Surely the game lacks in some areas of letting all classes be equally engaging but the complaint of it takes longer seems silly to me.
And if the rewards reflected that it took longer to do, it would be. Unfortunately the current reward structure means your Dil/Gear/Marks per hour are directly proportional to how many Tac/Escorts are in your team.
This game's playerbase wants 250 degree arc, higher accuracy, lower damage drop off weapons to do the same damage over time as narrow arc, short range focused weapons. In other words, complete thought process failure.
No. The playerbase wants phaser beam arrays gain utility from their abilities like cannons do, rather than being crippled by them.
After the recent 10K cruiser thread now cruiser fans are looking for another "in", another way to seem like victims. An escort tanking better than a cruiser? Are all of you mad or just carrying such a huge chip n your shoulders that its affecting your common sense?
Good grief, we KNOW cruisers are designed to tank and pay for that advantage in reduced DPS, why are we discussing this still? If you really feel that you should be in an escort move your behind into one.
Sheesh, at this rate you'll all be asking for a hard trinity soon.
10k Cruiser thread? Do you have the link?
Actually cruisers being designed to tank and pay for that in reduced DPS is reinforcing the idea of a hard trinity.
That said, I have little thought on it. I know my Engineer and Assault Cruiser is highly survivable and far more than my Tac in her Adv escort.
But I also don't see the escorts in my STF Pug teams die frequently either.
Usually against any truly competent PvE player, the only way you'll die is by one shot kill Mega Plasma Torpedo, combined with something that stops your buffs or just getting caught in a cooldown cycle. Which has little to do with class or skills.
If the ships are fairly balanced in PvP, then they aren't the problem in PvE. The problem in PvE is that the current missions do nothing to encourage tanking or healing as all the NPCs are just huge hit-point sinks that require damage, damage and more damage to bring down. Their attacks are also over-powered against all classes, and while a strong tank can survive them, the last thing they want to do is continually draw fire from a Tactical Cube or Gateway as no-one can survive that for long.
The problem with PvE is that dealing damage is king, everything else is just occasionally useful like Gravity Well and Eject Warp Plasma for stopping Probes/Nanite Spheres.
There are a few thing that do need tweaking for ship balance, like crew damage so cruisers can heal their hull faster before abilities, and decoupling science skills from tactical ones, but these aren't drastic changes for PvP. PvE is what needs to change, but it needs to do it by changing the enemies and the objectives.
No Win Scenario is a little better in this regard, but there are too many enemies for tanking reliably, but it at least encourages an active healer to strengthen and repair the freighter.
All true.
As a matter of canon, much of this game actually doesn't holds up as far as how abilities work. Things like engineering teams and science teams don't exist in the same way. If you're sending an away team over, then that ship is usually out of the fighting.
If there was a ship disable mechanic instead of outright destroying any ship, where your crew count could make a difference then it would be different. The ship is disabled, but your crew is repairing it, and that's the timer for your respawn. Thus investing in keeping your crew alive has a meaning behind it, namely your ship gets back in the fight sooner as it decreases your "respawn" timer. An engineering team would accelerate the ship's restoration, therefore functioning as an in space revive.
The idea of teamwork is a little skewed here. Every ship is a fully functioning entity. As it is in the Navy, every sailor is a firefighter, because you can't call a fire department out to sea. Sadly, there wasn't much squadron battle in the series save in DS9 where...it was DPS fest against the Dominion. On the other hand, individual ships had a wide variety of battles going up against their opponents, and they had different ways other than straight combat which is difficult to duplicate in a game.
This game needs a bit more cunning and guile. But as a space version of battleship, there must be an attrition based factor.
There should be a balance. A cruiser being extremely difficult to kill is absolutely meaningless if it cannot kill effectively in return. You can sit next to the neutronium hull of a dead planet killer all day, if it's not firing its antiproton beam you're pretty safe. So all ships should have their element of danger. You should not be able to win a war of attrition against a cruiser ever. A cruiser's biggest problem killing any escort should be it weaving in and out of weapons range with its superior maneuverability, but the cruiser shouldn't have spike damage, but pressure damage. Hitting so the opponent can't outdeal the damage coming in. The biggest problem with a sci should be it shutting down systems or scrambling things. An escort should have huge burst damage, but then have to reset for another run. As it is now...a cruiser isn't that big of a threat.
But by canon, even that isn't strict as the Defiant was tougher than $2 steak and could two shot a Bird of Prey.
The current DPS is king attitude on the PVE side is most prominent in STFs where the timer enforces the do more damage faster attitude. It's like that in all of them. Kill Birds and Raptor before they get to the Kang and destroy nanite probes and cubes quickly. Destroy probes before they get to the time portal. Destroy the cubes. Destroy the nanite generators and transformers. Destroy the Transwarp conduits. Destroy the generators and transformers. Destroy the probes before they can heal the transformers (this can be handled temporarily with crowd control, but killing the transformers fast is a better solution), destroy the gate and the tac cube.
