These roles arent dead/dying at all. To a certain extent i understand what youre saying, if you compare an sto tank to a different game tank, then yes, most tank are hybrids.
Get as much survivability as you need, and add dmg ontop of that.
As a "tank", i can however tell you, that most of the groups i get paired with in estf's will not be able to complete it. An escort that doesnt have to tank can outdamage an escort that needs to worry about survivability. Said escort can sit stationary at the optimum range and use offensive abilities, instead of worrying about surviving AND dps'ing.
No...a tank optimizes his escort's dps, and is still very much needed.
10k dps sci ships and cruisers dose not mean they are not also performing their iconic roles, it just means these players have a very detailed understanding of what makes a starship kickass.
Saying engineers and science captains are subpar is a failure to understand how to kickass with a crusier/science starship.
I don't think Ody pilots would consider their cruisers bad, and Excelsior pilots are the most vocal about how good their ships are. I can personally testify to the awesomeness that is the Regent. Good builds with these ships are not easy to make or get but it is doable. Of course, from your absolutist tone I don't think you really
know what you're talking about.
Take a step back and look at what you just said.
What is the one thing the excelsior, regent and odyssey cstore ships have in common?
Lt Cmdr slots that can be assigned to tactical (univ slots) or straight up lt cmdr tactical slots.
These are cruisers that have almost the full weapon boost that an escort has. Ergo, a cruiser-escort hybrid.
So yes, absolutely, they can boast they're good at damage because they're tactical cruisers. What does this tell you about the problem with tactical abilities and their effect on the game? Too freaking overpowered. Especially the lt cmdr slot that *IS* atk omega on these cruisers.
10k dps sci ships and cruisers dose not mean they are not also performing their iconic roles, it just means these players have a very detailed understanding of what makes a starship kickass.
Saying engineers and science captains are subpar is a failure to understand how to kickass with a crusier/science starship.
Your definition of kick TRIBBLE is damage output from what I see. So tell me, if a cruiser gives up its ability to tank very well and support its team very well in order to just up its damage output...is it really flying and performing the role of a cruiser? No.
Same goes for sci ships. They are not debuffing nor are they crowd controlling. The stats these abilities are based upon are FUBAR. The only thing left is to just spit out damage however they can.
The game lost its role and replaced it with DPS. You may not have been in the game pre-f2p but I can tell you back then an escort had to tackle sci ships and cruisers with great care because back then the cruiser and sci abilities to tank and debuff were at par with the escort damage level...and escorts did not get the god-mode omega hold immunity nor the shield autobalance benefits they have now.
The same could be said for just about every MMO there is.
Just my 2 EC here, rather than complaining about Escorts doing too much damage and crying for nerfs, the discussion should be for Cryptic to improve their encounter content. Something beyond adding a TRIBBLE ton of HP and cheat 1 shot abilities anyway.
Sadly, I don't see this happening either. There were a lot of complaints about having to do the Mario Bros. jumping in Infected. If folks can't handle that, then more complex boss encounters are not going to work.
I disagree, most MMO's I've played that are centered around the trinity have PVE content geared to utilize all three roles very effectively. It's just very poorly implemented here in STO with, as you say, HP meatshields and instant one shot mechanics as a way to increase cotnent difficulty.
I agree we should be discussing the fact that Cryptic really needs to improve thier pve content, but as for complaints about simple boss mechanics....people always complain about simple things, but overall increasing the complexity of boss encounters leads to a richer and rewarding experience for the typical pve player, and we can always make an 'easy' level encounter for those who can't quite figure out how to not stand in the fire...
What is the one thing the excelsior, regent and odyssey cstore ships have in common?
Lt Cmdr slots that can be assigned to tactical (univ slots) or straight up lt cmdr tactical slots.
These are cruisers that have almost the full weapon boost that an escort has. Ergo, a cruiser-escort hybrid.
I think we all agree that some crusiers, particularly the older ones are not suitable for the current game. In particular the starcruiser and galaxy. The same can be said of the less tactically oriented sci vessels. For me that isn't a problem since my alt's ships all ork on doing damage with a side benefit like tanking/space magic on the side. I don't think we should have ships whose primary contribution is just tanking/healing or space magic.
I think we all agree that some crusiers, particularly the older ones are not suitable for the current game. In particular the starcruiser and galaxy. The same can be said of the less tactically oriented sci vessels. For me that isn't a problem since my alt's ships all ork on doing damage with a side benefit like tanking/space magic on the side. I don't think we should have ships whose primary contribution is just tanking/healing or space magic.
This mentality is exactly why we have this problem.
Why then do we bother with having cruisers and science ships in the game? You may as well just remove them and just give the escorts the option of the sci/cruiser skins.
The primary contribution of tanking and debuffing (space magic!) is precisely what this game left behind in favor of dumb dps focus.
There is only one instance in STO right now where a science ship and a cruiser can perform their class roles: When facing the borg queen.
Raw DPS does not work very well against such a highly shielded, self-healing, mobile, effects-using boss NPC.
A science ship in the borg queen battle is absolutely vital. It can debuff the queen and strip her off any special abilities constantly. Cruisers can tank her massive AOE damage and keep her aggro focused on them.
It is in this kind of battle that the ship trinity of roles functions..even if science abilities are a fraction effective of what they should be.
If you imagine a game where each npc has just absurd amount of shield HP and hull HP..that retained current NPC damage output...and added NPC self-heal and self-buff (other than wep dmg) to the mix the escorts would cease, instantly, to be dominant. They are still VITAL to the trinity for their ability to deliver the heavy punch but without sci and cruiser ships the escort will simply have a hard time bringing down such a target.
The alternative solution is to remove the escort's ability to tank and do such high dps with impunity. Changing Omega to offense only bonuses, removing shield balance from tac team and making aux power once again be a component for turn rate makes the escort return to the trinity rather than being so far ahead of it.
I think we all agree that some crusiers, particularly the older ones are not suitable for the current game. In particular the starcruiser and galaxy. The same can be said of the less tactically oriented sci vessels. For me that isn't a problem since my alt's ships all ork on doing damage with a side benefit like tanking/space magic on the side. I don't think we should have ships whose primary contribution is just tanking/healing or space magic.
I agree. One cannot just purely tank or purely sci. Tanks and sci vessels need to be able to dps as well. Obviously the dps wont be as high as an escorts, but non the less, dps needs to be present.
