I guess the points I'm trying to make with the stories are:
What point are cruisers when a dps spec'd escort can tank just as well as any tank spec'd cruiser?
What point are science ships when escorts can scatter volley/torp spread things into dust before any CC is needed? When dps spec'd escorts can heal themselves just as well as a science ship?
The answer is none. As a science or engineering captain it makes more sense to forget the typical roles the ships were designed to do and gear them towards dps and dps only (i.e. go get an escort). This is what is broken with the game. It's not that tacs or escorts are OP. It's that the content favors a dps race and needs to change.
I agree to some extent, but I would also say that Sci abilities at least are somewhat underpowered. I've had agro from the ISE Tac Cube, popped TR2 and ES1 with max flow caps and Aux power, and watched the damage numbers its beams were getting, and they didn't change at all. That's a maxed out Lt. power plus a maxed out LtC. power having zero effect. That's a problem.
I guess the points I'm trying to make with the stories are:
What point are cruisers when a dps spec'd escort can tank just as well as any tank spec'd cruiser?
What point are science ships when escorts can scatter volley/torp spread things into dust before any CC is needed? When dps spec'd escorts can heal themselves just as well as a science ship?
You are mistaken if you believe an escort can tank or heal as well as a cruiser or do space magic to any noticeable degree. These two ships have a lower DPS output by design because they bring other advantages that are nice but not required. They are sidegrades not upgrades as it should be. Glass cannons and the trinity have no real place in a sci fi setting of any kind (or even a fantasy one but its a crutch from days gone by).
You don't NEED an escort's extra DPS, a cruiser's tankyness, or a sci vessel's space magics to get anything done, they are all nice to have but not mandatory. This is a good thing and I will not lament the fact we're not forced to get tanks and healers. While some players do enjoy those roles most do not. Its not coincidental those are always teh classes lacking for group content in other MMOs. Also, isn't it funny players aren't really crying about those roles not being mandatory, but rather about how their dps doesn't compare to escorts? What sense would it make for the non dps ships to do as much damage as the dps ships? Probably as much sense as making it mandatory to hve a cruiser stand around while a sci vessel heals it so that the bad guys put on blinders and focus only on it....
As fun as anecdotal stories are those escorts will also pop when hit with the RNG one hit wonder. It happened to me today, and again a day ago, and so on and on. I hear that if you're using the right armor consoles and are particularly tanky some cruisers can survive it. My own cruiser alt has yet to live through it though. How often they happen feels totally random too; some STFs you get hit and the guilty torpedo is invisible to boot, others you can see it but due to close ranges you really cant do anything in time unless you were already running FAW, and other times you clearly have agro and the one shot never hits. Its totally random!
As far as sci vessels go.... their heathen space magicks are of little use against the Borg. Quite a while ago the Borg were made more of less immune to most of the sci debuffs. About the only reliable thing to hit them with is Grav Well but only as a CC not a damage dealer. I would susggest either full power to weapons with low powered Sci powers or go full aux/shield and use all kinetic weapons.
To b fair the best sci vessels these days are actually the full carriers you see floating around as well as the Vesta (a ship that thinks its a HEC), and possibly the wells timeship (a sci vessel maneuverable enough to easily mount DBBs as standart and has got to be an amazing kinetic weapon delivery platform)
You are mistaken if you believe an escort can tank or heal as well as a cruiser or do space magic to any noticeable degree.
If cruisers can shield/hull tank and escorts can speed tank (i.e. move faster to make defenses go up and present the proper shield facing etc...) and both can be killed equally easily by the borg, then they have equal tanking capabilities.
If the borg were made more or less immune to most of the science debuffs then escorts and science ships are on equal footing with science magics. (more or less immune is equal to more or less immune.)
The discrepancy between a science ships healing and an escorts healing is 600 HP for hazard emitters, about 1000 shields for transfer shield strength, and equal on aux to SIF if the science ship runs with HE3 and TSS3. Typically you can only pick one level 3 so really, your only different from escorts by about 600HP every 45 seconds. But that's only for the escorts that don't have the LtC Science. Those can actually have an equal level of healing. Also, the healing difference is minuscule compared to the damage output of NPCs. Not even worth noting. So yes, escorts can heal just as well as a science ship. And in a previous post you pretty much hit on this fact:
If having a cruiser around was an upgrade instead of a sidegrade it'd be considered mandatory, and that directly restricts people's choices.
makes Escorts MANDATORY. Why? Because escorts can dps better than science or cruisers. If they do something better then they are mandatory right? Thus restricting people's choices.
Need more proof of the state of the game's content:
To b fair the best sci vessels these days are actually the full carriers you see floating around as well as the Vesta (a ship that thinks its a HEC), and possibly the wells timeship (a sci vessel maneuverable enough to easily mount DBBs as standart and has got to be an amazing kinetic weapon delivery platform)
All of the ships you suggested have something in common. They can equip a LtC tac officer or Commander tac officer. This boosts dps, and these are the best science ships? Sounds to me that this game makes DPS mandatory, which given the state of the other two ship classes the average science ship and cruiser are not sidegrades but downgrades.
