I wouldn't discount that cruiser just yet if I were you. You got the ship to begin with for the same reasons I purchased the ones I have. Because it looked fun and you wanted it. While flying it, you're enjoying yourself or at least you seem to be.
I don't plan to give up on it, sadly it's not as fun as it could be as I can't Jack of all trades which is my play style, when I took my Jack of all trades build from S-5 (working brilliantly) into S-6 it fell flat on it's face and failed at everything simultaneously, if however I could play to my play style I would likely enjoy the game some more
I view all of my ships as WIPs. They're never so good I cannot adjust them somewhere and there will always be things I'd like them to do better.
I find there are limits to this with my Excelsior for example that darned ensign engineer is a thorn in the side of the ship that one just can't get rid of, I could do wonderful things with a universal ensign there (Mainly science)
See my current build here any practical suggestions are welcomed (No large zen investments or multi-million EC overhauls :P)
Most times when my ship doesn't perform as expected it is because of me, not the crew or the hardware. Most of the time when my team does not do as well as we expect, it is because of a lack of effective communication amongst ourselves. Again, this is not a crew or hardware issue, it is a Captain issue.
Ok I don't know why but it won't let me PM you so i'll just put my advice for changes up here. First off though you are headed in the right direction these are mostly just tweaks that should really help boost performance and I encourage you to hop on tribble and try them out if you can. Also feel free to shoot me a tell or mail in game @Kreael if you have any questions.
Change up your Emergency Powers to a copy of Shield 2 and two copies of Weapon 1. The reason for this is simple as the shield version has a higher resistance boost at higher rank and the weapon version does not. Also a Warp Core Engineer Doff could help out as well. Beyond that your boff abilities are pretty good solid choices.
Hull Plating and Armor Reinforcements combined going from 3 to 9 rank give about half what a single Mk 11 blue Neuto console gives. It is around 10 resist gain and not worth the points. Likewise taking engine performance from 6 to 9 only grants you 1 or 2 extra points of power and while for shield that can be worthwhile not for engine. Likewise with the Impulse Thruster since the bonus it gives is based on the ship's stats just like RCS consoles and I would not recommend taking it that high.
Instead of those I put the saved points into Star-ship Maneuvers as that will increase your ships Bonus Defense (best damage reducing stat in the game) which gives 15% and will help keep you alive much longer since as a beam boat you can keep your speed up. I also took EPS from 3 to 6 as it will increase the bonus power of your Epower skills by 1 and your EPTS ability and because I just really like it. Finally I increased Warp Core efficiency from 3 to 6 which should get you another 3 or 4 power and took Auxiliary Performance to 3 getting you an additional 5 power to boost your heals. Please note that this is not necessarily the best skill setup but I do think it would be an improvement for what you are doing. Actually now that I think about it maxing out Attack Pattern skill might be a good idea as Attack Pattern Beta is pure PvE win.
Finally the best advice I can give you is on setup that does not require much change at all. Make sure you weapon power is set to 100 as beam array performance is extremely dependent on pushing your weapon power over the 125 'soft cap' post season 6. You want it at 145 as much as possible. And be sure to be packing 7 beam arrays trust me if you have the power they will perform and make sure you are not letting half of them go silent too often to bring a torpedo to bear.
For gear I highly recommend Maco Shield with 2 piece Borg, or even 2 piece Omega with the third item of your choosing. I'm going to assume you are using all tac console slots for you specific beam energy type and I would pack two Neut Armor consoles with a single Mono console. And don't dismiss the power of the Emitter Array Sci console as it can really help out your sustain. Finally with the rep store the Borg Console is still pure win and the new Zero-Point Energy Conduit Romulan console is the new hot-ness. And it just might be worth slapping on the cutting beam or omega torpedo launcher for the 2 piece proc but I do not know. Finally the Fleet Weapons are really good (better than people give them credit for especially in PvE) and fairly affordable. As far as doffs go Conn Officiers that reduce Tac Team recharge and more importantly boost attack pattern skill are really good. Shield Distro doffs are still pretty solid too. And with doffs blues will work just fine.
