You do know that kdf can get leadership too right? The tier 4 Marauding rewards a boff of any type and some races to the kdf. I got 4 human boffs with leadership from it. Purchased the boffs by direct trade from people who reached tier 4 Marauding but didn't want the boffs. So go get you some
My KDF character now tanks as much as my fed character. Also every once in a great while an kdf alien boff will randomly have leadership. This is very rare though. I got my boffs for 14-18 million each.
Unless things changed recently, you can't stack multiple humans boffs to get the hull repair proc, only one boff would count. Which isn't the case of saurians and letheans which you can stack as many as you can fit. The only advantage fed has is that the captain can also be human. So a fed human with one or many boff humans will get the proc from the captain and the proc from only one boff.
Hear! Sons of Kahless
Hear! Daughters too.
The blood of battle washes clean.
The Warrior brave and true.
We fight, we love, and then we kill...
It is not proc, it is a passive boost to hull heal. And yes, they stack all the way.
Then"proc" IMO is kind of a relative term. It could be view as an out of combat proc, since it happens every so many seconds. The way this used to work (the hull regen out of combat) was not stackable for boffs, and not in the combat. I can tell that 100% sure. I really don't know how this works now, since I barely played in the last 2.5 months.
Edit: never mind, I just read some posts and it seems the human boff was adjusted so it stacks now. Effing changes with every patch, lol.
Hear! Sons of Kahless
Hear! Daughters too.
The blood of battle washes clean.
The Warrior brave and true.
We fight, we love, and then we kill...
I realize this thread is about weapons, but I feel an issue that's been neglected here is boff abilities that do damage over time like Directed Energy Modulation and Eject Warp Plasma. Granted, DEM was never very strong in the first place, and many people use EWP to slow movement, not cause damage; however, I feel there is something wrong if DoT boff abilities can be completely overcome by passive healing and resistance.
I realize this thread is about weapons, but I feel an issue that's been neglected here is boff abilities that do damage over time like Directed Energy Modulation and Eject Warp Plasma. Granted, DEM was never very strong in the first place, and many people use EWP to slow movement, not cause damage; however, I feel there is something wrong if DoT boff abilities can be completely overcome by passive healing and resistance.
those skills are absolutely fine, when used right. pare DEM3 up with single cannons, or DHCs and turrets on kdf cruisers, and you will deal a bunch of extra damage wile CRF is up. DEM and beams, not much happens, rate of fire is too low.
EWP can be buffed by plasma tac consoles, particle gens, tac buffs and the tier 5 romulan active power. at 100% health, ive seen EWP3 deal 2k DOT fully buffed as by all those things. if it crits, and it chain crits, it will deal even more.
just auto fireing the omega torp on someone can take half thier health after you get 5 charges on them if they dont do any healing. you can get a lot out of that weapon too, and the rom torp
those skills are absolutely fine, when used right. pare DEM3 up with single cannons, or DHCs and turrets on kdf cruisers, and you will deal a bunch of extra damage wile CRF is up. DEM and beams, not much happens, rate of fire is too low.
Can you give me some specific numbers? How much damage can you get DEM to do per shot? per second? with what weapons and what other buffs running?
EWP can be buffed by plasma tac consoles, particle gens, tac buffs and the tier 5 romulan active power. at 100% health, ive seen EWP3 deal 2k DOT fully buffed as by all those things. if it crits, and it chain crits, it will deal even more.
So you are saying you have to fully invest in it to make the skill work. It sounds as though the opportunity cost is relatively high. In contrast, an ability like CRF benefits from skills and equipment that most people would use anyway.
Can you give me some specific numbers? How much damage can you get DEM to do per shot? per second? with what weapons and what other buffs running?
So you are saying you have to fully invest in it to make the skill work. It sounds as though the opportunity cost is relatively high. In contrast, an ability like CRF benefits from skills and equipment that most people would use anyway.
from parceing, on average DEM3 on my tac heavy cruisers accounts for 12 to 18% of my total damage. its about even with non CRF turret damage.
theres a phrase for a build that does not fully invest in the thing it is using, that phrase is fail build. you can get pretty easily about 1000 DOT even without using plasma weapons for the plasma tac consoles.when you use plasma weapons and use EWP, everything fits like a glove, theres no opertunity cost. the only issue is plasma damage agienst most shields. you still end up dealing most your damage with DOTs though, so as long as you use well EWP3 tacticly, the less damage you deal to shields isnt as big of a deal. in pve with EWP that strong you don't even need to shoot npcs you get stuck in the plasma.
theres a phrase for a build that does not fully invest in the thing it is using, that phrase is fail build. you can get pretty easily about 1000 DOT even without using plasma weapons for the plasma tac consoles.when you use plasma weapons and use EWP, everything fits like a glove, theres no opertunity cost. the only issue is plasma damage agienst most shields. you still end up dealing most your damage with DOTs though, so as long as you use well EWP3 tacticly, the less damage you deal to shields isnt as big of a deal. in pve with EWP that strong you don't even need to shoot npcs you get stuck in the plasma.
I don't know why you say there is "no opportunity cost". If you put skill points into particle generators, then you can't put those skill points somewhere else. If you use particle generator consoles, then you can't use those science console slots for something else.
The best balance adjustments are made gradually, please do not increase beam damage by 25% Cryptic. Start with a 5 or 10% increase in usefulness and see what happens.
if they did nerf healing, just so pressure could do more, that would leave everyone more exposed to DHC spike. theres a few damage duffing passives too, higher crit then ever, and 5 tac consoles and 5 forward weapons even. thats going to be significantly more deadly if 'healing' is nerfed to the point were pressure has an effect.
'healing' in this context is a stupidly stupidly simplified word to describe anti pressure, it really has nothing to do with station power healing. its doffs, set and elite shields that can let you cap shield resist, passives that proc heal, passives that add like 10 res mods to your shield, embassy consoles proc healing, elite phasers proc healing, ship based consoles giving AOE heals, team fortress, fleet and lockbox ships with more durability, its all of that that directly takes away from the impact of preasure.
where exactly does one start if one wanted to 'nerf healing' then? its not a solution. 4 shot per cycle pressure needs to be removed, beam arrays, DBBs and single cannons need a DHC like fireing cycle. that fixes the problem without taking anything away.
Well, look: DHCs should do more damage than beams.
But if you nerf healing (which can be a PvP only nerf, largely, if it's only player weapons that debuff healing) and then give cruisers adequate non-healing mitigation, they become LESS spike susceptible.
In my mind, all this calls for is a mitigation overhaul:
- Hull/resist/defense mitigation needs to be modified by ship, like shields are. Escorts need an inherent mod of less than 1.0 and cruisers need more than 1.0 here.
- More hull = more resist to all, beyond the current point of diminishing returns. The less hull you have, the less resist you should have. The more hull you have, the more resist you should have.
- Certain ships that are currently less impressive like the Galaxy should probably get higher mitigation mods in the course of assigning this "armor mod."
