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Bridge Officers the Bane of Class Structure?
daedalus304
Member Posts: 1,049 Arc User
Ok so here's the thing, for a long time STO has seemed useless in its class system.
many blamed it solely on the DPS oriented style and lack of other setups.
I think it's more because instead of following a traditional stance of DPS for DPS, Tanking for Tanking, and Heals for Heals, each class can use Bridge officers to do basically all of that.
I have freaking tanked as a Tactical in a cruiser because of the bridge officers that I have.
does anyone else see this?
does anyone else see the distinction between the classes just go away because of the bridge officers? it basically takes away the science officers job, the Engineers don't have enough threat as is so either way they can't tank properly.
many blamed it solely on the DPS oriented style and lack of other setups.
I think it's more because instead of following a traditional stance of DPS for DPS, Tanking for Tanking, and Heals for Heals, each class can use Bridge officers to do basically all of that.
I have freaking tanked as a Tactical in a cruiser because of the bridge officers that I have.
does anyone else see this?
does anyone else see the distinction between the classes just go away because of the bridge officers? it basically takes away the science officers job, the Engineers don't have enough threat as is so either way they can't tank properly.
Post edited by daedalus304 on
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Meh, With the new season coming any class captain can run a mission with any other.
As long as everyone is bringing bunker engineers with them.
So for example:
Science captain gets bonuses in a Science ship
Science Boffs get bonuses from a Science captain
Repeat synergy for other professions.
that would be the most logical course at the moment considering it'd be a big freaking middle finger to everyone and their Boff Setup, but the damage is already done
And Tactical character better with Tactical stuff making them more OP in PvE and even more played then they currently are.
So what. Tactical is always going to frelling king. But Synergies would help others, maybe in different ways.
Tactical synergies could increase resists say, or things like that.
Engineer synergies could reduce cooldowns on eng powers (very much needed with all the shared CD's) Or better power restoration.
There are a million ways they could do it without making the Tac's have more glaringly stronger product. There are ways without shooting down things as always tacs will have more blargh blargh blargh.....
You naysayers are horrible, even the cruiser commands you flipped cause tacs in escorts where going to make better use of it.
I am Il Shadow and i approve these Shennanigans!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Yes Tactical will always be king at killing stuff but they would have a even larger gap and that is not good. Tactical Officer don't need a boost at all.
Instead what should be looked at is the missions themselves. Do something that makes people say yes their is a Science Officer in here or yes a Engineer in here instead of yes another Tactical in here.
Everyone says currently Tactical Captain + Escort is king.
If say the current arrangement does 10K dps,
Balancing through synergies could make the net result of changes through skill adjustments means the Tactical Captain + Tactical Boffs + Escort still does 10K dps.
Science + Science + Science synergies could be increased shield capacity and regeneration, or increased duration and effect of science skills.
Engineering + Engineering + cruiser could result in increased resistance, and increased turn rate
How about have something similar in space that if their is a Engineer, Tactical and Science officer the team gains a synergy bonus of some kind? No special items required.
Make the big skills mutually exclusive, apa, snb,mw for example, pick one, the others get locked.
Even if they do, and they might as well at this point, that would just change the problem from everyone taking one class to everyone taking one build.
That would be more "canon" - on the screen the "captain" gives up their specialisation when they take on command.
See this guy takes a bunch of win right here.
I have said this before but i get told that would "ruin" the game and irreparably break it. I feel as this would be a good way to go.
I am Il Shadow and i approve these Shennanigans!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
You class on the ground is the class of your captain. You are limited in what you can do by a kit and your class skills. You can wear the same armor and carry the same weapon but you will never be able to the same skills as another class.
Your class in space is the configuration of your starship. Sure, a science ship has one or maybe two tactical boffs but consider they are Ensign or Lieutenant at best. The same with most cruiser configurations. The class of your captain gives you some special skills in space but the species traits of your captain are much more useful as they are passives without a long cooldown. A tactical officer in an escort can train his/her own boffs for their jobs. An engineer in an escort has to hire a tactical officer to train their crew. And this is cannon. Picard was a science officer in command of a cruiser for example although most captains I think of were matched class with ship configuration.