What am I not seeing? Throw some numbers out there, show me builds and playstyles that do not rely on dps to be valuable. I do not want to be required to fly an escort to pull my weight.
So there's been some talk in other forum posts unrelated to this thave have brought up some good ideas that could be used by the devs to restore the roles of the ships instantly to the table.
Make certain purchased consoles that are used to enhance boff skills available to be slotted in device slots like the plasma manifold but keep the consoles that have powers of their own like weapons and disable effects keep those as consoles.
Remove armors as consoles and add 2 armor slots to cruisers and 1 to science and 0 to escorts without reducing the console slots the ships already have in engineering.
Add defense bonuses to the number of total crewman, so that the higher the number of crewmen you have the better your defense, this way cruisers, carriers would have the highest defense and the smaller ships would have less.
These changes would ensure an immediate return to roles between the 3 types of ships.
So there's been some talk in other forum posts unrelated to this thave have brought up some good ideas that could be used by the devs to restore the roles of the ships instantly to the table.
Make certain purchased consoles that are used to enhance boff skills available to be slotted in device slots like the plasma manifold but keep the consoles that have powers of their own like weapons and disable effects keep those as consoles.
Remove armors as consoles and add 2 armor slots to cruisers and 1 to science and 0 to escorts without reducing the console slots the ships already have in engineering.
Add defense bonuses to the number of total crewman, so that the higher the number of crewmen you have the better your defense, this way cruisers, carriers would have the highest defense and the smaller ships would have less.
These changes would ensure an immediate return to roles between the 3 types of ships.
Interesting ideas.... thumbs up. More options the better imo.
The thing is, measuring a ships capabilities by DPS is a red herring. It is not always valid, and a lot of people are not realizing the effect they actually are having on a battle because it isn't something overtly obvious.
In Cryptic games, like City of Heroes, Champions Online and Star Trek Online, DPS is used as the metric that doles out certain rewards. In STO you can see this in action during fleet actions (the top reward is given to the person that does the most damage), and in most of the Special Task Forces (to get the added rewards from the optionals, you need a certain level of coordinated DPS, not difficult to achieve, but definitely slanted towards higher DPS setups).
So yeah, in some aspects DPS may be a red herring. But in this game there are certain situations which are biased toward rewarding the higher DPS.
The ubernerf coming to leadership boffs will likely pull escorts at least somewhat out of their tanking sweet spot.
leadership effects have been cut into 1/4 of what it was, which will drop an escort normally with around 125%+ per min hull regen in combat to only around 31% per min regen.
So there's been some talk in other forum posts unrelated to this thave have brought up some good ideas that could be used by the devs to restore the roles of the ships instantly to the table.
Make certain purchased consoles that are used to enhance boff skills available to be slotted in device slots like the plasma manifold but keep the consoles that have powers of their own like weapons and disable effects keep those as consoles.
Remove armors as consoles and add 2 armor slots to cruisers and 1 to science and 0 to escorts without reducing the console slots the ships already have in engineering.
Add defense bonuses to the number of total crewman, so that the higher the number of crewmen you have the better your defense, this way cruisers, carriers would have the highest defense and the smaller ships would have less.
These changes would ensure an immediate return to roles between the 3 types of ships.
Although i am not a fan of the Trinity and i think that Star Trek ships should work different, i like it.
It would still be better than keeping everything as it is, these suggestions would give bigger ships at least some advantage.
"...'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied--chains us all irrevocably.' ... The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. I fear that today--"
- (TNG) Picard, quoting Judge Aaron Satie
So there's been some talk in other forum posts unrelated to this thave have brought up some good ideas that could be used by the devs to restore the roles of the ships instantly to the table.
Make certain purchased consoles that are used to enhance boff skills available to be slotted in device slots like the plasma manifold but keep the consoles that have powers of their own like weapons and disable effects keep those as consoles.
Remove armors as consoles and add 2 armor slots to cruisers and 1 to science and 0 to escorts without reducing the console slots the ships already have in engineering.
Add defense bonuses to the number of total crewman, so that the higher the number of crewmen you have the better your defense, this way cruisers, carriers would have the highest defense and the smaller ships would have less.
These changes would ensure an immediate return to roles between the 3 types of ships.
Taking all armor from the escorts would either make them useless in PvE due to instantly dying, or it would need escorts to not generate any threat versus Npcs at all.
Escorts not generating any threat would let them still be useful in PvE, but would make them totally useless in PvP, which all these nerf escort threads all seem to be about.
I don't do PvP, so I don't care if escorts can do anything in it... but I want them to be usable in PvE.
Let us wear Swimsuits on Foundry maps or bridges please! I would pay zen for that.
Taking all armor from the escorts would either make them useless in PvE due to instantly dying, or it would need escorts to not generate any threat versus Npcs at all.
Escorts not generating any threat would let them still be useful in PvE, but would make them totally useless in PvP, which all these nerf escort threads all seem to be about.
I don't do PvP, so I don't care if escorts can do anything in it... but I want them to be usable in PvE.