I know that is a ton of stuff, feel free to dismiss it or PM me if you got any questions mate.
Brody(engineer)just refitted the ORCA(tac oddy)with plasma beams and 3 +threat Romulan plasma charged shield emitter consoles.
I thought I had good threat control before.
Now, fire at will + evasive manuevre = a bunch of crazy mad borg spheres literally chasing me all the while being hosed by far superior dps than what I can deliever.
Not only is plasma fun, its sticks on the roof of a mouth like peanutbutter and drives it's victims wild.
I really dont get it. On my Eng I have my Threat Generation skill maxed so most of the time I can agro targets off my allies after just my first shot. But I keep finding these tac officers flying escorts that no matter how much I try to agro whats killing them I cant. The only reason I can come up with is that they also have their Threat skill set pretty high. But why? I see too many escorts that try to do both DPS AND tank.
Usually they do really well, for about 10 sec until all their buffs run out and then they turn to toilet paper. So I ask again, can any escort Captains out their tell me why you like to tank in your tiny ships so much? I mean I fly a massive cruiser that its only purpose is to scream "Hey shoot me shoot me!!" Why do you want to take my job?
Give me someone who can generate threat properly and i wont take aggro. As a tactical captain in my fleet defiant my goal is to blow the enemy to hell and gone. And i got the craziest weapons in the game to do it with. The problem with this is that it'll more often than not make me the center of attention. I've got a beam overload defiant. I WILL generate more aggro on any given STF than a lot of people can handle. Unless i get set up with someone with even more DPS. That dual beam bank shot hits to the tune of 40+ sometimes if i hit with a shield down and usually they have rapid fire turrets and cannons on top of it.
If a ship cant generate threat properly it's either a problem with the system or a problem with a player. When a cruiser is trying to DPS i cant stand it. I need a cruiser to take fire off me so i can lay into a ship and not have to maneuver like the SSV normandy or the Millennium Falcon them not having aggro takes away from my DPS because i cant keep a target constantly in the 45 angle range of my heavy guns. So do i want to tank? Hell no. Can a cruiser keep a cube's primary attention off me? Sometimes but sometimes isnt enough.
Ok, I've been through this and made a couple of changes based on it, see here, I am currently debating the core efficiency and thinking about if/where I can better use those points (Given how little it raised my power levels I think 3 points is enough). I'm thinking based on in game descriptions maybe going with particle gens (I quite like my warp plasma).
Looks good to me mate and if you love the warp plasma I say go for the partical gen skill just test before hand to make sure it does boost eject warp plasma (just equip a console outside of ESD) as I cannot personally 100% verify that it does and I do remember warp plasma's damage having something odd about it.
Have you been running with as much weapon power as you can get? And if so has it seemed to help?
i've been wondering about this for a while, but now I see some answers.
I've been running the mobius temporal destroyer alongside a MVA escort, and i have zero threat, yet when i enter a battle, 95% of the time the focus turns to me. thats why half of my skills are either hull regen or shield boost.
glad i finally looked into this to see if anyone else had the same problem
If a ship cant generate threat properly it's either a problem with the system or a problem with a player. When a cruiser is trying to DPS i cant stand it. I need a cruiser to take fire off me so i can lay into a ship and not have to maneuver like the SSV normandy or the Millennium Falcon them not having aggro takes away from my DPS because i cant keep a target constantly in the 45 angle range of my heavy guns. So do i want to tank? Hell no. Can a cruiser keep a cube's primary attention off me? Sometimes but sometimes isnt enough.
