Leave my damned escorts alone.. If you dont like something, dont use it. if you want towhine, go to the damned nursery with the rest of the babies.
I've read every post in this thread and for the most part what people are saying is that the other two ship and captain types need to bring something unique to the table. The complaint is that DPS is all that matters and escorts are the best at that so therefore become the most commonly flown ships.
Personally I think the only way to do it is to make the level 3 captain abilities much stronger while greatly weakening the level 2 and 1 abilities. Next thing I would do is have a greater spread of consoles. The 10 console ships can be laid out as 4,4,3. That homogenizes the ships too much. They should be closer to 7,2,1. The last thing that I would do is greatly reduce the survivability of all ships then buff the hell out of the defense consoles. So a cruiser rocking 7 defense consoles should be the only ones able to take the damage from most ships.
For PvP sensor scans need to be buffed considerably and let your teammates also see the cloaked ships. The idea of having nothing but classic WoW rogues running around is absurd. Blizzard figured this stuff out 7 years ago.
Now with all of that said I don't think Cryptic will ever do it. They seem perfectly content with allowing power creep for Zen and keeping the content with the mindset that DPS is king. I don't think anything is wrong with that, but you'll never have all 3 ship types and captain types matter if DPS is the only thing that matters. Mathematically speaking you'll have a best and that's tac in escorts.
Its not that escorts are too powerful, too tanky, too whatever... it is that the PvE content is too easy.
Now, Cryptic seems to take the above comment and say, "Add Spike Damage". But that is not what I mean (i.e. instapop everything).
For my parser friends, what is the average DPS being done by NPC mobs... take out the spikes, and I think they sit right around 1.5k to 2k.
The problem is, that this is not a huge problem for an escort (again not because the escort's the problem). The average escort can absorb that amount of damage for longer than it takes for them to kill the target producing the damage. That in a nutshell is the problem.
I say, no nerfs to anything... just increase the base CONSISTENT damage dealt to say 2.5-4k.
What you'll see is that the escort can not longer sustain that type of incoming damage for any legnth of time. This returns the need for a cruiser (who can take the 1.5 - 2k DPS all day long, but not offer the DPS), will be needed to grab agro... healers/sci will be needed to debuff/cc and heal once again.
Again, this is not about 100K Invisatorps, or Lance of Deaths... it is their standard attacks that needs a boost in damage dealt.
All warships, all the time, is about as far from the spirit of the IP as you can get without dropping a Star Destroyer into Sol.
Riiiight.
Because Sol isn't already occuppied by enough Jem'Hadar, Romulan, Breen, Cardassian and even Ferengi ships as it is. "Spirit of the IP" was a ship that sailed long ago, then got hit by an iceberg before promptly sinking.
Look, the problem is really simple: Damage and defense disparity are bad design choices, period. Why? Because the health bar only matters when you go from the alive to the dead state. Until that point, you're 100% as viable and dangerous at 1 hull point as you are at 50k hull points. So if a ship has enough durability to keep from dying routinely, then they don't need any MORE durability. Is more durability nice to have? Sure! But is it worth giving up damage output? The answer is a definitive NO, because VAPORS DON'T SHOOT BACK.
Its not that escorts are too powerful, too tanky, too whatever... it is that the PvE content is too easy.
This won't fix the problem, it will only change the calculus of what ship is the optimum for clearing that content. In effect, it just makes the Klingon Cruisers like the Tor'Khat the go-to pick: Enough durability to survive, while still bringing the most pain possible.
What you'll see is that the escort can not longer sustain that type of incoming damage for any legnth of time.
They don't have to. They have to sustain it long enough to fly through their enemy's expanding cloud of debris. Which is what they'll continue to do so long as the enemy firepower isn't so dangerous as to blow up an escort as they commit to their attack run, at which point you haven't solved the problem, you've inverted it.
I think the root of the issue is that the designers tried to apply ground-based MMO mechanics to a different game, without doing much testing to validate their results. In their earlier efforts, enemies had one health bar. When it's empty, the enemy dies. But in STO, enemies have shields and hull, and with so many methods to bolster shielding (Shield Battery, Balance Shields, Transfer Shield Strength, Tactical Team, turning your ship), the relative strength of the 'slow but steady' damage style is excessively harmed.
Suggestions for buffing PvE or directly nerfing Escort ships, or buffing Cruiser and Science ships shows a profound lack of understanding of the problem the game is currently facing, and the continued health of a MMORPG gameplay balance wise.
It is the old buff not nerf which is often cited as the "solution" for imbalances.
Look at the big picture instead of the immediate obvious smaller aspects.
You have to fix the root cause or the problem will always persist and it will continue to cause issues down the road.
Class Ability disparity, Buff effectiveness and stacking, Accuracy vs Defense, inherent ship subsystem powers, restrictive skill selection system, racial/class trait disparity are all major key issues in the larger picture which needs to be addressed before messing directly with ship stats, form or function.
It's hard to pull anything productive out of threads like this, isn't it? The clash of personal interest and misinformation is overwhelming. Everyone has ideas of how to fix the 'problems' based on what they think would be more fun, which is based on their unique gaming style. Everyone has their own ideas of what the 'problems' are in the first place. And all of that is compounded by most players having an incredibly incomplete picture of what's actually going on.
