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Can we have a conversation about gameplay style?
treaen
Member Posts: 43 Arc User
I've been playing STO for a while now. It's the first MMO I've ever decided to get involved in with any seriousness. And I do really enjoy the game. I've been taking a bit of a break lately, mostly out of not really wanting to overplay so that when Season 6 gets here I won't feel burnt out. At any rate, I've started playing EverQuest and it's led me to some really interesting revelations. The specific thing I want to discuss here with everybody is the way ground combat works in our game.
In EverQuest, I'm playing a wizard. (I'll do a quick jibe and say that by the time I had played STO for about three or four weeks, I had already hit the level cap and run out of episodes to play. Now, about three or four weeks into EVE, I'm still at 36 and have only played quests in three regions.) Anyway, the big thing that I've noticed in my time with my wizard is that I can do an incredible amount of damage and pretty quickly, but I can't take on more than two or three guys at once without threat of dying and having to respawn. When I've played with my friends, it's certainly easier. And I'm well aware that this is the function of that game. Casters sit back behind the line and do as much damage as quickly as possible, fighters get in there and take the damage from the enemy while bludgeoning the TRIBBLE out of them, healers keep everybody else alive while it's all going down. When I try to get in there with just my staff and whack something, I fail miserably.
But I don't mean for this to turn into a lecture on how EverQuest works. What I'm curious to talk about is if any of this kind of thing (which I'm aware is a common way to structure how different characters work in the world of MMOs) is in STO.
My main in STO is an Engineer but I also have Tactical and Science characters and my Klingon is a Tactical officer. From my experience, all of the NPC baddies in STO either get hit by me from afar and run up to get in my face and shoot or they notice me before I hit them and run up to get in my face and shoot. Either way, they seem to like getting up close and personal despite the fact that very few of them actually carry hand-held weapons. This is essentially the same as my experience of EverQuest.
The big difference is that no matter which character I'm playing, the way to defeat the enemy is through my primary weapon (which is clearly and rightly meant to be the primary weapon of the game), my phaser (or whatever). This is a ranged weapon, implying that the correct way to use it is to maintain distance from the enemy. I haven't noticed a huge discrepancy between my characters insofar as hit points go and all characters in the game have access to every type of armor and shield of their level.
Further, I've played with most of the kits available. Some skills just seem completely useless to me. At any rate, the kit I use most often as an Engineer is clearly meant for tanking. I've got turrets, and shield and medical generators, and a drone summon. When I play as my Tac character, I like the kit with all the grenades, which is clearly meant for doing damage. And as my Science officer, I prefer the big med kit for healing. However, the other side of this is that in almost every single mission I've got an away team with me to pick up the slack of what I don't have on my own person, even through they may not always do the smartest thing. And running STFs with a team allows us to maximize our potential by selecting one of everything, while running STFs at random usually doesn't put five of the same class together and almost always has at least one of each.
What I'm driving at here, and what I'm curious about from the community, is am I missing the difference in styles of gameplay or is there just not one here? It seems to me that the game is set up to give us everything we need to be able to play as caster, tank, and healer all at once. Having different abilities myself changes only slightly what I need to do in a given situation and, even then, only really makes a difference at the beginning of the fight. Also, anything I don't have that I feel I need I can use off of my BOFFs during the fight by pushing those buttons.
I'm not saying that STO needs to be EverQuest. It, in fact, shouldn't be and, at least in my opinion, has the potential to be something far more interesting. But it might be nice to have a reason for choosing a class. Obviously we're always going to have our phasers and our away teams. I think that almost everyone ends up having a small number of skills they end up using and then decks their standard away team out with those skills so that they're always present. But maybe we can talk about the idea of having the stuff be specific to a class so that it affects the way the game works some.
But this is my experience. Where do others stand?
In EverQuest, I'm playing a wizard. (I'll do a quick jibe and say that by the time I had played STO for about three or four weeks, I had already hit the level cap and run out of episodes to play. Now, about three or four weeks into EVE, I'm still at 36 and have only played quests in three regions.) Anyway, the big thing that I've noticed in my time with my wizard is that I can do an incredible amount of damage and pretty quickly, but I can't take on more than two or three guys at once without threat of dying and having to respawn. When I've played with my friends, it's certainly easier. And I'm well aware that this is the function of that game. Casters sit back behind the line and do as much damage as quickly as possible, fighters get in there and take the damage from the enemy while bludgeoning the TRIBBLE out of them, healers keep everybody else alive while it's all going down. When I try to get in there with just my staff and whack something, I fail miserably.
