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STO lacks Class!
centersolace
Member Posts: 11,178 Arc User
Since the dawn of multiplayer gaming, there have always been 5 basic classes. The Fighter, the Archer, the Backstabber, the Attack Magic, and the Healing Magic. There are many minor variations, but whether the game is in a Fantasy setting, a Science Fiction setting, or even a Realistic setting, these classes have remained more or less the same for the past 40 years.
Enough history, what does this have to do with STO? Well, currently, STO has the five roles split over it's three classes. Tacticals are supposed to be the Fighter/Backstabber, Science are supposed to be Attack Magic, and Engineers are supposed to be the Healing Magic. This is what it's supposed to be. It's not. Tacticals do damage, and Engies heal, but Science abilities are less attack magic and more roots/disables. But don't worry, their healing/protection abilities are much more effective!
Aaaaaand heres where the problem lies. We have one class built around damage, and two support classes. If this were any other MMO, Science Officers would have awesome AOE attacks, and we would have to deal with various ranges of effectiveness, with different weapons and classes filling out the roster. In fact, this is exactly how ground combat works. But in space, every weapon has the same range, so this isn't really a problem.
So make it one.
Give Beams an effective range of 15 km, DHCs a range of 7 km, and everything else leave at 10.
This would open up a huge area and give cruisers a brand new purpose and dynamic. This also would force escorts to rely on one of their biggest strengths (their really good turn rates) rather than giving them a weakness. The only real issue is cruisers that equip DHC's, but those tend to have Cloaking Consoles, so to balance that out you could make them built in instead.
Enough history, what does this have to do with STO? Well, currently, STO has the five roles split over it's three classes. Tacticals are supposed to be the Fighter/Backstabber, Science are supposed to be Attack Magic, and Engineers are supposed to be the Healing Magic. This is what it's supposed to be. It's not. Tacticals do damage, and Engies heal, but Science abilities are less attack magic and more roots/disables. But don't worry, their healing/protection abilities are much more effective!
Aaaaaand heres where the problem lies. We have one class built around damage, and two support classes. If this were any other MMO, Science Officers would have awesome AOE attacks, and we would have to deal with various ranges of effectiveness, with different weapons and classes filling out the roster. In fact, this is exactly how ground combat works. But in space, every weapon has the same range, so this isn't really a problem.
So make it one.
Give Beams an effective range of 15 km, DHCs a range of 7 km, and everything else leave at 10.
This would open up a huge area and give cruisers a brand new purpose and dynamic. This also would force escorts to rely on one of their biggest strengths (their really good turn rates) rather than giving them a weakness. The only real issue is cruisers that equip DHC's, but those tend to have Cloaking Consoles, so to balance that out you could make them built in instead.
Post edited by centersolace on
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There are 3 classes, and 2 ship categories. Ship category (it seems to me) does more to define your class than your captain's training.
Tactical: Fighter
Engineering: Healing
Science: Support
Cruiser: Tank
Escort: DPS
Tact/Cruiser: Warrior, good damage, good health
Tact/Escort: Berserker, great damage, low health.
Engi/Cruiser: Paladin, Hard to kill, good healer, low DPS
Engi/Escort: Dark Priest, powerful attacks, competent healer
Sci/Cruiser: Warmage, Debilitates foes and buffs allies, hard to kill
Sci/Escort: Rogue, debilitates foes, combos with strong DPS.
Mostly we only end up seeing the Berkserker, the Paladin, and the Warmage, but that doesn't mean other possibilities exist!
I see it as 3 basic classes, the warrior, the rogue and the mage.
That seems totally random.
I should have stuck with my initial reaction to ignore the rest of your troll thread.
Buffing beams (and they should be buffed) could be done simply by giving them firing cycles patterned off of cannons. Well, DHCs to be specific. Actually, all the weapons should use DHC firing cycles, because it seems the most powerful weapon type also got the most efficient firing cycle.
Nerfing DHCs to use beam firing cycles is another option, but the servers would implode from the QQ.
It would be far better to use a rock-paper-scissor model for the space combat. It wouldnt be hard either, keep things basically like they are now but close up the damage so that tac>sci>eng>tac with about 10% margin of benefit (enough to overcome with player skill). Something like, tac can burn a hole in a sci ship, but eng can polarize the hull and shoot back, while sci can break the polarized hull with corrosion damage. Team dynamics still work (sci corrosion while tac shoots), but 1v1 also works where it doesnt with Designated Loser trying to go against Swordmaster.