Does anyone else find it funny that the tactical captains are afraid that their roles will become useless in an all DPS game?
Or that the "you-are-all-absolutely-wrong" crowd are describing those of us who are seeing these problems with their balance system as completely focused on escorts/tacticals as absolutist so we must therefore be wrong?
This mentality is exactly why we have this problem.
Why then do we bother with having cruisers and science ships in the game? You may as well just remove them and just give the escorts the option of the sci/cruiser skins.
The primary contribution of tanking and debuffing (space magic!) is precisely what this game left behind in favor of dumb dps focus.
There is only one instance in STO right now where a science ship and a cruiser can perform their class roles: When facing the borg queen.
Raw DPS does not work very well against such a highly shielded, self-healing, mobile, effects-using boss NPC.
A science ship in the borg queen battle is absolutely vital. It can debuff the queen and strip her off any special abilities constantly. Cruisers can tank her massive AOE damage and keep her aggro focused on them.
As a science captain, have to tell you, that it doesn't really work that way. It's nowhere near what it used to be like. Borg especially elite borg bosses are pretty much immune to most of the abilities that would otherwise normally work. They don't even have the option for them to work the first time we use them and then adapt the second time, they just simply cancel out. Sensor abilities, shield abilities, and target subsystem mk I (which i have to say is a serious problem when are we going to actually get Tier 5 science ships that at least have MK II or III when targeting subsystem it's not like they don't already have a cooldown) just don't function like they did pre-F2P and it's sad. So really it's no different then having science Boffs on your escorts doing those same jobs right now.
If they actually needed us it would be another story but really you can take out a queen without science ship science captains right now simply because of how they've nerfed our abilities and how they've made borg bosses crazy immune to our skills for the most part. I think the only things left that really function like they truly should are the particle effects. Graviton drains, anomalies, debuff weapons, chroniton, etc all work normally but placates, disables, and sensor abilities just plain nerfed into basic forms at this point.
What always comes to me during this debate is the idea that all energy weapons should be able to do the same amount of damage over some amount of time. What should change is how much of that damage comes at once and shoud very by ship. So any weapon on a escort would be changed to do spike damage, so 300 damage in 1 second, and then have along cooldown, while Cruisers would do 300 damage over the entire time of that cooldown. Science ships would be somewhere in the middle, with them doing 300 damage over a shorter amount of time than cruisers, but not spiking like escorts.
Something would have to be done about procs, so that not everyone would take turrets. Maybe make it so that procs have a chance to occure every x amount of damage, so escorts could stack a lot of procs at once, but cruisers and sci could spread them out. Or maybe make that the science advantage, you do damage like a cruiser, but proc like an escort does now.
Then, also change how good different ships are at resistaning the different types of damage. Make escorts very resistant to spike damage, like maybe inbuild changes to EptS and other heals like that, where yes, a single shot could take them down to near zero hull, but their heals would bring them right back up, and they could use those heals on other ships just like now. But then those heals would be on a longer cooldown, so they could heal every spike of damage but if they did it wrong, they would be worn down by draw out damage. Then make Cruisers able to do the opposite, heal pressure damage, but not spike as well. Science ships could heal both equally well, but neither as well as the extreems. And apply the same changes to the NPCs but make sure that any ship can kill any NPC, just some will take longer. So for instance, cubes become like cruisers, but spheres are like science ships, and probes are like escorts.
Doing something like that means that any ship can do any role, but some will do it better than others. Escorts become cruiser killers, Cruisers become better at killing escorts, and science sits in the middle, able to kill both equally, plus the special effects from sci skills. Not quite paper rock scissors, but I think a bit better than it is now.
Oh course, this is IMHO, and probably Cryptic will not touch this, but why not throw it out there.
What is the one thing the excelsior, regent and odyssey cstore ships have in common?
Lt Cmdr slots that can be assigned to tactical (univ slots) or straight up lt cmdr tactical slots.
These are cruisers that have almost the full weapon boost that an escort has. Ergo, a cruiser-escort hybrid.
So yes, absolutely, they can boast they're good at damage because they're tactical cruisers. What does this tell you about the problem with tactical abilities and their effect on the game? Too freaking overpowered. Especially the lt cmdr slot that *IS* atk omega on these cruisers.
Your definition of kick TRIBBLE is damage output from what I see. So tell me, if a cruiser gives up its ability to tank very well and support its team very well in order to just up its damage output...is it really flying and performing the role of a cruiser? No.
Same goes for sci ships. They are not debuffing nor are they crowd controlling. The stats these abilities are based upon are FUBAR. The only thing left is to just spit out damage however they can.
The game lost its role and replaced it with DPS. You may not have been in the game pre-f2p but I can tell you back then an escort had to tackle sci ships and cruisers with great care because back then the cruiser and sci abilities to tank and debuff were at par with the escort damage level...and escorts did not get the god-mode omega hold immunity nor the shield autobalance benefits they have now.
The thing is, I don't sacrifice any tanking on my engineer/cruiser to do good damage. No, its not escort numbers, but its very good. I pug infected elite all the time with Brody. I see just how badly players build their starships. Tac's in escorts pulling 700 dps. Cruisers that spend more time waiting to respawn, and launching boarding parties at borg cubes when they are active. Science ships throwning dampening field at a time when its not needed.
Cross healing virtually nonexistent.
Were all in this together. The Borg in elite stf's are going to kill us/assimilate us all. Complimenting our strengthes by knowing what to use and when to use it makes it that much harder for the Borg to succeed. Every class and every ship type brings something that adds to the overall chance of a fun and rewarding mission.
Choice of skills, boffs, doffs, and gear, is more important than raw damage numbers. Escorts, I admit, have the easiest path for a proper build. Damage is the name of their game. 5 well geared, well built, tac escorts will demolish infected elite with no problem. But the highly talented players like cruisers and science ships, engineers and science captains too. They like playing outside the box. And they have fun and still churn out elite stfs with apparent ease.
Cryptic isn't going to nerf escorts because they aren't going to harm their cash cow. I think sticking to the argument that sci powers need to be more effective, and that enemy npcs need to use more buffs/debuffs so sci and cruisers will be more useful would be a better argument, or at the very least one that might end up seeing results.
