If I have 0 points in grav and particle gens, the gav well 3 isn't that great. Also, if I have no points in torps and I shoot them out the back cuz I'm running hi aux, the won't do much either.
Granted, but normally you have at least a clue what you want to play.
As a Sci you will want to use some points in particle, and 3-6 Points in Torp isn't a bad idea either.
Where do you want to put all those spare points? If you play a Sci like a Tac, why not choose a Tactical Career?
I'm not a fan of Min/Max and it's just not needed for PvE, but its just my two cents. I for myself built all my toons for a special purpose (more or less) and i'm still able to test out the newest shiny without problems
I'm an utter noob (been playing for 3 days) and this is something that kind of worries me. I have basically no idea what I'm doing and while I'm usually perfectly fine with spending some money on a F2P game, it kinda bothers me that a skill respec is IMO excessively expensive.
It doesn't feel like spending money on something that adds to my enjoyment of the game, but it feels like my ignorance as a newbie will be monetarily exploited at some point down the line. I'd rather spend my money on ships and such. Feeling nickled and dimed for stuff like this does actually inhibit me from impulse-buying bigger ticket items.
That being said, is there maybe a good guide somewhere that sheds some light on the skill system and how it figures into your choice of ship? What are the "safe" points to distribute?
How about just spend the five dollars and help support this game for once and fix a bad spec at the same time. I know five is a lot and you may have to cancel Christmas but you will have to make choices. This is probably the most deadbeat friendly 'F2P' game I have ever seen and still people want more for free.
How about just spend the five dollars and help support this game for once and fix a bad spec at the same time. I know five is a lot and you may have to cancel Christmas but you will have to make choices. This is probably the most deadbeat friendly 'F2P' game I have ever seen and still people want more for free.
Yeh, tossing a free respec at 50 wouldn't hurt, or/and do the "1 free" (limit 1 at a time) that gets tossed to the other games with major changes. As mentioned some games have the "do challenge X get a respec, limit Y per year" too, with challenge X having usefull rewards for to get people helping you out.
On a more complicated note, they could split the active/passive skills, or make a more generic active system at low levels. Cause people have a point here, what level 10 newbie knows if they want to use tackyon beam and attack pattern x. They don't even know if their end ship will have Doffs with 1 or 4 power of each area. (I'll admit I've got level 50's who havn't decided). Game Design wise that's a fairly specific sub-set of skills, compared to "boosts any ship/shield healing" skill (covering both ENG and SCI Boffs for flexibility), or "increases all weapon damage" of the more generic first two tears to have there, instead "(small) boost to all Science/Tac powers" is more inline
Heck, Even shifting the points lower to unlock T2 would help, the base 3 passives (Damage,Hull,Shields) in T2 at yellow only give 18,000/33,000 points used (or 24,000 with the ground at yellow)
Yeh, tossing a free respec at 50 wouldn't hurt, or/and do the "1 free" (limit 1 at a time) that gets tossed to the other games with major changes. As mentioned some games have the "do challenge X get a respec, limit Y per year" too, with challenge X having usefull rewards for to get people helping you out.
On a more complicated note, they could split the active/passive skills, or make a more generic active system at low levels. Cause people have a point here, what level 10 newbie knows if they want to use tackyon beam and attack pattern x. They don't even know if their end ship will have Doffs with 1 or 4 power of each area. (I'll admit I've got level 50's who havn't decided). Game Design wise that's a fairly specific sub-set of skills, compared to "boosts any ship/shield healing" skill (covering both ENG and SCI Boffs for flexibility), or "increases all weapon damage" of the more generic first two tears to have there, instead "(small) boost to all Science/Tac powers" is more inline
Heck, Even shifting the points lower to unlock T2 would help, the base 3 passives (Damage,Hull,Shields) in T2 at yellow only give 18,000/33,000 points used (or 24,000 with the ground at yellow)
Most of the current skills can made so we can get ship tab whit skills for every ship and some nice captain ability in 3 variants
This is my 1st MMO game so take my comment with a grain of salt...