- Beyond this, longer term, I like Geko's idea of science ships equipping two deflectors and ships getting a "Hull Plating" gear slot. And under my proposed changes, this could largely be a +HP item. And cruisers get exclusive access to items with dramatically more HP.
Well, look: DHCs should do more damage than beams.
But if you nerf healing (which can be a PvP only nerf, largely, if it's only player weapons that debuff healing) and then give cruisers adequate non-healing mitigation, they become LESS spike susceptible.
In my mind, all this calls for is a mitigation overhaul:
- Hull/resist/defense mitigation needs to be modified by ship, like shields are. Escorts need an inherent mod of less than 1.0 and cruisers need more than 1.0 here.
- More hull = more resist to all, beyond the current point of diminishing returns. The less hull you have, the less resist you should have. The more hull you have, the more resist you should have.
- Certain ships that are currently less impressive like the Galaxy should probably get higher mitigation mods in the course of assigning this "armor mod."
- Beyond this, longer term, I like Geko's idea of science ships equipping two deflectors and ships getting a "Hull Plating" gear slot. And under my proposed changes, this could largely be a +HP item. And cruisers get exclusive access to items with dramatically more HP.
If cruisers had their healing reduced, why would their armor or damage mitigation matter? Their damage isn't threatening, so the only reason to shoot at a cruiser is to keep him from healing his more dangerous team-mates.
Tanks are utterly pointless in PvP, which is why most MMOs give their tanks good sustained damage in PvP. You shouldn't want the big armored warrior to keep following you around hacking at you with an axe.
Usually the distinction between tank and DPS doesn't become important until PvE, and even then there is usually an option for a tank to change gear a little and do 'good enough' DPS if not tops.
If cruisers had their healing reduced, why would their armor or damage mitigation matter? Their damage isn't threatening, so the only reason to shoot at a cruiser is to keep him from healing his more dangerous team-mates.
Tanks are utterly pointless in PvP, which is why most MMOs give their tanks good sustained damage in PvP. You shouldn't want the big armored warrior to keep following you around hacking at you with an axe.
Usually the distinction between tank and DPS doesn't become important until PvE, and even then there is usually an option for a tank to change gear a little and do 'good enough' DPS if not tops.
My experience is that tanking classes tend to have SPIKIER damage in PvP, vs. a PvE DPS class' sustained damage.
But it isn't unheard of to have PvP taunts which force you to target the tank and it's something Cryptic has done before. Probably trickier in STO space.
But, again, if you aren't looking at PvP AS DUELING, modes like Capture the Flag don't really necessitate a taunt as the gameplay will direct players to target certain targets.
The problem is partly focusing on PvP as a deathmatch rather than competing objectives.
You do know that kdf can get leadership too right? The tier 4 Marauding rewards a boff of any type and some races to the kdf. I got 4 human boffs with leadership from it. Purchased the boffs by direct trade from people who reached tier 4 Marauding but didn't want the boffs. So go get you some
My KDF character now tanks as much as my fed character. Also every once in a great while an kdf alien boff will randomly have leadership. This is very rare though. I got my boffs for 14-18 million each.
nobody who ground to t4 marauder is giving up theyre free human boff. even if i did believe you, how many people out there who got to t4 are going to trade to you so you can have 3 human boffs? not many if at all. if u are fed you can stack 5 for 5k ec. every fed uses them. maybe, and i say maybe 5 or ten kdf can find people to trade them more than one boff.
bottom line. everything is spoonfed to spoonFEDS. from ships to stacking leadership. luckily our kdf players are far more skilled than 99% of feds and we win 99% of arenas and C and Hs but the handholding from cryptic is getting silly.
luckily our kdf players are far more skilled than 99% of feds and we win 99% of arenas and C and Hs
The average Klingon is just as sad as the average Fed care bear. Only difference is that 5 selfish damage dealing builds will beat 5 selfish tank builds.
Unless things changed recently, you can't stack multiple humans boffs to get the hull repair proc, only one boff would count. Which isn't the case of saurians and letheans which you can stack as many as you can fit. The only advantage fed has is that the captain can also be human. So a fed human with one or many boff humans will get the proc from the captain and the proc from only one boff.
u are clueless. its not a proc. its a base hull regen. i took my fed out the other day to test.
bought 5 human boffs with my human captain. cost me less than 5k ec, lulz. loaded the little pukes all in and you know what my base regen was in non sector battle space? 289%
you know how much my kdf charachter has because i cannot stack leadership? 118%
i took that fed (mirror patrol scort) to carraya to test it on romulans. i hull tanked all 5 waves, never repaired my sheilds and if i took some damage it would laughably just heal right up. i was amazed, luckily i find cheese not fun and kinda pathetic. so i went back to kdf.
while i have no problem vaping fed players in pvp it is because i alpha strike with a BoP.
pressure dmg from our cruisers could not keep up with that kind of regen.
dontdrunk is kdf and a good cruiser man. im not surprised he is so vocal about this issue. i can imagine its not that hard for fed beamers to burn bops because we are inherintly very thin and squishy. a kdf beamer? with the fed hull regen on theyre scorts? forget it.
yes, consoles fleet sheilds etc are an issue but dont underestimate the fed only hull regen. that in itself can out pressure pressure dmg
one major issue i see that is directly develeopment related is that elite sheilds are far superior to advanced or elite fleet weapons.....dmg mods? cmon man!
the Average Klingon Is Just As Sad As The Average Fed Care Bear. Only Difference Is That 5 Selfish Damage Dealing Builds Will Beat 5 Selfish Tank Builds.
+1 Lol.....
"Cryptic Studio’s Jack Emmert (2010): Microtransactions are the biggest bunch of nonsense. I like paying one fee and not worrying about it – like my cellphone. The world’s biggest MMO isn’t item based, even though the black market item GDP is bigger than Russia … microtransactions make me want to die.”
Well, look: DHCs should do more damage than beams.
But if you nerf healing (which can be a PvP only nerf, largely, if it's only player weapons that debuff healing) and then give cruisers adequate non-healing mitigation, they become LESS spike susceptible.
In my mind, all this calls for is a mitigation overhaul:
- Hull/resist/defense mitigation needs to be modified by ship, like shields are. Escorts need an inherent mod of less than 1.0 and cruisers need more than 1.0 here.
- More hull = more resist to all, beyond the current point of diminishing returns. The less hull you have, the less resist you should have. The more hull you have, the more resist you should have.
- Certain ships that are currently less impressive like the Galaxy should probably get higher mitigation mods in the course of assigning this "armor mod."