Do you guys remember how the boss battles would go in the Final Fantasy series? They'd buff themselves, debuff you, and some of them would have an inherent weakness either against a spell and/or object you'd have to do a side mission to acquire. You didn't have to do it, but i'd make the battle easier if you did acquire it.
I started a thread in the PvE forum with my ideas on making better boss enemies.
This mentality is exactly why we have this problem.
Why then do we bother with having cruisers and science ships in the game? You may as well just remove them and just give the escorts the option of the sci/cruiser skins.
Nope! We have a problem because some people think that having a little variety is useless unless its COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!!
Besides, why is my point of view less valid than yours or indeed the cause of this "problem". If anything I would say that its YOUR mentality that is at fault.
I've played plenty of games with the trinity, its "there but not required" state in STO is one of its biggest strengths.
I agree. One cannot just purely tank or purely sci. Tanks and sci vessels need to be able to dps as well. Obviously the dps wont be as high as an escorts, but non the less, dps needs to be present.
Exactly! I can say with total honesty I didn't really know how to play until i started flying escorts. I was one of the terrible players that flew cruisers and depended entirely on their noob-proof nature to get me thru. Needless to say i was pretty useless in team maps lol.
But since I learned how to fly escorts I apply those lessons to all ships I fly. Its why my sci recon is a torp/mine ship, so I can use all power to propr up my shields and space magic. Similarly my cruiser is an A2B beast built around being JUST durable enough to tank things while dishing out as much damage as possible. I even keep my cruiser going as fast as possible at all times to get as much benefit from movement as I can, after all escorts may get 10% more defense, but that doesn't mean cruisers aren't perfectly capable of getting that bonus as well.
As a science captain, have to tell you, that it doesn't really work that way. It's nowhere near what it used to be like. Borg especially elite borg bosses are pretty much immune to most of the abilities that would otherwise normally work. They don't even have the option for them to work the first time we use them and then adapt the second time, they just simply cancel out. Sensor abilities, shield abilities, and target subsystem mk I (which i have to say is a serious problem when are we going to actually get Tier 5 science ships that at least have MK II or III when targeting subsystem it's not like they don't already have a cooldown) just don't function like they did pre-F2P and it's sad. So really it's no different then having science Boffs on your escorts doing those same jobs right now.
If they actually needed us it would be another story but really you can take out a queen without science ship science captains right now simply because of how they've nerfed our abilities and how they've made borg bosses crazy immune to our skills for the most part. I think the only things left that really function like they truly should are the particle effects. Graviton drains, anomalies, debuff weapons, chroniton, etc all work normally but placates, disables, and sensor abilities just plain nerfed into basic forms at this point.
Yes, this is why I said the sci ship still works even with their greatly wimped-out sci abilities. The stats they are based in have been heavily neutered in effective power. However, when the team has one sci debuff ship vs the borg she goes down a lot faster than just 5 escorts pummeling her down.
The thing is, I don't sacrifice any tanking on my engineer/cruiser to do good damage. No, its not escort numbers, but its very good.
...
Cross healing virtually nonexistent.
...
Choice of skills, boffs, doffs, and gear, is more important than raw damage numbers. Escorts, I admit, have the easiest path for a proper build. Damage is the name of their game. 5 well geared, well built, tac escorts will demolish infected elite with no problem. But the highly talented players like cruisers and science ships, engineers and science captains too. They like playing outside the box. And they have fun and still churn out elite stfs with apparent ease.
You may not sacrifice your own tanking to keep your damage but you did sacrifice the engineering ship role of support to the team. Of the three you can only do two at once. Now, this is NORMAL and i'm not saying that it is bad cruisers do damage. Im saying its bad that in the current state of the game thats really the only thing every ship must focus on since support/debuff roles just arent in the game anymore.
Nope! We have a problem because some people think that having a little variety is useless unless its COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!!
Besides, why is my point of view less valid than yours or indeed the cause of this "problem". If anything I would say that its YOUR mentality that is at fault.
I've played plenty of games with the trinity, its "there but not required" state in STO is one of its biggest strengths.
Variety? You do realize the game now has zero variety? Its all dps focused. Because a cruiser had to abandon its support/tanking role to just spit out damage is not variety, its called being left with that as their only option. Go make a tank/support cruiser and see what a waste of a team slot you are.
'not required' state is the first sign of a badly designed game. When you have no class or roles and the game just focuses on one means of play (dps) the whole thing becomes the same old TRIBBLE in different skins.
Variety? You do realize the game now has zero variety? Its all dps focused. Because a cruiser had to abandon its support/tanking role to just spit out damage is not variety, its called being left with that as their only option. Go make a tank/support cruiser and see what a waste of a team slot you are.
'not required' state is the first sign of a badly designed game. When you have no class or roles and the game just focuses on one means of play (dps) the whole thing becomes the same old TRIBBLE in different skins.
Why would I bother making a support ship (healer) if everyone can heal themselves. This means my engi cruiser tank can focus on tanking and DPSing. This is a GOOD THING as its far more fun to do.
As far as variety goes... you kinda just proved what I said to be true. You want wildly differing roles before you consider that variety is accomplished. I prefer the current status where you can do some things on the side extremely well on top of DPSing, such as tanking and space magic.
Having "required roles" is a thing of the past since few players like to play as tanks and healers. If you were to force cruiser and sci pilots into those roles with no way to play differently you may as well delete crusiers and sci vessels from the game's server database as people would abandon them in droves and thus prompting Cryptic to "pull a KDF" on them.
Worse yet tanking and healing sometimes seems to breed self important obnoxious players that cry at every turn. ESPECIALLY when they stop being required. This is exactly what's happenning with WoW's scenarios, most tanks HATE them because they don't require them.
Yes, this is why I said the sci ship still works even with their greatly wimped-out sci abilities. The stats they are based in have been heavily neutered in effective power. However, when the team has one sci debuff ship vs the borg she goes down a lot faster than just 5 escorts pummeling her down.
If you read what I typed you'd notice that I said it's nowhere near what it was. The poor excuse for the abilities effectiveness now is not what I'd call useful and as far as the tachyon beams are concerned or the combination of TB target subsystem I and energy drain can pretty much be done by one shot of the new cannons on the Kumari.
I've played plenty of games with the trinity, its "there but not required" state in STO is one of its biggest strengths.