The 'problem' as it were is with the system; Star Trek Online does not follow the traditional trio of DPS / Tank / Healer, opting for a far more interesting blending of roles in this area. As I explained a page or two back, if you have a high DPS escort, aggro mechanics are sufficiently skewed in favour of who's generating damage, that you'll get the attention of the NPCs. Threat control can help in some cases, but this is not WoW, where you can be confident that a competent 'tank' will be able to hold aggro. For this reason, I find it more effective to simply not try, and instead fly a highly capable support build intended to keep whoever happens to have aggro alive; in the event that I get aggro when flying one of my cruisers, I rely on the other support cruiser(s) and science ships.
STO is a game where spider-tanking reigns supreme in terms of effectiveness, each ship contributing with buffer refills and resistance abilities as appropriate.
PS: Talking about your high-DPS beam overload escort is a bit odd; when you factor in the lost damage from the massive weapons power drain, beam overload is just not that great a DPS boost. You want maximum DPS in PvE? Get Beta 3, three attack pattern doffs to rotate it continuously, 2x CRF 2, and a full suite of DHC & Turrets. The all-cannon escort is currently supreme when i comes to sustained DPS.
Looks good to me mate and if you love the warp plasma I say go for the partical gen skill just test before hand to make sure it does boost eject warp plasma (just equip a console outside of ESD) as I cannot personally 100% verify that it does and I do remember warp plasma's damage having something odd about it.
Yeah, one of the issues I've had trying to test it is the low population of the Tribble server
Have you been running with as much weapon power as you can get? And if so has it seemed to help?
I've been running max weapon power since shortly before S-7 and it did help at the time but of course I'm not noticing anymore because I'm used to it
....... As I explained a page or two back, if you have a high DPS escort, aggro mechanics are sufficiently skewed in favour of who's generating damage, that you'll get the attention of the NPCs. Threat control can help in some cases, but this is not WoW, where you can be confident that a competent 'tank' will be able to hold aggro.....
Whoa! Hold on there. What you say here about threat control is wrong. With 6 points invested into it you can practically guarantee to hold agro. The only times my cruiser can't hold agro with 6 ranks in threat control are when another ship with threat control beats me to it and are able to sustain higher DPS without blowing up.... this is incredibly rare but it does happen.
Whoa! Hold on there. What you say here about threat control is wrong. With 6 points invested into it you can practically guarantee to hold agro. The only times my cruiser can't hold agro with 6 ranks in threat control are when another ship with threat control beats me to it and are able to sustain higher DPS without blowing up.... this is incredibly rare but it does happen.
he is not all wrong though: the setup he posted is primarely a support setup, and it will never be able to actually draw and keep aggro with the 6 points he has against an escort. But thats no problem for him and his grp, since he lets the escorts tank and he supports them with heals, not primarely to heal them, but to skyrocket their resistance values with those heals.
So it is one approach to successfully playing a cruiser. And basically a training for PVP as a support cruiser. Although he is drawing aggro from unfocused targets, and i think his team kills one target at a time, making it an excellent teamplay build in my opnion.
Anyway, this is not WOW, where tanking is actually a well thoughtout mechanic, but it definately works as intended in STO. Thread control does it's job and is not "skewed", but if your cruiser lacks dmg, holding aggro is a problem...some cruiser lack the dmg abilitys, since they are primarely build for support. The only problem i really have with the skill "thread control" is that it is in the skilltree...that severely cuts your ship choices for that character. That cahracter is therefore limited to cruisers and other tank/support vessels. And that is simply stupid game design. (an aggro item...thread console... or ability would be way better)
What you say is exactly what i do myself in stfs...i go full dmg and aggro drawing, with only the absolute must have for survival. personally i find that better ofcourse, since the escorts i cover can throw their spare heals on me theoretically (TSS, HE) while they can sit still at 1km next to the target without getting hit.
I only heal myself, therefore my cruiser is unable to do any kind of support, appart from TSS and HE and Aux2SIF3, which i will need for myself all the time.
