I think the problem is actually in the content design, the ships themselves are mostly designed well.
The problem is that Cruisers and Sci ships were built to do things that are almost never required in PvE.
That's a system wide problem with PvE.
they still can redesign ships to fit current content. you can say im also fan of trinity, but i dont see why sto shouldnt be different, if they change ships to fit current content .. that works for me
none of which has any bearing on inherent flaws in the system.
none of which counters what i said
it do, they are not just INTENdEd to have roles, they HAVE them.
if they didnt, you could play any ship and it wouldnt make difference, but it do.
and which system dont have flaws ? and still trynity system worked fine in like 90% of mmos.
the problem here is that ships are made to fit into it, but there isnt anymore content that support that.
Let me real quick list a few of the difference between STO and CoH and why they are not applicable to one another. Just a few.
1) No resource system. We have no mana, no energy, nothing like that. This is such a huge difference it is not even funny.
2) No hyper-specialization. In CoH a tank could mitigate double the amount of damage a blaster could. If you really think cruisers can take double the punishment of escorts you need to start doing some math. Escorts by themselves cannot even deal double the damage of a cruiser if the cruiser can pack DHCs or is properly min/max out with beams.
3) No exclusive capabilities. In CoH many toons lacked the ability to do something, be it a form of CC, debuff, buff, heal, etc etc. In STO every ship has at minimum enough ensign/lt slots to cover the basics that it will want/need.
Finally if you 'force' people to bring tanks you end up with one of two situations.
1) Only uber skilled/geared players can partake in the content via premades
2) Escorts that are properly setup will tank it anyway.
The difference in sustain and EHP between my steamrunner and a standard cruiser is about the same as the difference you see taking a standard Mk 10 purple shield and replacing it with a Mk 12 Maco.
O and the comment about them all having the same exact EHP, that was in reference to the base ships without buffs being applied to them. And guess what, I'm pretty sure an APO + EPTS 1 + Tac Team grants me more survivability than EPTS 3 + Tac Team. I would throw in an extra ensign engineer ability for the cruiser for sustain but yeah Tac team trumps Eng team.
Content changes will not fix the problem. Your options are to abandon the out-dated concepts of tanks and healers like the ARPG genre has already and instead focus on other things or the entire game would need a redesign. Although in the end it matters not what we think/suggest/etc as I don't really think it makes any difference.
yea, they do have roles, horrible slanted in favor one one class roles
slanted because the trinity system is a load of tripe that breaks as soon as its exposed to anything beyond its narrow tolerances.
that you think you cant have specialisation and balance at the same time tells me you havnt played many genera's of games.
in reality? not one.
but there is a great deal of difference between applying a nffp system and one that allows the game to function in a way that is discrimitory to the majority of game play.
so we both agree trinity system exist in sto, implementation of content to support it is other matter as i said several times.
you can have specialisation, and complete lack of balance, i never said trinity system ensure some balance, and yes i played a lot mmos, some of which that dont use this system, like guildwars
problem in sto inst trinity system, or content separated
problem is ships are made with roles, and content is made in such way it dont require such and favor dps. game gonna work fine if ether of that 2 is fixed to be compatable with others. ie change content to fit roles of the ships, or change ships in ways that they can perform nearly equal in any situation.
PvE content is all about damage; just about everything in an elite STF has the capacity to kill you, and the best ability to counteract that is a Tactical ability.
Crew damage is severely broken; this is one of the areas where cruisers are supposed to excel, but since crew are killed so quickly their innate hull healing is non-existent. This should be the area that distinguishes cruisers from escorts that have practically the same hull points.
Threat is a skill, or a science console. What Engineering captains should really have is some kind of high-threat ability that will pretty much instantly direct a targeted enemy to attack them, but significantly reduces the damage that the tank sustains, and should ideally be based on crew so that once crew are fixed the ability will work best on cruisers but be a death sentence to other ship types.
