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alexindcobra
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The reason why alot of cruisers can't compete in PVP and PVE with escorts is because the devs are bent of making escorts do everything and be all around better ships. If thats not the case, then why are almost every new ship that they come out with are escorts and armed with cannons? Why is it that torpedos, being the cruiser's most powerful weapon, does little to nothing to shields? Cruisers on the Fed side can't arm heavy cannons like they can on the Klingon side.
To balance out things and slow the drive of everyone rushing to get an escort to use in PVP, they need to either bring up the damage level of beams or bring down the damage level in heavy cannons. There is no guide or manual saying that cannons are better than beams. In Memory Alpha say the the disruptor cannons have more energy then standard phaser banks but took longer to recharge. Standerd phasers in that time were Type 8, while the Galaxy class was armed with Type X and Sovereign was armed with type XII. Those later mentioned phasers were not standard and were mostly on the new most important ships. Now that this is the 25th Century, most ships with the phaser strips would be using type X or type XII phaser arrays. With that being said, the power outputs for cannons and beams should be the same and the damage should be the same. That would make more ships in this game more even, especially in pvp. Lets see if the Devs are really interested in the balance of the game or are they just blowing smoke up everyone's TRIBBLE.
To balance out things and slow the drive of everyone rushing to get an escort to use in PVP, they need to either bring up the damage level of beams or bring down the damage level in heavy cannons. There is no guide or manual saying that cannons are better than beams. In Memory Alpha say the the disruptor cannons have more energy then standard phaser banks but took longer to recharge. Standerd phasers in that time were Type 8, while the Galaxy class was armed with Type X and Sovereign was armed with type XII. Those later mentioned phasers were not standard and were mostly on the new most important ships. Now that this is the 25th Century, most ships with the phaser strips would be using type X or type XII phaser arrays. With that being said, the power outputs for cannons and beams should be the same and the damage should be the same. That would make more ships in this game more even, especially in pvp. Lets see if the Devs are really interested in the balance of the game or are they just blowing smoke up everyone's TRIBBLE.
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Which doesn't change the fact that they still have much higher damage output which will still annoy OP. But we've gone over this. MANY TIMES. Escorts are SUPPOSED TO HAVE HIGH DPS. THAT'S THEIR JOB. The main problem is how much survivability they have. They have too much of that. If you reduced survivability on them, THEN that would balance them out. An escort should not be able to tank much if anything at all. But they can. So that's where they are broken.
I mean at least they got it right with the BoP, HUGE burst damage, but made of tinfoil (no offense to any BoP pilots reading this, but you probably know what I mean).
You forgot about the lockbox shipa which are mostly escorts: D'kora, Jem'Hadar Attack Ship, Orb Weaver, Wells Class, Mobius Class, Korath Class, Krenn Class, and A Qin Raptor. Thats a hell of alot more escorts than cruiser coming out as of recent. The new assault cruiser is the only new cruiser on the that has come out.
For as the other statement about escorts supposed to be more powerful, there is no manual or canon material that says so. Don't be so caught up in the BS that Cryptic feeds you because they are not feeding you with information from any Star Trek canon site. They are making up stuff as they go along just because they are the Devs. I have read the sites on cannons and phaser banks and arrays. I have read sites on the smaller attack ships and the regular cruisers.
"In starship classification, an escort vessel was a starship whose primary purpose is to accompany other vessels as a means of protection. Escorts typically protected lesser armed vessels, or vessels carrying an important cargo.
In 2154, Degra's ship was protected by two Xindi-Reptilian warships, which served as escort ships, during the proving ground Xindi superweapon prototype test mission in the Calindra system. (ENT: "Proving Ground")
In 2368, a radical faction based on the Beta moon of Peliar Zel intercepted the Federation shuttlecraft Hawking claiming to be an escort vessel. (TNG: "The Host")
The Defiant-class, originally developed to counter the Borg, is officially classified as an escort vessel, but was unofficially a warship. (DS9: "The Search, Part I")."
Ref:http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Escort_vessel
That is not the point of an Escort.
The Defiant for example carries an extreme payload... for its size.