- Beyond this, longer term, I like Geko's idea of science ships equipping two deflectors and ships getting a "Hull Plating" gear slot. And under my proposed changes, this could largely be a +HP item. And cruisers get exclusive access to items with dramatically more HP.
in the entire course of this, no one has suggested that beams should out damage cannons. all i se is more short sighted solutions, that actually do nothing to solve what is actually the problem. there is nothing on the healing side that can be nerfed, its not the station powers that are the problem all the powercreep, that suppose defense and spike actually, continue to balance each other really. spike and healing, with or without tones of cross healing, with or without that being countered by sci, is still basically balanced.
messing with ether the lol healing or lol spike that keeps getting built up cant be done in a vacuum, that unravels the balance that there is. maintaining balance has always been about containing spike, and as both spike and healing grew, pressure was not part of the equation, and now its gone, never to be a part of game strategy again after everything that has been added.
so for the 50th time, get rid of pressure damage delivery from non DHC weapons, and your done. no ones spike gets nefed, no ones healing and passives gets nerfed, and ships other then escorts will do more then a sum total of 0 damage again. they can continue buffing spike and healing for the rest of the games life, and there wouldn't be anything marginalized.
cruisers geting an armor console, sci ships getting another deflector slot, and escorts geting... something, well they dont need anything, they are fine. making cruisers more tanky is not needed, knowing how to defend your self makes a cruiser 1000 times tankier then not knowing how to defend yourself, the probolem with all the noobs complaining about escorts. not just defending yourself in a cruiser, but everything. but again, the issue is damage, non escorts deal none with energy weapons, and they used too, and it was good.
an escort should not be able to beat a decked out tac cruiser, like back in the old days. im not talking about balancing 1v1, that was just a result of standard balancing. when i attack a cruiser in an escort, im not worried about any damage the cruiser is capable of, im worried about another escort counter attacking me wile i do it. no fed cruiser is capable of even driving away an escort anymore, let alone killing them faster then the escort can kill the cruiser.
cruisers geting an armor console, sci ships getting another deflector slot, and escorts geting... something, well they dont need anything, they are fine.
In the bit he talked about the Heavy Armor and Secondary Deflector - those were things he mentioned for Cruisers and Science Vessels getting because Escorts get DHCs.
an escort should not be able to beat a decked out tac cruiser, like back in the old days.
Okay. This is what I am disputing. I disagree with this. Completely. Absolutely. Totally. Nothing could persuade me of this.
You should need to be a tanking cruiser that sacrifices firepower for this to be remotely true.
The problem is rooted in PvP that is designed around killing rather than goals. Escorts should be the best at killing. Absolutely. Period. By less of a margin when compared to a Tac Cruiser/Battlecruiser but still ahead.
But killing alone should not win matches. If all you can do is kill, you should be severely at a disadvantage for winning.
that was an example of a 1v1 situation a tac cruiser and an escort find them selves in, that does not in any way correlate to cruisers being better killers then escorts. that just means a combination of damage and tanking is stronger on the cruiser, then on the escort.
do you have a lot of pvp experience? im not trying to insult, but what im saying i think should make more sense to someone with lots of hours logged pvping well
its also time to end the meme saying cruisers need to suck at damage forever. an escort has 80% the raw tanking that a good cruiser has, not counting the speed and defense and fire arc avoiding tanking, that actually makes them BETTER tanks, if you know how to fly them at least. by comparison, cruisers should not have effectively 20% or less the damage dealing of escorts. escorts will always have the spike, which maters more then any stream of dps buffed cruiser weapons could cause. even with the improved firing cyle i proposed, DHC would of course still be king, it has the most spike and most DPS
that was an example of a 1v1 situation a tac cruiser and an escort find them selves in, that does not in any way correlate to cruisers being better killers then escorts. that just means a combination of damage and tanking is stronger on the cruiser, then on the escort.
do you have a lot of pvp experience? im not trying to insult, but what im saying i think should make more sense to someone with lots of hours logged pvping well
its also time to end the meme saying cruisers need to suck at damage forever. an escort has 80% the raw tanking that a good cruiser has, not counting the speed and defense and fire arc avoiding tanking, that actually makes them BETTER tanks, if you know how to fly them at least. by comparison, cruisers should not have effectively 20% or less the damage dealing of escorts. escorts will always have the spike, which maters more then any stream of dps buffed cruiser weapons could cause. even with the improved firing cyle i proposed, DHC would of course still be king, it has the most spike and most DPS
Actually depending on the details a stock cruiser and a stock escort have the same base health. The cruiser gets 10% more shield and hull but the escort should take 10% fewer hits. By the same token the cruiser passively heals 10% more shields and hull while the escort does not need to because of avoidance.
Weapon arc, and the inherent design of the DHC compared to the Beam Array combined with the reliance on defense bonus by escorts for survival also reveals that they appear to be designed on a principal of the Escort/DHC dealing more damage in short bursts but having a hard time staying on target while the Cruiser/Beam would deal more consistent damage and with luck they would even out.
Unfortunately while that may have been true in the past several things have now changed that dynamic. The passive regeneration accounts for a small portion of healing done when compared to abilities and gear that does not scale by hull. The DHC/Escort actually has an easier time keeping the enemy in his good arc than the BA/Cruiser. Finally tanking has become much more about having good resistance values than anything else and both ships are equal in that regard the only differing factor is the boff abilities on the specific ship.
I fail to see why people think escorts should deal the most damage. The most spike damage with the highest maneuverability and getting to choose the positioning during the fight sure. But over an entire engagement the damage output should be about equal. In addition I have no idea why people think the cruiser should be the uber tank of doom when practically speaking damage avoided is just as effective as damage healed.
I am sick and tired of holy trinity. I am sick and tired of developers deciding something must be 'support' or play 'second fiddle'. There is a reason most successful modern MMOs allow characters to have two sets of specializations, or skill choices. So they can experience parity between the classes in a solo situation and still design complex group encounters that require the players to specialize into a role.
One would think that STO, with it's flexible boff ability selection would have an extremely easy time doing this. It does not. So for now I simply stick to warships and everyone else who is happy with the current design style can feel free to continue being at a disadvantage.
The balance of this game is awful. From the large scale issues such as this, to the smaller issues such as boff abilities and in game rewards. At times I feel like I must exploiting something. After all how else would I do half the damage of a team in an ESTF? Or use my PvE setup defiant in a PvP match and only die a single time during the course of it? But then I remember that I am a min/max type person and in a game with balance issues that grants me an immense advantage over those who are not.
Given all the variables possibly involved, is it a simple case that you're each envisioning different Tac Escorts and Tac Cruisers?
No.
This game uses hybridized trinity mechanics. That is the genre of the game mechanics. That means nobody is stuck being a PURE priest/warrior/ranger but it's there and moving away from it is like demanding for the Dalai Lama as the new Pope. Yes. This is a Star Trek game. It is not the only Star Trek game or the Star Trek game for everyone. This is a Star Trek game that is built on the fantasy trinity system, albeit tempered by everyone playing a slightly hybridized class -- which is mainly there as a concession for solo play, not PvP and not really Elite STFs. There are other games for people who want something else.
Cruisers going for damage NEED to do measurably less damage, even with a tactical focus. They should not be significantly equipped to handle incoming damage from escorts without surrendering more firepower to take on a mitigation focus.
Escorts should be more maneuverable and have an insurmountable damage advantage. They should also take damage much harder when they are hit, as though they had hulls made of warm butter. They are a bit too tough as it stands.