Currently, at the reasonable higher end which I will place somewhere far above the average pugger and somewhat below the crazed speed-run enthusiasts, we have a dynamic where cruisers deal more overall DPS but only to split targets and at a steady rate, while escorts have superior single-target kill time and short-time spike damage. Of course, since cruisers have achieved this through gradual power creep and via specialist builds that you must be 'in-the-know' about, many players have completely missed the fact that cruisers have inched past escorts in terms of general, overall encounter DPS. So we still get people thinking escorts are way more powerful.
I personally like this setup on paper. To me, it seems rather logically elegant that big, center-of-the-fleet capital ship cruisers with their giant warp cores have superior overall damage but an inability to focus it all on one target. It's a fitting dynamic. But it still has problems. For one thing, it completely ignores the issue of defenses. The DPS may have an interesting balance, but whether escorts are too tough or content is too toothless to allow cruisers to shine, that's a whole 'nother bag o' worms. It doesn't help that people have wildly different experiences with this as well. Some people have flown good tanks and know how perfectly possible it is to tank any borg outside of Hive forever. And yet other people have never flown anything other than fragile escorts and genuinely still believe that the borg shoot invisible insta-kill torps that NOOTHIIIIING can survive, with such conviction that trying to tell them the truth is as much an up-hill battle as religiously converting someone. And THEN there are the people who fly cruisers with stacked -Th consoles. I don't even want to get started on that.
A big potential problem is that the way cruisers have achieved their new status is most certainly inelegant. They rely on obscure builds that depend on fairly high-end equipment. Comparing low end casual cruiser builds to high end ones, and then doing the same with escorts, there is a vastly larger gap between the lowest and highest of the cruisers than with escorts, and a higher bar of entry to the 'good' cruisers. But even this is prone to players lacking the full picture and isn't as bad as some people think, as I think many of the current top-level, log running cruiser pilots have not taken the time to go back to old builds and see how well they work with new systems. For example, they would maintain that while an escort can level from 1-50 in a week, buy blue items off the exchange and jump into STFs with a high damage build using only good boff arrangement, a cruiser cannot achieve high damage without multi-millions sunk into doffs and the best gear. On the contrary, perhaps the biggest boost to low end cruisers is simply the omega weapon amplifier. Sure, it's not the same as the single week it takes an escort, but all a cruiser needs to be 'pretty good' is two pieces from tier 2 rep. Seriously. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. A plain old dragon build beam boat cruiser, with KCB and assimilated console (along with good piloting!) can break the 8-10k ISE EncDPS rate - with an engineer captain, no less. Alright, maybe adjust that down to 4-6k for the average player piloting skill and the number of people that -won't- be running either the fleet Excelsior or Regent, but still. T2 rep is not as high a bar of entry as some of the cruiser DPSers will tell you is necessary to make them rock.
What does that leave us with? Strong single target and spiky escorts from the word go, strong AOE cruisers with a definite-but-not-as-bad-as-some-people-think overhead of required time investment. So what should be done? I have no choice but to let my aforementioned unique gaming style inform my opinions. I fly quite a lot in both cruisers and escorts. I love the styles of both, and do not feel weak in either. Coming from an earlier time when cruisers were often derided as perpetually inferior DPS boats, good only for healing builds in a game where only DPS matters, I'm still amazed and thoroughly enthused that they can now match and surpass escorts in their own way, and are even slowly being recognized as such. I personally feel like cruisers and escorts are more balanced than they have ever been. I would probably like it if something were changed to promote cruiser defense and bolster the desirability of threat control tanks alongside escorts. I personally have stretched my defenses to the breaking point in the name of more DPS, exactly as tough as I need to be to survive everything, so if PvE got any stronger I'd likely have to loose some teeth. Therefore I'd vote for escorts to loose some defensiveness, but that would be one of those selfish viewpoints. A case could reasonably be made for giving cruisers more early options for being powerful. Lower beam array drain would be the obvious way to do this, as drain resist is pretty much the sole foundation of the strength that higher end builds possess and raising the lower end of drain will only boost low-end builds without increasing the power of high-end builds that already counter drain effectively.
In the end though, once again, I feel like cruisers and escorts are enjoying the best balance they could hope for. So a more appropriate answer to 'what to do now' would be... drop the cruiser and escort balancing act. It's good enough for now. We have a much more dire situation over on the science side of things. With the new uselessness of gravity well, it feels like the gimping of science is finally coming to a head, to a point where even Cryptic is going to have to wake up and take action. They already are, in a way. The aux based Nukara passive, warp cores, and various other bits of LoR here and there seem to be attempting to solve the problem the same way they did with cruisers... with gradual, science focused power creep via a trickle of new abilities and gear so as to avoid making fundamental balancing tweaks to the powers. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Cryptic, but that's not going to work this time. You're going to have to wise up, admit that science is broken, and actually fix it. Seriously, this joke has ceased to be funny for a very, very long time. I've mentioned a lot of popular opinions up there that are largely based on players who haven't fully explored the game yet and don't quite know what they are talking about... but I'm pretty confident when I say that Science is not one of those things. We UNANIMOUSLY want you to fix science. Please get that through your heads already.
I fully support your conclusion and hereby sign that petition.