In starship classification, an escort vessel was a starship whose primary purpose is to accompany other vessels as a means of protection. Escorts typically protected lesser armed vessels, or vessels carrying an important cargo. (From Memory Alpha)
In starship classification, a warship or war vessel was a generic term for any armed starship designed for combat. These vessels included battleships, battle cruisers, various sized cruisers, escorts, and destroyers. (Also from Memory Alpha)
Since Starfleet usually uses other "non-violent" terminology to describe their ships, I thought I would include both the Escort and Warship definitions as Star Trek has classified their meaning.
I will now do the same with Cruisers.
In starship classification, battleships were a type of large and powerful warship. In traditional terms, battleships were the most powerfully armed and most heavily armored warships of their era. It is likely that the definition was still true among starships, although standards may have varied by species and technological level.
Starfleet often referred to Jem'Hadar battle cruisers as battleships. (DS9: "Ties of Blood and Water")
The Defiant-class was sometimes referred to as a battleship. (VOY: "Drone")
Satarran agent Keiran MacDuff believed that the Galaxy-class USS Enterprise-D was a battleship, based on her specifications. (TNG: "Conundrum")
In some alternate timelines, Federation Galaxy-class starships were referred to as battleships. (TNG: "Yesterday's Enterprise", "All Good Things...")
Yes the Defiant is mentioned as a Battleship, it was also in Voyager... but its also 3 to1 in favor of the Galaxy class.
Dismissing Voyager, it was the desire of some behind the scenes when creating the Defiant for DS9 that it be a "pocket battleship"
In traditional terminology, a battle cruiser was any large armed cruiser (or warship) with battleship armament, that carried lighter armor than a battleship.
In starship classification, the term battle cruiser was sometimes used synonymously with heavy cruiser. The Klingons once referred to the Federation Constitution-class USS Enterprise as a battle cruiser. (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock)
So even going strictly by what is said, mentioned and seen on screen through all of Star Trek. Something that the original developers said they were trying to stick close to in order to maintain a semblance of easily recognizable features and functions... they have failed miserably.
Erm, the D'Kora is a battlecruiser that can mount dual cannons, if I remember right. It's pretty similar to the Klingon battlecruisers at that, with a turn rate of just 8.(I don't know about battle mode, though.) As for the rest, the Orb Weaver, Wells Class and Korath Class are science ships that can't mount dual cannons. Also, the Qin Raptor is barely any different from the stock one that you get at level 40. I don't think it really counts.
Therefore, the only escorts that have come out in lockboxes are the JHAS and the two Temporal Destroyers.
Nevertheless, I think that escorts tank a little too well to be called squishy. I think it's mainly due to Tactical Team and speed tanking.
I think its not so much about the weapons (although beam arrays are a bit sub-par, but not by much). The problem is that a cruiser has some problems delivering the damage:
Beam arrays have 2x 70? firing arcs
Beam banks+turrets have 90?
Cannons+turrets have 180?
Which one would you choose in a ship that cant out-turn anything? Against NPCs beam arrays and on some more agile cruisers also beam banks work well enough though.
Then we go on. Escorts have at least one additional tactical console slot which is good for about 15% more raw damage. But this is then multiplied with the very powerful BO-abilities. This is something unique to escorts.
There is no easy fix here. You cannot change the weapons, they are already not that imbalanced. You can also not just nerf tactical BO-abilities, they define the play-style.
So i have dreamed up two solutions:
1.) introduce a multiplier for weapons that works in the same way as the shield multiplier, it just boosts your base damage.
2.) Give cruisers a build-in resistance to weapon energy drain. Instead of reducing the power level by 10 it could only reduce by 7 or so. This needs to be combined with some torpedo-improvements though.
You could even explain both "fixes" with the larger reactor power of cruisers. In both cases escorts would still do more damage, but not by such a large margin as currently.
I can show how both the fixes you have suggested are not practical
1: A damage mod would still play in favour of escorts, as it is 1 DHC does 3 times the damage of 1 beam array, a damage mod would simply increase this again
2: Drain resistance wouldn't help, as an engineer I can drive my cruisers weapon power level off the scale and it still doesn't do more than 1700 damage per hit.