Also balance ship types separately, especially here where everything is basically a cruiser or battleship class (modulo the shuttles). Larger ships need more hard-points than smaller ships, and preferably bigger power plants too, while smaller ships need better agility, faster healing, and so on. There's not any bombers or gunboats with wholly different abilities, so you can do it with linear progression and avoid ship classes entirely.
Different ranges are interesting, but the auto-aim and auto-fire mechanisms of this game wont allow it to perform correctly. The guy with the longer reach just keeps mashing spacebar while running, to keep the other ship from closing within 10k. Or worse, the fast light ship uses beams and is completely untouchable. Or another example, weapons have different munition speed (EG heavy cannon travels slower than instant-on beam), but its irrelevant when the computer does the aiming and firing, the slow and fast weapons will hit regardless.
One thing you can do though is monkey with variables, things like ~cannons lose accuracy over distance (same as they lose damage now), so that they miss more often at range versus the instant-on beam weapons that travels at the speed of light and therefor is more accurate at range.
Self-propelled munitions can have a variable range, since those can actually be shot down, or outrun, or cloaked from, as the case may be. Mines are fine now with 3k seeker range, if you dont get seekered they're no-op. Forward-firing torpedoes could be bumped to 12k probably but only for forward-mounted launchers (harder to spam while running when you have to do it in reverse).
Anyway, I agree that the classes should be realigned. The gameplay would be improved, and it wouldnt be that much of a change.
Hrmmm, source?
Hrmmm, somewhat opinion...mainly opinion.
Hrmmm, speculation and opinion...
Hrmmm, range does affect damage...
Hrmmm, what do ships have to do with classes?
But anyway...
To an extent, I agree...but only in the sense of scrapping what they've got for what one would actually see in Star Trek - so to speak.
Unfortunately, this is biased toward Feds (simply don't have the information at hand if it's even available in a similar fashion for KDF)...but anyway:
Command Division
Operations Division (Tactical/Engineer)
Science Division
In many cases, the "heroes" would either be dual-spec or in some cases single-spec or even multi-spec.
So imagine, if along those lines (again, this is unfortunately Fed biased) that players could choose to play as the following:
Command/Command
Command/Tac Ops
Command/Eng Ops
Command/Science
Tac Ops/Command
Tac Ops/Tac Ops
Tac Ops/Eng Ops
Tac Ops/Science
Eng Ops/Command
Eng Ops/Tac Ops
Eng Ops/Eng Ops
Eng Ops/Science
Science/Command
Science/Tac Ops
Science/Eng Ops
Science/Science
Where for the 5 abilities a player is able to select, they select 3 for the the item before the slash and 2 for the item after the slash. Only those that went Command/Command, Tac Ops/Tac Ops, Eng Ops/Eng Ops, Sci/Sci would be able to pick the "top" 2 of 5 abilities for that particular Division/Career. They've specialized.
This would reflect the nature of the "heroes" we see in Star Trek more - where Captains and Bridge Officers were often part of multiple divisions.
In Space (and for the most part, I only talk about Space) - there are "only" five things that separate each of the Careers. I put the only in quotes because some people have complained that I'm being dismissive of those five things - when it's just a case of pointing out that so many of the things people attribute to the Careers have nothing to do with the Careers. Those five things are the five innate abilities.
That's it. Not being dismissive, but that's it.
Ships neither define nor are they restricted based on Career chosen. Gear? Nope. Doesn't define/restrict. Even the skill build doesn't. Outside of Ground skills, all three Careers have the same access to skills for Space.
Perhaps it's a case of discussing role more than it is a case of discussing class, because much like the same class in many games can perform different roles - the Careers in STO can perform different roles.
The gist of the three Careers, mind you, are Damage (Tac), Tank (Eng), Support (Sci)...imho. Sci is the only one that can kind of be argued, imho - since Sci does a few things there, eh? It's pretty easy to label them with the term support - they debuff, they debuff, they buff, they have pets, they buff... Buffer/Debuffer/Pet Master? Nah, Support.
Of course, of interest is how the roles change on the Ground, eh? Look at the 5 innates - heck, look at the kits. I've always found that interesting - Tac with the taunt, Eng as the shield healer, etc, etc, etc.
I think the gist of the Careers in Space is somewhat broken - and although many feel that Ground is broken as well, it's much easier to view Tac as DPS, Eng as Defensive Support/Offensive Support, and Sci as Offensive Support/Defensive Support...imho.
