to control the battlespace by limiting opponent options as best as I can.
Agreed. A lot of players on the Federation side just don't seem to grasp the point of Federation cruisers. Cruisers do exactly what you described, and nothing more.
If people REALLY want to fly a DPS-heavy cruisers, they should make a KDF toon and fly the battlecruisers that are meant to both dish out DPS and heal themselves (but not so much healing others), rather than constantly whining that Federation cruisers aren't the ridiculously powerful ships depicted in canon (phaser beams skewering enemy craft, etc).
Agreed on the sci ships. The prime purpose of sci ships in this game is to debuff enemies and make it easier for friendlies to kill said enemies. As a secondary role, they can throw out some shield heals and HEs. I hate fighting sci ships in PvP, because there's a whole lot of really frustrating stuff they can toss at you.
You wanna boost power levels? Here's what you do: Use an Engineering character. Get Bridge Officers with Efficiency. Invest into the skills that boost power levels. Boom, suddenly you've got more power than you could ever need.
Science ships should be in a better position to support, as they're not damage dealers so they don't need to be in the thick of the fighting, just close enough to debuff enemies and buff friends. Unfortunately fact that pretty much everything has a range of 10km, except tractor beams which are one of the ways a science ship can pin an enemy, it means that it's hard not to be in weapons range anyway.
There's also a lot of wiggle room for hybrid builds; thanks to PvE being about nothing but damage you don't see as many specialists other than the tactical DPS escort builds. In PvP I think there's more room for specialising.
I like this idea; even if it means your weapon power holds above 100 most of the time it still won't do more damage than the kind of burst damage escorts can do with their cannons when fired from 125 weapon power with emergency power to weapons, tactical team, attack pattern alpha/beta plus some relevant weapon powers, but the continuous fire would be punishing over time. It would also give more of a reason for human players to focus on taking down a cruiser, which would make tanking builds more effective since they can't just be ignored as easily.
I agree with this as well; it doesn't really make sense that you need a tactical team to manage your shields for you. I'd rather it were a feature of the shield distribution officer (which makes more sense), for example a 20% chance that when a shield facing is damage that it will drain 4% from from each of the other shield facings in order to heal the one under fire, effectively giving your ship a heavily reinforced single shield facing, especially with multiple such officers, but would leave you vulnerable if surrounded.
The crew damage mechanic absolutely needs to be fixed; I don't see how it can be so hard to just scale the crew damage with the amount of damage actually inflicted. e.g - if a torpedo would deal 2,000 damage, but 1,800 is absorbed by shields then that reduces the damage to crew to 10% of what the damage would have been (e.g - if 30 crew would have been disabled/killed, then that becomes 3 instead).
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
Perhaps the distribution skill should either be linked to crew levels remaining (after fixing all these things that seem to murder them in 2 seconds) or another option is to bring it to all team abilities but give tactical team say 50% more speed at distributing.
I also think tactical team giving a speed and manoeuvrability buff would go some ways to making escorts more hit and run. Not defence, not damage, just as it is now with a scaling boost to speed and slight boost to turn.
Still I think we all agree that something needs doing about shield distribution and tactical team, whatever we think.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
I agree with your point but...
Every MMO ever created or ever will be created has three types of players. A "healer", A "Tank" and a "DPS". You could also say a "defensive", a "balanced", and a "offensive". Some games add a few extra little variants in there to make you feel like you get a choice. But the more damage dealt is almost always equal to the lack of damage you can take before death. Hence game balance.
The sci character, even in the STO original documentation that I have right here in my hand says "Science officers focus on support (page three by the way). They can lend aid to allied ships and officers by HEALING them... or hinder the effectiveness of their enemies."
The science officer has greatly lost the effectiveness they once had but a good science officer with the right skills STILL can do his job and protect his entire team while limiting the enemy. The problem is that everyone wants DPS and no one gives a TRIBBLE about their team.
Every player today wants to turn every game they touch into a first-person-shooter and kill everything that moves with no thought to strategy and/or team work.
So I do agree how the game has perverted this role, but that was NEVER its intent.
Eisaak
A cruiser and thus the engineering space skills (as the OP was talking about space) have more heals at 5 out of 14. Only 3 can be used on other players but still that is about the same as science.
Another thing you seem to be overlooking is that since the original documentation we have had 7 seasons, a full skill revamp, added level caps and many new ships and consoles. The original documentation is out of date at least if not damn right untrue.
There are only 4 PvE missions I can think of where damage is not the focus of whether you win with optional or lose in a blaze of fail. This is why everyone is so wrapped up in damage. It is the only thing that gauges whether you win or lose.
From what I can gather from your posts you seem to be confused between ships and captains. The captain brings extra abilities either in terms of damage, survivability or debuffs to the ship. The ship has a natural alignment towards certain roles which can lead to some very interesting combos if the game was balanced properly.
As stated earlier its all about damage now and the OP is drawing attention to the fact that unless you're in an escort you just can't keep up and will only end up hurting the team regardless of captain career.
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Really all of the rank I attack patterns need to get weaker so that the rank II and III versions have a reason to be used, as currently most escorts use their higher rank slots for cannon and/or torpedo abilities, or high level beam abilities for ships with good tactical layouts but no access to cannons. Meanwhile Tactical Team I is pretty much king of the ensign tactical slot; no-one takes anything else unless they've got a third ensign slot to fill.