What we NEED to fix this is for DHC damage to come down and/or Beam damage to come up. If we look at canon the defiants cannons were designed to give "Equivalent" damage to Beam arrays (I don't remember the source). However even if we were to make the damage levels the same escorts would still do more damage (which is then reasonable) due to the extra consoles and tactical abilities but there wouldn't be the several thousand damage per hit gulf that there is now.
I have detailed where I think they went wrong and my solution here
And the weapons are not really that different. Sure a beam array does far less damage than a cannon, but then you can shoot 8 at the same time, but only 4 cannons. If you do a plain dps calculation (without any mods etc.) you will see that a 4 cannons 3 turrets vs. 8 beams setup is only ~15% different.
My second suggestion would improve an 8-beam setup in such a way that it would actually be superior to a cannon setup in terms of raw dps. What makes escorts so powerful are still the BOs and the console slot...
I find it amusing when I read posts that explain how real life naval ships, and canon descriptions, are meant to justify an unbalanced gaming situation. We can rationalize all we want but the end result is that there is a significant amount of dissatisfaction in game balance. As in most MMOs there are essentially three types of ships/classes. These distinct classes are supposed to establish equitable gaming enjoyment for the player community. Each class needs it's own, unique defined role and structure that clearly differentiates it from the others so one doesn't feel like a weak step child of another, but rather contributes in it's own valuable and fun manner.
It has already been clearly established in a number of forum posts that besides being the heavy damage dealers, escorts have a disproportionate tankability or survivability given its main role. There are several ways to deal with this. Since Cruisers are meant to be THE tank for all practicable purposes (yes healer too), make them more tankable. This can be done, again as mentioned in many posts to date, by giving them, for example, a higher shield modifier, increased threat control abilities (pve), boosted skills that deal with healing/damage mitigation above and beyond that which an escort has. In other words and just as an example, TT is a wonderful skill but when everyone has it or has it with the same efficacy then it doesn't help a tank differentiate itself in damage mitigation. I bet that if you give cruisers a more meaningful tanking role you will even hear less complaints about the sorely lacking turn rates.
While we're at it let's take a look at the issue of turn rates. I'm a big proponent of increased turn rates for cruisers. They fly like a brick and it's difficult to maintain full broadside against a skilled opponent (pve but mostly pvp). And why do we cruiser captains hate this? One reason is because our already meager dps from beam arrays are even less effective because we can only get half of them on target. But if you make cruiser dps less important, because they can draw more aggro and tank better, this becomes less of an issue. While there will always be cruiser captains that want to be dps machines, they can still make builds to maximize cruiser dps but shouldn't be able to complain about challenging the dps effectiveness viz a viz escorts because of the clearly defined roles.
Although I have a VA Sci captain, I will be the first to admit my limitations in knowing how to play an effective role here. Also, I understand from a Borticus posting sci will undergo a revamp 'soon', which I hope will deal with sci's specific role similar to the way I tried to clarify that of cruisers.
I'm not trying to take up the old arguments that escorts are too strong or cruisers too weak. Just trying to get people to see that its the lack of clearly defined class roles that is contributing to all the angst. Flame me if you want and feel free to pick apart my arguments, but please keep in mind that I'm not offering definitive specific solutions, but a different way of looking at this long fought over battle. Not that this hasn't been mentioned before, but I don't think the focus has remained on mmo classic roles.
do you guys think that a destroyer have any chance against a cruiser? not at all, cruisers have biger calibre weapons more range and armor so bring this concept to space and apply
it, you have to concepts that can bring some sense here, first range extend the range of cruiser weapons (beam arrays) to 15 would be great, and calibre making beam arrays do more damage.
Actually the tradeoff of the energy drain doing by beams arrays are too big compared to DHC that is mitigated by the weapons power modifier of escorts/destroyers resulting in a inefficent weapon in terms of damage something can be make here also.