If you think that the entire trinity is "there but not required" in STO you need to start paying attention to the game you're playing. The whole trinity is there, that's true (aside from the fact that sci abilities are pathetically weak), but exactly one part of it is required: DPS. Because DPS is the only required role, all others fall by the wayside, and in fact can't be used because everyone has to be playing DPS to be effective. That's the problem: everyone is forced into a DPS role, they can't do anything else and be effective, and we're sick of that.
I disagree, I have found my way to contribute to the team with lower dps values, such as 3-4k. how? zero death tolerance. heal and disable. control the enemy and help your team to focus the dps so your team damage gets higher, no deaths means more dmg.
sure I pull 3-4k dps, get blamed regardless of the perfect gravity wells that instapop all spheres and make the tac cube tankable to any escort, with zero deaths for the team.
Say the word, it saves the world. CUUCUUMBEER!"-With slight partigen with it." Proud member or DPS-800"-We kill dem mines with our scitter turrets."
I disagree, I have found my way to contribute to the team with lower dps values, such as 3-4k. how? zero death tolerance. heal and disable. control the enemy and help your team to focus the dps so your team damage gets higher, no deaths means more dmg.
sure I pull 3-4k dps, get blamed regardless of the perfect gravity wells that instapop all spheres and make the tac cube tankable to any escort, with zero deaths for the team.
First of all, you cannot and do not instastop anything with GW please stop telling fibs. (or provide a video of this happening because the rest of us are not seeing that with science skills sorry) and second, control the enemy is fine so long as our skills work, and let me tell you half the time they don't because they've nerfed science skills since they still allow tactical skills to boost us. It's wrong and needs to be changed, simple as that. We as science captains should not pay the price universally for a poor design choice in their game. It needs to be changed as much as the tactical attack patterns need to have their defense abilities in those patterns removed and turned into a separate skill because it's way too much power in 1 skill and it's not canon. They also need to reduce the escorts defense by 15% across the board because it's obvious they were never meant to have this much defense in the first place with only 2 engineer console slots. It's as simple as that. Anyone making the argument against the changes simply want to remain OP and keep the 10mil escort captains in the game in an unfair advantage.
All content is dps oriented, basically all missions progress is faster and much more enjoyable with the builds that can produce the most damage. Sci and tanks fail at that so hard it's not even funny. Support roles are no longer required nor necessary. Currently, unless you are very bad at making adequate builds, you can heal/support yourself with just lieutenant eng/sci and usually you can survive long enough to finish off most opponents. No need for support from tanks or sci.
Do not get me wrong, this is not a cruiser vs escort build threads (we already have enough of those lol). This is about the fundamental roles of tanks/sci builds and their eventual future extinction. A cruiser can be build to tank, but in consideration of current content, it is so much more rewarding to scrap the tankiness for you and your team to boost your personal dps and power levels with abilities like aux to batteries (technician doff) or directed energy modulation, why not? Extend shields is a very useless ability, arguably still of some importance in PvP (debatable). Sci used to pride themselves at being the best healers/strongest shields with incredible ability to disable a ship's subsystem. Except that now, you have hybrids weapons (polarized phased weapons = subsystem targeting), sub nuc doff, lieutenant cmdr sci station equipped escorts/cruisers etc...
I saw a vesta doing 10k dps thread, it's built like a cruiser. Link
I saw a cruiser doing ~9k dps youtube vid, its skill tree is similar to that of an escort. Link
These above are indeed exceptional builds, but it does illustrate my point I'm trying to make people see in this thread.
Don't build a science vessel like a science vessel, and you perform better.
Don't build a cruiser starship like a cruiser, and you perform better.
Hence the title, death of sci and tank roles.
your point of view is totally wrong...
You expect your sci vessel (cruiser) doing the same job of an escort... but sci ships and cruiser work in a different way.
Sci ships (and somehow also cruisers) debuff the enemy so that the other ships can deal more damage or receive less damage, cruisers should take agro so that other ships can attack staying safe. Both sci ships and cruiser can also heal/protect (HE, TSS, AtS, ST, ET, ES...) a teammate (ex an escort trying to attack).
What yo do not think about is that the way support ships attack is enhancing the dps of all the ships in a team.
However there are several way to improve the dps of a support ship enough to be dangerous both in pve and pvp...
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
Agreed - a powerful GWIII certainly slows the enemy down, but it rarely (if ever) actually stops them altogether.
As said earlier in this thread, I am increasingly finding that I am all but useless when using my sci toon/ship and I am in an STF/Fleet action etc that involves two or more escorts (a situation that is becoming increasingly frequent). Debuffs and crowd control are of no use whatsoever if the enemy is already space-dust. It makes for some VERY boring play as a sci.
It is and it's amazing to me how few people actually get that this is a huge problem. We might as well have a single captain and only two types of ships, tactical captain and escorts/carriers because nothing else matters apparently.
valoreah said "It's amazing so few people seem to understand this basic aspect of the game."
I completely agree, aspects like having three captains two of which are useless in space, having loads of ships half of which don't function how canon demands, a game where dps is the only rule of law (might as well make this Serenity because that's all it is is TOS cowboy play), science which is the very reason why you're able to fly in these ships and heal your crew and repair in the first place is somehow diminished by the very people who supposedly want this game to succeed while tearing out the thing that made it possible in scifi in the first place, thus the sci in scifi.
We're not asking for much here, we're asking for true balance and it's not that difficult to do honestly you have to be objective as devs and not have favorites and that's not happening.
It's not that difficult to remove the buff that tact skills give science skills, rebuff science skills, make them behave like basic physics would demand (ie GWIII actually holding something in place) separate the attack and evasive patterns on tactical skills, improve the damage and shutdown time from subsystem attacks, Improve the emergency power skills like the Auxiliary power to structural, and people might choose them again, right now we've got a whole bunch of tacticals flying all over the place and no one can convince me that the devs do not know the sheer number of tactical captains that outnumber all other captains or the sheer number of escorts flying around.
Why would I bother making a support ship (healer) if everyone can heal themselves. This means my engi cruiser tank can focus on tanking and DPSing. This is a GOOD THING as its far more fun to do.
As far as variety goes... you kinda just proved what I said to be true. You want wildly differing roles before you consider that variety is accomplished. I prefer the current status where you can do some things on the side extremely well on top of DPSing, such as tanking and space magic.
