I pvp as a sci/sci most of the time and have been noticing the amount of different builds to choose from seems somewhat..limited. Either because of lack of effectiveness, or general hate towards certain powers cause people to shy away from using them. Even though they are legitimate bridge officer powers. I always seem to end up in a healer setup at the end of the day.
Energy Drain Builds = Worthless, fed side at least. Badly needs something in the ui to indicate the target's power levels as well.
Shield Drain Builds = Semi-worthless. Good against people with no/minimum amount of Power Insulators skill points. Against everyone else?
Crowd Control Builds = Mixed bag. Viral Matrix with the doffs to shutdown additional subsystems after x seconds have passed is great, possibly too much so. Eject Warp Plasma with the doff to proc a hold is effective, but people complain of not being able to see the plasma clouds. So they feel powerless to prevent getting stuck in it for the next half a minute or so. Powers like Gravity Well are powerless to hold just about anything by itself. Escorts are immune most of the time due to 50% up time on attack pattern omega. Other ships can just hit evasive maneuvers to get out easily enough if necessary. That leaves...tractor beam as the only power that won't get complaints/be flat out worthless?
Jam Sensors seems pointless to me when you could just slot another heal instead. Which can be used to protect your teammates as well, not just yourself. Scramble Sensors is generally disliked/viewed as unfun. Cast a 20+ sec duration Scramble Sensors 3 into the opposing fed ball a few times and watch the aggro switch to you

I'm just getting tired of seeing a sci ship and thinking "healer". I want to be able to use my ship for more outside the box roles and still feel like i'm useful. But most of the time my ship setup either ends up sucking, or i get complaints like Learn2Play noob, etc. It seems the only "right" way to play at times is to bring 2-3 healers, and a similar amount of dps escorts. It's getting kind of boring.
Comments
While normally I'm against display any information about a target (I despise all the information provided in fantasy games that there is no way the character could know) - Star Trek provides the interesting scenario (as do such space/futuristic games) of allowing for some of that information to be displayed. That being said though, I really wish it was tied into sensor skill...and...there was even the opportunity for false information.
If somebody had 0 Sensors (from skill/gear) - then they might end up getting false readings sort of thing. Something along those lines. Better the skill, the more info and more correct that info would be.
Course, then they could add in some ECM fun..
...meh, wrong game.
^that could work. Also, haha about the ECM.
yea they need to do a balance pass soo badly that its no funny whats holding them back from this is the bunch of 12y/o whiners that all play the make things go boom type of games ;-)
this game used to be intelligent and fun but they went down the lets just make things explode fast and a lot so we get paid more :rolleyes:
The longer you're locked onto a target the more info ur given.
Example-
As soon as you gain lock- shows their power levels.
After 10 seconds- it shows their shield strength
After 15 seconds- it allows you to see how much crew they have.
Ect... Extra....
Just an idea to make sci actually be useful in other ways.
Maybe even have sensor scan do somthing similar but only show that stuff at the moment it's scanned but stay displayed until its cleared/time runs out.
Do you even Science Bro?
as far as BO skills go though, i have to disagree. TSS3 ST3 are the super buffed sci powers of the day. as far as CC goes most BO powers still suffer from too high player resists across the board with at too little cost.
Variety has gone down. GW3 is great for some because you keep your Lt C slot for heals. ...*meh.* Not a single CC ability can stand on its own, all need doff support, mostly of the ultra-rare kind, without any reliable means of generating those doffs. Sci has become snb + healer, eng are out of the game. I pitty all the new players LoR hopefully brings thinking that they can just pick up a class, or BO and hope to be effective with it.
a history of sto pvp: 2010 - 2011
a history of sto pvp: 2012 - 2013