But the point is really that the shield distribution effect either needs to be moved to where we can all use it all the time or just generally in a more balanced way, and keep heavy duty healing firmly in the domain of the cruiser. Tactical team should be more offensive but with the repel boarders effect (no tactical debuff removal), engineering team the full-on emergency repair ability for when more of your hull is adrift than attached to your ship, and science team should be more about the debuff resistance and removal. Give them some actual roles, but such that a cruiser can realistically survive even with its shields spending more time down than up, science ships being practically debuff proof and tactical ships just doing what they already do and shooting everything.
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
This is why you and I have such a disconnect on this issue. I use Tac Team 2 on every ship I own and I use tac team 3 on my Escorts..... as intended.
Why wouldn't you. It is a great damage buff +30 to energy weapons and +30 to projectiles. It also throws in a small shield buff and repels boarders.
Eisaak
The reasons are...
1) TT1 is the best Ensign level Tactical ability, hands down.
2) TT2 and 3 only have marginal bonuses to damage. In most cases you're better served by running an Attack Pattern or a cannon skill in those higher slots.
This. By running TT2 or TT3 on an escort, he's nerfing the offensive capabilities of the escort. . .the only real use for an escort.
As for the reasons above there is no reason to run TT2 or 3 as the buff it gives is max 30 while attack pattern beta 1 will lower target resistance by over 20 (think its about 30 with max attack patterns) which increases not only your damage but everyone else's damage and it stacks.
You will find you kill things far quicker with that than TT2 and choosing as high a level cannon ability will boost your damage so much more than tactical team ever could.
Hope this helps clarify things. I can even post you a sample generic build to try which will make all enemies laughable for your tactical captain
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
If that is true, then thanks for pointing it out. However, let me point out one possible disadvantage of using Tactical Team 2 over Attack Pattern Beta 1: The Tactical Team 2 is only a buff to yourself, whereas Attack Pattern Beta 1 is a debuff that benefits everyone on your team. So, I'd say it's a situational thing.
Let me also point out this: In the Lieutenant BOFF slot, you have access to Scatter Volley and Rapidfire, both of which are arguably more important than TT2 when it comes to improving DPS (burst DPS, that is). Then there's the attack patterns, etc. TT has to 'compete' with other very useful skills in the LT slot.
Perhaps my statement was worded wrong. It's not so much a 'nerf' as a 'less optimal choice', at least in how I see it. I use Tactical Team for tanking in my Raptors/BoPs. . .the firepower benefit is icing on the cake. That's why I don't see much point in going beyond TT1.
They don't use ET/ST because everyone seems to prefer stuff like Transfer Shield Strength and Hazard Emitters. Most people consider them better, and even if you don't, at the very least they are good alternatives.
What's the alternative to TT? Nothing because no other skill provides shield distribution. The higher level versions of it provide a paltry improvement but the reason people take it is for the shield distribution and that doesn't improve. So everyone takes TT1 because tac ensign skills are a very limited choice anyway.
I already find most enemies laughable. I also don't feel I need to run the same cookie-cutter design every 9 year old uses.
But seriously last thing I will say on this because you want to preach and not really listen. I will agree that attack pattern beta lowers enemy by 20 and that helps all players. Tactical Team 2 boosts EVERY weapon I have by 24, then add buffs which in the big picture can add up to a lot of damage. Also Tactical team can be given to other players and NPCs. Which I use all the time in Elite STFs because no how many time you are boarded and set on fire, no one seems to think Hazard Emitters and Tactical team are important.
My builds work great with all my universal consoles and I manage to stay alive even when all the other "better built" tac ships with me are killed over and over.
Eisaak
Your the one who isn't listening. Yes TT2 boosts weapons by 24. But TT1 boosts them by 18. Your gaining +6 over other players not 24. That +6 difference is neglible. That's the point.
There's many other nice things that could fill that slot. Your choices in the ensign slot are much more limited.
No one's TELLING you how to play, if your not interested in others opinion, then you can POLITELY decline it. If your build works for you then great.
Probably.
But without it, cruisers pretty much pop like balloons.
Actually, pretty much everything will pop without it, I suppose. Unless they make shield distribution work faster.
It's the synergy with shield heals that makes it powerful. One shield facing pops -> TT, all shields now yellow, TSS, all shields now green. It's more powerful the more shields and heals you have because it ensures those shields and heals always go where it's needed.
The problem with it for cruisers imo is because they have less tac slots, and because they need the damage skills as well, the choice is a bit more painful to make for them compared to escorts who usually feel they have too many (ensign) tac slots.
My Fleet Ambassador, maybe you have seen her, The ORCA, Handles elite stf's with ease.
Tac Team, I have 1, I use it to clear assimilate starship. Bind your distribute shields to your right mouse button, and with the right build and boff powers it will cover 90% of your shield recovery needs. Yes, spikes happen. A shield facing can drop in a heartbeat, but if TT is the only way you think you can recover, I will bluntly tell you you're doing it wrong.
Not only can a Fed cruiser tank, but tank and deal good damage. Klingon cruisers with Plasmatic leech can do better, but that is a different story. I average 6k dps in elite stf's, while healing others and maintaining 100% lockdown on aggro against fleetmates that pull twice to three times my damage.
I pug regularly, as stf's are my prefered way to play for dil. You want proof, shoot me a tell and join me for a run.
Brody.
PS I run a sci-team. I pvp with my fleet alot and clearing subnucs > tac team for all but the most mind-boggling alpha strikes.