Killing should not provide a huge advantage in PvP. If it is, people are mindlessly dueling and/or encounter design is bad. There should be objectives such as capture the flag or capture and hold which forcepeople to turn their fire towards tougher targets. Being good at killing should not win matches (in fact, it should lose them if that's the bulk of what you do) and matches should have meaningful rewards. Dueling/skirmishes should not be rewarded any more than Foundry content is.
Healing should almost be a non-factor in PvP unless it's coming from a science ship, as science ships are basically the reconciler and the term-setter for fights.
Additionally, "pressure DPS" isn't a thing, anywhere. It's a weird propaganda buzzword that this community has taken up for identifying a role that some cruisers in this game may have had, that they should never have had and that was more or less the result of sloppy attention to detail in terms of where PvP was going.
PvP usually has issues in most games. MMO mechanics are designed to force and reward PvE teaming, generally. Balancing for PvP or 1v1 PvP tends to damage that balance. This usually results in PvPers disrespecting the idea of killing enemies being less attractive to most players than killing players and repeating mantras about PvP being cheaper to develop. Neither of these hold water in practice. Now, the problem here is that the PvP community in this game has started inventing terms and theories for the gameplay they have... when the PvP gameplay in STO is basically just the result of it being a no man's land for three years.
And two things are going to happen:
Either the devs will ignore PvP aside from Borticus spending his personal free time working on it and some Neverwinter tech being inherited...
Or the devs will pay attention to it. In which case, it will get dragged kicking and screaming into the loose Trinity System that the rest of the game is built around. And all these theories of things like "pressure DPS" will have to go flying out the window because this game won't get turned upside down for the 90% of people who don't PvP from a dev team that is actively courting non-PvPers for the bulk of its planned longterm growth/upkeep and designing its content going forward to be more television-y.
There are two kinds of legitimate DPS. There's spike (alpha) which is what cruisers should have more of perhaps. And there's sustained, which is what escorts should always have an edge in.
In the absence of a PvP design, the PvP community has invented their own. And a lot of that will go out the window if Cryptic ever does develop PvP. And that may factor into why you don't see them charging in to develop PvP. Because they can't and won't design a system that accommodates things like "pressure DPS." It's not a standard term anywhere that I'm aware of and, really, I don't see it being used consistently here.
The PvP community has developed their own alien language for discussing the broken toys they've been playing with unsupervised for three years. And I'd wager most systems designers at Cryptic would have trouble grasping what the community here talks about. Because they've developed their own language and adopted a lot of things that aren't working as intended as part of their theory of gameplay.
And I think that's unsustainable, particularly when you have standard RPG terms being tossed around by PvPers here in ways that don't match up to the way they're used in other MMOs or to describe mechanics that players (myself ESPECIALLY included) have a very imperfect understanding of.
And if Cryptic is going to maintain PvP, realistically it needs to be industry standard. If nothing else because turnover is high. Cryptic probably gains and loses 5-10 STO team members a month at this point. PvP needs to be something that they can put people unfamiliar with STO, who have developed other Trinity System games, in charge of.
That's a big part of why you can't just throw out the idea of Trinity System mechanics (unless you replace it with something LESS complicated and MUCH easier to balance, generally with less player input). Because MMO systems need to be so standard that somebody new to STO but familiar with MMOs can take over, possibly a new person every few months. Idiosyncratic systems will get ignored and die on the vine in an industry where even the smallest companies may often have employees coming and going from the company every week of the year. It has to be something that an EQ or a WoW dev could jump into and take over. And if it isn't, it won't get developed.
Pressure dmg is simply sustained dps that forces someone to run away, or in case of healers, forces them to heal themself making team mates vulnerable. It's not alien concept to any other MMO.
Obviously when a ship has 8 weapon slots and some of them 4 tactical slots they should be able to "dps" not spike. Hence cruisers were doing fine job in suistained dmg (pressure). When you were flying tac/cruiser you could do pretty high sustained dps but still lack the escort spikes. That changed with the passives/resistances, because beams simply cannot penetrate those.
Currently, escort is not only king of spikes, but also sustained dps and tanking.
If anything, it's the PvE community that does confuse terms, because they label everything simply as "dps". In PvP, spikes/CC kill you, not DPS, and spikes generally do not have high dps (average dmg per second).
The problem why you do not perceive the problem stoleviathan99, is simply because you do not PvP. In PvE a beam cruiser kills everything pretty quick, because npcs have zero resistances, do not heal themself and fly at half speed (reduced defence). It's also why Beams are labeled WAD - because in PvE they do indeed work. I took my steamrunner to PvE, equiped FAW3 + APB3 and 5 beam arrays and i just won fleetactions one over another without breaking sweat. Then I went to PvP and I could barely drop the shields of enemy player.
The core problem of this game simply is NPC = TRIBBLE, PvE = trivial. If NPCs would use shield/hull resistances and rebalance the shields you would see how quickly "my ship is useless" threads would appear all over the forums.
In PvE you do not need tanks, healers or even CC, all you need is 5x tac/escort with clue and you steamroll everything. No need for obsolete trinity, no need for other classes and ships. 5xtac/escort kills everything. NPCs do not clear debuffs, do not heal, do not chase you.
"Cryptic Studio’s Jack Emmert (2010): Microtransactions are the biggest bunch of nonsense. I like paying one fee and not worrying about it – like my cellphone. The world’s biggest MMO isn’t item based, even though the black market item GDP is bigger than Russia … microtransactions make me want to die.”
DPS pressure isn't real? i know its crappy and all, but its plenty real. and its an accurate term. we may have different terms because we deal with 2 sets of hitpoints, shields and hull, im no mmo expert but thats not to common i don't think. you need the spike to make a hole in 1 set of hitpoints to get to the other, pressure is every energy weapon that is not spike.
the trinity is TRIBBLE, and has been trampled to hard by all the hybrid ships that its practically gone, save for the arbitrary rules about things that are left. escorts should deal the most spike damage, but not have that great of off alpha pressure. cruisers should should be hitting once a second with medium sized clumps of damage, that is consistent, and enough at once to make manual distribute have trouble keeping up. even if cruisers had 50% more DPS at the end of them match, the escorts spike will be doing much more effective damage. just gradual dps, no mater how high you can make it thanks to the power creep has little effect. the spike from a well timed alpha is always going to be most important.
That may be what you think, or want it to be. But that is not what it is, was, or necessarily should be
The three captain classes are setup for the trinity, that much is true. But the ships? Hardly. All three have a method of defense where they excel compared to the others, and all three also have an offense method where they excel.
In addition the boff abilities fail to follow your logic. Two of the three attack patterns are defensive in nature. Tactical Team is the strongest defense against burst damage, something tanks are purposely designed to deal with in the trinity. Debuffs are also split amongst all three types of boffs even if the styles and application vary. Heals are also split between the engineering and science boffs almost evenly.
And the consoles also show a split between engineering and science in regards to tanking and healing.