Personally, I do not see the cost of 500 Zen to respect a character to be overly expensive, but at the same time it is not particularly cheap either. In a different post about this same issue about 2 or maybe 3 weeks ago someone posted the cost to respec characters in different games and at least on the surface the cost to respec in STO seems fairly inexpensive (since I didn't not bother to actually verify the cost in other MMOs).
Since STO is a F2P game it Cryptic needs to generate money so that at the very minimum it can maintain the current state of the game. That excludes money necessary to fix bugs and create new content. So in general, I have no inherent problems with Cryptic charging Zen for respec.
However, I can understand that for new players it can be a challenge to understand how best to assign skills to your characters so it is easy to regret making certain choice later in the game as they become more familiar with STO. I am one of those people. Both my Fed and KDF toon are at max level now and I can honestly say their skills part not particularly optimized, but they are not terrible either. I would like to respec both toons, but that would cost me 1,000 Zen.
I think it would be nice if there was actually one free respec say at Captain rank. At that point of the game you should be familiar enough with many aspects of the game to properly allocate skill points to your character. However, it needs to be used before getting to Rear Admiral, once there the free respec token is gone whether you used or not.
One person stated that respec is an in game function of the game so dilithium (an in game currency) should be used to respect your characters. In fact, that can be done. People can convert their stockpile of dilithium crystals to Zen. The result is you do not actually use any real money.
Now people have argued that time is money. In a sense that is true, but only if you are using the time to play the game instead of actually working to earn money. For example, if you choose not to go to work to earn your paycheck and you prefer to stay home so that you can grind dilithium to eventually get a respec for free, then at is your choice. A rather stupid choice, but a choice never the less. In most cases, I think it would be something like spending time to be with your friends instead of being at home grinding away. No one is paying you to go out and hang with your friends, therefore, no real money is lost by simply staying home.
My suggestion to lower the cost of repsec'ing toons is to use a combination of dilithium crystals, purchasing some Zen and waiting around for discounts. For example, I decided today to purchase $20 worth of Zen because PWE was giving an extra 15% bonus so I got 2,300 Zen for my $20. I plan on waiting until PWE does a 15% discount on Services (which is where I think the Respec Token is). That brings down the cost to 425 Zen which is a little easier to swallow. I can then use my little pile of 2,300 Zen ($20) to purchase the token. Additionally, I can also convert some of my dilithium crystals to Zen... say enough to get 200 Zen. Now the "real out of pocket" cost is only 225 Zen or $1.92 (rounded up) of the $20 I used to purchase Zen.
I agree for reskill to be free, but 1 per week(with no stacking), and 350 Zen for more. And ppl would actually buy other ships to try different builds, 500 is just too expensive (5 or 5$ is too much). I have respec'ed only once 2 years ago and still flying with my old build.
Absolutely, this needs to go the way of the current traits system and allow us to freely experiment with our skills, would add so much more enjoyment to be able to finely tune for all the different ships I fly. In the past with prior traits system and rep passives, you had to make a hard choice that made it difficult to get into different kinds of ships and not feel gimped if those wasn't matching your traits or rep passives.
What they should do is sell skill point loadouts/slots or whatever you call it so we can switch between different skill layouts for convenience. Then they could still sell something but allow us to configure freely. And as some have pointed out, this encourages people to buy more ships since they won't feel locked into just one type of play-style. If I'm specced into science vessels, but not so much for cruisers etc, that means I'm not going to be so interested in buying any unless I feel like I can adapt for such ships without cost.
Don't think it should cost zen to obtain. A free respec at 50 would be ideal for free players. I get one every time I get promoted and I've been playing for a long time now...I think I've used two in the time that I've joined. My advice to new players would be to take your time and study the skill system, saving you the trouble. It can be confusing at first, so why not take your time? I have a feeling most new players just want to grind the fastest way...that many of them make stupid decisions without even reading about what is best.