You fail to understand the concept of variety then. There is zero variety if everone just dps's very well. Why? Because tanking and 'space magic' become irrelevant. As it is now actually. You dont NEED a cruiser tank nor a sci debuffer but you DO need DPS. Why tank when stuff just dies in seconds? Why debuff when stuff simply gets crushed in seconds by every ship there is?
The 'dps well and do something else good' theory would only work if said dps was not so absolutely dominant. If every NPC (say, sphere) had the hitpoints of an elite stf tac cube and the self-healing ability of mirror event ships/borg queen.
I gather from your mentality that you never played this game pre-f2p. Pre-f2p the escort was not the highest damage dealer. Cruisers were. The difference was the cruiser could not concentrate its firepower in one shield facing nor could it buff its attacks for a spike damage volley. Escorts were the 2nd highest damage dealers...but were very effective at focusing fire on a ship's weak shields. Thats why they were so fast and maneuverable. That is why they have the damage buff up abilities for their weapons. Sci were the worst at weapon DPS since they ran on high aux power. A sci ship oth, would and did debuff/snare/sensor attack targets to the point where a dangerous enemy was debuffed or frustrated down to the sci ship's level of firepower.
Note: pre-f2p tac team did not have shield autobalance and the captain skills for tactical were twice the amount so very few captains had full weapon skill sets. Those that did had to sacrifice a lot in terms of speed/healing or utility to achieve it. Atk Omega did not have immunity to hold; it was a resist bonus not a binary yes/no on being held.
All three ships COULD and many DID spec for high dps. Their builds were quite unique and you never knew what build the other player had until he begun fighting you. All three could DPS decently but never, ever to the extent they can now where most npcs simply arent a challenge even on elite settings.
Having "required roles" is a thing of the past since few players like to play as tanks and healers. If you were to force cruiser and sci pilots into those roles with no way to play differently you may as well delete crusiers and sci vessels from the game's server database as people would abandon them in droves and thus prompting Cryptic to "pull a KDF" on them.
Its not a thing of the past. The reason why this game and basically every F2P goes the DPS route is because it can monetize it easier.
There is no need to delete the cruisers and sci ships. They're already made mostly useless in the game. Please dont even bother trying to argue this, just grab a team of full escorts and go do any mission. time it. then repeat with a full team of sci or full team of cruisers and time it. Take a guess which group finishes faster. Its not a matter of 'choice' of ship.. you have no choice any more. If you dont dps you are useless. Propping a cruiser or sci ship to dps is merely an attempt to gain the illusion of variety because otherwise they'd have to be flying escorts.
Worse yet tanking and healing sometimes seems to breed self important obnoxious players that cry at every turn. ESPECIALLY when they stop being required. This is exactly what's happenning with WoW's scenarios, most tanks HATE them because they don't require them.
Nice choice of words. 'stop being required' ... ok so tanking and sci are obsolete and removed from the game. not required.
what are you left with? Escorts online.
.... where's the variety in that? one pew-pews with red lasers the other one with blue?
is my point getting across or do I need to dumb this down even more?
If you read what I typed you'd notice that I said it's nowhere near what it was. The poor excuse for the abilities effectiveness now is not what I'd call useful and as far as the tachyon beams are concerned or the combination of TB target subsystem I and energy drain can pretty much be done by one shot of the new cannons on the Kumari.
I did not mean it in that way. I meant it in context of the borg queen fight where, because she is mostly immune to escorts just vomiting dps on her (she insta heals and debuffs escorts.. I love that wench) and you just hear QQ from the escort pilots about how 'freaking hard/crazy' this boss fight is. Yet one , mostly stat-neutered sci ship in the team can debuff her enough that she goes down noticeably faster. If the stats worked better it would be much nicer though I agree.
Do this test now that the devs have so conveniently given us the tools to prove how TRIBBLE their nerfing of sci skills have been:
reputation tier 5 ability: +100 to sci skills.
Grab a fully debuff/drain specced/loaded sci ship and compare how effective the debuffs are (powers menu will display changes) before and during this ability being active.
Its just ridiculous. Using this ability actually makes the sci debuffs WORK like they did pre-f2p. Basically this shows that the sci stats have been reduced nearly 100 points worth in effectiveness via the absurd buffs in resists (due to the QQ of escorts no less) and nerfing of sci skills (...because tacs were abusing atk alpha/GDF/FOMM) to buff sci dmg attacks).
You fail to understand the concept of variety then. There is zero variety if everone just dps's very well. Why? Because tanking and 'space magic' become irrelevant. As it is now actually. You dont NEED a cruiser tank nor a sci debuffer but you DO need DPS. Why tank when stuff just dies in seconds? Why debuff when stuff simply gets crushed in seconds by every ship there is?
You think making something NECESSARY is the way to FORCE variety, I think making it optional and beneficial but not necessary to better promote variety.
I put up with this forced variety in WoW, STO is different and that's one of its few non IP strenghts.
You think making something NECESSARY is the way to FORCE variety, I think making it optional and beneficial but not necessary to better promote variety.
But that's the whole point: variety is not beneficial. An optimized team consists of Andorian Escorts and Fleet Defiants, or in a handful of cases (mainly No Win) mostly those but also a Fleet Advanced Escort or two. The introduction of even a Vesta or Fleet Excelsior, the best ships in their classes (thanks to their high DPS), will slow the team down overall. That's because the only role that is necessary or beneficial in this game, or at least the PvE portion of it (which is what all the content is based around, just try to get good gear or a sizable amount of any currency out of PvP), is that of damage dealer. That forces people to play that role and make anything else secondary at best, and that pushes them toward the ships that are best at that role: the top escorts. That leaves the game with no variety.
But that's the whole point: variety is not beneficial.
Its not a net "DPS gain" but having a capable tank that can also do decnet cruiser DPS makes things far easier for everyone else. If having a cruiser around was an upgrade instead of a sidegrade it'd be considered mandatory, and that directly restricts people's choices. While there are some that prefer that playstyle I certainly do not, especially not in a spaceship game.
Comments
no.
These roles arent dead/dying at all. To a certain extent i understand what youre saying, if you compare an sto tank to a different game tank, then yes, most tank are hybrids.
Get as much survivability as you need, and add dmg ontop of that.
As a "tank", i can however tell you, that most of the groups i get paired with in estf's will not be able to complete it. An escort that doesnt have to tank can outdamage an escort that needs to worry about survivability. Said escort can sit stationary at the optimum range and use offensive abilities, instead of worrying about surviving AND dps'ing.