A better address to the system would be to make skills used by a certain ship configuration a skill within that BOFF's class. Not many escorts use Fire At Will III but it is ranked too high to fit on most cruisers because it is a tactical skill at a BOFF rank higher than the BOFF station it is fired from. Not many escorts attack subsystems with beams (a skill built into almost all science ships at a grade 1 skill level) but I can tell you with 100% certainty that none of my ships will support grade 3 because of seats. If they made Fire At Will an engineering modification of a beam attack and it used an engineering seat due to its nature of being an aftermarket modification, then a ship that uses it would have it. The same with subsystem attacks. That and ensign seats are a joke. They should have a skill "Get me a mug of coffee" to put in those as it would almost be as effective as what we have to use in them.
The problem is not the boffs. The problem is the skills available to boffs and the boff rank they belong to as well as the way the system rewards participants. When you fire Scatter Volley III and put out masses of DPS, a cruiser is not going to pull threat by throwing out a Fire At Will I to trump you unless they spend skills in threat generation. But we all know that you don't get first place being a punching bag. You get first place making the enemy a punching bag. So you will see your cruiser with full points in energy weapons and none in threat generation. It is not in their best interest anywhere in space but STF to protect you or heal you. In many places on the ground, it is not in their best interest to protect you or heal you either. When tanking X% or healing X% of the enemy's output matches dishing out X% of the damage done to the enemy, this will change. Until then, your science ships and cruisers will be in the DPS business.
Just remember, they don't call our game we love (I love it anyway) Escorts Online and now Romulan Escorts Online for nothing. This is nothing new. Still, I play science and engineer. I don't have a single tactical officer. Silly me!
Why is that a problem?
You want Science officers to only captain Science Vessels? Engineers to only captain Cruisers? Tactical officers to only captain Escorts?
You want no one to be capable of soloing content? For every class to be dependent on each other? For each team to require at least one Sci, Engineer, and Tac officer?
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
... any class of captain on any kind of ship can do anything and everything. This is by design. Its one of the things Cryptic got REALLY right.
Yes, AND IT IS AWESOME!:D
So that is why Starfleet put Kirk (tactical) into a cruiser, Sulu (tactical) into a cruiser, Picard (science) into a cruiser and Sisko (engineering) into an escort? Good to know.:rolleyes: Sorry, worst idea ever.
Sometimes, if you want to bury the hatchet with a Klingon, it has to be in his skull. - Captain K'Tar of the USS Danu about J'mpok.
Tactical has an ability which reduces tactical officer cooldown.
Add the exact same ability for Science and Engineering. That way, each class will have a slight advantage going heavy with their matching BOFF layout (compared to the others) but nothing large enough to break balance.
The differences as they exist now are fairly close overall. A TAC captain gets to do 50% more damage every 30s out of every 2 minutes, and a team damage buff (to a single target) for 30 seconds out of 2:30. Call that double damage for ~20% of the time overall, and you get a simple 20% DPS buff in anything as a TAC captain.
However, an engineering captain in the same build can run EPS for the same duration, which strengthens aux heals a lot, makes your ship move a turn faster, toughens up your shields and overcaps your weapons on most power level settings used. They also have miracle worker + grace under fire, nadion inversion and rotate shield frequency. Basically, while the TAC captain can do 20% more damage, the ENG captain can take a lot more fire without being destroyed or forced to retreat.
A science captain can call a photonic fleet to both draw fire and provide some additional DPS, as well as use SNB to strip any buffs off the target. I am not sure if this works against boss targets, but this ability is still extremely useful especially in PVP.
Each class has it's advantages. The main reason TAC is favoured is because of the lack of challenge in most endgame PVE. Once you get above ~5k DPS, STFs become easy. At or above 10K and they are jokes. I ran a pug ISE that ended with 10:15 left on the optional, I was the second highest parse at 10K DPS, everyone was over 6k. That mission was too easy at this level of player ability.
Basically, running TAC is the easiest way to break PVE through excessive firepower. If the content was scaled up (perhaps make the current elite "advanced" and add a new level of "elite" STFs where the borg use buffs, debuffs and cross heal, etc) then you will see other classes used more often, as more team play and abilities will be needed to complete the content as opposed to just vaporizing everything with your 10K DPS cookie cutter escort / 20k DPS cookie cutter aux2bat FAW cruisers.