Too many abilities are available in ensign and lieutenant slots; the most powerful self-healing and friend-healing abilities for engineers and science stations respectively should be limited to Lt. Commander and Commander slots only; as it stands right now anybody can take Transfer Shield Strength and Hazard Emitters, which might be okay for cruisers, but doesn't suit escorts who can end up friend-healing themselves. Moving them into Lt. Commander and Commander slots would make ships like Star Cruisers more specialised as the only ones that can run a hybrid tank/healer for example. Science abilities should be focused on direct offence attacks in Ensign/Lieutenant slots, engineering move Auxiliary to X powers down to make Emergency Power to X powers up, likewise with Extend Shields. Basically the current engineering ability layout is largely backwards, as it means that engineering focused ships have more offensive options (directed energy modulation, aceton beam, boarding party) but I'm not sure it should be that way around.
Tactical Team shouldn't be the go-to power for survival; escorts should be forced to turn to survive, with tactical team's distribution effect instead moving to a Lt. Commander or Commander engineering ability, but maybe give everyone access to some shield auto-distribution as an effect of shield distribution duty officers. This leaves Tactical Team to become a pure offence/repel boarders combo ability.
Attack Patterns currently do a heap of things really well, almost just as well as the dedicated powers available to engineering/science officers. They need to be reduced in effectiveness, or given a downside, for example attack pattern beta/alpha giving a defensive penalty to counteract their offensive boost.
game gonna work fine if ether of that 2 is fixed to be compatable with others. ie change content to fit roles of the ships, or change ships in ways that they can perform nearly equal in any situation.
We're a lot closer to the second case since the first would require a total overhaul of the campaigns and AI, while the second is basically just numerical tweaks to existing systems.
[QUOTE=haravikk;8747251
[*]Tactical Team shouldn't be the go-to power for survival; escorts should be forced to turn to survive, with tactical team's distribution effect instead moving to a Lt. Commander or Commander engineering ability, but maybe give everyone access to some shield auto-distribution as an effect of shield distribution duty officers. This leaves Tactical Team to become a pure offence/repel boarders combo ability.[/list][/QUOTE]
The fundamental problem with Tactical Team is that it transfers shield power much much faster than is otherwise possible. Manual balancing, i.e. shield balancing based on player skill and awareness of the situation, simply can't keep up with the massive damage spikes. Especially when the NPCs start throwing torpedoes, because they cheat.
In an ancient thread about the roles of different ships, I argued that cruisers should balance shields nearly as fast as tactical teams can, if they use manual balancing to direct all their power in a specific direction. Cruisers should also have something like Sensor Analysis, but defensive and threat-generating in nature; basically the longer a cruiser is engaged with an enemy, the less damage that enemy would do to the cruiser and the less likely that enemy would ever change targets.
[*]Tactical Team shouldn't be the go-to power for survival; escorts should be forced to turn to survive, with tactical team's distribution effect instead moving to a Lt. Commander or Commander engineering ability, but maybe give everyone access to some shield auto-distribution as an effect of shield distribution duty officers. This leaves Tactical Team to become a pure offence/repel boarders combo ability.
[/list]
If you think about uptime you'd realize that if escorts really had to turn and do strafing runs their spike and innate DPS would have to 4 or 5 times what it is now, maybe even more. That just leads to an arms race between cruisers and needing ever higher defenses to survive such attacks and NPCs needing higher damaging powers to get thru those defenses... it becomes a scaling nightmare.
If you think about uptime you'd realize that if escorts really had to turn and do strafing runs their spike and innate DPS would have to 4 or 5 times what it is now, maybe even more. That just leads to an arms race between cruisers and needing ever higher defenses to survive such attacks and NPCs needing higher damaging powers to get thru those defenses... it becomes a scaling nightmare.
if you have a cruser to hold aggro, they wouldnt worry about turning, in ideal only dmg they gonna take will be from aoe atacks, and also that gonna make them think about aggro and ways to prevent taking it., also as many ppl already siad, its pure dps race right now, if escorts are to worry about dying, it will change in some way, it wont be just dps that matters, as for survival of crusers, i think they are just fine, may be ajust NPCS with a bit higher sustained dmg, and remove or greatly reduce their spike dmg, at best that dmg should be enough to one shoot kill you, but avoidable, like moving out of area, clearing buff/debuff in some short interval, or using some univerasl ability.