So conclusive: a dmg/tank oriented cruiser (more than 3 tactical abilitys) will most definately have no problems against an escort that has 0 points in thread control...if they have points in Thread control, whatever happens to them doesnt really concern me...once they die i get the aggro anyway.
A support cruiser will struggle keeping aggro on a target that is focused by an escort. But it doesn't matter, he has enough support powers to keep the escort alive.
personally i find the dmg/tank cruiser variation better for STFs, doesn't need a working team to be effective (aka PUG). I asume grp dps is higher too, when escorts can sit at the target without having to deal with the aggro.
On the other hand certain STFs need a working team anyway, then a support cruiser is nice to have.
PS: on the builds posted before, i think APdelta would work better than APbeta, for a support cruiser, or any cruiser that has thread control skilled.
PPS: basically wanted to explain that the way he said "aggro is broken" in sto was not wrong, but lacked some further explantion, but now i wrote a long and boring post about much more stuff. I underlined the sentence that actually is focused on the comment.
Sorry, I can't contain myself any longer: thread =//= threat.
The only ones with thread control are the mods, around here.
It's an error that comes up a lot on these forums, and it bugs me. Sorry.
OT: in my experience, the threshold for holding aggro in a regular, pugged estf seems to be around 5k dps. If you can produce that, you'll end up drawing aggro in about 80% of the cases, even without speccing in threat control.
There seems to be little difference in captain or ship class too, btw; I draw massive aggro on my Negh'Var engi, my Wells fed scientist and my Kar'Fi pilots, and all can either tank the damage reasonably well and/or make other ships live longer if they get aggro (generally run HE, Aux2SIF, TSS and sometimes ES). None of them are specced in threat control.
Some skills do seem to produce more aggro than others, I find, but I could be wrong. Gravity Well, Tyken's Rift and Warp Plasma come to mind.
*shrug*
I think the system works, but if flying a "tank" cruiser, you will still need to pull your weight in terms of dps. The good news is that generally running full weapons power will provide enough output (either through power settings or EPtW).
Sorry, I can't contain myself any longer: thread =//= threat.
The only ones with thread control are the mods, around here.
It's an error that comes up a lot on these forums, and it bugs me. Sorry.
OT: in my experience, the threshold for holding aggro in a regular, pugged estf seems to be around 5k dps. If you can produce that, you'll end up drawing aggro in about 80% of the cases, even without speccing in threat control.
There seems to be little difference in captain or ship class too, btw; I draw massive aggro on my Negh'Var engi, my Wells fed scientist and my Kar'Fi pilots, and all can either tank the damage reasonably well and/or make other ships live longer if they get aggro (generally run HE, Aux2SIF, TSS and sometimes ES). None of them are specced in threat control.
Some skills do seem to produce more aggro than others, I find, but I could be wrong. Gravity Well, Tyken's Rift and Warp Plasma come to mind.
*shrug*
I think the system works, but if flying a "tank" cruiser, you will still need to pull your weight in terms of dps. The good news is that generally running full weapons power will provide enough output (either through power settings or EPtW).
You aren't wrong. A lot of the higher tier sci skills do tend to generate a tremendous amount of threat, often to the point where I am in my qin heavy raptor doing a decloaking alpha strike on a tac cube, and I still can't draw it off the sci that is unloading every sci BOff power under the sun onto it. And I know for a fact that my raptor is doing a ton more DPS than that science ship (when your cannons are hitting for 8k, and critting for 15k with every round and your turrets are doing 2-3k per hit, I think that counts as out-dpsing the sci).
I also found that healing generates threat too. I will be sitting back healing an escort and doing good damage to a gateway/tac cube (not nearly to the level of an escort, but I don't expect to), and then out of the blue, the gate/cube will switch to me, over the escort who is averaging about 33-75% more damage than me. And what I had been doing the whole time was tossing heals at the escort, keeping it alive. It could be a bug, but apparently healing does cause you to generate threat.
It is said the best weapon is one that is never fired. I disagree. The best weapon is one you only have to fire... once.