This game has no idea weather it wants to be a trinity (soft or hard) or not. This is apparent both in the design of the ships, abilities, gear, and in the encounters you face in game. There is not a single encounter an escort cannot avoidance tank, a cruiser cannot face tank, nor a science vessel sustain tank.
They need to abandon outdated trinity concepts or completely re-design the game to fully embrace them. This middle ground TRIBBLE where cruisers are supposedly not intended to deal damage while escorts are actually better at mitigating damage via avoidance is silly. And who pray tell is the healer ship the cruiser with it's extend or the science with it's transfer shield strength? And if the cruiser with the extend is the healer than who is the tank eh? I'm not joking if this game had a hardcore WoW style raid and you invited PvE min/max people you would see the t5 Akira tanking with over 100 defense and an engineering heavy science vessel healing it. Cruisers would not be invited to the party because they are a hybrid.
PvP usually has issues in most games. MMO mechanics are designed to force and reward PvE teaming, generally. Balancing for PvP or 1v1 PvP tends to damage that balance. This usually results in PvPers disrespecting the idea of killing enemies being less attractive to most players than killing players and repeating mantras about PvP being cheaper to develop. Neither of these hold water in practice. Now, the problem here is that the PvP community in this game has started inventing terms and theories for the gameplay they have... when the PvP gameplay in STO is basically just the result of it being a no man's land for three years.
PvP tends to have issues in most games because of craptastic PvE design. STO's no different than the average game when it comes to craptastic PvE design. STO does take it to extremes, though - and - should be the poster child for doing it wrong.
It's the beefier mob with the bigger club monster farm syndrome...and the ability to replay missions where you fight a beefier version with a bigger club of the same mob you fought at 50 as you fought at 1...is taking it to the extreme.
Level 1 - the player's in their Miranda. They have 3 Ensign BOFF abilities, 2 fore/1 aft weapons, 1 each Tac/Eng/Sci console slots, and they've got a very limited skill build if any.
Level 50 - say the player's in just a RA Assault Cruiser. They have 12 total BOFF abilities, 4 fore/4 aft weapons, 9 consoles, and they've spent up 300k skill points in Space skills.
The NPC? It's the same Level 1 mob with more health and weapons that do more damage. That's it. It's the same mob at 50 that was waiting for the level 1 toon to come kill it.
Many games will at least hide their beefier mobs with bigger clubs behind different artwork and names...
MMO PvE teaming mechanics tend to center around the most ridiculous thing in the gaming world - the Trinity System. Tank, Healer, and DPS. Yep, there will be some mob that threatens the village, the nation, the planet - rules over vast empires - has fought the gods, might be a god, etc, etc, etc... yet that mob is going to sit there and beat on a meatshield while ignoring the guy(s) healing that meatshield and ignoring the guys that are actually doing the damage and going to kill the mob. Yes, somehow - a mob that is such a threat to everybody and everything...is too stupid to realize this simple fact.
It tends to ignore friendly fire, allowing players to reign down massive balls of fire...that only hurt the baddies! One can go on and on and on and on and on and on about the complete fail that is the standard MMO PvE. More difficult encounters which are little more than learning a coordinated dance and meeting a gear check...the encounter will be the same thing every single time you do it. That includes those mobs standing around in line of sight watching you slaughter the guys they probably had breakfast or lunch with not so long ago.
There are countless reasons that many people that PvP complain about PvE. Some simply wish that PvE was more like PvP - not in that need to fight another player that some folks have - but simply wishing that PvE was not such a complete and epic failure.
The majority of players out there in the MMOverse though - they're perfectly fine with PvE being the way it is. It's simple. It's casual. They can be the hero for a few seconds like the millions before them and the millions after them. They're the kids that played in pee wee soccer leagues where winning didn't matter and everybody got a shiny star. Other kids played pee wee baseball, pee wee football, tennis, basketball, you name it - and - they learned about winning, challenges, overcoming odds and...well, yeah - they're going to be dissatisfied with a game that offers them little more than dropping in a grenade into a barrel of kittens so they can meet up their friends for a decaf coffee.
PvP folks aren't inventing terms in the least. Pressure Damage...Sustained DPS. Spike Damage...Burst DPS. Those are not new terms in the least. They weren't invented by PvP folks either.
It's like in the thread about classes in STO - you questioned my questioning the guy's five classes from the dawn of time...because he was wrong. It seems that you think quite a few wrong things are right...
I loathe most MMORPGs because of the attitude they've taken toward "PvE" - in the beginning, it was somewhat understandable because of technology. Coming from a PnP RPG background, I was used to the PvP aspect of "PvE"...the players vs. the DM/GM. The DM/GM would challenge the players - the DM/GM would play mobs to their capacity. You could run the same adventure over and over again and it never be the same. When you went into some dungeon or castle - you didn't storm it...that would be suicide...
...but no, MMORPGs and PvE - nothing but a monster farm.
Bejeweled offers a greater challenge. There's a better chance of overcoming the odds and feeling like a hero from playing Angry Birds.
Comments
Unless things changed recently, you can't stack multiple humans boffs to get the hull repair proc, only one boff would count. Which isn't the case of saurians and letheans which you can stack as many as you can fit. The only advantage fed has is that the captain can also be human. So a fed human with one or many boff humans will get the proc from the captain and the proc from only one boff.
Hear! Daughters too.
The blood of battle washes clean.
The Warrior brave and true.
We fight, we love, and then we kill...
Then"proc" IMO is kind of a relative term. It could be view as an out of combat proc, since it happens every so many seconds. The way this used to work (the hull regen out of combat) was not stackable for boffs, and not in the combat. I can tell that 100% sure. I really don't know how this works now, since I barely played in the last 2.5 months.
Edit: never mind, I just read some posts and it seems the human boff was adjusted so it stacks now. Effing changes with every patch, lol.
Hear! Daughters too.
The blood of battle washes clean.
The Warrior brave and true.
We fight, we love, and then we kill...
those skills are absolutely fine, when used right. pare DEM3 up with single cannons, or DHCs and turrets on kdf cruisers, and you will deal a bunch of extra damage wile CRF is up. DEM and beams, not much happens, rate of fire is too low.
EWP can be buffed by plasma tac consoles, particle gens, tac buffs and the tier 5 romulan active power. at 100% health, ive seen EWP3 deal 2k DOT fully buffed as by all those things. if it crits, and it chain crits, it will deal even more.
just auto fireing the omega torp on someone can take half thier health after you get 5 charges on them if they dont do any healing. you can get a lot out of that weapon too, and the rom torp
Can you give me some specific numbers? How much damage can you get DEM to do per shot? per second? with what weapons and what other buffs running?
So you are saying you have to fully invest in it to make the skill work. It sounds as though the opportunity cost is relatively high. In contrast, an ability like CRF benefits from skills and equipment that most people would use anyway.
from parceing, on average DEM3 on my tac heavy cruisers accounts for 12 to 18% of my total damage. its about even with non CRF turret damage.
theres a phrase for a build that does not fully invest in the thing it is using, that phrase is fail build. you can get pretty easily about 1000 DOT even without using plasma weapons for the plasma tac consoles.when you use plasma weapons and use EWP, everything fits like a glove, theres no opertunity cost. the only issue is plasma damage agienst most shields. you still end up dealing most your damage with DOTs though, so as long as you use well EWP3 tacticly, the less damage you deal to shields isnt as big of a deal. in pve with EWP that strong you don't even need to shoot npcs you get stuck in the plasma.