We're a lot closer to the second case since the first would require a total overhaul of the campaigns and AI, while the second is basically just numerical tweaks to existing systems.
if we want to be made right, just numerical tweaks wont work, 95% of engineriing consoles are useless for example, to be honest is nearly same with sci ones. as someone said crew system is .. it isnt even broken, it should be remade too. i never ever paid attention or relayed on my crew on my cruser eng.
also they might have good formula to calculate difference between lower and higher arc weapons ... but with current high end weapons, diffrence become a bit too big. it was fine before we got all that purple mk12 weapons, fleet weapons and such, but that was like 2 yars ago.
formula is something like that if i remember correct
(MK0 Base Damage*(360-firing arc)/360) * (1 + (Weapon Skill / 100) + (Mark * 0.1))*(weapon power level/50)
and as you can see with all this multiplications with advancing of weapons, dmg gap becomes larger and larger. not to mention changes they made to weapon drains. wich favors uses of less energy weapons. crusers are way too slow to use anything but 8 beams.
i dont say its not possible, but the lack of ability to equip cannons. nearly same is situation with sci ships after all nerfs to sci abilities past year.
all in all in my opinion, entire content, or ship/boff powers systems should be remade to balance the game and bring all ships to bear.
I am still reading but i do want to say that while you may want it to be a trinity based mmo, the sto storyline does not support that idea. 9 out of 10 encounters where championed by a single ship and when they did receive help it was not from a team of three balanced roles. Every ship in Startrek was capable of holding its own. Everyship is a floating city. Its alot more about style and desire to play together than it is about the trinity system. There are differences and they probably need to be more clearly defined but you will never see a clear role devision in STO. Not in space combat at least.
I am still reading but i do want to say that while you may want it to be a trinity based mmo, the sto storyline does not support that idea. 9 out of 10 encounters where championed by a single ship and when they did receive help it was not from a team of three balanced roles. Every ship in Startrek was capable of holding its own. Everyship is a floating city. Its alot more about style and desire to play together than it is about the trinity system. There are differences and they probably need to be more clearly defined but you will never see a clear role devision in STO. Not in space combat at least.
in content may be, but in fact ships designs are already with clear role devision more or less.
I am still reading but i do want to say that while you may want it to be a trinity based mmo, the sto storyline does not support that idea. 9 out of 10 encounters where championed by a single ship and when they did receive help it was not from a team of three balanced roles. Every ship in Startrek was capable of holding its own. Everyship is a floating city. Its alot more about style and desire to play together than it is about the trinity system. There are differences and they probably need to be more clearly defined but you will never see a clear role devision in STO. Not in space combat at least.
No they were not able to hold their own. Thats just called television.
In every show every trek ship basically got their arses owned by whoever they were facing and they only won by some technobabble solution. Irony: They won through use of engineering and science skills not tactical.
The concept of trinity is a gameplay factor. If you have a game where players don't need the help of others and/or when DPS is the sole performing ability in the game you end up not with a game nor an MMO but with a game with little variety and lots of mind-numbing repetitive tasks. Sound familiar?
I remind you (or inform you if you weren't around pre-F2P) that STO used to have a very well balanced trinity. Each ship had a very specific role and while no ship was absolutely required to win a map, the lack of one said ship was noticeable.
For example, elite STFs type missions (hard) where a team was all escorts had great damage..but it took them a long time to finish off the mission since none of them could keep firing on a target for more than a few seconds or they died. They had to stay fast, moving and heal each other. Escorts were nowhere near as overpowered back then as they are now. Doing same said mission with just sci ships... the targets were debuffed till next friday but the sci ship low dps meant it took them time to bring it down. Cruiser teams fared a little better since they were more versatile..they could tank and they could dps but they couldnt do both at once. It was when you had 2 out of three in the trinity doing their jobs that the team had a noticeable improvement. Three present meant that if all three knew their jobs and did them things went smoothly.