Minor footnote: escort 100% EptE+AP:O speed tanking might merit some minor tweaking, though that situation might actually be much improved by fixing science.
No, we don't. That is just wrong. What we have is a dynamic where ships with beams using FAW deal more DPS, but only in AOE, while ships with dual heavy cannons have superior singe target kill time.
Use an escort with single beam arrays and FAW, and the escort will outperform any cruiser in that role, despite the power issue. It will also be a bit more survivable than a dual heavy cannon escort, because it can move sideways and evade a lot while maintaining its fire.
The other part of your above analysis correct, though: Cruisers deal damage as steady output, while escorts potentially have more spikes, due to the way Attack Patterns work in the game. That is, I believe, working as designed and fine that way.
Cruisers are intended to be tanks, but the threat mechanics don't really work (and wouldn't make sense if they did) in PvE, and are obviously nonexistant in PvP. If one wants a trinity, it needs some reliable way to make the tank be the tank. That way, it would not be important that the escort does more damage, as there would be an alternate way to make the team succeed.
A fair response. But I'm curious... In what way does threat not work? I use 6/9 threat control currently with a single +Th console, and it works brilliantly. No one steals my current target, ever. Most or all of the other targets also stay on me, with the possible exception of if a strong escort has decided to chase down a quaternary target that only received a few glancing hits from FaW. In my experience the mechanics are perfectly functional for PvE.
The point about FaW vs cannon builds is very true. But don't we also have some dynamics between the ships here? For one thing, it hasn't changed that cruisers are a potential user of the FaW setup, allowing them to be quite strong. The power dynamic with escorts is still more or less intact. It's hard to say that a beam escort directly invalidates the cruiser, because they do achieve the same build in fairly different ways. One way or another, cruisers really are tanks. They do have a genuine advantage of survivability, even if some might say that it needs to be rebalanced, and currently they are easily capable of handling the threat that FaW puts out, and indeed can pump +Th to actually act as a tank. Beam escorts, by contrast, are decidedly going to be going for the -Th consoles... Probably as a requirement to even work. A beam escort really cannot shove its face into a fleet of spheres and pump FaW without a team that can one way or another keep the threat off. So, while a cruiser can live up to its role as the centerpiece around which a combat fleet revolves by running threat, pumping high damage, and keeping the heat off of high-dps and pathetic pug groups alike, a beam escort dropped into a pug is very likely to die or be forced into stand-off tactics which will invariably result in lower damage than an in-their-face cruiser.
I have to say, even if threat control makes little sense, it is certainly functional at the moment. Even if points are better spent into damage skills, the nature of the skill tree allows you to have both easily, and for a cruiser it will be needed to keep the aggro. 6/9 or 9/9 is very workable, with +Th consoles only being necessary for THE most dedicated, and those who don't -really- needed it but nevertheless feel insulted whenever they run across the occasional tactical spiker who can still steal aggro when only using the skill points.
Hopefully it's come across at this point that I value having a great deal of experience on the topic at hand and from a broad perspective, as oppose to those who would suggest things with awareness of only one side of the equation. Unfortunately I don't personally have a great deal of experience with beam escorts, which makes it hard to continue this nice conversation. I do fly cannon escorts quite a lot, including a fragile tac captained one, a sci captain, and even an engineer in a steamrunner and armitage taking up the bulkier side of the spectrum as well as a fun tac torpedo build. I'd like to open up some questions that might hopefully get answered by someone who has good, first-hand experience with beam escorts. I may even set one up to test soon!
So, if such a person happens to come along and they can be honest about their abilities...
What kind of DPS are you looking at? For reference, the standard I tend to use is EncDPS for ISE using ACT, averaged over a few pugs. I'm seeing 12 - 12.5k in my current engineer aux2batt fleet Regent. For lower end build reference I have a bit more than 9k in my dragon-build fleet Excelsior. I estimate no lower than 8k with my piloting to account for lesser cruisers and the fact I was still using advanced fleet weapons. I'm ashamed to admit it but I have significant difficulty breaking the 9.5k mark with any of my escorts or BoPs, regardless of build, and most often see 8 or 9k.
What kind of groups can you fly with? With a cruiser, I can carry any pug. Doesn't matter if they all do 1k dps, I can fly how I want and tank all the hits, even if they don't necessarily die all that fast and I have to keep that tanking up for a while. Can you survive if you have all the aggro without changing your play style? If not, can you stack enough -Th to keep the heat off with low DPS teams? Do you need higher level teams to function at peak effectiveness? Sophlogimo, you say you've never seen an escort have problems killing everything fast enough to survive, but considering your informed opinions, I have to assume that you personally cannot be considered a low-DPS teammate and you may have expedited the process if not held a portion of the aggro.
How aggressively can you fly? As a cruiser, I can be the first one on the scene and get up close to avoid range penalties. When the ISE transformer pops, for example, I can EM myself directly into the middle of the sphere swarm and start firing away while the rest of the team is still taking their sweet time drifting over. Even with -Th you'll have to deal with some massive incoming damage if you play fast and hard before the others catch up, so can you survive it in an escort? Can you always maintain minimum distance and not fly off to 7 or 9km? I also like to sit 1km away from the top of the gate while breaking it down. I can do this in my Engineer escorts as well and on my Tac armitage sometimes, but in my cruisers I can do this while there are still spheres around hitting me, and I can fly around to the other side at around 50-30% gate health depending on circumstances and start hitting - and tanking - the tac cube at the same time. In KSE, I can ignore the gate and cubes for the most part - by spawning the cube and then attacking only the transformer, I can make the game go faster. The transformer dies faster, and the cube still dies over the course of the transformers' life merely by FaW damage, but it takes longer. Could an escort tank the cube for that long? I don't think my tac escort could at all. I can also position myself to most effectively take out probes while still hitting the transformer, despite that position being in range of the gate.