What is 12% to 18% of the total in terms of damage per shot or damage per second?
I don't know why you say there is "no opportunity cost". If you put skill points into particle generators, then you can't put those skill points somewhere else. If you use particle generator consoles, then you can't use those science console slots for something else.
I have seen as high as 1000 in PvP and up to 3000 in PvE.
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Well, look: DHCs should do more damage than beams.
But if you nerf healing (which can be a PvP only nerf, largely, if it's only player weapons that debuff healing) and then give cruisers adequate non-healing mitigation, they become LESS spike susceptible.
In my mind, all this calls for is a mitigation overhaul:
- Hull/resist/defense mitigation needs to be modified by ship, like shields are. Escorts need an inherent mod of less than 1.0 and cruisers need more than 1.0 here.
- More hull = more resist to all, beyond the current point of diminishing returns. The less hull you have, the less resist you should have. The more hull you have, the more resist you should have.
- Certain ships that are currently less impressive like the Galaxy should probably get higher mitigation mods in the course of assigning this "armor mod."
- Beyond this, longer term, I like Geko's idea of science ships equipping two deflectors and ships getting a "Hull Plating" gear slot. And under my proposed changes, this could largely be a +HP item. And cruisers get exclusive access to items with dramatically more HP.
Tanks are utterly pointless in PvP, which is why most MMOs give their tanks good sustained damage in PvP. You shouldn't want the big armored warrior to keep following you around hacking at you with an axe.
Usually the distinction between tank and DPS doesn't become important until PvE, and even then there is usually an option for a tank to change gear a little and do 'good enough' DPS if not tops.
My experience is that tanking classes tend to have SPIKIER damage in PvP, vs. a PvE DPS class' sustained damage.
But it isn't unheard of to have PvP taunts which force you to target the tank and it's something Cryptic has done before. Probably trickier in STO space.
But, again, if you aren't looking at PvP AS DUELING, modes like Capture the Flag don't really necessitate a taunt as the gameplay will direct players to target certain targets.
The problem is partly focusing on PvP as a deathmatch rather than competing objectives.
nobody who ground to t4 marauder is giving up theyre free human boff. even if i did believe you, how many people out there who got to t4 are going to trade to you so you can have 3 human boffs? not many if at all. if u are fed you can stack 5 for 5k ec. every fed uses them. maybe, and i say maybe 5 or ten kdf can find people to trade them more than one boff.
bottom line. everything is spoonfed to spoonFEDS. from ships to stacking leadership. luckily our kdf players are far more skilled than 99% of feds and we win 99% of arenas and C and Hs but the handholding from cryptic is getting silly.
The average Klingon is just as sad as the average Fed care bear. Only difference is that 5 selfish damage dealing builds will beat 5 selfish tank builds.
u are clueless. its not a proc. its a base hull regen. i took my fed out the other day to test.
bought 5 human boffs with my human captain. cost me less than 5k ec, lulz. loaded the little pukes all in and you know what my base regen was in non sector battle space? 289%
you know how much my kdf charachter has because i cannot stack leadership? 118%
i took that fed (mirror patrol scort) to carraya to test it on romulans. i hull tanked all 5 waves, never repaired my sheilds and if i took some damage it would laughably just heal right up. i was amazed, luckily i find cheese not fun and kinda pathetic. so i went back to kdf.
while i have no problem vaping fed players in pvp it is because i alpha strike with a BoP.
pressure dmg from our cruisers could not keep up with that kind of regen.
dontdrunk is kdf and a good cruiser man. im not surprised he is so vocal about this issue. i can imagine its not that hard for fed beamers to burn bops because we are inherintly very thin and squishy. a kdf beamer? with the fed hull regen on theyre scorts? forget it.
yes, consoles fleet sheilds etc are an issue but dont underestimate the fed only hull regen. that in itself can out pressure pressure dmg
one major issue i see that is directly develeopment related is that elite sheilds are far superior to advanced or elite fleet weapons.....dmg mods? cmon man!
R.I.P
+1 Lol.....
in the entire course of this, no one has suggested that beams should out damage cannons. all i se is more short sighted solutions, that actually do nothing to solve what is actually the problem. there is nothing on the healing side that can be nerfed, its not the station powers that are the problem all the powercreep, that suppose defense and spike actually, continue to balance each other really. spike and healing, with or without tones of cross healing, with or without that being countered by sci, is still basically balanced.
messing with ether the lol healing or lol spike that keeps getting built up cant be done in a vacuum, that unravels the balance that there is. maintaining balance has always been about containing spike, and as both spike and healing grew, pressure was not part of the equation, and now its gone, never to be a part of game strategy again after everything that has been added.
so for the 50th time, get rid of pressure damage delivery from non DHC weapons, and your done. no ones spike gets nefed, no ones healing and passives gets nerfed, and ships other then escorts will do more then a sum total of 0 damage again. they can continue buffing spike and healing for the rest of the games life, and there wouldn't be anything marginalized.
cruisers geting an armor console, sci ships getting another deflector slot, and escorts geting... something, well they dont need anything, they are fine. making cruisers more tanky is not needed, knowing how to defend your self makes a cruiser 1000 times tankier then not knowing how to defend yourself, the probolem with all the noobs complaining about escorts. not just defending yourself in a cruiser, but everything. but again, the issue is damage, non escorts deal none with energy weapons, and they used too, and it was good.
an escort should not be able to beat a decked out tac cruiser, like back in the old days. im not talking about balancing 1v1, that was just a result of standard balancing. when i attack a cruiser in an escort, im not worried about any damage the cruiser is capable of, im worried about another escort counter attacking me wile i do it. no fed cruiser is capable of even driving away an escort anymore, let alone killing them faster then the escort can kill the cruiser.
In the bit he talked about the Heavy Armor and Secondary Deflector - those were things he mentioned for Cruisers and Science Vessels getting because Escorts get DHCs.
Does that mean no HA for BCs? No SDs for Vesta?
Okay. This is what I am disputing. I disagree with this. Completely. Absolutely. Totally. Nothing could persuade me of this.
You should need to be a tanking cruiser that sacrifices firepower for this to be remotely true.
The problem is rooted in PvP that is designed around killing rather than goals. Escorts should be the best at killing. Absolutely. Period. By less of a margin when compared to a Tac Cruiser/Battlecruiser but still ahead.