Just the borg alerts back then were challenging..a single borg cube was challenging for a team. The sci ship was vital in disabling and debuffing it...the cruiser held aggro and tanked..the escort was the only one with speed and turn rate and firepower to keep hitting the same shield facing and slam the hull (back then neither players nor npcs had balance shield tac team). Ships were nowhere as fast as today either so the team actually fought and stayed together (within 5km) covering each other.
Why I remember flying my sci ship debuffing, covering my cruiser with aoe resist buffs & tossing them heals every now and then. Today doing that is a freaking waste of time. Cruiser doesn't need me and my sci ship has been nerfed (sci itself) so bad the only role that thing can do is toss damage as best it can. A wasted slot in the team actually, any ship with low dps.
in content may be, but in fact ships designs are already with clear role devision more or less.
captain specialization is not at all the same thing as forced grouping with trinity though
an eng captain can use his innates on an escort and a tac captain can use his innates on a cruiser, but forcing them to play "healer" and "hero" roles in a trinity system is something else entirely.
edit--Trinity is not canon either. TOS, TNG, VOY, ENT, were all about one ship making its way, not about "where's my healer"
Trinity is wrong for this game. Period. It should be excised, from the space combat anyway.[/QUOTE]
I completely agree with this statement.
Also, in STO role/class division offers variety in the methods we use to defeat the enemy but does not require us to conform to the typical trinity system. There are far to many different combinations of skills, abilities and equipment to be put into such a small box. However a player should be required to play to his strengths in order to excel. Someone said that each role should be able to defeat another using there own strengths, I agree but I would rather see 2 players of different roles that are equal in skill, experience, rank and equipment both in game and out, reach a stalemate. 1 on 1 pvp should be a testing ground only. No 1 role should be dominant.
The problem here, as I see it, is not with the captain specializations so much as it is with ship classes. You add the strike nature of an escort to a tact captain's focus on damage output, and you end up with something that is way better than any other captain type in that ship, and way better than a tact in any other ship type. people see an assault "role" and next thing you know "we can stick engineers in slow heavy cruisers and make them be healers" that do not get to fight because that's the tacscort's "role". Flatten the ship and the roles would become more portable, just as a byproduct of not having combinations that are twice as effective as any other combination. You would still have the advantage of captain specialization, but without the disease where tacscort is the only thing allowed to rambo it up.
You can still have teams with focused roles, but you dont break the whole game getting there.
Also! there is an optional possibility of implementing rock-paper-scissors into this kind of arrangement. It's not required, its just an option that allows for more variety in battle scenarios. sci>tac>eng>sci, with 5-10% inherent advantage in simulator, enough to be overcome with skill
ESCORTS:
Fast and nimble, action oriented playstyle
Boff Slot emphasis: Tactical 10/10 Engineering 5/10 Science 0/10 Hull 5/10
Maneuverability 10/10
SCIENCE:
Science Magic and crowd control
Boff Slot emphasis: Tactical 1/10 Engineering 5/10 Science 10/10 Hull 6/10
Maneuverability 8/10
Additionally, each ship class should get adequate Console layout and a additionaly universal Lt BOFF slot.
I think Escorts and Cruisers should be quite similar in Survivability and Firepower, just with other means.
While Escorts should have their primiary firepower to the front, and be able to maneuver very fast (just as the do already), cruisers should be able to do just as much damage. Balanced this way, ships in STO would be much more like ships in the shows. It is not about making any ship type over powered or superior to another, but to make them more equal. But in no way a ship should be put into a role of a passive teethless healer, the Galaxy Class being the most extreme example of this. All Cruisers should get at least +2 turnrate and Starfleet Cruisers should get acess to Dual Cannons.
The most important thing would be to rework some BOFF powers and to add some additional ones, to give every branch a much wider array of possible offensive and defensive powers.
For example, almost all low level Engineering powers share the same cooldown and are either passive or heals.
In my opinion Engineering powers should support Beam weapons much more, like a "Beam Weapon: Rapid Fire" power or something similar.