No...a tank optimizes his escort's dps, and is still very much needed.
Saying engineers and science captains are subpar is a failure to understand how to kickass with a crusier/science starship.
Take a step back and look at what you just said.
What is the one thing the excelsior, regent and odyssey cstore ships have in common?
Lt Cmdr slots that can be assigned to tactical (univ slots) or straight up lt cmdr tactical slots.
These are cruisers that have almost the full weapon boost that an escort has. Ergo, a cruiser-escort hybrid.
So yes, absolutely, they can boast they're good at damage because they're tactical cruisers. What does this tell you about the problem with tactical abilities and their effect on the game? Too freaking overpowered. Especially the lt cmdr slot that *IS* atk omega on these cruisers.
Your definition of kick TRIBBLE is damage output from what I see. So tell me, if a cruiser gives up its ability to tank very well and support its team very well in order to just up its damage output...is it really flying and performing the role of a cruiser? No.
Same goes for sci ships. They are not debuffing nor are they crowd controlling. The stats these abilities are based upon are FUBAR. The only thing left is to just spit out damage however they can.
The game lost its role and replaced it with DPS. You may not have been in the game pre-f2p but I can tell you back then an escort had to tackle sci ships and cruisers with great care because back then the cruiser and sci abilities to tank and debuff were at par with the escort damage level...and escorts did not get the god-mode omega hold immunity nor the shield autobalance benefits they have now.
I disagree, most MMO's I've played that are centered around the trinity have PVE content geared to utilize all three roles very effectively. It's just very poorly implemented here in STO with, as you say, HP meatshields and instant one shot mechanics as a way to increase cotnent difficulty.
I agree we should be discussing the fact that Cryptic really needs to improve thier pve content, but as for complaints about simple boss mechanics....people always complain about simple things, but overall increasing the complexity of boss encounters leads to a richer and rewarding experience for the typical pve player, and we can always make an 'easy' level encounter for those who can't quite figure out how to not stand in the fire...
I think we all agree that some crusiers, particularly the older ones are not suitable for the current game. In particular the starcruiser and galaxy. The same can be said of the less tactically oriented sci vessels. For me that isn't a problem since my alt's ships all ork on doing damage with a side benefit like tanking/space magic on the side. I don't think we should have ships whose primary contribution is just tanking/healing or space magic.
This mentality is exactly why we have this problem.
Why then do we bother with having cruisers and science ships in the game? You may as well just remove them and just give the escorts the option of the sci/cruiser skins.
The primary contribution of tanking and debuffing (space magic!) is precisely what this game left behind in favor of dumb dps focus.
There is only one instance in STO right now where a science ship and a cruiser can perform their class roles: When facing the borg queen.
Raw DPS does not work very well against such a highly shielded, self-healing, mobile, effects-using boss NPC.
A science ship in the borg queen battle is absolutely vital. It can debuff the queen and strip her off any special abilities constantly. Cruisers can tank her massive AOE damage and keep her aggro focused on them.
It is in this kind of battle that the ship trinity of roles functions..even if science abilities are a fraction effective of what they should be.
If you imagine a game where each npc has just absurd amount of shield HP and hull HP..that retained current NPC damage output...and added NPC self-heal and self-buff (other than wep dmg) to the mix the escorts would cease, instantly, to be dominant. They are still VITAL to the trinity for their ability to deliver the heavy punch but without sci and cruiser ships the escort will simply have a hard time bringing down such a target.
The alternative solution is to remove the escort's ability to tank and do such high dps with impunity. Changing Omega to offense only bonuses, removing shield balance from tac team and making aux power once again be a component for turn rate makes the escort return to the trinity rather than being so far ahead of it.
I agree. One cannot just purely tank or purely sci. Tanks and sci vessels need to be able to dps as well. Obviously the dps wont be as high as an escorts, but non the less, dps needs to be present.
Or that the "you-are-all-absolutely-wrong" crowd are describing those of us who are seeing these problems with their balance system as completely focused on escorts/tacticals as absolutist so we must therefore be wrong?
Just thought that was funny.
As a science captain, have to tell you, that it doesn't really work that way. It's nowhere near what it used to be like. Borg especially elite borg bosses are pretty much immune to most of the abilities that would otherwise normally work. They don't even have the option for them to work the first time we use them and then adapt the second time, they just simply cancel out. Sensor abilities, shield abilities, and target subsystem mk I (which i have to say is a serious problem when are we going to actually get Tier 5 science ships that at least have MK II or III when targeting subsystem it's not like they don't already have a cooldown) just don't function like they did pre-F2P and it's sad. So really it's no different then having science Boffs on your escorts doing those same jobs right now.
If they actually needed us it would be another story but really you can take out a queen without science ship science captains right now simply because of how they've nerfed our abilities and how they've made borg bosses crazy immune to our skills for the most part. I think the only things left that really function like they truly should are the particle effects. Graviton drains, anomalies, debuff weapons, chroniton, etc all work normally but placates, disables, and sensor abilities just plain nerfed into basic forms at this point.
Something would have to be done about procs, so that not everyone would take turrets. Maybe make it so that procs have a chance to occure every x amount of damage, so escorts could stack a lot of procs at once, but cruisers and sci could spread them out. Or maybe make that the science advantage, you do damage like a cruiser, but proc like an escort does now.
Then, also change how good different ships are at resistaning the different types of damage. Make escorts very resistant to spike damage, like maybe inbuild changes to EptS and other heals like that, where yes, a single shot could take them down to near zero hull, but their heals would bring them right back up, and they could use those heals on other ships just like now. But then those heals would be on a longer cooldown, so they could heal every spike of damage but if they did it wrong, they would be worn down by draw out damage. Then make Cruisers able to do the opposite, heal pressure damage, but not spike as well. Science ships could heal both equally well, but neither as well as the extreems. And apply the same changes to the NPCs but make sure that any ship can kill any NPC, just some will take longer. So for instance, cubes become like cruisers, but spheres are like science ships, and probes are like escorts.
Doing something like that means that any ship can do any role, but some will do it better than others. Escorts become cruiser killers, Cruisers become better at killing escorts, and science sits in the middle, able to kill both equally, plus the special effects from sci skills. Not quite paper rock scissors, but I think a bit better than it is now.
Oh course, this is IMHO, and probably Cryptic will not touch this, but why not throw it out there.