Basically, it is not so much that the classes are broken, but that the endgame content is geared to favour the simplistic brute force solution.
This.
Character creation should allow us to choose a "background" for our character that grants certain captain skills, but in the end we are above the department classes. We should also start as captains (rank) since that's what we are in this game.
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1. It undermines team play.
If everyone is DPS than team composition becomes irrelevant all that matters is number of ships x purity of DPS.
2. It makes player choice irrelevant.
If there is only one viable build it makes all our choices when leveling pointless since that choice can only make the character weaker.
3. It allows for only one type of play and alienates anyone who doesn't enjoy that DPS focused builds/game play>
Some players enjoy being support, minion masters, tanks/defenders, controllers etc. etc. If DPS is the only thing that matters that severely limits the appeal of your game. I for one do not enjoy playing the striker all the time and would enjoy some different roles.
4. It eliminates much of the reason for Alts (and the revenue that comes from players buying stuff for alts)
If there is only one build or one roll, their is much less incentive to run alts. Why would I bother grinding out equipment for 3-5 alts if they all are just going to do basically the same thing the same way? There is a lot more reason to run alts if they fill different roles, making the incentive for alts to have a diversity of options when putting together a group to take on game content.
5. It kills fun but doesn't add anything.
Having only one viable build doesn't add anything to the game and eliminates a lot of things which are fun. In short there is no advantage while lots of disadvantages as previously mentioned. It isn't like there is some kind of trade off which we gain by removing other viable options, it just flatly detracts from the game and limits it.
I don't see the problem.
I run alts to bypass the dilithium cap as much as anything. You can get 4k dil per character per day without really doing anything if you know how to DOFF for contraband, etc.
I'm just gonna flat out reject that response as it is too silly to thoughtfully consider. It is a huge straw-man stuffed with assumptions which ignore a myriad of other possible and more likely circumstance in order to support a predetermined position.
So my response is, where "x" = "No it doesn't", 5x.
I read all 5 of your points and they are already true with the current system. I know a lot of players who have left or play rarely because the game is built around DPS and anything other than a Tac is weaker and at a disadvantage. I am a Science Captain, yet I am most effective in an escort, where I can do only half the damage a Tac can. PvP could solve a lot of this if it were actually developed and balanced.
(PS) I see you just jouned this month, maybe you have yet to reach max level and reputation grind and STFs to see that it is TacScorts (now TacFAWCruisersAux2Bat) Online. The whole balance of STO has become so gimmicky and devoid of skill.
Oh of course. I think everyone runs alts to bybass the cap, which is why I said "much of reason" not all. I run many alts myself but I don't really play most of them, I just milk them for more in game currency. If they ever let me manage my DOFF from my phone I don't know that I would ever log into some of them again. I certainly haven't dropped cash to buy anything for them and while I don't have access to metrics I can say in my social experience I've found this to be fairly common in STO where as in say EverQuest or CoH most people I knew ran an average of three characters regularly and never rolled up an alt just for currency. Actually using alt for currency is a fairly unique element of STO's umm.....metagame? (Would that be the right term here?)
Look, if you think I'm way off base, that is fine but you are not using the phrase straw-man argument correctly.
A star-man is "a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position." Since you asked a question, to which I responded, and did not in fact reference or represent your position in anyway I factually, have not engaged in a straw-man argument. I simply stated and explained my own views without reference to anyone else's stances, design philosophy or opinions.
Additionally, we've all got predetermined positions. It is something humans form experience with something. You asked a question to which I responded. You then failed to articulate an statement designed to change or even just challenge the position much less its supporting points, one which you requested I expand on to which I conversationally obliged. As such you've given no reason for anyone to re-evaluate their position nor even the opportunity for anyone to have done so. As such your statements about my response are rather confusing.
Yes I agree. My original point was that eliminating the class system would just chance the real issue from being only one viable class to only one viable build. So yes these are, as I see it, issues already present in the game. Sorry if that got lost a few pages.
To the contrary, I was pointing that out in my own backwards ways.