But I don't mean for this to turn into a lecture on how EverQuest works. What I'm curious to talk about is if any of this kind of thing (which I'm aware is a common way to structure how different characters work in the world of MMOs) is in STO.
My main in STO is an Engineer but I also have Tactical and Science characters and my Klingon is a Tactical officer. From my experience, all of the NPC baddies in STO either get hit by me from afar and run up to get in my face and shoot or they notice me before I hit them and run up to get in my face and shoot. Either way, they seem to like getting up close and personal despite the fact that very few of them actually carry hand-held weapons. This is essentially the same as my experience of EverQuest.
The big difference is that no matter which character I'm playing, the way to defeat the enemy is through my primary weapon (which is clearly and rightly meant to be the primary weapon of the game), my phaser (or whatever). This is a ranged weapon, implying that the correct way to use it is to maintain distance from the enemy. I haven't noticed a huge discrepancy between my characters insofar as hit points go and all characters in the game have access to every type of armor and shield of their level.
Further, I've played with most of the kits available. Some skills just seem completely useless to me. At any rate, the kit I use most often as an Engineer is clearly meant for tanking. I've got turrets, and shield and medical generators, and a drone summon. When I play as my Tac character, I like the kit with all the grenades, which is clearly meant for doing damage. And as my Science officer, I prefer the big med kit for healing. However, the other side of this is that in almost every single mission I've got an away team with me to pick up the slack of what I don't have on my own person, even through they may not always do the smartest thing. And running STFs with a team allows us to maximize our potential by selecting one of everything, while running STFs at random usually doesn't put five of the same class together and almost always has at least one of each.
What I'm driving at here, and what I'm curious about from the community, is am I missing the difference in styles of gameplay or is there just not one here? It seems to me that the game is set up to give us everything we need to be able to play as caster, tank, and healer all at once. Having different abilities myself changes only slightly what I need to do in a given situation and, even then, only really makes a difference at the beginning of the fight. Also, anything I don't have that I feel I need I can use off of my BOFFs during the fight by pushing those buttons.
I'm not saying that STO needs to be EverQuest. It, in fact, shouldn't be and, at least in my opinion, has the potential to be something far more interesting. But it might be nice to have a reason for choosing a class. Obviously we're always going to have our phasers and our away teams. I think that almost everyone ends up having a small number of skills they end up using and then decks their standard away team out with those skills so that they're always present. But maybe we can talk about the idea of having the stuff be specific to a class so that it affects the way the game works some.
But this is my experience. Where do others stand?
Post edited by treaen on
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you can conform to those roles or you can go your own way
people will tell you both
Best advice
ASSUME WE ARE ALL BIASED
Sure, you do have a set of folks that want to only follow a set dps/tank/healer role and they can do that if they want since the game does allow it. I like the way I can do what I want through ship and boff selection and that I can change things easily if I want to.
Dec/2008
The game back then was not nearly as solo friendly as it is now. Everything needed groups unless you could kite(druid/bard)or a pet class(necro/mage)and while some other classes could solo, like the wizard, the downtime for medding to full mana was nearly 10mins with average gear. It was a huge snorefest.
Mechanics like I described were so bad that when Blizzard started making WoW they included members of an Everquest guild(Fires of Heaven)to provide insight into what is fun and what is rude.
Most MMO's today are built with the lessons learned from Everquest. The holy trinity of warrior, cleric, and enchanter classes that made all other classes just filler for a good group is a thing of the past. That is why in many games classes now have a broad spectrum of abilities to always provide something worthwild to parties.
STO ground combat has improved since launch, but it's still more or less a single player vs environment even in group settings like STFs. Coordination and things like vent help generate a group feel, but because every class has a blend of tank/healer/dps/cc it dose not offer the real synergy feeling older MMO's had.
I admit though, they don't feel all that different to play; as in, the experience of playing an engineer is not all that different from the experience of playing tactical.
It's basically about choosing your special attacks. Want a fleet of holographic starships? Science. Want to pour out as much DPS as possible? Tactical. Want to go, "lol, death from above!"? Engineering.