Threat control is something I've been keeping my eye on for a while, it works pretty reliably but every once and a while you have to wonder what is going on.
We have a number of people in our groups that are quite skilled in the game, we often run combat log parsers to gain more information about combat.
As the highest dps ship in our fleet I can rarely get agro when a properly speced tank is playing. 6 points in threat control is enough to hold agro 90% of the time if you are a well built cruiser, which is what you want, let the escorts absorb 10%.
That said I am also in a very defensive escort, I could generate a lot more damage if I wanted to, but drawing agro and being dead doesn't do anything for the team or your DPS. A higher DPS escort could need to scale back and distribute their buffs more evenly.
I've also noticed I'm much less likely to pull agro when tactical fleet is running, giving the cruisers a damage boost and having their threat control multiplied by the damage boost makes pulling agro nearly impossible.
Sorry, I can't contain myself any longer: thread =//= threat.
The only ones with thread control are the mods, around here.
It's an error that comes up a lot on these forums, and it bugs me. Sorry.
OT: in my experience, the threshold for holding aggro in a regular, pugged estf seems to be around 5k dps. If you can produce that, you'll end up drawing aggro in about 80% of the cases, even without speccing in threat control.
There seems to be little difference in captain or ship class too, btw; I draw massive aggro on my Negh'Var engi, my Wells fed scientist and my Kar'Fi pilots, and all can either tank the damage reasonably well and/or make other ships live longer if they get aggro (generally run HE, Aux2SIF, TSS and sometimes ES). None of them are specced in threat control.
Some skills do seem to produce more aggro than others, I find, but I could be wrong. Gravity Well, Tyken's Rift and Warp Plasma come to mind.
*shrug*
I think the system works, but if flying a "tank" cruiser, you will still need to pull your weight in terms of dps. The good news is that generally running full weapons power will provide enough output (either through power settings or EPtW).
Yeah, you seem to be right.
The most important thing a tank has to do is generate thread. Then, once he's generated enough thread, he can pull out his [Zombie Split Beam Rifle Mk XII] [Acc]x5 [Dmg]x10 and kill his enemy!
Just make sure you don't run into anybody who's specced into thread control. :P
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
The new Fleet Advanced MVAM because of tier 3 science skills you find someone to train TSS3 for in your fleet if your a Tac and also the higher hull and starting shield modifiers.
and the classic Heavy Escort Carrier: Because of Boff layout can run Aux to Structural 2. There use to be a problem with this ship's turn rate but with Tachyokinetic Converter this has been solved and can usually keep everything in line of sight with min effort.
These ships while cannot tank as well as cruisers are not what you would call glass cannons.
Basically any ship that can keep EPTS active the majority of the time, pack 3 armor consoles, and has two sci boff slots can tank nearly all content in the game. And if not, cross healing will allow them to.
Most people just don't realize the synergy of resists and regeneration, or the importance of a high shield power level to be perfectly honest. Shield power is just as strong defensively as weapon power is offensively.
Even the coded AI must follow a tactical progression. Attack the greatest threat. The only way this is measured for the AI is dps.
Jack Emmert: "Starfleet and Klingon. ... So two factions, full PvE content." Al Rivera hates Klingons Star Trek Online: Agents of Jack Emmert All cloaks should be canon.
Comments
I don't plan to give up on it, sadly it's not as fun as it could be as I can't Jack of all trades which is my play style, when I took my Jack of all trades build from S-5 (working brilliantly) into S-6 it fell flat on it's face and failed at everything simultaneously, if however I could play to my play style I would likely enjoy the game some more
I find there are limits to this with my Excelsior for example that darned ensign engineer is a thorn in the side of the ship that one just can't get rid of, I could do wonderful things with a universal ensign there (Mainly science)
See my current build here any practical suggestions are welcomed (No large zen investments or multi-million EC overhauls :P)
This is usually true
Change up your Emergency Powers to a copy of Shield 2 and two copies of Weapon 1. The reason for this is simple as the shield version has a higher resistance boost at higher rank and the weapon version does not. Also a Warp Core Engineer Doff could help out as well. Beyond that your boff abilities are pretty good solid choices.