Beam escort will give just as good if not better than cruiser performance with proper setup. Granted you cannot just stop many times you must fly in circles or atleast yo-yo but you have the speed and turn rate to pull it off.
The JemHadar HEC is likely the best for an A2B setup, the armitage is fun with EPtX doffs to run EPtS 3 or EPtW 3 can combine with attack pattern doffs to mix APO3/APB2 or whatever you wish. Steamrunner can do a dragon build which is fun as well.
Big thing the carriers have are the pets which can do stupid high DPS against things like gates and whatnot. Heck even way back when the purple pets first released I used to get a giggle soloing the tac cube in ISE with my KDF BoP pets and I'm pretty sure the new pet options are even stronger.
The only way I know of to strip an Escort of its Bonus Defense is the same for any vesssel.
Any power that disrupts thier movement. Last I checked Bonus Defense works only while moving.
When standing still no one ingame has a Bonus Defense as per the definition of the power. As far as I know only the elusive trait works around this to give a 10% buff when sitting still.
Flight deck doff too, but they broke the stacking on this a while ago
Suggestions for buffing PvE or directly nerfing Escort ships, or buffing Cruiser and Science ships shows a profound lack of understanding of the problem the game is currently facing, and the continued health of a MMORPG gameplay balance wise.
It is the old buff not nerf which is often cited as the "solution" for imbalances.
Look at the big picture instead of the immediate obvious smaller aspects.
You have to fix the root cause or the problem will always persist and it will continue to cause issues down the road.
Class Ability disparity, Buff effectiveness and stacking, Accuracy vs Defense, inherent ship subsystem powers, restrictive skill selection system, racial/class trait disparity are all major key issues in the larger picture which needs to be addressed before messing directly with ship stats, form or function.
I agree it's why I want them to change my science skills back to exotic damage before they place these items into the game. The items with massive kinetic resist. Can you imagine? The escorts having the consoles, the warp core AND the new deflectors/engines/shields all with resist on them? It'd would make them immune to every science skill that causes damage out there! It's outrageous!
Also some time ago I made the suggestion that they actually allow certain scores in certain aspects of the system to allow certain weapon types to have higher procs.
Flow Cap to help increase the proc chance/damage type for Phasers and Tetryon and Polaron
Particle Gen to help increase the proc chance/damage for plasma and disruptor weapons
If they did that they would give the other two captains the chance to improve the alternative effects of their weapons and it would allow for a more balanced approach to the problem.
No, we don't. That is just wrong. What we have is a dynamic where ships with beams using FAW deal more DPS, but only in AOE, while ships with dual heavy cannons have superior singe target kill time.
Use an escort with single beam arrays and FAW, and the escort will outperform any cruiser in that role, despite the power issue. It will also be a bit more survivable than a dual heavy cannon escort, because it can move sideways and evade a lot while maintaining its fire.
The other part of your above analysis correct, though: Cruisers deal damage as steady output, while escorts potentially have more spikes, due to the way Attack Patterns work in the game. That is, I believe, working as designed and fine that way.
Cruisers are intended to be tanks, but the threat mechanics don't really work (and wouldn't make sense if they did) in PvE, and are obviously nonexistant in PvP. If one wants a trinity, it needs some reliable way to make the tank be the tank. That way, it would not be important that the escort does more damage, as there would be an alternate way to make the team succeed.
I have a Fleet Defiant. Full romulan plasma, embassy consoles, the works. I've been clocked at 17k dps with 5 single beams, cutting beam, and a quantum torp in Infected Elite.
I can tell you hands down that while an escort can pump more damage than a similar cruiser build, it is toasted with the frequency of breakfast.
I take that same gear, same tac captain, put them in a tac ody and pull 13k and SURVIVE the shield drain spam from spheres and the heavy gate hits.
I don't care how high you get your defense, I'm running 2 purple attack pattern doffs and Omega, in PvE shots WILL hit you.
Care to try to pull threat from me in my engineer/fleet ambassador? You wont. I am not evening going to go into that. Just look me up in game, Martin Brody, ToS Veteran. I can run with your fleet, my fleet or a pug. Bring whatever DPS non threat tank type you want.
Flight deck doff too, but they broke the stacking on this a while ago
It has long been my belief that the "Escorts are unkillable" thought came about because they no longer have to worry about Holds due to cycling ApO with its Hold Immunity.
I have no issue with it being cycled or its buffs, but the Hold immunity is what makes escorts hard to kill as now, with the exception of BTSE, there is little way to stop an escort and one must really time the Hold for when ApO is on cool down.
Or run twin Holds to stack them for effective use.
It has long been my belief that the "Escorts are unkillable" thought came about because they no longer have to worry about Holds due to cycling ApO with its Hold Immunity.