What does this achieve? We have so many skill points to allocate already that going from a generalist to specialist skill build typically only gives a 1-3% performance gain. Certainly not enough to notice without parsing.
Those people who run a generalist build already wont notice the difference, and those people who run a specialist build already will loose their tiny advantage. And all that will really happen is that every one will run the optimum configuration for each ship they fly.
So why not just have all our skills scale up from 1 to 85/99 as we level and remove player control over them outside of gear selection? Ultimately the effect will be exactly the same, but it wont penalize the stupid or the time deprived.
Personally I would rather just leave things as they are. It all seems like a huge waist of development time to me. Unless cryptic want to shake up the skill system and make increments of 15 points noticeably better.
Thanks for being constructive and not bashing each other.
With the Z-Store, I'm sure they make more than enough off of fleet modules key sales, and costume / ship / bundle sales to "throw us players a bone" so to say.
If they make that ability similar to the traits ability now, it's just a win / win for everyone.
I think they should be "free" but have a 24 hour c/d my reasoning is they are a crucial part of the game. a necessary feature. having them cost 5 dollars just to try something new or to correct a mistake is unreasonable. iv bought 4 cs ships and 2 fleet ships and despite that still have not gotten a reset token as I cant be 100% i'd be happy with a new build or even if that build will work for more then one of my ships. so im stuck flying around with a ho hum skill set that covers a lot of area's but does not excel at anything.
but I do feel it should have a c/d of some sort so it does feel there is some commitment too the system other wise it may lose meaning all together at least imo. maybe throwing a 1m ec cost in as well can help and because ec sinks never hurt either.
so im stuck flying around with a ho hum skill set that covers a lot of area's but does not excel at anything.
If you think your 'ho hum' its probably not because of your skills. Cryptic realy have done a fairly good job of obscuring just how your skills work, and how unimportant hevily investing in anything is. Many people, even good and otherwise knowledgeable players, overstate the importance of their skills.
The truth is, that if your doing well, its more likely to be because your good at handling your ship, and selecting abilities and equipment that synagize, then because your captain skills are making a huge difference.
A lot of people have contributed to the task of finding out just what our skill points really do over the years and it turns out they don't do that much, at least not in small increments. Hear are some examples:
15 points in graviton generators adds 0.22km to the radius of a Gravity Well 3
15 points in particle generators adds 10.9 points of damage to each tick of Gravity Well 3
15 points in attack patterns adds 1% to the damage bonus of Omega 3
15 points in sensors adds 0.4% to the stealth sight buff from sensor scan
15 points in energy weapons specialization adds 0.3% to your critical hit chance
15 points in subspace decompiler adds 0.7 seconds to the duration of viral matrix 3
So why am I giving increments of 15 points? Well going from 6 investments in a captain skill to 9 gives you 15 points in a skill. As you can see from the above that's honestly not a big deal. In most cases your ping, and your luck with the random number generator are going to make a far bigger impact to your performance then 15 points will.
In fact if your not prepared to spend one heck of a lot of time parsing your probably going to be completely unable to tell the difference between some one who has maxed their skills and some one who hasn't.
Now skills do matter. But only in increments far larger. A good rule of thumb is that any change in your skill level of less then 30 points, is unlikely to be noticeable. For many skills even 30 points isn't noticeable unless your paying a grate deal of attention.
Now if I have convinced you that you don't need to maximize skills. then you can save a lot of skill points by not doing so. In fact you can save so many, and generalize your build so much, that provided you are good at the game, and know how to build your ship you can still easily outperform the vast majority of min/max-ers at everything from DPS and tanking to science.
You get a free respec every time you get promoted. You need more than that? Do you really need to be respec'ing your toon constantly?
How cool would it be to have a "tactical" spec saved to your Defiant ship and a "science" spec you swap in with the rest of your gear and boff layout when switching to a Luna class? We can already fly any kind of ship regardless of proff. Might as well spare us having to run a tactical setup on science ships and vice versa. 500 zen a ship swap doesn't mean we're paying Cryptic left and right. It means we opt to make do with one particular build forever.