With skills you have alot of waste but alot of good choices as well. First off though before any respec hop onto tribble and try it out but I would suggest this build http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/index.php?build=suggestionadamkafei_0 . Allow me to explain why I changed what I did.
Hull Plating and Armor Reinforcements combined going from 3 to 9 rank give about half what a single Mk 11 blue Neuto console gives. It is around 10 resist gain and not worth the points. Likewise taking engine performance from 6 to 9 only grants you 1 or 2 extra points of power and while for shield that can be worthwhile not for engine. Likewise with the Impulse Thruster since the bonus it gives is based on the ship's stats just like RCS consoles and I would not recommend taking it that high.
Instead of those I put the saved points into Star-ship Maneuvers as that will increase your ships Bonus Defense (best damage reducing stat in the game) which gives 15% and will help keep you alive much longer since as a beam boat you can keep your speed up. I also took EPS from 3 to 6 as it will increase the bonus power of your Epower skills by 1 and your EPTS ability and because I just really like it. Finally I increased Warp Core efficiency from 3 to 6 which should get you another 3 or 4 power and took Auxiliary Performance to 3 getting you an additional 5 power to boost your heals. Please note that this is not necessarily the best skill setup but I do think it would be an improvement for what you are doing. Actually now that I think about it maxing out Attack Pattern skill might be a good idea as Attack Pattern Beta is pure PvE win.
Finally the best advice I can give you is on setup that does not require much change at all. Make sure you weapon power is set to 100 as beam array performance is extremely dependent on pushing your weapon power over the 125 'soft cap' post season 6. You want it at 145 as much as possible. And be sure to be packing 7 beam arrays trust me if you have the power they will perform and make sure you are not letting half of them go silent too often to bring a torpedo to bear.
For gear I highly recommend Maco Shield with 2 piece Borg, or even 2 piece Omega with the third item of your choosing. I'm going to assume you are using all tac console slots for you specific beam energy type and I would pack two Neut Armor consoles with a single Mono console. And don't dismiss the power of the Emitter Array Sci console as it can really help out your sustain. Finally with the rep store the Borg Console is still pure win and the new Zero-Point Energy Conduit Romulan console is the new hot-ness. And it just might be worth slapping on the cutting beam or omega torpedo launcher for the 2 piece proc but I do not know. Finally the Fleet Weapons are really good (better than people give them credit for especially in PvE) and fairly affordable. As far as doffs go Conn Officiers that reduce Tac Team recharge and more importantly boost attack pattern skill are really good. Shield Distro doffs are still pretty solid too. And with doffs blues will work just fine.
I know that is a ton of stuff, feel free to dismiss it or PM me if you got any questions mate.
I thought I had good threat control before.
Now, fire at will + evasive manuevre = a bunch of crazy mad borg spheres literally chasing me all the while being hosed by far superior dps than what I can deliever.
Not only is plasma fun, its sticks on the roof of a mouth like peanutbutter and drives it's victims wild.
Give me someone who can generate threat properly and i wont take aggro. As a tactical captain in my fleet defiant my goal is to blow the enemy to hell and gone. And i got the craziest weapons in the game to do it with. The problem with this is that it'll more often than not make me the center of attention. I've got a beam overload defiant. I WILL generate more aggro on any given STF than a lot of people can handle. Unless i get set up with someone with even more DPS. That dual beam bank shot hits to the tune of 40+ sometimes if i hit with a shield down and usually they have rapid fire turrets and cannons on top of it.