And the problem is bigger with dreadnoughts that does irrelevant damage compared with escorts/destroyers the problem is that they are seeing as tanks but forgetting their superior firepower so the concept is that a ship that can?t equip DHC is not a damage dealer adopting the role of auxiliar ship, just the opposite at it should be.
So i think escorts/destroyer should be means of add more damage to a specific target not to adopt the role of main damage dealers the main damage dealer is the dreadnought/cruiser with their hig calibre weapons and range and with their bigger power core that can satisfy the enrgy demands during combat situations .
But this is all mental masturbation because in the end we all know what is going to happen
since is more easy to build a ship from scratch and pack it into a box than rework everything that is already done as it should.
An escort is successful because the damage it produces, while large, is also heavily focused. It takes out a shield facing, then their hull, a cruiser slowly flies around hitting shield facing after shield facing, you waste all your potential. If you ever actually logged a battle (which I know you don't) you'd see escorts turrets actually do nearly as much damage as their cannons, but the cannons are bursty, causing real damage. If cruisers learned this they'd be better off.
The escort gets penalized in durability, but most escorts are forced to learn to avoid dying, cruisers rarely maximize this. Escorts have no utility, they damage and take damage, its the point of a warship. Cruisers heal, tank, control and support damage all in one.
A cruiser gaining firepower comes at the cost of its losing durability, just like the Assault refit. A slow moving very heavy tactical like cruiser would be so ineffective it isn't funny, it doesn't make sense.
Oh, and there was a very long time that escorts (and science) received no new ships at all, it was all cruisers for zen, all cruisers for lock boxes, then they focused on escorts, now science ships are being filled out, its a process, stop your ridiculous prejudice.
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Now, beam arrays are equivalent of big guns in naval warfare. They have better range then DHC and while they are not as powerfull per shot as DHC can deliver more damage over the time as you can keep your target longer under fire. DHC is an equivalent of torpedo. It has smaller effective range but it is delivering it's damage in a burst way and through this able to kill things faster then beam array. Beams are not worse then DHC, they operate differently.
Now, in STO has two other problems. First one is the the limited (yeah) arc of fire for beam arrays. With the manoeuvrability of escorts and the fact that most combat is done over short distances does not make it better.
Second problem is that current healing powers and BOFF layouts that escorts have allow them to overtank. They can take all the damage from cruiser and cruisers dont have anything to solve this problem.
If you mix those two problems it ends with escorts being virtually indestructible as long as they are piloted by semi-competent pilot. They can stay away from half of your damage (more if your are not 8-beam cruiser) and they can easily tank what's left.
Here are things that are, from my point of view, needed to fix it, and all those things are not, I think, complicated from programming point of view and should be easily implemented:
1) Beams should have 360 degrees coverage, or at least over 300 to minimize the chance for escort to stay away from HALF of the firepower (while cruiser has no such chance).
2) Escorts should get hull/shields nerf. Most should look like Bird of Pray with hull out of glass and tinfoil shields.
3) Escorts need a minus modifier for aux and shields. A big one so that their tanking/healing abilities get a nerf. They should not be able to heal themselves as effectively as cruisers or sci ships are.
4) Tactical Team should still work as automatic shield distribution but it should be slowed to to the same level (or just slightly aboce) as manual shield balancing.
not even a week past since the last one, from the same people with the same agenda.
i give it another 2 pages until the super beam comes up again. That escorts are over powered was already covered on page one and two.
Most of the people crying for a more powerfull damage cruiser are either incapable of building one or lack the skill to do any damage in a cruiser. Of course not every cruiser is build for damage, but some are...D'kora for instance, that ship is a monster. In the right hands, you have a full tank, dealing damage close to an escort. Same goes for the fleet vor'cha.
Also the regent, AHC retrofit and the tac oddy can be real mean damage dealers, but if you stick to the clumsy assault/star/exploration cruisers no wonder your punsh is like the sting of a mosquito.
If we are gonna blurr the lines to satisfy player desires then blur them in both directions or not at all.
R.I.P
They're already pretty blurred on the escort side. Escorts dodge like mad and still do amazing DPS. Cruisers do low damage and are one Sub Nuke doff away from a terrible death.