Well, this is going to be a sore subject. Here is the problems I see. Gold members are going to feel like they are loosing another benefit if you make respecting free. New and F2P players join the game and look at the skill tree and say wow what does this do. There can be middle ground. But he number one thing I see that needs to be done is reduce the number of points and skill areas in the tree. Make the skill tree smaller and less complicated.
Here are some thoughts. Look at power insulators. Unless you PvP most players can get away from putting points into the skill. This skill is a resistance to drains. Sub system repair helps repair subsystem off line effects once again players that don't PvP can get away with little or no points in the skill. Why not make them one skill and and the effectiveness can be based off of available crew.
Another skill is initial dampeners we have abilities that will allow you to get out of holds, if you don't want to run them it is up to you. So while have this skill. Also engine power can hope reduce this a little. But it is a skill that needs to go away.
Sensors and counter measures need to become one skill. Sensors help with debuffs and counter mess squares in a hole are placate, usually messing with one persons sensors. So why not have both skills tied together.
Particle and grav gens should be one skill also. Call it anomalies generators or what have you but allow it to do the job of both.
Subsystem decompile should just go away. Takes it's attributes and make it work of flow caps.
Engine performance, driver coil and impulse thrusters should be the same skill.
Hull plating and armor reinforcement should be combined.
Hull repair and shield emitters should become one skill also.
Stealth should become part of sensors.
Combine warpcore efficiency and potential
This is some of the suggestions I would do to the skill tree revamp
Also make skills only effected by one skill. Maybe except weapons. It is crazy the the best photonics shockwave has to be skilled into three skill categories.
Remove threat from the tree and add it to the ship. Carrier and cruisers have the largest hulls and should be able to take more damage. So I would do a new threat system I based on DPS and hull strength. One threat point built into game mechanics based on DPS output and hull strength of the ship. It would look like this. A cruiser would get a threat multiplier of 1.25 as a base. Captain skills like APA could add another multiplier.
Player a in a cruiser has 65000 hull and can perform 10k DPS. So you take your 65000 and add it to 10k DPS and get 75,000 them multiply that by the cruiser threat multiplier and his threat is worth 93,750.
Player b is in an escort that has 45000 hull and he does 20k DPS. Now his threat generator is 1.15 because of the DPS a escort can pump out. His threat would be calculated the same way. Hull plus DPS times multiplier. This would give the escort a threat gen of 74,750.
Player c in a since ship has 38000 hull and can pump put 10k DPS. But his multiplier is 1.0. So same format gives the player c a threat gen of 48,000.
This will fix multiple problems in the game. This will give cruisers threat so they can become tanks. Ships like the scimitars that can perform insane DPS can still grab threat. And will hopefully make science ships more healer.
Another game fix based on skill tree is make all abilities work on all levels of NPCs. It is insane that a science ship spec'd into scrabble sensors can not scramble a tac cube for five seconds to help relieve threat off the cruiser to give him valuable time to catch a cooldown.
I do support a reduced price skill revamp and a free one for all level 50 toons, I do not support making them free.
One last thing the increase in cost is a stupid format. A skill should cost 1000 points for each level no mater what the skill is adjust the missions and level requirements to make this happen. It is awards that a ship you fight as a ensign is worth a certain value but as you level the value is increased. Stop this madness. Make the boss more difficult but keep the skill points.
I also support a flats rate ground and space tree. None of this min/max going on now. Give a certain amount of points to ground use and a certain amount of pints to pace use. Then make players spec into there builds for the ships and abilities they want to run.
The idea is to make the skill tree easier to use which will reduce the amount of respects needed.
After the revamp a free token to all captains at level 50 and a free token every full season update. Also make them tradable on the exchange. Five dollars is not hat much money I would consider a price reduction but don think it would be needed if they were tradable. I would also love to I see a tutorial area lie, Champions online where you can play certain content with the new spec'd skill three before accepting.
