That is because without the technician doffs, Aux2Bat is an utterly worthless, TRIBBLE ability that negatively affects your ship's functionality. Even WITH the Tech doffs, it's still a negative in the package, just one you suck up because of what the Tech doffs do. Its entire purpose for existing is the Tech doffs. The fact that the ability itself is garbage is pretty much why the doffs got attached to it.
And that is exactly my point.
Taking a wildly unpopular skill and tacking something on top of it that's OP enough to convince people to put up with the skill - heck, even 2 copies of it - is just bad game design, in my opinion.
I'd much rather see the skill itself improved and the doffs changed to add a different benefit, more in line with other doffs, in terms of performance. So that, maybe, people would use the skill for its own merits and choose to run the doffs, or not, based on the rest of their build.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for cruisers (and engineers, btw) to be a valuable addition to any team, but I'd prefer that to be achieved in a way that isn't quite so sloppy.
It all comes down to FAW & Beams. Tech doffs, Marion, Dem, ATB, C-beam 2p set proc, romulan rep array. All of those things just build off of FAW & make it stronger. I can run FAW with out any of that TRIBBLE and still out parse most cannon ships in a multi target environment. Eng & Tac both do it well, Sci a little less so.
Beams have a massive advantage in coverage & a moderate advantage in fall off. The average beam boat needs only to park in the middle of the @#%$ storm and fire to be effective. No cannon ship can compete with that. The amount of potential damage lost in positioning is massive, and that seams to where most of the damage difference comes from, but knowing Cryptic I'm sure there's more then a few bugs helping FAW along...
Assuming "numbers" are the only thing your after of course. Oh.. and don't forget about power creep making everything crazy.
Beams have a massive advantage in coverage & a moderate advantage in fall off.
Beam Arrays have no advantage in fall off, because at any range shorter than 9.5km, DHCs will out-damage Beam Arrays.
Beam Arrays have an insignificant advantage in coverage, because pretty much any ship that can mount DHCs won't have problems keeping enemies in their front arc (keeping in mind that this thread is about PvE).
Beam Arrays have always been inferior weapons compared to DHCs in PvE, not only because the balancing component (arc vs damage) is mostly irrelevant in PvE, but because of the inferior drain mechanism.
Bran's on the live stream and he runs a 6 beam faw/dem/marion/a2b build.
So I would assume that if it were borked they would have seen it.
Anyone can see. Just by watching it, I'd encourage anyone to find out the exact percentage but branflakes looks away from his screen 75% of the time and doesn't even use aux2bat maybe half the time. If one is so inclined to watch and stop-watch exactly the percentiles of all that cruise control he's got going on, I'd love to know.
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And that is exactly my point.
Taking a wildly unpopular skill and tacking something on top of it that's OP enough to convince people to put up with the skill - heck, even 2 copies of it - is just bad game design, in my opinion.
I'd much rather see the skill itself improved and the doffs changed to add a different benefit, more in line with other doffs, in terms of performance. So that, maybe, people would use the skill for its own merits and choose to run the doffs, or not, based on the rest of their build.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for cruisers (and engineers, btw) to be a valuable addition to any team, but I'd prefer that to be achieved in a way that isn't quite so sloppy.
Beams have a massive advantage in coverage & a moderate advantage in fall off. The average beam boat needs only to park in the middle of the @#%$ storm and fire to be effective. No cannon ship can compete with that. The amount of potential damage lost in positioning is massive, and that seams to where most of the damage difference comes from, but knowing Cryptic I'm sure there's more then a few bugs helping FAW along...
Assuming "numbers" are the only thing your after of course. Oh.. and don't forget about power creep making everything crazy.
Beam Arrays have no advantage in fall off, because at any range shorter than 9.5km, DHCs will out-damage Beam Arrays.
Beam Arrays have an insignificant advantage in coverage, because pretty much any ship that can mount DHCs won't have problems keeping enemies in their front arc (keeping in mind that this thread is about PvE).
Beam Arrays have always been inferior weapons compared to DHCs in PvE, not only because the balancing component (arc vs damage) is mostly irrelevant in PvE, but because of the inferior drain mechanism.
Anyone can see. Just by watching it, I'd encourage anyone to find out the exact percentage but branflakes looks away from his screen 75% of the time and doesn't even use aux2bat maybe half the time. If one is so inclined to watch and stop-watch exactly the percentiles of all that cruise control he's got going on, I'd love to know.