The ESTFs are all do damage quickly. Which would be perfectly acceptable, if everyone was able to contribute to that goal meaningfully. Especially if it happens that one of the escorts gets blasted to scrap (even while I'm healing them) and I can't do their job anywhere near as efficiently.
No ship should be so good at another ship's function that the other ship becomes redundant. But no ship should be so poor at doing the primary objective of the mission that it becomes irrelevant.
This game is very weird. Look at it in infantry terms. If the Escort is the fast and nimble jeep or troop transport, the science ship is a mobile hospital, assymetrical ops, and cyberwarfare unit, and the Cruiser is the tank. Then we have jeeps with heavy artillery, and tanks with light machine gun mounts.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
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USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
Thats kinda silly reason isnt it?
Surely the game lacks in some areas of letting all classes be equally engaging but the complaint of it takes longer seems silly to me.
R.I.P
And if the rewards reflected that it took longer to do, it would be. Unfortunately the current reward structure means your Dil/Gear/Marks per hour are directly proportional to how many Tac/Escorts are in your team.
No, the playerbase wants their Cruiser and Sci ships to have as much impact as the class of ships that only do damage. Important distinction. No. The playerbase wants phaser beam arrays gain utility from their abilities like cannons do, rather than being crippled by them.
Actually cruisers being designed to tank and pay for that in reduced DPS is reinforcing the idea of a hard trinity.
That said, I have little thought on it. I know my Engineer and Assault Cruiser is highly survivable and far more than my Tac in her Adv escort.
But I also don't see the escorts in my STF Pug teams die frequently either.
Usually against any truly competent PvE player, the only way you'll die is by one shot kill Mega Plasma Torpedo, combined with something that stops your buffs or just getting caught in a cooldown cycle. Which has little to do with class or skills.
All true.
As a matter of canon, much of this game actually doesn't holds up as far as how abilities work. Things like engineering teams and science teams don't exist in the same way. If you're sending an away team over, then that ship is usually out of the fighting.
If there was a ship disable mechanic instead of outright destroying any ship, where your crew count could make a difference then it would be different. The ship is disabled, but your crew is repairing it, and that's the timer for your respawn. Thus investing in keeping your crew alive has a meaning behind it, namely your ship gets back in the fight sooner as it decreases your "respawn" timer. An engineering team would accelerate the ship's restoration, therefore functioning as an in space revive.
The idea of teamwork is a little skewed here. Every ship is a fully functioning entity. As it is in the Navy, every sailor is a firefighter, because you can't call a fire department out to sea. Sadly, there wasn't much squadron battle in the series save in DS9 where...it was DPS fest against the Dominion. On the other hand, individual ships had a wide variety of battles going up against their opponents, and they had different ways other than straight combat which is difficult to duplicate in a game.
This game needs a bit more cunning and guile. But as a space version of battleship, there must be an attrition based factor.
There should be a balance. A cruiser being extremely difficult to kill is absolutely meaningless if it cannot kill effectively in return. You can sit next to the neutronium hull of a dead planet killer all day, if it's not firing its antiproton beam you're pretty safe. So all ships should have their element of danger. You should not be able to win a war of attrition against a cruiser ever. A cruiser's biggest problem killing any escort should be it weaving in and out of weapons range with its superior maneuverability, but the cruiser shouldn't have spike damage, but pressure damage. Hitting so the opponent can't outdeal the damage coming in. The biggest problem with a sci should be it shutting down systems or scrambling things. An escort should have huge burst damage, but then have to reset for another run. As it is now...a cruiser isn't that big of a threat.
But by canon, even that isn't strict as the Defiant was tougher than $2 steak and could two shot a Bird of Prey.
The current DPS is king attitude on the PVE side is most prominent in STFs where the timer enforces the do more damage faster attitude. It's like that in all of them. Kill Birds and Raptor before they get to the Kang and destroy nanite probes and cubes quickly. Destroy probes before they get to the time portal. Destroy the cubes. Destroy the nanite generators and transformers. Destroy the Transwarp conduits. Destroy the generators and transformers. Destroy the probes before they can heal the transformers (this can be handled temporarily with crowd control, but killing the transformers fast is a better solution), destroy the gate and the tac cube.
The ESTFs are all do damage quickly. Which would be perfectly acceptable, if everyone was able to contribute to that goal meaningfully. Especially if it happens that one of the escorts gets blasted to scrap (even while I'm healing them) and I can't do their job anywhere near as efficiently.
No ship should be so good at another ship's function that the other ship becomes redundant. But no ship should be so poor at doing the primary objective of the mission that it becomes irrelevant.
This game is very weird. Look at it in infantry terms. If the Escort is the fast and nimble jeep or troop transport, the science ship is a mobile hospital, assymetrical ops, and cyberwarfare unit, and the Cruiser is the tank. Then we have jeeps with heavy artillery, and tanks with light machine gun mounts.