Why would escorts be useless, if they would require healing from healers ? You mean 5x tac/escort teams would be useless ? With that I agree, and I do not think it would be a bad thing actually. After all in all MMOS you need healers and tanks for the DPS players.
"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.”
Why would escorts be useless, if they would require healing from healers ? You mean 5x tac/escort teams would be useless ? With that I agree, and I do not think it would be a bad thing actually. After all in all MMOS you need healers and tanks for the DPS players.
An easy mistake is to think that you can heal the dead.
All the people whining for nerfing the escorts are fighting escorts that are fully kitted out with reputation items and abilities. I am really sick and tired of PVP ruining the PVE. I wish PVP was removed from STO.
If you take those away, the escorts are suddenly not that tank-able any more. Even with purple mark XII shields, they die easily without rep tier V sets.
Taking the armor consoles away would result in instant deaths. Instant ones.
Again... you can't heal those. Oh. And escorts running away from enemies with evasive manovers is NOT tanking the cube.
But Cryptic seems to think that Escorts do too much damage, so they are making the tactical captain new traits for tanking.
So with the human buff nerf, I expect tacticals in cruisers.
Let us wear Swimsuits on Foundry maps or bridges please! I would pay zen for that.
In your signature you have "Learn to use your cruiser. Its a tank, not a damage dealer."
So why opposed to lower tanking for escorts ? They tank very well atm, no ship survives 250k crits anyway. I could rephrase it to learn to use your escort, it's a damage dealer, not a tank ? :rolleyes:
And btw, lately I'm flying tac/escort as I'm bored to grind rep for other toons. My steamrunner tanks/dps better in STF than any of my other ships (but truth is, half of it is from leadership). I almost always have the agro (intentionally) and die only to one-shots. The surviability of escorts is too high atm especially when combined with top gear and rep bonuses.
If you blow up easily in your escort from normal weapon fire, then there must be something seriously wrong with your build.
Of course that's PVE I'm speaking about. Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to die from normal weapon fire.
"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.”
In your signature you have "Learn to use your cruiser. Its a tank, not a damage dealer."
So why opposed to lower tanking for escorts ? They tank very well atm, no ship survives 250k crits anyway. I could rephrase it to learn to use your escort, it's a damage dealer, not a tank ? :rolleyes:
And btw, lately I'm flying tac/escort as I'm bored to grind rep for other toons. My steamrunner tanks/dps better in STF than any of my other ships (but truth is, half of it is from leadership). I almost always have the agro (intentionally) and die only to one-shots. The surviability of escorts is too high atm especially when combined with top gear and rep bonuses.
If you blow up easily in your escort from normal weapon fire, then there must be something seriously wrong with your build.
Of course that's PVE I'm speaking about. Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to die from normal weapon fire.
Its the same build that can tank almost anything with a fully reputation-ed escort.
The difference between set and non set shields seem enormous. With the same build a set shield lasts for 3 times longer then a non set shield.
Even with 3 armour consoles, 2 tactical teams, 5 human bridge officers, 2 Emergency power to shields a non-set shield just drains away in seconds to an elite cube.
And say good bye to that. Human bridge officers are going to be useless pretty soon.
250k crits should be taken out of the game entirely, unless cruisers get 300k hull.
And while I dislike my fun being ruined by others for simply the sake of ruining other's stuff, I would be capable of accepting the escorts being 1 hit kill glass cannons.
If they did not create so much threat.
Either you have to remove escort threat generation, or improve cruiser threat generation dramatically.
Because dead escorts do no damage at all. So if their tanking is taken away, then the cruisers need to generate threat 50 times better then they do now.
Let us wear Swimsuits on Foundry maps or bridges please! I would pay zen for that.
I have to agree, somewhat, with the OP. In this game DPS is King... and escorts are the ship of choice for PVE.
Now, don't get me wrong, you can still have a place in PvE in a sci/cruiser... but are they truely needed... no not really. The fact is, I don't care to fly an escort (i have multiple toons... an the one I prefer is the Sci/CC/Healer). If it weren't for PvP... I wouldnt feel any use for that character (and its the one I like best).
Now... let me just say, I have been here a LOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG time... and I can tell you, that Cryptic really has an issue with balance... I am not bashing on Escorts (nor do i think that a single cruiser should be able to tank a borg cube (let alone a tac cube) especially on elite.
My point is... is that it wasnt always this way... there was a time, when teams would form LOOKING for all classes. You wanted a tank, and a sci...
I constantly go back to KASE as the classic example here. When KASE was Khitamor Accord (pre queue days)... even on NORMAL Spheres spawned with each probe spawn (from both sides)... There was NO WAY 1 person could take a side by themselves... Escorts NEEDED support. The damage wasnt even "insta-kill" type... oh sure you died quickly... mainly because if you were on your own.. you had two/three spheres firsing at you.
Somewhere along the way (and I blame players for this (whining in forums that its too hard to beat), cryptic decided that DPS will rule ... and since there were more escorts... that they needed to be stronger and less of a glass cannon...
Then to counter (cause it got too easy)... forget about balance, they gave the NPC's insane amounts of 1 shot DPS (that few could survive, and there was no way to survive even with support).