I have no issue with it being cycled or its buffs, but the Hold immunity is what makes escorts hard to kill as now, with the exception of BTSE, there is little way to stop an escort and one must really time the Hold for when ApO is on cool down.
Or run twin Holds to stack them for effective use.
Wasn't Nicha talking about PvE and you're talking about PvP? Those are two completely separate issues.
It has long been my belief that the "Escorts are unkillable" thought came about because they no longer have to worry about Holds due to cycling ApO with its Hold Immunity.
I have no issue with it being cycled or its buffs, but the Hold immunity is what makes escorts hard to kill as now, with the exception of BTSE, there is little way to stop an escort and one must really time the Hold for when ApO is on cool down.
Or run twin Holds to stack them for effective use.
They've tried addressing that with some escorts boff layout, but honestly, you can just sit on the APO till you get tractored and then unload on them.
Cruisers are intended to be tanks, but the threat mechanics don't really work (and wouldn't make sense if they did) in PvE, and are obviously nonexistant in PvP. If one wants a trinity, it needs some reliable way to make the tank be the tank. That way, it would not be important that the escort does more damage, as there would be an alternate way to make the team succeed.
Its called Threat Control, spec into it enough and no escort will take agro from you. As a bonus it also adds to your durability so its not useless in PvP while making you a little tankier. Thing is, most cruiser pilots do NOT spec into it and then wonder why they can't hold agro. But that's ok, because its a very soft trinity, and that is actually a GOOD THING.
And the Cryptic guy was rude about how he answered the question. Great you can come to the forums, find a month old topic and learn how exotic damage works in the game. What good does that do for the player. Abilities should mark that they are exotic based. Exotic Plasma, Exotic Kinetic, whatever but it would help new and unknowledgeable players know what's up.
I must admit, the biggest problem I find when I play my Wells Torp / control boat is that I get TRIBBLE rewards due to it's lower-than-normal dps. I think I've squeezed all I can out of her considering what I've gone for and I barely get anything out of the end bosses of ESTFs.
I just wish there was a place for the "less dps, more support" ships. The fact that everyone must have healing / tanking abilities is a nice touch but support ships do need some love in PVE, it's no fun just jumping in a ship and squeezing out as much DPS as you can. Anyone can do that :P
Wasn't Nicha talking about PvE and you're talking about PvP? Those are two completely separate issues.
The post he responded to was about stopping an Escort in PvP. Why would I be concerned with stopping an Escort in pve? NPC escorts never use ApO much less cycle it so such would have nothing to do with me original post that was quoted.
Will we ever get group content that doesn't rely on a DPS race?
How about making escorts glass cannons?
How about buffing the base DPS of other ships?
Something? Anything?
It seems to me that cruisers are worthless without the perfect build, or the perfect player at the controls, whereas an escort can have a mediocre build or mediocre player, and still pull their weight in these DPS races...
Comments
I've read every post in this thread and for the most part what people are saying is that the other two ship and captain types need to bring something unique to the table. The complaint is that DPS is all that matters and escorts are the best at that so therefore become the most commonly flown ships.
Personally I think the only way to do it is to make the level 3 captain abilities much stronger while greatly weakening the level 2 and 1 abilities. Next thing I would do is have a greater spread of consoles. The 10 console ships can be laid out as 4,4,3. That homogenizes the ships too much. They should be closer to 7,2,1. The last thing that I would do is greatly reduce the survivability of all ships then buff the hell out of the defense consoles. So a cruiser rocking 7 defense consoles should be the only ones able to take the damage from most ships.
For PvP sensor scans need to be buffed considerably and let your teammates also see the cloaked ships. The idea of having nothing but classic WoW rogues running around is absurd. Blizzard figured this stuff out 7 years ago.
Now with all of that said I don't think Cryptic will ever do it. They seem perfectly content with allowing power creep for Zen and keeping the content with the mindset that DPS is king. I don't think anything is wrong with that, but you'll never have all 3 ship types and captain types matter if DPS is the only thing that matters. Mathematically speaking you'll have a best and that's tac in escorts.
Its not that escorts are too powerful, too tanky, too whatever... it is that the PvE content is too easy.
Now, Cryptic seems to take the above comment and say, "Add Spike Damage". But that is not what I mean (i.e. instapop everything).
For my parser friends, what is the average DPS being done by NPC mobs... take out the spikes, and I think they sit right around 1.5k to 2k.
The problem is, that this is not a huge problem for an escort (again not because the escort's the problem). The average escort can absorb that amount of damage for longer than it takes for them to kill the target producing the damage. That in a nutshell is the problem.
I say, no nerfs to anything... just increase the base CONSISTENT damage dealt to say 2.5-4k.
What you'll see is that the escort can not longer sustain that type of incoming damage for any legnth of time. This returns the need for a cruiser (who can take the 1.5 - 2k DPS all day long, but not offer the DPS), will be needed to grab agro... healers/sci will be needed to debuff/cc and heal once again.
Again, this is not about 100K Invisatorps, or Lance of Deaths... it is their standard attacks that needs a boost in damage dealt.
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
Riiiight.
Because Sol isn't already occuppied by enough Jem'Hadar, Romulan, Breen, Cardassian and even Ferengi ships as it is. "Spirit of the IP" was a ship that sailed long ago, then got hit by an iceberg before promptly sinking.