But killing alone should not win matches. If all you can do is kill, you should be severely at a disadvantage for winning.
do you have a lot of pvp experience? im not trying to insult, but what im saying i think should make more sense to someone with lots of hours logged pvping well
its also time to end the meme saying cruisers need to suck at damage forever. an escort has 80% the raw tanking that a good cruiser has, not counting the speed and defense and fire arc avoiding tanking, that actually makes them BETTER tanks, if you know how to fly them at least. by comparison, cruisers should not have effectively 20% or less the damage dealing of escorts. escorts will always have the spike, which maters more then any stream of dps buffed cruiser weapons could cause. even with the improved firing cyle i proposed, DHC would of course still be king, it has the most spike and most DPS
Actually depending on the details a stock cruiser and a stock escort have the same base health. The cruiser gets 10% more shield and hull but the escort should take 10% fewer hits. By the same token the cruiser passively heals 10% more shields and hull while the escort does not need to because of avoidance.
Weapon arc, and the inherent design of the DHC compared to the Beam Array combined with the reliance on defense bonus by escorts for survival also reveals that they appear to be designed on a principal of the Escort/DHC dealing more damage in short bursts but having a hard time staying on target while the Cruiser/Beam would deal more consistent damage and with luck they would even out.
Unfortunately while that may have been true in the past several things have now changed that dynamic. The passive regeneration accounts for a small portion of healing done when compared to abilities and gear that does not scale by hull. The DHC/Escort actually has an easier time keeping the enemy in his good arc than the BA/Cruiser. Finally tanking has become much more about having good resistance values than anything else and both ships are equal in that regard the only differing factor is the boff abilities on the specific ship.
I fail to see why people think escorts should deal the most damage. The most spike damage with the highest maneuverability and getting to choose the positioning during the fight sure. But over an entire engagement the damage output should be about equal. In addition I have no idea why people think the cruiser should be the uber tank of doom when practically speaking damage avoided is just as effective as damage healed.
I am sick and tired of holy trinity. I am sick and tired of developers deciding something must be 'support' or play 'second fiddle'. There is a reason most successful modern MMOs allow characters to have two sets of specializations, or skill choices. So they can experience parity between the classes in a solo situation and still design complex group encounters that require the players to specialize into a role.
One would think that STO, with it's flexible boff ability selection would have an extremely easy time doing this. It does not. So for now I simply stick to warships and everyone else who is happy with the current design style can feel free to continue being at a disadvantage.
The balance of this game is awful. From the large scale issues such as this, to the smaller issues such as boff abilities and in game rewards. At times I feel like I must exploiting something. After all how else would I do half the damage of a team in an ESTF? Or use my PvE setup defiant in a PvP match and only die a single time during the course of it? But then I remember that I am a min/max type person and in a game with balance issues that grants me an immense advantage over those who are not.
No.
This game uses hybridized trinity mechanics. That is the genre of the game mechanics. That means nobody is stuck being a PURE priest/warrior/ranger but it's there and moving away from it is like demanding for the Dalai Lama as the new Pope. Yes. This is a Star Trek game. It is not the only Star Trek game or the Star Trek game for everyone. This is a Star Trek game that is built on the fantasy trinity system, albeit tempered by everyone playing a slightly hybridized class -- which is mainly there as a concession for solo play, not PvP and not really Elite STFs. There are other games for people who want something else.
Cruisers going for damage NEED to do measurably less damage, even with a tactical focus. They should not be significantly equipped to handle incoming damage from escorts without surrendering more firepower to take on a mitigation focus.
Escorts should be more maneuverable and have an insurmountable damage advantage. They should also take damage much harder when they are hit, as though they had hulls made of warm butter. They are a bit too tough as it stands.
Killing should not provide a huge advantage in PvP. If it is, people are mindlessly dueling and/or encounter design is bad. There should be objectives such as capture the flag or capture and hold which forcepeople to turn their fire towards tougher targets. Being good at killing should not win matches (in fact, it should lose them if that's the bulk of what you do) and matches should have meaningful rewards. Dueling/skirmishes should not be rewarded any more than Foundry content is.
Healing should almost be a non-factor in PvP unless it's coming from a science ship, as science ships are basically the reconciler and the term-setter for fights.
Additionally, "pressure DPS" isn't a thing, anywhere. It's a weird propaganda buzzword that this community has taken up for identifying a role that some cruisers in this game may have had, that they should never have had and that was more or less the result of sloppy attention to detail in terms of where PvP was going.
PvP usually has issues in most games. MMO mechanics are designed to force and reward PvE teaming, generally. Balancing for PvP or 1v1 PvP tends to damage that balance. This usually results in PvPers disrespecting the idea of killing enemies being less attractive to most players than killing players and repeating mantras about PvP being cheaper to develop. Neither of these hold water in practice. Now, the problem here is that the PvP community in this game has started inventing terms and theories for the gameplay they have... when the PvP gameplay in STO is basically just the result of it being a no man's land for three years.
And two things are going to happen:
Either the devs will ignore PvP aside from Borticus spending his personal free time working on it and some Neverwinter tech being inherited...
Or the devs will pay attention to it. In which case, it will get dragged kicking and screaming into the loose Trinity System that the rest of the game is built around. And all these theories of things like "pressure DPS" will have to go flying out the window because this game won't get turned upside down for the 90% of people who don't PvP from a dev team that is actively courting non-PvPers for the bulk of its planned longterm growth/upkeep and designing its content going forward to be more television-y.
There are two kinds of legitimate DPS. There's spike (alpha) which is what cruisers should have more of perhaps. And there's sustained, which is what escorts should always have an edge in.
In the absence of a PvP design, the PvP community has invented their own. And a lot of that will go out the window if Cryptic ever does develop PvP. And that may factor into why you don't see them charging in to develop PvP. Because they can't and won't design a system that accommodates things like "pressure DPS." It's not a standard term anywhere that I'm aware of and, really, I don't see it being used consistently here.
The PvP community has developed their own alien language for discussing the broken toys they've been playing with unsupervised for three years. And I'd wager most systems designers at Cryptic would have trouble grasping what the community here talks about. Because they've developed their own language and adopted a lot of things that aren't working as intended as part of their theory of gameplay.
And I think that's unsustainable, particularly when you have standard RPG terms being tossed around by PvPers here in ways that don't match up to the way they're used in other MMOs or to describe mechanics that players (myself ESPECIALLY included) have a very imperfect understanding of.
And if Cryptic is going to maintain PvP, realistically it needs to be industry standard. If nothing else because turnover is high. Cryptic probably gains and loses 5-10 STO team members a month at this point. PvP needs to be something that they can put people unfamiliar with STO, who have developed other Trinity System games, in charge of.
That's a big part of why you can't just throw out the idea of Trinity System mechanics (unless you replace it with something LESS complicated and MUCH easier to balance, generally with less player input). Because MMO systems need to be so standard that somebody new to STO but familiar with MMOs can take over, possibly a new person every few months. Idiosyncratic systems will get ignored and die on the vine in an industry where even the smallest companies may often have employees coming and going from the company every week of the year. It has to be something that an EQ or a WoW dev could jump into and take over. And if it isn't, it won't get developed.