Now... Finally... they are beginning to address the AI issue with NPC's... and I hope... HOPE that things are gonig to get harder again... so when you come out of an Elite STF you feel like you accomplished something... when the optional is considered an achievement ... not a given... where a player can still think they won the mission, without the optional.
Taking all armor from the escorts would either make them useless in PvE due to instantly dying, or it would need escorts to not generate any threat versus Npcs at all.
Escorts not generating any threat would let them still be useful in PvE, but would make them totally useless in PvP, which all these nerf escort threads all seem to be about.
I don't do PvP, so I don't care if escorts can do anything in it... but I want them to be usable in PvE.
There are consoles that they can easily expand upon that have reduced threat. It's real simply to change the other consoles or add to these consoles the ones people normally use from the embassy so that escorts produce less threat.
I'd suggest that we ask for the consoles be added to the romulan faction since everyone is using that now for everything or require reduced threat on certain types of weapons that can be purchased from the fleet. There are plenty of ways to increase the threat for the tanking ships too.
Geez, nerfing escorts will not solve the issue. The problem is not with escorts or cruisers or science ships!!! It's the content!!!!
You need NPCs that can heal, use regen passives, have abilities to remove debuff passives or better yet debuff players effectively. Once you do that, escort won't seem so OP and cruisers and science ships will be very useful again in STF.
It has been done with Donatra (somewhat) and the Queen diamond. So at least I know it's possible.
Edit: I also realize it has been done with Romulans, Breen, tholians and to some extent Dominion. These NPCs don't have powerful debuffers or resist, but it's enough to give you a challenge if you're fighting a whole fleet on your own.
Your right about that. Even maybe a longer respawn or death penalty might work. Change tactics people use to survive longer. I see a lot of escorts on eSTF's blowing up or flying out of a battle on fire to heal, then zoom back in. i do the same when i'm running mine. it gets old. there's no strategy or tactics except DPS grinding.Makes me laugh to see escorts sitting still unloading into a cube. seriously? taking out a cube should be a team strategy, not a DPS pissing match. Obviously they cant make the cubes come out Wolf 359 style and vaporizing everyone since its only 5 players (besides onslaught), but make it so you have to have a somewhat balanced team, instead of mindless pew pewing. regen cubes more powerful and smarter AI....ect.
Don't get me wrong, you can build a cruiser and sci ships to dps very well, but you will definitely be abandoning your role as a team healer or tank.
If you want to focuson something your ships isn't designed to do you really have to expect to make some sacrifices. Of course as a trinity hater I do not mourn but rather celebrate the fact tank and healer roles are nice but not required in space combat.
What I do not get is why people are so adamant about trying to pound square pegs into round holes, if you find cruisers and sci vessels so lacking don't fly them? I have alts on each and somehow manage to find enjoyment out of the different playstyles.
If you want to focuson something your ships isn't designed to do you really have to expect to make some sacrifices. Of course as a trinity hater I do not mourn but rather celebrate the fact tank and healer roles are nice but not required in space combat.
What I do not get is why people are so adamant about trying to pound square pegs into round holes, if you find cruisers and sci vessels so lacking don't fly them? I have alts on each and somehow manage to find enjoyment out of the different playstyles.
I'm tired of flying escorts. I want to do something new without having my team gripe and complain about "Oh great a cruiser. We'll be lucky to get the optional". The tank and healer roles are not nice to have now. They are the runt of the pack that the dps have to carry through content. The problem is the ships are designed to focus on something the content has rendered pointless. Why have the ships in the game if they are not designed to handle the content? Wouldn't it make more sense to alter the content to make tanks and healers appealing and useful yet not kill off the 5-man escort groups?
I'm tired of flying escorts. I want to do something new without having my team gripe and complain about "Oh great a cruiser. We'll be lucky to get the optional". ?
I call BS on this. I've flown my engi cruiser in what must by now be HUNDREDS of ESTFs, and my sci in a sci vessel in at least a hundred ESTFs, and I have NEVER heard anyone utter such complaints until AFTER the player in question proves to be utterly incompetent, and in those cases players will complain about useless escorts just as much. I think people make up these "anecdotal" complaints from other players to make their stance seem more real. I. CALL. BS.
I call BS on this. I've flown my engi cruiser in what must by now be HUNDREDS of ESTFs, and my sci in a sci vessel in at least a hundred ESTFs, and I have NEVER heard anyone utter such complaints until AFTER the player in question proves to be utterly incompetent, and in those cases players will complain about useless escorts just as much. I think people make up these "anecdotal" complaints from other players to make their stance seem more real. I. CALL. BS.
I agree, I too never see anyone complaining about the fact people fly cruisers, only if said players are not very good. That said, my limited experience with stf's so far: About half of the escorts I meet in random pick up group stf's do less damage than my Tank cruiser.
I call BS on this. I've flown my engi cruiser in what must by now be HUNDREDS of ESTFs, and my sci in a sci vessel in at least a hundred ESTFs, and I have NEVER heard anyone utter such complaints until AFTER the player in question proves to be utterly incompetent, and in those cases players will complain about useless escorts just as much. I think people make up these "anecdotal" complaints from other players to make their stance seem more real. I. CALL. BS.