If a ship cant generate threat properly it's either a problem with the system or a problem with a player. When a cruiser is trying to DPS i cant stand it. I need a cruiser to take fire off me so i can lay into a ship and not have to maneuver like the SSV normandy or the Millennium Falcon them not having aggro takes away from my DPS because i cant keep a target constantly in the 45 angle range of my heavy guns. So do i want to tank? Hell no. Can a cruiser keep a cube's primary attention off me? Sometimes but sometimes isnt enough.
Ok, I've been through this and made a couple of changes based on it, see here, I am currently debating the core efficiency and thinking about if/where I can better use those points (Given how little it raised my power levels I think 3 points is enough). I'm thinking based on in game descriptions maybe going with particle gens (I quite like my warp plasma).
Have you been running with as much weapon power as you can get? And if so has it seemed to help?
I've been running the mobius temporal destroyer alongside a MVA escort, and i have zero threat, yet when i enter a battle, 95% of the time the focus turns to me. thats why half of my skills are either hull regen or shield boost.
glad i finally looked into this to see if anyone else had the same problem
STO is a game where spider-tanking reigns supreme in terms of effectiveness, each ship contributing with buffer refills and resistance abilities as appropriate.
PS: Talking about your high-DPS beam overload escort is a bit odd; when you factor in the lost damage from the massive weapons power drain, beam overload is just not that great a DPS boost. You want maximum DPS in PvE? Get Beta 3, three attack pattern doffs to rotate it continuously, 2x CRF 2, and a full suite of DHC & Turrets. The all-cannon escort is currently supreme when i comes to sustained DPS.
Yeah, one of the issues I've had trying to test it is the low population of the Tribble server
I've been running max weapon power since shortly before S-7 and it did help at the time but of course I'm not noticing anymore because I'm used to it
Whoa! Hold on there. What you say here about threat control is wrong. With 6 points invested into it you can practically guarantee to hold agro. The only times my cruiser can't hold agro with 6 ranks in threat control are when another ship with threat control beats me to it and are able to sustain higher DPS without blowing up.... this is incredibly rare but it does happen.
he is not all wrong though: the setup he posted is primarely a support setup, and it will never be able to actually draw and keep aggro with the 6 points he has against an escort. But thats no problem for him and his grp, since he lets the escorts tank and he supports them with heals, not primarely to heal them, but to skyrocket their resistance values with those heals.
So it is one approach to successfully playing a cruiser. And basically a training for PVP as a support cruiser. Although he is drawing aggro from unfocused targets, and i think his team kills one target at a time, making it an excellent teamplay build in my opnion.
Anyway, this is not WOW, where tanking is actually a well thoughtout mechanic, but it definately works as intended in STO. Thread control does it's job and is not "skewed", but if your cruiser lacks dmg, holding aggro is a problem...some cruiser lack the dmg abilitys, since they are primarely build for support. The only problem i really have with the skill "thread control" is that it is in the skilltree...that severely cuts your ship choices for that character. That cahracter is therefore limited to cruisers and other tank/support vessels. And that is simply stupid game design. (an aggro item...thread console... or ability would be way better)
What you say is exactly what i do myself in stfs...i go full dmg and aggro drawing, with only the absolute must have for survival. personally i find that better ofcourse, since the escorts i cover can throw their spare heals on me theoretically (TSS, HE) while they can sit still at 1km next to the target without getting hit.
I only heal myself, therefore my cruiser is unable to do any kind of support, appart from TSS and HE and Aux2SIF3, which i will need for myself all the time.
So conclusive: a dmg/tank oriented cruiser (more than 3 tactical abilitys) will most definately have no problems against an escort that has 0 points in thread control...if they have points in Thread control, whatever happens to them doesnt really concern me...once they die i get the aggro anyway.
A support cruiser will struggle keeping aggro on a target that is focused by an escort. But it doesn't matter, he has enough support powers to keep the escort alive.
personally i find the dmg/tank cruiser variation better for STFs, doesn't need a working team to be effective (aka PUG). I asume grp dps is higher too, when escorts can sit at the target without having to deal with the aggro.