Nouveau riche LTS member
The thing is, I don't sacrifice any tanking on my engineer/cruiser to do good damage. No, its not escort numbers, but its very good. I pug infected elite all the time with Brody. I see just how badly players build their starships. Tac's in escorts pulling 700 dps. Cruisers that spend more time waiting to respawn, and launching boarding parties at borg cubes when they are active. Science ships throwning dampening field at a time when its not needed.
Cross healing virtually nonexistent.
Were all in this together. The Borg in elite stf's are going to kill us/assimilate us all. Complimenting our strengthes by knowing what to use and when to use it makes it that much harder for the Borg to succeed. Every class and every ship type brings something that adds to the overall chance of a fun and rewarding mission.
Choice of skills, boffs, doffs, and gear, is more important than raw damage numbers. Escorts, I admit, have the easiest path for a proper build. Damage is the name of their game. 5 well geared, well built, tac escorts will demolish infected elite with no problem. But the highly talented players like cruisers and science ships, engineers and science captains too. They like playing outside the box. And they have fun and still churn out elite stfs with apparent ease.
Do you guys remember how the boss battles would go in the Final Fantasy series? They'd buff themselves, debuff you, and some of them would have an inherent weakness either against a spell and/or object you'd have to do a side mission to acquire. You didn't have to do it, but i'd make the battle easier if you did acquire it.
I started a thread in the PvE forum with my ideas on making better boss enemies.
Click here
Nope! We have a problem because some people think that having a little variety is useless unless its COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!!
Besides, why is my point of view less valid than yours or indeed the cause of this "problem". If anything I would say that its YOUR mentality that is at fault.
I've played plenty of games with the trinity, its "there but not required" state in STO is one of its biggest strengths.
Exactly! I can say with total honesty I didn't really know how to play until i started flying escorts. I was one of the terrible players that flew cruisers and depended entirely on their noob-proof nature to get me thru. Needless to say i was pretty useless in team maps lol.
But since I learned how to fly escorts I apply those lessons to all ships I fly. Its why my sci recon is a torp/mine ship, so I can use all power to propr up my shields and space magic. Similarly my cruiser is an A2B beast built around being JUST durable enough to tank things while dishing out as much damage as possible. I even keep my cruiser going as fast as possible at all times to get as much benefit from movement as I can, after all escorts may get 10% more defense, but that doesn't mean cruisers aren't perfectly capable of getting that bonus as well.
Yes, this is why I said the sci ship still works even with their greatly wimped-out sci abilities. The stats they are based in have been heavily neutered in effective power. However, when the team has one sci debuff ship vs the borg she goes down a lot faster than just 5 escorts pummeling her down.
You may not sacrifice your own tanking to keep your damage but you did sacrifice the engineering ship role of support to the team. Of the three you can only do two at once. Now, this is NORMAL and i'm not saying that it is bad cruisers do damage. Im saying its bad that in the current state of the game thats really the only thing every ship must focus on since support/debuff roles just arent in the game anymore.
Variety? You do realize the game now has zero variety? Its all dps focused. Because a cruiser had to abandon its support/tanking role to just spit out damage is not variety, its called being left with that as their only option. Go make a tank/support cruiser and see what a waste of a team slot you are.
'not required' state is the first sign of a badly designed game. When you have no class or roles and the game just focuses on one means of play (dps) the whole thing becomes the same old TRIBBLE in different skins.
Why would I bother making a support ship (healer) if everyone can heal themselves. This means my engi cruiser tank can focus on tanking and DPSing. This is a GOOD THING as its far more fun to do.
As far as variety goes... you kinda just proved what I said to be true. You want wildly differing roles before you consider that variety is accomplished. I prefer the current status where you can do some things on the side extremely well on top of DPSing, such as tanking and space magic.
Having "required roles" is a thing of the past since few players like to play as tanks and healers. If you were to force cruiser and sci pilots into those roles with no way to play differently you may as well delete crusiers and sci vessels from the game's server database as people would abandon them in droves and thus prompting Cryptic to "pull a KDF" on them.
Worse yet tanking and healing sometimes seems to breed self important obnoxious players that cry at every turn. ESPECIALLY when they stop being required. This is exactly what's happenning with WoW's scenarios, most tanks HATE them because they don't require them.
If you read what I typed you'd notice that I said it's nowhere near what it was. The poor excuse for the abilities effectiveness now is not what I'd call useful and as far as the tachyon beams are concerned or the combination of TB target subsystem I and energy drain can pretty much be done by one shot of the new cannons on the Kumari.
If you think that the entire trinity is "there but not required" in STO you need to start paying attention to the game you're playing. The whole trinity is there, that's true (aside from the fact that sci abilities are pathetically weak), but exactly one part of it is required: DPS. Because DPS is the only required role, all others fall by the wayside, and in fact can't be used because everyone has to be playing DPS to be effective. That's the problem: everyone is forced into a DPS role, they can't do anything else and be effective, and we're sick of that.
sure I pull 3-4k dps, get blamed regardless of the perfect gravity wells that instapop all spheres and make the tac cube tankable to any escort, with zero deaths for the team.
CUUCUUMBEER! "-With slight partigen with it."
Proud member or DPS-800 "-We kill dem mines with our scitter turrets."
First of all, you cannot and do not instastop anything with GW please stop telling fibs. (or provide a video of this happening because the rest of us are not seeing that with science skills sorry) and second, control the enemy is fine so long as our skills work, and let me tell you half the time they don't because they've nerfed science skills since they still allow tactical skills to boost us. It's wrong and needs to be changed, simple as that. We as science captains should not pay the price universally for a poor design choice in their game. It needs to be changed as much as the tactical attack patterns need to have their defense abilities in those patterns removed and turned into a separate skill because it's way too much power in 1 skill and it's not canon. They also need to reduce the escorts defense by 15% across the board because it's obvious they were never meant to have this much defense in the first place with only 2 engineer console slots. It's as simple as that. Anyone making the argument against the changes simply want to remain OP and keep the 10mil escort captains in the game in an unfair advantage.
your point of view is totally wrong...
You expect your sci vessel (cruiser) doing the same job of an escort... but sci ships and cruiser work in a different way.
Sci ships (and somehow also cruisers) debuff the enemy so that the other ships can deal more damage or receive less damage, cruisers should take agro so that other ships can attack staying safe. Both sci ships and cruiser can also heal/protect (HE, TSS, AtS, ST, ET, ES...) a teammate (ex an escort trying to attack).
