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Move Cannon abilities down a BOff seat; have Rapid Fire/Scatter Volley start at Ens
praxi5
Member Posts: 1,562 Arc User
Beams have a ton of advantages of Cannons, a big one being that Beam abilities start at Ensign, whereas Cannon abilities start at Lt.
With this, Beams have the unique (to Energy weapons, torps excluded) advantage of being able to run 2 copies their level 3 ability (FAW 3/BO 3), whereas Cannons can only run 1 copy of RF/SV 3 at most.
This is also compounded by the fact that outside of Escorts (and the Dyson ships), you're not going to have access to a Cmdr Tac slot to even have the chance to run even a single copy of RF/SV 3.
By moving them down a seat, starting at Ensign, it opens up Cannons to be used on ships that would normally be ill-fit to run them (only having an Lt Tac). Even ships that can't run DHCs or DCs would benefit since you can now run 2 RF/SV abilities with (single) Cannons and Turrets, giving the same uptime as FAW/BO.
Further, this would allow whole new types of builds - dual Cannon abilities would be available to all, "wasted" Ens Tac seats might not be considered as such anymore (Kemocite is still prohibitively expensive) since the more coveted Lt+ Tac seats have opened up for things like Attack Patterns/higher level Cannon abilities, etc. No longer would there be a lot of restrictions on Cannons, preventing many from using them.
I can't really see any downsides to this; DHCs maintain their "exclusive" status, Cannon-based builds become more viable for everyone, it opens up whole new build concepts, and could potentially provide a break from the heavy Beam dominance that we've had for quite some time now.
Thoughts?
(And, as a side note, buffing the utterly useless Dual Cannons to something more useful would be nice, while we're at it. There's seriously no reason whatsoever to use Dual Cannons over DHCs.)
With this, Beams have the unique (to Energy weapons, torps excluded) advantage of being able to run 2 copies their level 3 ability (FAW 3/BO 3), whereas Cannons can only run 1 copy of RF/SV 3 at most.
This is also compounded by the fact that outside of Escorts (and the Dyson ships), you're not going to have access to a Cmdr Tac slot to even have the chance to run even a single copy of RF/SV 3.
By moving them down a seat, starting at Ensign, it opens up Cannons to be used on ships that would normally be ill-fit to run them (only having an Lt Tac). Even ships that can't run DHCs or DCs would benefit since you can now run 2 RF/SV abilities with (single) Cannons and Turrets, giving the same uptime as FAW/BO.
Further, this would allow whole new types of builds - dual Cannon abilities would be available to all, "wasted" Ens Tac seats might not be considered as such anymore (Kemocite is still prohibitively expensive) since the more coveted Lt+ Tac seats have opened up for things like Attack Patterns/higher level Cannon abilities, etc. No longer would there be a lot of restrictions on Cannons, preventing many from using them.
I can't really see any downsides to this; DHCs maintain their "exclusive" status, Cannon-based builds become more viable for everyone, it opens up whole new build concepts, and could potentially provide a break from the heavy Beam dominance that we've had for quite some time now.
Thoughts?
(And, as a side note, buffing the utterly useless Dual Cannons to something more useful would be nice, while we're at it. There's seriously no reason whatsoever to use Dual Cannons over DHCs.)
Post edited by praxi5 on
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Even if one had access to 2x Cmdr CRF3/CSV3, you'd still need at least 1 of those slots for APO3 anyway (APO3 + CSV2/CRF2 is stronger than APO1 + CSV3/CRF3).
Beam and Cannon abilities should be on par, really (at least station-slot wise). Maybe, at one time, during 'Escorts Online', cannons may have been considered so much better than beams, to justify the higher rank requirements, but those days are long gone.
So, yeah, let's do it!
Not all procs are per cycle - some are per shot.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, you have my support! Cannons and escorts in general need a new mechanic in order to keep up. They are falling way behind.
As a Beam Boat Captain.. I fully support this great idea.
Something needs to be done to bring Cannons up to Par. My recommendation is to follow this example as well as increase Cannon Firing Arc from 45 degrees to 90 Degrees to match Dual Beam Banks.
Between those changes and the new agile Pilot ships, you might actually see more use of Cannons.
Scatter volley is cone AOE which is nice, but can't be used for point defense the same way FAW can. If a targetable torp or mine is outside the arc it does nothing.
Since abilities DO scale, if they're wary about things like CSV at Ensign level, it could always scale worse or it could have a longer shared cooldown with higher rank versions of the same ability.
Which in addition to being a balance thing, kind of makes sense. Ensigns will hesitate more and take more coddling than higher trained personnel so having the shared cooldown for an ability be higher with lower ranks makes sense as a simulation... And would actually do a LOT for game balance since it would mean that stocking copies of an ability would be better served by taking the "costlier" option of two high rank copies than using a high rank and a low rank or two low rank copies of an ability. That would probably break a lot of the more exploitative builds... And cases where something like Aux2Batt might become a stronger build, it would be more on ships like the Galaxy that need it since the Galaxy could actually use duplicate high rank copies of the power across two stations.
(The other thing would probably be to have a per-bridge officer global cooldown, rather than a per ability GCD, which would make bridge officers less like a power tray and more like bridge officers, who realistically couldn't receive 3 orders at once while another bridge officer sits there doing nothing.)
The way I found to get around this, sadly, is to use the old qin heavy raptor. 3 tac, 1 Engi, 1 Sci.