On the other hand certain STFs need a working team anyway, then a support cruiser is nice to have.
PS: on the builds posted before, i think APdelta would work better than APbeta, for a support cruiser, or any cruiser that has thread control skilled.
PPS: basically wanted to explain that the way he said "aggro is broken" in sto was not wrong, but lacked some further explantion, but now i wrote a long and boring post about much more stuff. I underlined the sentence that actually is focused on the comment.
The only ones with thread control are the mods, around here.
It's an error that comes up a lot on these forums, and it bugs me. Sorry.
OT: in my experience, the threshold for holding aggro in a regular, pugged estf seems to be around 5k dps. If you can produce that, you'll end up drawing aggro in about 80% of the cases, even without speccing in threat control.
There seems to be little difference in captain or ship class too, btw; I draw massive aggro on my Negh'Var engi, my Wells fed scientist and my Kar'Fi pilots, and all can either tank the damage reasonably well and/or make other ships live longer if they get aggro (generally run HE, Aux2SIF, TSS and sometimes ES). None of them are specced in threat control.
Some skills do seem to produce more aggro than others, I find, but I could be wrong. Gravity Well, Tyken's Rift and Warp Plasma come to mind.
*shrug*
I think the system works, but if flying a "tank" cruiser, you will still need to pull your weight in terms of dps. The good news is that generally running full weapons power will provide enough output (either through power settings or EPtW).
You aren't wrong. A lot of the higher tier sci skills do tend to generate a tremendous amount of threat, often to the point where I am in my qin heavy raptor doing a decloaking alpha strike on a tac cube, and I still can't draw it off the sci that is unloading every sci BOff power under the sun onto it. And I know for a fact that my raptor is doing a ton more DPS than that science ship (when your cannons are hitting for 8k, and critting for 15k with every round and your turrets are doing 2-3k per hit, I think that counts as out-dpsing the sci).
I also found that healing generates threat too. I will be sitting back healing an escort and doing good damage to a gateway/tac cube (not nearly to the level of an escort, but I don't expect to), and then out of the blue, the gate/cube will switch to me, over the escort who is averaging about 33-75% more damage than me. And what I had been doing the whole time was tossing heals at the escort, keeping it alive. It could be a bug, but apparently healing does cause you to generate threat.
We have a number of people in our groups that are quite skilled in the game, we often run combat log parsers to gain more information about combat.
As the highest dps ship in our fleet I can rarely get agro when a properly speced tank is playing. 6 points in threat control is enough to hold agro 90% of the time if you are a well built cruiser, which is what you want, let the escorts absorb 10%.
That said I am also in a very defensive escort, I could generate a lot more damage if I wanted to, but drawing agro and being dead doesn't do anything for the team or your DPS. A higher DPS escort could need to scale back and distribute their buffs more evenly.
I've also noticed I'm much less likely to pull agro when tactical fleet is running, giving the cruisers a damage boost and having their threat control multiplied by the damage boost makes pulling agro nearly impossible.
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Yeah, you seem to be right.
The most important thing a tank has to do is generate thread. Then, once he's generated enough thread, he can pull out his [Zombie Split Beam Rifle Mk XII] [Acc]x5 [Dmg]x10 and kill his enemy!
Just make sure you don't run into anybody who's specced into thread control. :P
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The new Fleet Advanced MVAM because of tier 3 science skills you find someone to train TSS3 for in your fleet if your a Tac and also the higher hull and starting shield modifiers.
and the classic Heavy Escort Carrier: Because of Boff layout can run Aux to Structural 2. There use to be a problem with this ship's turn rate but with Tachyokinetic Converter this has been solved and can usually keep everything in line of sight with min effort.
These ships while cannot tank as well as cruisers are not what you would call glass cannons.
Most people just don't realize the synergy of resists and regeneration, or the importance of a high shield power level to be perfectly honest. Shield power is just as strong defensively as weapon power is offensively.
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