Just because you didn't see it in team chat, doesn't mean it wasn't typed/said elsewhere, but this is another one of the deflections away from the topic at hand. The content favors DPS and has caused the lack of appeal / usefulness / need of cruisers and science ships played in the roles of tank and healer.
So again I ask, Why have the ships in the game if they are not designed to handle the content? Wouldn't it make more sense to alter the content to make tanks and healers appealing and useful yet not kill off the 5-man escort groups? You would get to have STO's beautiful strength of not needing one particular class to do STFs and the people who want to play a pure tank or a pure debuff/CC/Healer a much needed feeling of usefulness and at the same time this would expand on the viable builds for PvE for all ship classes.
Just because you didn't see it in team chat, doesn't mean it wasn't typed/said elsewhere, but this is another one of the deflections away from the topic at hand. The content favors DPS and has caused the lack of appeal / usefulness / need of cruisers and science ships played in the roles of tank and healer.
So again I ask, Why have the ships in the game if they are not designed to handle the content? Wouldn't it make more sense to alter the content to make tanks and healers appealing and useful yet not kill off the 5-man escort groups? You would get to have STO's beautiful strength of not needing one particular class to do STFs and the people who want to play a pure tank or a pure debuff/CC/Healer a much needed feeling of usefulness and at the same time this would expand on the viable builds for PvE for all ship classes.
HUNDREDS of STFs and not one complain, that gets into valid statistical sample numbers.
I get that you want to make pure tank cruisers and pure CC/healboat Sci Vessels work, but the very overly specialized nature of "pure" roles makes them only work in hard trinity content. As it stands they can contribute significant DPS while providing other benefits. More than enough DPS to carry at least one or two other players. Even my kinetic sci vessels always seems to go to the top of the agro table surpassing cruisers and escorts, and its my least geared alt!
If you're a cruiser or sci vessel pilot you need to realize doing damage is just as important as doing your "role". I get you don't want that and you want to be a super specialized and required part of groups but THANKFULLY STO has avoided a dependance in tanks and healers while still managing to make them usefull.
HUNDREDS of STFs and not one complain, that gets into valid statistical sample numbers.
I get that you want to make pure tank cruisers and pure CC/healboat Sci Vessels work, but the very overly specialized nature of "pure" roles makes them only work in hard trinity content. As it stands they can contribute significant DPS while providing other benefits. More than enough DPS to carry at least one or two other players. Even my kinetic sci vessels always seems to go to the top of the agro table surpassing cruisers and escorts, and its my least geared alt!
If you're a cruiser or sci vessel pilot you need to realize doing damage is just as important as doing your "role". I get you don't want that and you want to be a super specialized and required part of groups but THANKFULLY STO has avoided a dependance in tanks and healers while still managing to make them usefull.
Yes, hundreds gets into a statistical sample of : 0.001% I actually gave you 500 runs and calculated the sample size based on the number of accounts which I got from the archive on the STO infragraphics post and assuming everyone you grouped with was a new account/person. This gives you a total of about 2000 players. Given the size of the userbase, you would need about 1 million more to call it acceptable. 1.5 million more and you could call it valid.
If you are measuring dps based on aggro, you're doing it wrong. I have about 50 logs that show that I was doing the 2nd to least dps yet I have aggro about 20-30% of fights. Aggro does not mean higher dps all the time. Things like torpedoes and some science skills draw more aggro than their damage.
The ships are not useful. Everything can be done by escorts. Why have cruisers or science ships available? In a number of your posts you make note of this fact, yet dance around it by stating they are not needed but useful. How can something be both not needed and useful? This doesn't compute.
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.
Why would I bother making a support ship (healer) if everyone can heal themselves.
If a support ship is not needed, why have them?
To make them useful, you have to build them as a dps ship, which an escort can do better. To that end, science ships are inferior to escorts. Which by your own logic everyone should play with escorts:
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.
As a science and cruiser captain, I have been limited to one build that's viable. It's the tanky DPS or the support DPS role (which by your earlier quote why bother making a support ship...). I have been forced into these roles with no acceptable way to play differently so we may as well delete cruisers and sci vessels from the game's server database.
Why not instead expand the content to allow pure tanks or pure science ships to be more viable without requiring the hated trinity? It would be nice if there was a synergy bonus from having an eng/cruiser or a sci/science vessel that boosted the damage/effectiveness of the tank or science skills. But this would only work if escorts didn't tank as well as a cruiser or heal as well as a science ship.
Conversely if you are opposed to the whole tank/healer roles, why not change those captains to be dps but in different ways from the escorts? If that happens, they would need to be brought up to the level of dps of escorts only then can you call the two sidegrades from escorts.
If content can be done with a given ship/build, then it is viable. If content is done with a minimum of time or trivialized difficulty, then it is optimal. Everything is else a matter of players selfishly expecting others to conform to their standards of play. If I want to play a science captain and fly a rainbow beam cruiser, if I can complete content and perform to reasonable expectations (and I can, which means it is viable), no matter how "sub-optimal" it may be it's my right to do so as a player. Players have no reasonable expectation of others to conform to their own standards of play.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say I've seen more (and by more, I mean practically every time) optional objective failures, deaths, and wipes that are the result of players doing the DPS race with little to no regard for other players or situational awareness, than someone not being able to "pull their weight" by playing sub-optimally.