This won't fix the problem, it will only change the calculus of what ship is the optimum for clearing that content. In effect, it just makes the Klingon Cruisers like the Tor'Khat the go-to pick: Enough durability to survive, while still bringing the most pain possible.
They don't have to. They have to sustain it long enough to fly through their enemy's expanding cloud of debris. Which is what they'll continue to do so long as the enemy firepower isn't so dangerous as to blow up an escort as they commit to their attack run, at which point you haven't solved the problem, you've inverted it.
I think the root of the issue is that the designers tried to apply ground-based MMO mechanics to a different game, without doing much testing to validate their results. In their earlier efforts, enemies had one health bar. When it's empty, the enemy dies. But in STO, enemies have shields and hull, and with so many methods to bolster shielding (Shield Battery, Balance Shields, Transfer Shield Strength, Tactical Team, turning your ship), the relative strength of the 'slow but steady' damage style is excessively harmed.
It is the old buff not nerf which is often cited as the "solution" for imbalances.
Look at the big picture instead of the immediate obvious smaller aspects.
You have to fix the root cause or the problem will always persist and it will continue to cause issues down the road.
Class Ability disparity, Buff effectiveness and stacking, Accuracy vs Defense, inherent ship subsystem powers, restrictive skill selection system, racial/class trait disparity are all major key issues in the larger picture which needs to be addressed before messing directly with ship stats, form or function.
Currently, at the reasonable higher end which I will place somewhere far above the average pugger and somewhat below the crazed speed-run enthusiasts, we have a dynamic where cruisers deal more overall DPS but only to split targets and at a steady rate, while escorts have superior single-target kill time and short-time spike damage. Of course, since cruisers have achieved this through gradual power creep and via specialist builds that you must be 'in-the-know' about, many players have completely missed the fact that cruisers have inched past escorts in terms of general, overall encounter DPS. So we still get people thinking escorts are way more powerful.
I personally like this setup on paper. To me, it seems rather logically elegant that big, center-of-the-fleet capital ship cruisers with their giant warp cores have superior overall damage but an inability to focus it all on one target. It's a fitting dynamic. But it still has problems. For one thing, it completely ignores the issue of defenses. The DPS may have an interesting balance, but whether escorts are too tough or content is too toothless to allow cruisers to shine, that's a whole 'nother bag o' worms. It doesn't help that people have wildly different experiences with this as well. Some people have flown good tanks and know how perfectly possible it is to tank any borg outside of Hive forever. And yet other people have never flown anything other than fragile escorts and genuinely still believe that the borg shoot invisible insta-kill torps that NOOTHIIIIING can survive, with such conviction that trying to tell them the truth is as much an up-hill battle as religiously converting someone. And THEN there are the people who fly cruisers with stacked -Th consoles. I don't even want to get started on that.
A big potential problem is that the way cruisers have achieved their new status is most certainly inelegant. They rely on obscure builds that depend on fairly high-end equipment. Comparing low end casual cruiser builds to high end ones, and then doing the same with escorts, there is a vastly larger gap between the lowest and highest of the cruisers than with escorts, and a higher bar of entry to the 'good' cruisers. But even this is prone to players lacking the full picture and isn't as bad as some people think, as I think many of the current top-level, log running cruiser pilots have not taken the time to go back to old builds and see how well they work with new systems. For example, they would maintain that while an escort can level from 1-50 in a week, buy blue items off the exchange and jump into STFs with a high damage build using only good boff arrangement, a cruiser cannot achieve high damage without multi-millions sunk into doffs and the best gear. On the contrary, perhaps the biggest boost to low end cruisers is simply the omega weapon amplifier. Sure, it's not the same as the single week it takes an escort, but all a cruiser needs to be 'pretty good' is two pieces from tier 2 rep. Seriously. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. A plain old dragon build beam boat cruiser, with KCB and assimilated console (along with good piloting!) can break the 8-10k ISE EncDPS rate - with an engineer captain, no less. Alright, maybe adjust that down to 4-6k for the average player piloting skill and the number of people that -won't- be running either the fleet Excelsior or Regent, but still. T2 rep is not as high a bar of entry as some of the cruiser DPSers will tell you is necessary to make them rock.
What does that leave us with? Strong single target and spiky escorts from the word go, strong AOE cruisers with a definite-but-not-as-bad-as-some-people-think overhead of required time investment. So what should be done? I have no choice but to let my aforementioned unique gaming style inform my opinions. I fly quite a lot in both cruisers and escorts. I love the styles of both, and do not feel weak in either. Coming from an earlier time when cruisers were often derided as perpetually inferior DPS boats, good only for healing builds in a game where only DPS matters, I'm still amazed and thoroughly enthused that they can now match and surpass escorts in their own way, and are even slowly being recognized as such. I personally feel like cruisers and escorts are more balanced than they have ever been. I would probably like it if something were changed to promote cruiser defense and bolster the desirability of threat control tanks alongside escorts. I personally have stretched my defenses to the breaking point in the name of more DPS, exactly as tough as I need to be to survive everything, so if PvE got any stronger I'd likely have to loose some teeth. Therefore I'd vote for escorts to loose some defensiveness, but that would be one of those selfish viewpoints. A case could reasonably be made for giving cruisers more early options for being powerful. Lower beam array drain would be the obvious way to do this, as drain resist is pretty much the sole foundation of the strength that higher end builds possess and raising the lower end of drain will only boost low-end builds without increasing the power of high-end builds that already counter drain effectively.