Comments
Yes, I paid for them.
you're a lifetime member they're one of your perks
I know... can't I tease the freebies? I used to be one myself once
Not in the Academy forum where newbs come to genuinely ask questions and learn. We don't want to drive off the newbs who actually ask questions.
Over in General Discussion where everybody comes to TRIBBLE and moan like irrational, inconsolable babies, by all means tease away.
As a Sci you will want to use some points in particle, and 3-6 Points in Torp isn't a bad idea either.
Where do you want to put all those spare points? If you play a Sci like a Tac, why not choose a Tactical Career?
I'm not a fan of Min/Max and it's just not needed for PvE, but its just my two cents. I for myself built all my toons for a special purpose (more or less) and i'm still able to test out the newest shiny without problems
It doesn't feel like spending money on something that adds to my enjoyment of the game, but it feels like my ignorance as a newbie will be monetarily exploited at some point down the line. I'd rather spend my money on ships and such. Feeling nickled and dimed for stuff like this does actually inhibit me from impulse-buying bigger ticket items.
That being said, is there maybe a good guide somewhere that sheds some light on the skill system and how it figures into your choice of ship? What are the "safe" points to distribute?
I could not help but laugh!
On a more complicated note, they could split the active/passive skills, or make a more generic active system at low levels. Cause people have a point here, what level 10 newbie knows if they want to use tackyon beam and attack pattern x. They don't even know if their end ship will have Doffs with 1 or 4 power of each area. (I'll admit I've got level 50's who havn't decided). Game Design wise that's a fairly specific sub-set of skills, compared to "boosts any ship/shield healing" skill (covering both ENG and SCI Boffs for flexibility), or "increases all weapon damage" of the more generic first two tears to have there, instead "(small) boost to all Science/Tac powers" is more inline
Heck, Even shifting the points lower to unlock T2 would help, the base 3 passives (Damage,Hull,Shields) in T2 at yellow only give 18,000/33,000 points used (or 24,000 with the ground at yellow)
Most of the current skills can made so we can get ship tab whit skills for every ship and some nice captain ability in 3 variants
No, captain Geko said in his latest Priority One interview that they won't have time to revamp skill tree until season 10 (year 2015.)
Personally, I do not see the cost of 500 Zen to respect a character to be overly expensive, but at the same time it is not particularly cheap either. In a different post about this same issue about 2 or maybe 3 weeks ago someone posted the cost to respec characters in different games and at least on the surface the cost to respec in STO seems fairly inexpensive (since I didn't not bother to actually verify the cost in other MMOs).
Since STO is a F2P game it Cryptic needs to generate money so that at the very minimum it can maintain the current state of the game. That excludes money necessary to fix bugs and create new content. So in general, I have no inherent problems with Cryptic charging Zen for respec.
However, I can understand that for new players it can be a challenge to understand how best to assign skills to your characters so it is easy to regret making certain choice later in the game as they become more familiar with STO. I am one of those people. Both my Fed and KDF toon are at max level now and I can honestly say their skills part not particularly optimized, but they are not terrible either. I would like to respec both toons, but that would cost me 1,000 Zen.
I think it would be nice if there was actually one free respec say at Captain rank. At that point of the game you should be familiar enough with many aspects of the game to properly allocate skill points to your character. However, it needs to be used before getting to Rear Admiral, once there the free respec token is gone whether you used or not.
One person stated that respec is an in game function of the game so dilithium (an in game currency) should be used to respect your characters. In fact, that can be done. People can convert their stockpile of dilithium crystals to Zen. The result is you do not actually use any real money.
Now people have argued that time is money. In a sense that is true, but only if you are using the time to play the game instead of actually working to earn money. For example, if you choose not to go to work to earn your paycheck and you prefer to stay home so that you can grind dilithium to eventually get a respec for free, then at is your choice. A rather stupid choice, but a choice never the less. In most cases, I think it would be something like spending time to be with your friends instead of being at home grinding away. No one is paying you to go out and hang with your friends, therefore, no real money is lost by simply staying home.