Escort with holographic posse helping you bring the pain? Mix and matching is also doable.
It's a nice change of pace from other MMOs I've played where several classes are utterly useless unless you're helping your friends stay alive... by being the first thing the bad guys go after because you're an easy kill.
thats not how you expressed yourself over in the pvp forums..
you call people a drug using deviant you get them mad
especially when they are only trying to help
and we ARE all biased
Why I was just thinking the other day that having strangers on the Internet disagree with me was exactly the same as genocide. Thanks for bringing it up.
Beyond that...
Like I said, I don't think this game needs to be EverQuest. I like the fact that there's really not anything in this game you can't solo. It's super annoying to me that I have to level four or five levels past some quests as a wizard to take them on by myself because I can't take very much damage.
I guess my larger point is that, while it's certainly interesting and fun trying to find the balance between what set of skills works on an individual basis, I'd like for it to really mean something to be an Engineer, or whatever. It doesn't have to be that I'm always a tank or ever a tank. The potential in the world of Star Trek is certainly more vast than that. It could be a few new skills for each class that are not available to BOFFs and that are extremely useful. I say extremely useful because the few that are only available to players generally have long casting times and very very long recovery times. Maybe there could be a game mechanic to turn off the ability to use your BOFF skills at will, and while it's not exactly an attractive option to me, it would serve the purpose of limiting you to your own skills and no more. There's also the option to make it a stats difference. Certain bonuses to things that are good for each class. Or even bonuses to away team members based on which class the player chooses. For instance, my Engineer's engineering BOFFs would all be better at what they can do. Or perhaps more interestingly, my Engineer's skillset could be malleable enough that I may actually be able to increase the effectiveness of specific skills of any of my BOFFs.
The other part of this discussion is probably this question: how often to people really retrain their BOFFs based on what mission they're going on or which enemy they're fighting? And further, do people really use all that many BOFFs outside the standard away team or do they generally use six or seven and leave the rest for show and RP purposes? My instinct based on the number of times I've seen people plead for something to be able to do with their extra BOFFs (like promoting them to Captain and assigning them their own ships) is that most people probably own a lot of BOFFs but don't use anywhere near all of them. And even if they do switch around a lot, does it really affect the nuts and bolts of how ground combat works? From my experience of changing things around, it doesn't make a difference. But I could be wrong.
I also want to say that I know that there are differences between classes and traits. But, as you say, capnmanx, they don't feel any different in a practical gameplay sense. The object here would not be to make one class weaker than the others in some area or another, as in my inability to fight as a wizard, but rather to make each of the classes feel like they're different. Especially, I think, because all the characters we know and love from Canon are so distinct.
As ever, responses are appreciated.
That is one thing STO has in great abundance, customization. In that department the Trekkie nerd in all of us can create a massive cast of personal with unique identies.
I totally agree that there's a huge amount of customization options with this particular subsystem of the game. But in my case, the ability to customize doesn't translate into the need to customize. Like I said earlier, I have tried switching around for different missions. It doesn't make a measurable difference to me. Though I still spend an inordinate amount of time loading up on gear for the ones I never use. Maybe I need to fire my Vulcans...
Anyway, Oridjerraa, is there a big difference in what skills you choose to take with you if you're fighting Klingons versus fighting Cardassians? To my knowledge, the species of the BOFF doesn't make a difference to the enemy. Though how cool would that be? Load up on Andorians for their warrior spirit in order to fight Klingons and get some kind of tiny buff. Or have a Caitian up against a Ferasan and see them immediately launch into a cat fight with eyes for no one else. That'd be spiffy.
My Sci is very much in your face, close quarters style, with the Engineer the range and keep it that way style. The Tac falls somewhere in between, particularly with the HG grenade launcher.
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and yet you have those who scream at you for being a tac in an cruiser or a sci in an escort because you are not conforming to their idea of the way ST should be. but science has always been screwed in this game. an Akira carrier? what a joke! they should have made the NEBULA a carrier, but i digress.
the game is geared to reward DPS. not tactics, not teamwork. tactics. in WOW if you tried an instance with 5 clerics, 5 MU 5 of any class you can expect to get your butt handed to you. STO, 5 escorts is "optimal"
until/unless the game gets balanced back to a triad instead of a tac with supporting engy group, you won't shake the attitudes