Somebody getting uppity about canon? No problem! Just take a deep breath, and repeat after me:
Comments
I agree to some extent, but I would also say that Sci abilities at least are somewhat underpowered. I've had agro from the ISE Tac Cube, popped TR2 and ES1 with max flow caps and Aux power, and watched the damage numbers its beams were getting, and they didn't change at all. That's a maxed out Lt. power plus a maxed out LtC. power having zero effect. That's a problem.
You are mistaken if you believe an escort can tank or heal as well as a cruiser or do space magic to any noticeable degree. These two ships have a lower DPS output by design because they bring other advantages that are nice but not required. They are sidegrades not upgrades as it should be. Glass cannons and the trinity have no real place in a sci fi setting of any kind (or even a fantasy one but its a crutch from days gone by).
You don't NEED an escort's extra DPS, a cruiser's tankyness, or a sci vessel's space magics to get anything done, they are all nice to have but not mandatory. This is a good thing and I will not lament the fact we're not forced to get tanks and healers. While some players do enjoy those roles most do not. Its not coincidental those are always teh classes lacking for group content in other MMOs. Also, isn't it funny players aren't really crying about those roles not being mandatory, but rather about how their dps doesn't compare to escorts? What sense would it make for the non dps ships to do as much damage as the dps ships? Probably as much sense as making it mandatory to hve a cruiser stand around while a sci vessel heals it so that the bad guys put on blinders and focus only on it....
If cruisers can shield/hull tank and escorts can speed tank (i.e. move faster to make defenses go up and present the proper shield facing etc...) and both can be killed equally easily by the borg, then they have equal tanking capabilities.
If the borg were made more or less immune to most of the science debuffs then escorts and science ships are on equal footing with science magics. (more or less immune is equal to more or less immune.)
The discrepancy between a science ships healing and an escorts healing is 600 HP for hazard emitters, about 1000 shields for transfer shield strength, and equal on aux to SIF if the science ship runs with HE3 and TSS3. Typically you can only pick one level 3 so really, your only different from escorts by about 600HP every 45 seconds. But that's only for the escorts that don't have the LtC Science. Those can actually have an equal level of healing. Also, the healing difference is minuscule compared to the damage output of NPCs. Not even worth noting. So yes, escorts can heal just as well as a science ship. And in a previous post you pretty much hit on this fact:
Thus you are left with these two ship types that bring very little to a dps race that is STO. Which by your own logic,
makes Escorts MANDATORY. Why? Because escorts can dps better than science or cruisers. If they do something better then they are mandatory right? Thus restricting people's choices.
Need more proof of the state of the game's content: All of the ships you suggested have something in common. They can equip a LtC tac officer or Commander tac officer. This boosts dps, and these are the best science ships? Sounds to me that this game makes DPS mandatory, which given the state of the other two ship classes the average science ship and cruiser are not sidegrades but downgrades.
What am I not seeing? Throw some numbers out there, show me builds and playstyles that do not rely on dps to be valuable. I do not want to be required to fly an escort to pull my weight.
Exactly why they need nerfing, they should never be able to tank.
Make certain purchased consoles that are used to enhance boff skills available to be slotted in device slots like the plasma manifold but keep the consoles that have powers of their own like weapons and disable effects keep those as consoles.
Remove armors as consoles and add 2 armor slots to cruisers and 1 to science and 0 to escorts without reducing the console slots the ships already have in engineering.
Add defense bonuses to the number of total crewman, so that the higher the number of crewmen you have the better your defense, this way cruisers, carriers would have the highest defense and the smaller ships would have less.
These changes would ensure an immediate return to roles between the 3 types of ships.
So yeah, in some aspects DPS may be a red herring. But in this game there are certain situations which are biased toward rewarding the higher DPS.
leadership effects have been cut into 1/4 of what it was, which will drop an escort normally with around 125%+ per min hull regen in combat to only around 31% per min regen.
Plus, the regen is affected by crew properly now.
It would still be better than keeping everything as it is, these suggestions would give bigger ships at least some advantage.
Taking all armor from the escorts would either make them useless in PvE due to instantly dying, or it would need escorts to not generate any threat versus Npcs at all.
Escorts not generating any threat would let them still be useful in PvE, but would make them totally useless in PvP, which all these nerf escort threads all seem to be about.
I don't do PvP, so I don't care if escorts can do anything in it... but I want them to be usable in PvE.
Why would escorts be useless, if they would require healing from healers ? You mean 5x tac/escort teams would be useless ? With that I agree, and I do not think it would be a bad thing actually. After all in all MMOS you need healers and tanks for the DPS players.
An easy mistake is to think that you can heal the dead.
All the people whining for nerfing the escorts are fighting escorts that are fully kitted out with reputation items and abilities. I am really sick and tired of PVP ruining the PVE. I wish PVP was removed from STO.