My suggestion to lower the cost of repsec'ing toons is to use a combination of dilithium crystals, purchasing some Zen and waiting around for discounts. For example, I decided today to purchase $20 worth of Zen because PWE was giving an extra 15% bonus so I got 2,300 Zen for my $20. I plan on waiting until PWE does a 15% discount on Services (which is where I think the Respec Token is). That brings down the cost to 425 Zen which is a little easier to swallow. I can then use my little pile of 2,300 Zen ($20) to purchase the token. Additionally, I can also convert some of my dilithium crystals to Zen... say enough to get 200 Zen. Now the "real out of pocket" cost is only 225 Zen or $1.92 (rounded up) of the $20 I used to purchase Zen.
I realize I posted a wall of text above.
Just skip to the last 3 paragraphs for the meat of my post.
What they should do is sell skill point loadouts/slots or whatever you call it so we can switch between different skill layouts for convenience. Then they could still sell something but allow us to configure freely. And as some have pointed out, this encourages people to buy more ships since they won't feel locked into just one type of play-style. If I'm specced into science vessels, but not so much for cruisers etc, that means I'm not going to be so interested in buying any unless I feel like I can adapt for such ships without cost.
Those people who run a generalist build already wont notice the difference, and those people who run a specialist build already will loose their tiny advantage. And all that will really happen is that every one will run the optimum configuration for each ship they fly.
So why not just have all our skills scale up from 1 to 85/99 as we level and remove player control over them outside of gear selection? Ultimately the effect will be exactly the same, but it wont penalize the stupid or the time deprived.
Personally I would rather just leave things as they are. It all seems like a huge waist of development time to me. Unless cryptic want to shake up the skill system and make increments of 15 points noticeably better.
Thanks for being constructive and not bashing each other.
With the Z-Store, I'm sure they make more than enough off of fleet modules key sales, and costume / ship / bundle sales to "throw us players a bone" so to say.
If they make that ability similar to the traits ability now, it's just a win / win for everyone.
but I do feel it should have a c/d of some sort so it does feel there is some commitment too the system other wise it may lose meaning all together at least imo. maybe throwing a 1m ec cost in as well can help and because ec sinks never hurt either.
If you think your 'ho hum' its probably not because of your skills. Cryptic realy have done a fairly good job of obscuring just how your skills work, and how unimportant hevily investing in anything is. Many people, even good and otherwise knowledgeable players, overstate the importance of their skills.
The truth is, that if your doing well, its more likely to be because your good at handling your ship, and selecting abilities and equipment that synagize, then because your captain skills are making a huge difference.
A lot of people have contributed to the task of finding out just what our skill points really do over the years and it turns out they don't do that much, at least not in small increments. Hear are some examples:
15 points in graviton generators adds 0.22km to the radius of a Gravity Well 3
15 points in particle generators adds 10.9 points of damage to each tick of Gravity Well 3
15 points in attack patterns adds 1% to the damage bonus of Omega 3
15 points in sensors adds 0.4% to the stealth sight buff from sensor scan
15 points in energy weapons specialization adds 0.3% to your critical hit chance
15 points in subspace decompiler adds 0.7 seconds to the duration of viral matrix 3
So why am I giving increments of 15 points? Well going from 6 investments in a captain skill to 9 gives you 15 points in a skill. As you can see from the above that's honestly not a big deal. In most cases your ping, and your luck with the random number generator are going to make a far bigger impact to your performance then 15 points will.
In fact if your not prepared to spend one heck of a lot of time parsing your probably going to be completely unable to tell the difference between some one who has maxed their skills and some one who hasn't.
Now skills do matter. But only in increments far larger. A good rule of thumb is that any change in your skill level of less then 30 points, is unlikely to be noticeable. For many skills even 30 points isn't noticeable unless your paying a grate deal of attention.
Now if I have convinced you that you don't need to maximize skills. then you can save a lot of skill points by not doing so. In fact you can save so many, and generalize your build so much, that provided you are good at the game, and know how to build your ship you can still easily outperform the vast majority of min/max-ers at everything from DPS and tanking to science.