Creating a satisfying amount of firepower on a crusier has nothing to to with the incapability of some people to to a decent build. This is the same argument some people bring up when they say "if the ship isn't good, it the fault of the player", so these people have more confidence in cryptics devs making a good designed ship than several hunderd people that say this isn't the case.
Some ships are just badly designed with a complete wrong premise in mind. Cruisers in Star Trek never where pure tanks, they where multi role ships. No matter how they where designated.
CRYPTIC made cruisers slow unmaneuverable bricks.
CRYPTIC made cruiser having virtually no noticeable firepower. Yeah, you can tickle your enemy to death (if you can keep yourself from falling to sleep), if he is stupid enoug not to disengage, heal and attack you again.
CRYPTIC made Escorts highly maneuverable (and thus very hard to hit) ships that can easily manage to survive a cruisers boardside for several minutes.
CRYPTIC made Escorts so fast they can easily outrun any other ships if things go wrong.
CRYPTIC made Escorts firepower so powerful no other ship even comes close to it.
If you look purely on Hull, BOFF & Console layout you maybe could have a point here, but since escorts can virtually dodge 1/3 - 1/2 of a cruisers firepower they are already more than on par with them. The problem is that cruisers have just a little more hull (which isn't much of a problem, since hull damage can be "healed" in a matter of seconds).
If all healing abilities in STO had a much longer cooldown, hull HP had a much bigger impact than it has now. But since this isn't the case, escorts can easily negate any damage they receive from a Cruiser, while seriously damaging the cruiser, since their Firepower is just beyond good and evil.
That's the main problem i see in STO (besides the fact that the whole "balace" structure has nothing to do with Star Trek).
Thank you for reading.
but also fail to acnolage that the galaxy can take a lot more beating in exchange for less firepower.
while the "balance" structure has nothing to do with star trek, it is essential to make a game...and last i checked STO is a game based on star trek.
You may think this is only wordplay, but it is not. It is the developers interpretation of space combat based in the star trek universe.
Not only that but many of the good escort pilots use the borg console setup with treats the escort just like it does as a cruiser. It tanks well with it and heals like a cruiser. I think that set-up needs to be nerfed a little bit or adjusted to the type of ship its applied to.
Keep in mind some ships can't fire 8 beams at once, like the Galaxy Dreadnought, because the pylons get in the way. I brought this to the Devs attention and maybe they will let the ship use it's 3 nacelle mounted arrays to combat this problem of not broadsiding.
Speak for yourself, maybe you enjoy flying around in escorts causing mayhem, but everbody else that would like to fly a different ship don't. Its not fun when you are in a PVP match and see all the escort players are getting all the kills and escaping being destroyed, while you are struggling in your cruiser or science ship to stay alive. It is not fun in PVE missions when the players with escorts get all the credit for kills, earning First and 2nd place, getting the very rare drops. You and your cruiser barley kills enough, and get stuck with common or uncommon drops. Thats lopsided and unfair. The Devs rewarding a certain group of players over another is not fair and fun for all. Most true Star Trek fans favor the cruisers because that what's mostly in the shows, but the devs in this game are bent on marginalizing us to make fun for themselves and other MMO players.
Fun for all does not come with unfairness.
Any experienced player knows about the Borg console setup and that wipes out the durabilty issue of Escorts. Now they can shield tank with the best of them and you will never get their hull below a half using beams, before the autonimous regen brings their health back to full.
The game has been given to escort players, hand over fist, so its understandable for them to object to any change bringing the performance of other ships to match their own.
You really need to move beyond the classic trinity. Escorts are not glass canons, Cruisers are not impossible to destroy tanks that can't hurt a fly, and science vessels aren't healbots! They are ALL meant to be HYBRIDS, each favoring certain things over others.
THIS is what we are asking for!