If you take those away, the escorts are suddenly not that tank-able any more. Even with purple mark XII shields, they die easily without rep tier V sets.
Taking the armor consoles away would result in instant deaths. Instant ones.
Again... you can't heal those. Oh. And escorts running away from enemies with evasive manovers is NOT tanking the cube.
But Cryptic seems to think that Escorts do too much damage, so they are making the tactical captain new traits for tanking.
So with the human buff nerf, I expect tacticals in cruisers.
So why opposed to lower tanking for escorts ? They tank very well atm, no ship survives 250k crits anyway. I could rephrase it to learn to use your escort, it's a damage dealer, not a tank ? :rolleyes:
And btw, lately I'm flying tac/escort as I'm bored to grind rep for other toons. My steamrunner tanks/dps better in STF than any of my other ships (but truth is, half of it is from leadership). I almost always have the agro (intentionally) and die only to one-shots. The surviability of escorts is too high atm especially when combined with top gear and rep bonuses.
If you blow up easily in your escort from normal weapon fire, then there must be something seriously wrong with your build.
Of course that's PVE I'm speaking about. Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to die from normal weapon fire.
Its the same build that can tank almost anything with a fully reputation-ed escort.
The difference between set and non set shields seem enormous. With the same build a set shield lasts for 3 times longer then a non set shield.
Even with 3 armour consoles, 2 tactical teams, 5 human bridge officers, 2 Emergency power to shields a non-set shield just drains away in seconds to an elite cube.
And say good bye to that. Human bridge officers are going to be useless pretty soon.
250k crits should be taken out of the game entirely, unless cruisers get 300k hull.
And while I dislike my fun being ruined by others for simply the sake of ruining other's stuff, I would be capable of accepting the escorts being 1 hit kill glass cannons.
If they did not create so much threat.
Either you have to remove escort threat generation, or improve cruiser threat generation dramatically.
Because dead escorts do no damage at all. So if their tanking is taken away, then the cruisers need to generate threat 50 times better then they do now.
Now, don't get me wrong, you can still have a place in PvE in a sci/cruiser... but are they truely needed... no not really. The fact is, I don't care to fly an escort (i have multiple toons... an the one I prefer is the Sci/CC/Healer). If it weren't for PvP... I wouldnt feel any use for that character (and its the one I like best).
Now... let me just say, I have been here a LOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG time... and I can tell you, that Cryptic really has an issue with balance... I am not bashing on Escorts (nor do i think that a single cruiser should be able to tank a borg cube (let alone a tac cube) especially on elite.
My point is... is that it wasnt always this way... there was a time, when teams would form LOOKING for all classes. You wanted a tank, and a sci...
I constantly go back to KASE as the classic example here. When KASE was Khitamor Accord (pre queue days)... even on NORMAL Spheres spawned with each probe spawn (from both sides)... There was NO WAY 1 person could take a side by themselves... Escorts NEEDED support. The damage wasnt even "insta-kill" type... oh sure you died quickly... mainly because if you were on your own.. you had two/three spheres firsing at you.
Somewhere along the way (and I blame players for this (whining in forums that its too hard to beat), cryptic decided that DPS will rule ... and since there were more escorts... that they needed to be stronger and less of a glass cannon...
Then to counter (cause it got too easy)... forget about balance, they gave the NPC's insane amounts of 1 shot DPS (that few could survive, and there was no way to survive even with support).
Now... Finally... they are beginning to address the AI issue with NPC's... and I hope... HOPE that things are gonig to get harder again... so when you come out of an Elite STF you feel like you accomplished something... when the optional is considered an achievement ... not a given... where a player can still think they won the mission, without the optional.
Just my cranky self
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
There are consoles that they can easily expand upon that have reduced threat. It's real simply to change the other consoles or add to these consoles the ones people normally use from the embassy so that escorts produce less threat.
I'd suggest that we ask for the consoles be added to the romulan faction since everyone is using that now for everything or require reduced threat on certain types of weapons that can be purchased from the fleet. There are plenty of ways to increase the threat for the tanking ships too.
Your right about that. Even maybe a longer respawn or death penalty might work. Change tactics people use to survive longer. I see a lot of escorts on eSTF's blowing up or flying out of a battle on fire to heal, then zoom back in. i do the same when i'm running mine. it gets old. there's no strategy or tactics except DPS grinding.Makes me laugh to see escorts sitting still unloading into a cube. seriously? taking out a cube should be a team strategy, not a DPS pissing match. Obviously they cant make the cubes come out Wolf 359 style and vaporizing everyone since its only 5 players (besides onslaught), but make it so you have to have a somewhat balanced team, instead of mindless pew pewing. regen cubes more powerful and smarter AI....ect.
If you want to focuson something your ships isn't designed to do you really have to expect to make some sacrifices. Of course as a trinity hater I do not mourn but rather celebrate the fact tank and healer roles are nice but not required in space combat.
What I do not get is why people are so adamant about trying to pound square pegs into round holes, if you find cruisers and sci vessels so lacking don't fly them? I have alts on each and somehow manage to find enjoyment out of the different playstyles.