How cool would it be to have a "tactical" spec saved to your Defiant ship and a "science" spec you swap in with the rest of your gear and boff layout when switching to a Luna class? We can already fly any kind of ship regardless of proff. Might as well spare us having to run a tactical setup on science ships and vice versa. 500 zen a ship swap doesn't mean we're paying Cryptic left and right. It means we opt to make do with one particular build forever.
Here are some thoughts. Look at power insulators. Unless you PvP most players can get away from putting points into the skill. This skill is a resistance to drains. Sub system repair helps repair subsystem off line effects once again players that don't PvP can get away with little or no points in the skill. Why not make them one skill and and the effectiveness can be based off of available crew.
Another skill is initial dampeners we have abilities that will allow you to get out of holds, if you don't want to run them it is up to you. So while have this skill. Also engine power can hope reduce this a little. But it is a skill that needs to go away.
Sensors and counter measures need to become one skill. Sensors help with debuffs and counter mess squares in a hole are placate, usually messing with one persons sensors. So why not have both skills tied together.
Particle and grav gens should be one skill also. Call it anomalies generators or what have you but allow it to do the job of both.
Subsystem decompile should just go away. Takes it's attributes and make it work of flow caps.
Engine performance, driver coil and impulse thrusters should be the same skill.
Hull plating and armor reinforcement should be combined.
Hull repair and shield emitters should become one skill also.
Stealth should become part of sensors.
Combine warpcore efficiency and potential
This is some of the suggestions I would do to the skill tree revamp
Also make skills only effected by one skill. Maybe except weapons. It is crazy the the best photonics shockwave has to be skilled into three skill categories.
Remove threat from the tree and add it to the ship. Carrier and cruisers have the largest hulls and should be able to take more damage. So I would do a new threat system I based on DPS and hull strength. One threat point built into game mechanics based on DPS output and hull strength of the ship. It would look like this. A cruiser would get a threat multiplier of 1.25 as a base. Captain skills like APA could add another multiplier.
Player a in a cruiser has 65000 hull and can perform 10k DPS. So you take your 65000 and add it to 10k DPS and get 75,000 them multiply that by the cruiser threat multiplier and his threat is worth 93,750.
Player b is in an escort that has 45000 hull and he does 20k DPS. Now his threat generator is 1.15 because of the DPS a escort can pump out. His threat would be calculated the same way. Hull plus DPS times multiplier. This would give the escort a threat gen of 74,750.
Player c in a since ship has 38000 hull and can pump put 10k DPS. But his multiplier is 1.0. So same format gives the player c a threat gen of 48,000.
This will fix multiple problems in the game. This will give cruisers threat so they can become tanks. Ships like the scimitars that can perform insane DPS can still grab threat. And will hopefully make science ships more healer.
Another game fix based on skill tree is make all abilities work on all levels of NPCs. It is insane that a science ship spec'd into scrabble sensors can not scramble a tac cube for five seconds to help relieve threat off the cruiser to give him valuable time to catch a cooldown.
I do support a reduced price skill revamp and a free one for all level 50 toons, I do not support making them free.
One last thing the increase in cost is a stupid format. A skill should cost 1000 points for each level no mater what the skill is adjust the missions and level requirements to make this happen. It is awards that a ship you fight as a ensign is worth a certain value but as you level the value is increased. Stop this madness. Make the boss more difficult but keep the skill points.
I also support a flats rate ground and space tree. None of this min/max going on now. Give a certain amount of points to ground use and a certain amount of pints to pace use. Then make players spec into there builds for the ships and abilities they want to run.
The idea is to make the skill tree easier to use which will reduce the amount of respects needed.
After the revamp a free token to all captains at level 50 and a free token every full season update. Also make them tradable on the exchange. Five dollars is not hat much money I would consider a price reduction but don think it would be needed if they were tradable. I would also love to I see a tutorial area lie, Champions online where you can play certain content with the new spec'd skill three before accepting.