In the end though, once again, I feel like cruisers and escorts are enjoying the best balance they could hope for. So a more appropriate answer to 'what to do now' would be... drop the cruiser and escort balancing act. It's good enough for now. We have a much more dire situation over on the science side of things. With the new uselessness of gravity well, it feels like the gimping of science is finally coming to a head, to a point where even Cryptic is going to have to wake up and take action. They already are, in a way. The aux based Nukara passive, warp cores, and various other bits of LoR here and there seem to be attempting to solve the problem the same way they did with cruisers... with gradual, science focused power creep via a trickle of new abilities and gear so as to avoid making fundamental balancing tweaks to the powers. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Cryptic, but that's not going to work this time. You're going to have to wise up, admit that science is broken, and actually fix it. Seriously, this joke has ceased to be funny for a very, very long time. I've mentioned a lot of popular opinions up there that are largely based on players who haven't fully explored the game yet and don't quite know what they are talking about... but I'm pretty confident when I say that Science is not one of those things. We UNANIMOUSLY want you to fix science. Please get that through your heads already.
Excellent analysis.
I fully support your conclusion and hereby sign that petition.
Minor footnote: escort 100% EptE+AP:O speed tanking might merit some minor tweaking, though that situation might actually be much improved by fixing science.
A fair response. But I'm curious... In what way does threat not work? I use 6/9 threat control currently with a single +Th console, and it works brilliantly. No one steals my current target, ever. Most or all of the other targets also stay on me, with the possible exception of if a strong escort has decided to chase down a quaternary target that only received a few glancing hits from FaW. In my experience the mechanics are perfectly functional for PvE.
The point about FaW vs cannon builds is very true. But don't we also have some dynamics between the ships here? For one thing, it hasn't changed that cruisers are a potential user of the FaW setup, allowing them to be quite strong. The power dynamic with escorts is still more or less intact. It's hard to say that a beam escort directly invalidates the cruiser, because they do achieve the same build in fairly different ways. One way or another, cruisers really are tanks. They do have a genuine advantage of survivability, even if some might say that it needs to be rebalanced, and currently they are easily capable of handling the threat that FaW puts out, and indeed can pump +Th to actually act as a tank. Beam escorts, by contrast, are decidedly going to be going for the -Th consoles... Probably as a requirement to even work. A beam escort really cannot shove its face into a fleet of spheres and pump FaW without a team that can one way or another keep the threat off. So, while a cruiser can live up to its role as the centerpiece around which a combat fleet revolves by running threat, pumping high damage, and keeping the heat off of high-dps and pathetic pug groups alike, a beam escort dropped into a pug is very likely to die or be forced into stand-off tactics which will invariably result in lower damage than an in-their-face cruiser.
Hopefully it's come across at this point that I value having a great deal of experience on the topic at hand and from a broad perspective, as oppose to those who would suggest things with awareness of only one side of the equation. Unfortunately I don't personally have a great deal of experience with beam escorts, which makes it hard to continue this nice conversation. I do fly cannon escorts quite a lot, including a fragile tac captained one, a sci captain, and even an engineer in a steamrunner and armitage taking up the bulkier side of the spectrum as well as a fun tac torpedo build. I'd like to open up some questions that might hopefully get answered by someone who has good, first-hand experience with beam escorts. I may even set one up to test soon!
So, if such a person happens to come along and they can be honest about their abilities...
What kind of DPS are you looking at? For reference, the standard I tend to use is EncDPS for ISE using ACT, averaged over a few pugs. I'm seeing 12 - 12.5k in my current engineer aux2batt fleet Regent. For lower end build reference I have a bit more than 9k in my dragon-build fleet Excelsior. I estimate no lower than 8k with my piloting to account for lesser cruisers and the fact I was still using advanced fleet weapons. I'm ashamed to admit it but I have significant difficulty breaking the 9.5k mark with any of my escorts or BoPs, regardless of build, and most often see 8 or 9k.
What kind of groups can you fly with? With a cruiser, I can carry any pug. Doesn't matter if they all do 1k dps, I can fly how I want and tank all the hits, even if they don't necessarily die all that fast and I have to keep that tanking up for a while. Can you survive if you have all the aggro without changing your play style? If not, can you stack enough -Th to keep the heat off with low DPS teams? Do you need higher level teams to function at peak effectiveness? Sophlogimo, you say you've never seen an escort have problems killing everything fast enough to survive, but considering your informed opinions, I have to assume that you personally cannot be considered a low-DPS teammate and you may have expedited the process if not held a portion of the aggro.