Obviously when a ship has 8 weapon slots and some of them 4 tactical slots they should be able to "dps" not spike. Hence cruisers were doing fine job in suistained dmg (pressure). When you were flying tac/cruiser you could do pretty high sustained dps but still lack the escort spikes. That changed with the passives/resistances, because beams simply cannot penetrate those.
Currently, escort is not only king of spikes, but also sustained dps and tanking.
If anything, it's the PvE community that does confuse terms, because they label everything simply as "dps". In PvP, spikes/CC kill you, not DPS, and spikes generally do not have high dps (average dmg per second).
The problem why you do not perceive the problem stoleviathan99, is simply because you do not PvP. In PvE a beam cruiser kills everything pretty quick, because npcs have zero resistances, do not heal themself and fly at half speed (reduced defence). It's also why Beams are labeled WAD - because in PvE they do indeed work. I took my steamrunner to PvE, equiped FAW3 + APB3 and 5 beam arrays and i just won fleetactions one over another without breaking sweat. Then I went to PvP and I could barely drop the shields of enemy player.
The core problem of this game simply is NPC = TRIBBLE, PvE = trivial. If NPCs would use shield/hull resistances and rebalance the shields you would see how quickly "my ship is useless" threads would appear all over the forums.
In PvE you do not need tanks, healers or even CC, all you need is 5x tac/escort with clue and you steamroll everything. No need for obsolete trinity, no need for other classes and ships. 5xtac/escort kills everything. NPCs do not clear debuffs, do not heal, do not chase you.
the trinity is TRIBBLE, and has been trampled to hard by all the hybrid ships that its practically gone, save for the arbitrary rules about things that are left. escorts should deal the most spike damage, but not have that great of off alpha pressure. cruisers should should be hitting once a second with medium sized clumps of damage, that is consistent, and enough at once to make manual distribute have trouble keeping up. even if cruisers had 50% more DPS at the end of them match, the escorts spike will be doing much more effective damage. just gradual dps, no mater how high you can make it thanks to the power creep has little effect. the spike from a well timed alpha is always going to be most important.
That may be what you think, or want it to be. But that is not what it is, was, or necessarily should be
The three captain classes are setup for the trinity, that much is true. But the ships? Hardly. All three have a method of defense where they excel compared to the others, and all three also have an offense method where they excel.
In addition the boff abilities fail to follow your logic. Two of the three attack patterns are defensive in nature. Tactical Team is the strongest defense against burst damage, something tanks are purposely designed to deal with in the trinity. Debuffs are also split amongst all three types of boffs even if the styles and application vary. Heals are also split between the engineering and science boffs almost evenly.
And the consoles also show a split between engineering and science in regards to tanking and healing.
This game has no idea weather it wants to be a trinity (soft or hard) or not. This is apparent both in the design of the ships, abilities, gear, and in the encounters you face in game. There is not a single encounter an escort cannot avoidance tank, a cruiser cannot face tank, nor a science vessel sustain tank.
They need to abandon outdated trinity concepts or completely re-design the game to fully embrace them. This middle ground TRIBBLE where cruisers are supposedly not intended to deal damage while escorts are actually better at mitigating damage via avoidance is silly. And who pray tell is the healer ship the cruiser with it's extend or the science with it's transfer shield strength? And if the cruiser with the extend is the healer than who is the tank eh? I'm not joking if this game had a hardcore WoW style raid and you invited PvE min/max people you would see the t5 Akira tanking with over 100 defense and an engineering heavy science vessel healing it. Cruisers would not be invited to the party because they are a hybrid.
PvP tends to have issues in most games because of craptastic PvE design. STO's no different than the average game when it comes to craptastic PvE design. STO does take it to extremes, though - and - should be the poster child for doing it wrong.
It's the beefier mob with the bigger club monster farm syndrome...and the ability to replay missions where you fight a beefier version with a bigger club of the same mob you fought at 50 as you fought at 1...is taking it to the extreme.
Level 1 - the player's in their Miranda. They have 3 Ensign BOFF abilities, 2 fore/1 aft weapons, 1 each Tac/Eng/Sci console slots, and they've got a very limited skill build if any.
Level 50 - say the player's in just a RA Assault Cruiser. They have 12 total BOFF abilities, 4 fore/4 aft weapons, 9 consoles, and they've spent up 300k skill points in Space skills.
The NPC? It's the same Level 1 mob with more health and weapons that do more damage. That's it. It's the same mob at 50 that was waiting for the level 1 toon to come kill it.
Many games will at least hide their beefier mobs with bigger clubs behind different artwork and names...
MMO PvE teaming mechanics tend to center around the most ridiculous thing in the gaming world - the Trinity System. Tank, Healer, and DPS. Yep, there will be some mob that threatens the village, the nation, the planet - rules over vast empires - has fought the gods, might be a god, etc, etc, etc... yet that mob is going to sit there and beat on a meatshield while ignoring the guy(s) healing that meatshield and ignoring the guys that are actually doing the damage and going to kill the mob. Yes, somehow - a mob that is such a threat to everybody and everything...is too stupid to realize this simple fact.
It tends to ignore friendly fire, allowing players to reign down massive balls of fire...that only hurt the baddies! One can go on and on and on and on and on and on about the complete fail that is the standard MMO PvE. More difficult encounters which are little more than learning a coordinated dance and meeting a gear check...the encounter will be the same thing every single time you do it. That includes those mobs standing around in line of sight watching you slaughter the guys they probably had breakfast or lunch with not so long ago.
There are countless reasons that many people that PvP complain about PvE. Some simply wish that PvE was more like PvP - not in that need to fight another player that some folks have - but simply wishing that PvE was not such a complete and epic failure.
The majority of players out there in the MMOverse though - they're perfectly fine with PvE being the way it is. It's simple. It's casual. They can be the hero for a few seconds like the millions before them and the millions after them. They're the kids that played in pee wee soccer leagues where winning didn't matter and everybody got a shiny star. Other kids played pee wee baseball, pee wee football, tennis, basketball, you name it - and - they learned about winning, challenges, overcoming odds and...well, yeah - they're going to be dissatisfied with a game that offers them little more than dropping in a grenade into a barrel of kittens so they can meet up their friends for a decaf coffee.
PvP folks aren't inventing terms in the least. Pressure Damage...Sustained DPS. Spike Damage...Burst DPS. Those are not new terms in the least. They weren't invented by PvP folks either.
It's like in the thread about classes in STO - you questioned my questioning the guy's five classes from the dawn of time...because he was wrong. It seems that you think quite a few wrong things are right...
I loathe most MMORPGs because of the attitude they've taken toward "PvE" - in the beginning, it was somewhat understandable because of technology. Coming from a PnP RPG background, I was used to the PvP aspect of "PvE"...the players vs. the DM/GM. The DM/GM would challenge the players - the DM/GM would play mobs to their capacity. You could run the same adventure over and over again and it never be the same. When you went into some dungeon or castle - you didn't storm it...that would be suicide...
...but no, MMORPGs and PvE - nothing but a monster farm.
Bejeweled offers a greater challenge. There's a better chance of overcoming the odds and feeling like a hero from playing Angry Birds.