Tac Set up is, Com: TT1, SV1, RFII, APOIII, LtC: TS1, TSII, RFII, En: TT1
This way using your own captain abilities. YOu can just bounce back and forth between APA and APO.
The Reason that RF/SV is a higher rank than the Beam ones is because DHC's are still the highest burst damage weapons in the game. They also have the second longest internal cooldown of any weapons. Topedo's still having the longest. Beams, Cannons, an Turrets haveing the shorest. Putting the Duel cannons at the middle ground for internal cooldowns.
If you're going for a more sustained cannon build. Try using just Duel Heavy's. DHC's are great for big burst of dmg, but suck for sustained dmg. But if you'lre looking for a sustained, with a big burst ability, Mix and match. Run 1 or 2 Duel cannos, with a DHC or 1 or 2 DHC's with 1 Duel Cannon. Whether or not you keep a torp in this mix, that's up to you. Without it you can run a 1/3 or a 2/2 mix of cannons.
Indeed, 15km would be much more practical for everyone.
I'd like to see a "Scatter Volley" like power for beam weapons also.
It's nonsense that one kind of ability is only availlable to one kind of weapon type.
A FAW fo cannons AND a Scatter volley for Beam Weapons would give players the chance to adapt their ship to their playstyle much better.
I always disliked FAW because it attacks EVERYTHING in range, which makes no sense to me tbh.
A radical change in how Weapons work in STO would be favourable imo.
Remove Cannons and Beams altogether and introduce simply Energy Weapons with different arc and power. (you can choose which animation you like, Cannon or Beam)
Make all Weapons abilities availlabe to all energy weapons.
What i would like to see would Attack Patterns start at ensign level.
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
At this point, nothing will.
And now we have Pilot ships. Ludicrously fast and agile 5/2 Escorts with a neat immunity gimmick. Perfect platforms for 5 DBB/2 Omni Beams. Antiproton of course.
And fun times were had by all.
Great all we needed. Faster BF@W zombies.
You should try dealing with Engineering abilities... while Tactical might not be Science when it comes to finding something to put in those slots, it's still head and shoulders above the options available with Engineering.
At least with Beams ruling the came it's more accurate to the series, after all phaser beam weapons were the primary armament on Federation Starships, even the Defiant had them,
I'm the one that created the thread, and I'm a PvPer through and through. Try again, Troll.
I agree on at par basis of tac boffs.
IMO, The one stopping High End PvE from using cannons is the players themselves. You dont see parses from FPER using cannons even before all this Pilot ship Cannon buff happened.
An FPER cannon build can get to 100k+ DPS due to that Nadeon Bomb which can bring you to top 15 and cannons synergies with the 2pc phaser buff turret. But FPER is tedious to perfect. So, it may also be ease of use that is stopping players. Because FPER is superior in DPS than Scimitar but FPER is harder to perfect in one parse. Yet, you still see 1 FPER in top end PvE. Maybe Top End Players would prefer ease of use since FPER outDPS a Scimitar yet you still got more parses at 75k+ of scimitar than FPER.
Or it is just the current lag, since FPER is more sensitive to the lag than the Scimitar.
The other factor that contributes to this is those who may/can parse high end pve cannons also have beam parses. So they record only the beams. Its like having too many parses on one toon, but the only one recorded is the highest which is the beam parse.
But this is high End PvE we are talking about, which is just luxury when we adjust since it involves very few players.
With the rest of playerbase, we just dont have the exact info to know which is popular or dominant and which is due to the lack of info of what each player use.
I really like this and your "Give NPCs TacTeam" idea.
And there certainly is a sadness for cannons in LOLFAW land. So escorts do have sort of a sad. But they can still mount 2 good cannon abilities and 2 good torpedo abilities.
And if your a fed, and soon to be everyone, you get reciprocity.
That being said, the ships that can mount DC's and DHC's really were meant to be DEM users, back in the dark ages. It's a legacy design. But there you have it. Would you really want to see Battlecruisers with reciprocity or Aux2Bat mounting CRF3?
If you do you do that's fine, sure not fighting this one as I never see it happening. They're so busy adding alternative ways to buff cannons and tactical in general I don't think this has a chance.
Peace and good luck in your quest!
I agree lag has a lot to do with me not using cannons. I took my pilot ship into KSA last night and my cannons kept misfiring to the point that I would go a few seconds without even being able to fire a shot. I switched my load out to beams and I could finally kill things again.
To the OP. I agree. It would be nice to have cannons moved down a slot. My galaxy-x (and other battle cruisers for that matter) would thank you
Don't dual heavies get 10% crit?
Well, I was going to ask just what was the rationale behind putting cannon skills a promotion higher than beam skills.
That said, there's this stigmatization against FAW/A2B users from certain vocal corners that's just... ugh. Its a valid build and players are enjoying it. If it does make life difficult for PVP then the issue should never be 'nerf PVE for PVP's sake' instead of 'why are our PVP skills still dependent on PVE'. Seperating PVP and PVE skills may be a bridge too far for Cryptic's budget, but then again we've had other wholesale changes done in the past few years. Maybe its something that is not entirely impossible to ask for.
The question is how many useful skills are there.
Sci wins without a doubt. If you have a ship with 3 Ens Sci skills, you'll be OK. But with 3 Ens Tac or Eng, you're almost always going to be wasting a seat.
I wouldn't say that about Engineering...with the other EPT(?) buffed and ET not conflicting with TT...I'd say you'd have options...plus with the new boff abilities from the lock box now everyone has a option at Ensign.