What yo do not think about is that the way support ships attack is enhancing the dps of all the ships in a team.
However there are several way to improve the dps of a support ship enough to be dangerous both in pve and pvp...
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
It is and it's amazing to me how few people actually get that this is a huge problem. We might as well have a single captain and only two types of ships, tactical captain and escorts/carriers because nothing else matters apparently.
valoreah said "It's amazing so few people seem to understand this basic aspect of the game."
I completely agree, aspects like having three captains two of which are useless in space, having loads of ships half of which don't function how canon demands, a game where dps is the only rule of law (might as well make this Serenity because that's all it is is TOS cowboy play), science which is the very reason why you're able to fly in these ships and heal your crew and repair in the first place is somehow diminished by the very people who supposedly want this game to succeed while tearing out the thing that made it possible in scifi in the first place, thus the sci in scifi.
We're not asking for much here, we're asking for true balance and it's not that difficult to do honestly you have to be objective as devs and not have favorites and that's not happening.
It's not that difficult to remove the buff that tact skills give science skills, rebuff science skills, make them behave like basic physics would demand (ie GWIII actually holding something in place) separate the attack and evasive patterns on tactical skills, improve the damage and shutdown time from subsystem attacks, Improve the emergency power skills like the Auxiliary power to structural, and people might choose them again, right now we've got a whole bunch of tacticals flying all over the place and no one can convince me that the devs do not know the sheer number of tactical captains that outnumber all other captains or the sheer number of escorts flying around.
You fail to understand the concept of variety then. There is zero variety if everone just dps's very well. Why? Because tanking and 'space magic' become irrelevant. As it is now actually. You dont NEED a cruiser tank nor a sci debuffer but you DO need DPS. Why tank when stuff just dies in seconds? Why debuff when stuff simply gets crushed in seconds by every ship there is?
The 'dps well and do something else good' theory would only work if said dps was not so absolutely dominant. If every NPC (say, sphere) had the hitpoints of an elite stf tac cube and the self-healing ability of mirror event ships/borg queen.
I gather from your mentality that you never played this game pre-f2p. Pre-f2p the escort was not the highest damage dealer. Cruisers were. The difference was the cruiser could not concentrate its firepower in one shield facing nor could it buff its attacks for a spike damage volley. Escorts were the 2nd highest damage dealers...but were very effective at focusing fire on a ship's weak shields. Thats why they were so fast and maneuverable. That is why they have the damage buff up abilities for their weapons. Sci were the worst at weapon DPS since they ran on high aux power. A sci ship oth, would and did debuff/snare/sensor attack targets to the point where a dangerous enemy was debuffed or frustrated down to the sci ship's level of firepower.
Note: pre-f2p tac team did not have shield autobalance and the captain skills for tactical were twice the amount so very few captains had full weapon skill sets. Those that did had to sacrifice a lot in terms of speed/healing or utility to achieve it. Atk Omega did not have immunity to hold; it was a resist bonus not a binary yes/no on being held.
All three ships COULD and many DID spec for high dps. Their builds were quite unique and you never knew what build the other player had until he begun fighting you. All three could DPS decently but never, ever to the extent they can now where most npcs simply arent a challenge even on elite settings.
Its not a thing of the past. The reason why this game and basically every F2P goes the DPS route is because it can monetize it easier.
There is no need to delete the cruisers and sci ships. They're already made mostly useless in the game. Please dont even bother trying to argue this, just grab a team of full escorts and go do any mission. time it. then repeat with a full team of sci or full team of cruisers and time it. Take a guess which group finishes faster. Its not a matter of 'choice' of ship.. you have no choice any more. If you dont dps you are useless. Propping a cruiser or sci ship to dps is merely an attempt to gain the illusion of variety because otherwise they'd have to be flying escorts.
Nice choice of words. 'stop being required' ... ok so tanking and sci are obsolete and removed from the game. not required.
what are you left with? Escorts online.
.... where's the variety in that? one pew-pews with red lasers the other one with blue?
is my point getting across or do I need to dumb this down even more?
I did not mean it in that way. I meant it in context of the borg queen fight where, because she is mostly immune to escorts just vomiting dps on her (she insta heals and debuffs escorts.. I love that wench) and you just hear QQ from the escort pilots about how 'freaking hard/crazy' this boss fight is. Yet one , mostly stat-neutered sci ship in the team can debuff her enough that she goes down noticeably faster. If the stats worked better it would be much nicer though I agree.
Do this test now that the devs have so conveniently given us the tools to prove how TRIBBLE their nerfing of sci skills have been:
reputation tier 5 ability: +100 to sci skills.
Grab a fully debuff/drain specced/loaded sci ship and compare how effective the debuffs are (powers menu will display changes) before and during this ability being active.
Its just ridiculous. Using this ability actually makes the sci debuffs WORK like they did pre-f2p. Basically this shows that the sci stats have been reduced nearly 100 points worth in effectiveness via the absurd buffs in resists (due to the QQ of escorts no less) and nerfing of sci skills (...because tacs were abusing atk alpha/GDF/FOMM) to buff sci dmg attacks).
You think making something NECESSARY is the way to FORCE variety, I think making it optional and beneficial but not necessary to better promote variety.
I put up with this forced variety in WoW, STO is different and that's one of its few non IP strenghts.
But that's the whole point: variety is not beneficial. An optimized team consists of Andorian Escorts and Fleet Defiants, or in a handful of cases (mainly No Win) mostly those but also a Fleet Advanced Escort or two. The introduction of even a Vesta or Fleet Excelsior, the best ships in their classes (thanks to their high DPS), will slow the team down overall. That's because the only role that is necessary or beneficial in this game, or at least the PvE portion of it (which is what all the content is based around, just try to get good gear or a sizable amount of any currency out of PvP), is that of damage dealer. That forces people to play that role and make anything else secondary at best, and that pushes them toward the ships that are best at that role: the top escorts. That leaves the game with no variety.
Its not a net "DPS gain" but having a capable tank that can also do decnet cruiser DPS makes things far easier for everyone else. If having a cruiser around was an upgrade instead of a sidegrade it'd be considered mandatory, and that directly restricts people's choices. While there are some that prefer that playstyle I certainly do not, especially not in a spaceship game.