How aggressively can you fly? As a cruiser, I can be the first one on the scene and get up close to avoid range penalties. When the ISE transformer pops, for example, I can EM myself directly into the middle of the sphere swarm and start firing away while the rest of the team is still taking their sweet time drifting over. Even with -Th you'll have to deal with some massive incoming damage if you play fast and hard before the others catch up, so can you survive it in an escort? Can you always maintain minimum distance and not fly off to 7 or 9km? I also like to sit 1km away from the top of the gate while breaking it down. I can do this in my Engineer escorts as well and on my Tac armitage sometimes, but in my cruisers I can do this while there are still spheres around hitting me, and I can fly around to the other side at around 50-30% gate health depending on circumstances and start hitting - and tanking - the tac cube at the same time. In KSE, I can ignore the gate and cubes for the most part - by spawning the cube and then attacking only the transformer, I can make the game go faster. The transformer dies faster, and the cube still dies over the course of the transformers' life merely by FaW damage, but it takes longer. Could an escort tank the cube for that long? I don't think my tac escort could at all. I can also position myself to most effectively take out probes while still hitting the transformer, despite that position being in range of the gate.
The JemHadar HEC is likely the best for an A2B setup, the armitage is fun with EPtX doffs to run EPtS 3 or EPtW 3 can combine with attack pattern doffs to mix APO3/APB2 or whatever you wish. Steamrunner can do a dragon build which is fun as well.
Big thing the carriers have are the pets which can do stupid high DPS against things like gates and whatnot. Heck even way back when the purple pets first released I used to get a giggle soloing the tac cube in ISE with my KDF BoP pets and I'm pretty sure the new pet options are even stronger.
Flight deck doff too, but they broke the stacking on this a while ago
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I agree it's why I want them to change my science skills back to exotic damage before they place these items into the game. The items with massive kinetic resist. Can you imagine? The escorts having the consoles, the warp core AND the new deflectors/engines/shields all with resist on them? It'd would make them immune to every science skill that causes damage out there! It's outrageous!
Also some time ago I made the suggestion that they actually allow certain scores in certain aspects of the system to allow certain weapon types to have higher procs.
Flow Cap to help increase the proc chance/damage type for Phasers and Tetryon and Polaron
Particle Gen to help increase the proc chance/damage for plasma and disruptor weapons
If they did that they would give the other two captains the chance to improve the alternative effects of their weapons and it would allow for a more balanced approach to the problem.
I have a Fleet Defiant. Full romulan plasma, embassy consoles, the works. I've been clocked at 17k dps with 5 single beams, cutting beam, and a quantum torp in Infected Elite.
I can tell you hands down that while an escort can pump more damage than a similar cruiser build, it is toasted with the frequency of breakfast.
I take that same gear, same tac captain, put them in a tac ody and pull 13k and SURVIVE the shield drain spam from spheres and the heavy gate hits.
I don't care how high you get your defense, I'm running 2 purple attack pattern doffs and Omega, in PvE shots WILL hit you.
Care to try to pull threat from me in my engineer/fleet ambassador? You wont. I am not evening going to go into that. Just look me up in game, Martin Brody, ToS Veteran. I can run with your fleet, my fleet or a pug. Bring whatever DPS non threat tank type you want.
It has long been my belief that the "Escorts are unkillable" thought came about because they no longer have to worry about Holds due to cycling ApO with its Hold Immunity.
I have no issue with it being cycled or its buffs, but the Hold immunity is what makes escorts hard to kill as now, with the exception of BTSE, there is little way to stop an escort and one must really time the Hold for when ApO is on cool down.
Or run twin Holds to stack them for effective use.
R.I.P
Wasn't Nicha talking about PvE and you're talking about PvP? Those are two completely separate issues.
They've tried addressing that with some escorts boff layout, but honestly, you can just sit on the APO till you get tractored and then unload on them.
Fun Fact: Tractor Beam Repulsers boost pushed targets Def Bonus. :P
Its called Threat Control, spec into it enough and no escort will take agro from you. As a bonus it also adds to your durability so its not useless in PvP while making you a little tankier. Thing is, most cruiser pilots do NOT spec into it and then wonder why they can't hold agro. But that's ok, because its a very soft trinity, and that is actually a GOOD THING.
I guarantee that if you google "escorts online" you are not going to get many hits about Star Trek.
Just sayin'.
Satcher@ferthanna
R'awlins@ferthanna
T'flup@ferthanna
just did and this thread 8 down on the first page :cool:
system Lord Baal is dead
There is no exotic damage in the game.
Exotic means that the source of the damage is not a weapon. The damage type is still energy/kinetic/whatever.
Yup, this was covered in details during LoR beta.
Source: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=664521
And the Cryptic guy was rude about how he answered the question. Great you can come to the forums, find a month old topic and learn how exotic damage works in the game. What good does that do for the player. Abilities should mark that they are exotic based. Exotic Plasma, Exotic Kinetic, whatever but it would help new and unknowledgeable players know what's up.
I just wish there was a place for the "less dps, more support" ships. The fact that everyone must have healing / tanking abilities is a nice touch but support ships do need some love in PVE, it's no fun just jumping in a ship and squeezing out as much DPS as you can. Anyone can do that :P
The post he responded to was about stopping an Escort in PvP. Why would I be concerned with stopping an Escort in pve? NPC escorts never use ApO much less cycle it so such would have nothing to do with me original post that was quoted.
Its easy to Hold and CC an NPC.
R.I.P
How about making escorts glass cannons?
How about buffing the base DPS of other ships?
Something? Anything?
It seems to me that cruisers are worthless without the perfect build, or the perfect player at the controls, whereas an escort can have a mediocre build or mediocre player, and still pull their weight in these DPS races...
/rant off.