However Cryptic don't listen and escort pilots tell us where to go, it would seem casual players have no business playing as they can't be bothered to find the perfect build, they just want to pick a ship that they like and blow stuff up, which pre season 6 they could, why shouldn't we be able to do this?
wait what? you srsly believe that the pylons of your ship stop your beams from fireing? Rest assured, all 8 beams are fireing as intended on any design...the visuals are only cosmetic and do not allways represent the actualy fireing cycle.
hillarous actually that you brought that to the "attention" of the developement team...they surely had a good laugh.
I bet as usual without any numbers supporting that claim.
i sacrifice 5-6 boff slots for survival and heal abilities, thats whats keeping me alive not the borg set...to rely on the borg set is foolish. I use the borg set because it has more favourable stats than the other sets, the heals are just a bonus.
i'm also getting some mixed messages from you. First you say escort are generally too strong, then you claim you shoot them down on a regular bases, then they allways run away and escape defeat. You say escorts are so much superior to cruisers...yet you fail to pick one up yourself, and realize that escorts aren't that indestructable demons you think they are.
most (if not to say all) of the cruiser pilots in this thread do not use their cruiser because they think it is the best ship for their style of playing...they fly it because they like the looks. And rather to change into a ship they do not like (by the looks) they demand to beef up the ships they like best. ridiculous!
And proclaiming the cruiser is broken or not balanced, when in fact you just don't know how and when to use it is even more ridiculous.
as is this whole weekly "buff cruisers thread event" here on the forum.
all i can agree on, however, is a turnrate increase for cruisers...no ship should be lower than 8 in my opinion.
Remove the defense bonus and tractor immunity from attack pattern omega and you'll see a dramatic shift in escort uberness.
You know, as they were pre-f2p when escorts did not have this idiotic amount of defenses. They were highly maneuverable, fast, burst dps ships but neither their damage was not that much higher than a full beam cruiser firing broadside nor could it tank..at all. Its main strength was that it could maneuver and always hit the weakest shield. Back then battles were a lot more about maneuvering than about hitting the I-win-DPS key over and over again.
The tanking ability a escort has is enough to survive most encounters. Being able to tank the quadruple amount of damage or time is simply not needed. I would gladly sacrifice some survivability to get more firepower on some ships.
I have seen other Star Trek games where Cruiseres aren't doomed to serve only as tanks without being able to generate a satisfying amount of firepower.
It's the developers interpretation of Star Trek which is totally wrong and flawed.
They took the most iconic ships (cruisers) and made them boring flying bricks. On the other hand they took the defiant and made a whole branch of ship types like it (escorts) and made them the most powerful ships in "their" Star Trek game. If that isn't weird then i don't know.
Thank you for reading.
I think cruisers and escorts are all just fine, the balance is pretty good. You can even out damage escorts sometimes at the cost of some survivavbility in a cruiser if set up right, escpecially if you are in an Oddy, Bortasqu, or Fleet Vorcha.
Where the imbalance lies is the gear. MACO and 3pc borg is overpowered and this needs to be balanced. The 4pc borg set should be required for the shield heal, and the 3pc set should give the tractor beam thus forcing ships to choose between full borg, MACO, Omega or HG sets. Cruisers will still be able to tank good without MACO and 3pc borg, and escorts won't be able to quite as much anymore.
This was also true for a short period of time post F2P going live and frankly I LOVED it back then it was better than I had expected, even when I hit VA it was still good nicely balanced with no ship doing too much more damage than any other because it was less about the build and more about how the player USED the build they had and as a result I personally thing the game and the players of the game were better than they are now with less escorts in PvE (effectively) saying to the team "relax, I got this" and more looking at their team and saying "Hey, you wanna gimme a hand here?"
Back then team members talked to one another, worked on their strengths and made up for each-others weaknesses, now you fly into an STF, count the escorts and assess from that the level of success you're going to have, with the current system nine times out of ten if you son't have 2 escorts in CSE (1 to guard the Kang and one to kill nanite probes and cubes) you aren't gonna get the optional.
I say lets go back to the old days when people were friendlier in game because they needed one another's help to bring down a big target but at the same time everyone was able (emphasis there-upon) to solo pretty much anything in the game if you cared enough to perfect the ship build, otherwise you still had the ability to look after yourself and ask for a hand if you needed it