But yep, in Space at least, the Career is "only" those five innate abilities. You could skill an Eng into mainly damage dealing abilities, drop them in an Escort, and play that way... that's not going to be the same as the Eng skilled mainly in healing abilities and in a Cruiser, eh? They're both Engineers though...yep, so much of the role that a player takes on is determined by things other than Career choice with those five innate abilities that only come into play when they're not on their extended cooldowns...
You just asked for a source for a statement that was the equivalent of, "The sky is blue."
No, I asked somebody for a source on something that I had never seen said before and contradicts my own experience (as well as research into the matter).
I started playing RPGs in 1980.
I started playing MMOs in 1997.
Not sure what they mean either. 40 years ago would have been 1973. PCs didn't come around until a few years later. Unless I'm being too literal or they are referring to pen and paper games. I think they started early 70s.
Then your experience has been very narrow... Because it's pretty self evident.
I figured they were referring to RPGs, which would fit in with the 40 year thing. Tabletop wargaming and so forth tended to two player...not multi-player.
He's talking D&D, which is the tradition STO is rooted in. Not wargaming, which is debatably not an RPG but a strategy or tactical simulation.
And I won't say nobody at Cryptic is into wargames. I think Jack Emmert, Dan Stahl, and Thomas the Cat are all probably bigger into wargames than RPGs.
But STO is much less directly descended from Warhammer or Heroclix or any of that stuff than it is from tabletop games... and the lineage for the standard MMO is basically:
D20 multiplayer games (ie. D&D) -> MUDs -> Graphical MUDS (2D still images and, very late, animated Gifs and Doom style 3D) -> Ultima (2D with movement) -> Everquest (3D with movement) -> ******** style games.
I think you're looking at a different lineage altogether and not one this game is really based on.
Um, I'm not sure how you misread what I said - I even stated that I believed the OP was talking about RPGs. The wargaming aspect only came into play in that statement for what else might have been multi-player type gaming around 40 years ago.
But again, that's the thing - those classes were not the original D&D classes.
And again, that's the thing - that's why I asked for a source...
Yet again, how did you miss the part that I've been playing RPGs for over 30 years and MMOs for over 15 years?
I would go so far as to say, there's more diversity in these three classes, than any other MMO. Only problem being you can't customise your kits on ground, but I hear that is "coming soon (tm)".
On the subject of weapon ranges: I like the idea of adding more systemic differences between weapon types to make everything feel a tad less homogenous. On TV, the Defiant was shown to be insanely powerful at close ranges. This is already reflected by how cannons behave in-game, but beams could use a rethink. If beams aren't already set at "more power over longer distance," they really should be, even if the maximum range stays at 10k.
Moving the maximum beam range all the way out to 15k and limiting the heavier cannons to 7k could be interesting, but I'd have to see it in action rather than just on paper. My instinct (and/or being melted by escorts repeatedly in PVP) tells me that most escort pilots worth their weight in stem bolts could probably close the gap and still turn my cruiser into molten slag pretty quickly even with that new range advantage.
So, that added range for a beam-laden cruiser would give it a new edge, but probably no more of an edge than what a good escort already has.
...but surely this sort of design was already tested in beta and thrown out, right? Anyone have a memory of that?
There are more than two ship categories.
Hazard Emitters, Transfer Shield Strength, and Science Team are some of the better heals in the game that you can cast on a friendly target. They're not Engineering BOFF powers.
You all realize that a properly geared and traited Engineer tank in a cruiser can tank a fully MACO geared Tac officer in an escort?
Yeah, trust me. Works well. I tried tanking in an escort aaaand - yeah way to squishy. Cruiser all the way
It certainly makes PvP situations more appealing to me. PvP in MMO is always a pale comparison to a real test of skills, so many factors out of player control. I vastly prefer systems where everybody is on the exact same footing and it is what they do with those resources that determines the victor... but I digress.
Fleet Admiral Space Orphidian Possiblities Wizard
You already can spend points on what skills you want. They have revamped the skill trees multiple times to create a system that really is not bound or restricted by the profession you chose at creation.
Sure you may not be able to train some of the BOFF skills, but people can do that for your BOFFs and trade em right back.
The only difference is captain powers, and that's like three buttons per character. There's so little difference between classes these days.
Not that I expect or am calling for such a change here, just being whimsical.
Fleet Admiral Space Orphidian Possiblities Wizard