I'm tired of flying escorts. I want to do something new without having my team gripe and complain about "Oh great a cruiser. We'll be lucky to get the optional". The tank and healer roles are not nice to have now. They are the runt of the pack that the dps have to carry through content. The problem is the ships are designed to focus on something the content has rendered pointless. Why have the ships in the game if they are not designed to handle the content? Wouldn't it make more sense to alter the content to make tanks and healers appealing and useful yet not kill off the 5-man escort groups?
I call BS on this. I've flown my engi cruiser in what must by now be HUNDREDS of ESTFs, and my sci in a sci vessel in at least a hundred ESTFs, and I have NEVER heard anyone utter such complaints until AFTER the player in question proves to be utterly incompetent, and in those cases players will complain about useless escorts just as much. I think people make up these "anecdotal" complaints from other players to make their stance seem more real. I. CALL. BS.
I agree, I too never see anyone complaining about the fact people fly cruisers, only if said players are not very good. That said, my limited experience with stf's so far: About half of the escorts I meet in random pick up group stf's do less damage than my Tank cruiser.
sig
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It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
Just because you didn't see it in team chat, doesn't mean it wasn't typed/said elsewhere, but this is another one of the deflections away from the topic at hand. The content favors DPS and has caused the lack of appeal / usefulness / need of cruisers and science ships played in the roles of tank and healer.
So again I ask, Why have the ships in the game if they are not designed to handle the content? Wouldn't it make more sense to alter the content to make tanks and healers appealing and useful yet not kill off the 5-man escort groups? You would get to have STO's beautiful strength of not needing one particular class to do STFs and the people who want to play a pure tank or a pure debuff/CC/Healer a much needed feeling of usefulness and at the same time this would expand on the viable builds for PvE for all ship classes.
HUNDREDS of STFs and not one complain, that gets into valid statistical sample numbers.
I get that you want to make pure tank cruisers and pure CC/healboat Sci Vessels work, but the very overly specialized nature of "pure" roles makes them only work in hard trinity content. As it stands they can contribute significant DPS while providing other benefits. More than enough DPS to carry at least one or two other players. Even my kinetic sci vessels always seems to go to the top of the agro table surpassing cruisers and escorts, and its my least geared alt!
If you're a cruiser or sci vessel pilot you need to realize doing damage is just as important as doing your "role". I get you don't want that and you want to be a super specialized and required part of groups but THANKFULLY STO has avoided a dependance in tanks and healers while still managing to make them usefull.
Yes, hundreds gets into a statistical sample of : 0.001% I actually gave you 500 runs and calculated the sample size based on the number of accounts which I got from the archive on the STO infragraphics post and assuming everyone you grouped with was a new account/person. This gives you a total of about 2000 players. Given the size of the userbase, you would need about 1 million more to call it acceptable. 1.5 million more and you could call it valid.
If you are measuring dps based on aggro, you're doing it wrong. I have about 50 logs that show that I was doing the 2nd to least dps yet I have aggro about 20-30% of fights. Aggro does not mean higher dps all the time. Things like torpedoes and some science skills draw more aggro than their damage.
The ships are not useful. Everything can be done by escorts. Why have cruisers or science ships available? In a number of your posts you make note of this fact, yet dance around it by stating they are not needed but useful. How can something be both not needed and useful? This doesn't compute.
Why have them at all?
If a support ship is not needed, why have them?
To make them useful, you have to build them as a dps ship, which an escort can do better. To that end, science ships are inferior to escorts. Which by your own logic everyone should play with escorts:
I think you actually answered a lot of these questions in an earlier post: As a science and cruiser captain, I have been limited to one build that's viable. It's the tanky DPS or the support DPS role (which by your earlier quote why bother making a support ship...). I have been forced into these roles with no acceptable way to play differently so we may as well delete cruisers and sci vessels from the game's server database.
Why not instead expand the content to allow pure tanks or pure science ships to be more viable without requiring the hated trinity? It would be nice if there was a synergy bonus from having an eng/cruiser or a sci/science vessel that boosted the damage/effectiveness of the tank or science skills. But this would only work if escorts didn't tank as well as a cruiser or heal as well as a science ship.
Conversely if you are opposed to the whole tank/healer roles, why not change those captains to be dps but in different ways from the escorts? If that happens, they would need to be brought up to the level of dps of escorts only then can you call the two sidegrades from escorts.
Optimal =/= viable.
If content can be done with a given ship/build, then it is viable. If content is done with a minimum of time or trivialized difficulty, then it is optimal. Everything is else a matter of players selfishly expecting others to conform to their standards of play. If I want to play a science captain and fly a rainbow beam cruiser, if I can complete content and perform to reasonable expectations (and I can, which means it is viable), no matter how "sub-optimal" it may be it's my right to do so as a player. Players have no reasonable expectation of others to conform to their own standards of play.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say I've seen more (and by more, I mean practically every time) optional objective failures, deaths, and wipes that are the result of players doing the DPS race with little to no regard for other players or situational awareness, than someone not being able to "pull their weight" by playing sub-optimally.
Spock's Brain.