I think the Trinity just doesn't work with Star Trek ships. As we saw in the shows and Movies, Star Trek ships where generalists, not specialists. Of course some where more focussed on a certain field, like the defiants tactical focus, but still it could do some recon missions. The Galaxy Class is a more extreme example, being able to do almost every type of mission and being highly adaptable to refits and modifications, this ship should have a science/engineering/tactical version by default.
So Star Trek ships are not like BSG or Star Wars ships, they are much more versatile.
Cryptic should make them equal strong in offensive and defensive, just supporting different playstyles. Character class PLUS BOFF powers PLUS the Ship should define the "role" of the ship, but not the ship alone.
Ships should rather support varius playstyles.
"...'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied--chains us all irrevocably.' ... The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. I fear that today--"
- (TNG) Picard, quoting Judge Aaron Satie
If you think about uptime you'd realize that if escorts really had to turn and do strafing runs their spike and innate DPS would have to 4 or 5 times what it is now, maybe even more. That just leads to an arms race between cruisers and needing ever higher defenses to survive such attacks and NPCs needing higher damaging powers to get thru those defenses... it becomes a scaling nightmare.
Not really; escorts should be avoiding damage by having tanks drawing fire and being healed. Even so, an escort can still turn to bear a flank, distribute shields forward then turn back, which means their uptime isn't reduced that much. The point is that under heavy, sustained fire they shouldn't be able to just sit where they are cycling tactical team to keep their forward shields up.
Not really; escorts should be avoiding damage by having tanks drawing fire and being healed. Even so, an escort can still turn to bear a flank, distribute shields forward then turn back, which means their uptime isn't reduced that much. The point is that under heavy, sustained fire they shouldn't be able to just sit where they are cycling tactical team to keep their forward shields up.
I heavily doubt that Cryptics devs will nerf Escorts survivability, since a lot of MMO players love their OP ship, just as some of Cryptics devs love them more than anything. :rolleyes:
The only thing to do is, to bring Cruisers and Science ships offensive capabilities on par with it, to make them a viable alternative.
That would mean, Cruisers should get something like more power, acess to DHCs or something else that increases their Weapons offensive capabilities. Science ships need their Damage Powers buffed, like Charged Particale burst and things like that.
The tricky thing about it is not to make anthing too strong, because nerfing something should always be the very last option IMO.
Once they are all on the same level Cryptics devs should be very, very careful when introducing anything that could destabilize that balance, but in my experience Escorts are always be OP in this game....
"...'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied--chains us all irrevocably.' ... The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. I fear that today--"
- (TNG) Picard, quoting Judge Aaron Satie
I like how it currently is with a really soft "trinity", this concept isn't even canon and doesn't belong in Star Trek anyway, so making a more strict trinity would be bad. Yes a escort will be better at dps, a cruiser will be better as a tank/healer, and a sci ship as a healer/caster, but you aren't restricted to that role completley in STO and can make DPS cruisers and tanky escorts if thats what you want.
Not really; escorts should be avoiding damage by having tanks drawing fire and being healed.
If you're referring to the trinity, no thanks. At least not a forced one.
Ideally Cryptic would've implemented an equal but different approach right from the start. At least more recent ships feel better thought out to be closer to hybrids than pures.
If you're referring to the trinity, no thanks. At least not a forced one.
Ideally Cryptic would've implemented an equal but different approach right from the start. At least more recent ships feel better thought out to be closer to hybrids than pures.
Which is sad in my opinion, since the most important ships ( Sovereign, Galaxy) are too extreme and thus just bad designed.
I would have loved if we got the opportunity to just put the BOFF & Console Layout of a Lockbox Cruiser (science or Escort) onto a T5 Cruiser (science or Escort).
It always shudders me seeing a Galor or Ferengi D'kora being able to outgun a Galaxy Class or Sovereign. Since Ships are supposed to be highly modular in STO, BOFF and Console Layout shouldn't be restricted to one Cruiser, Escort or Science Ship alone.
"...'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied--chains us all irrevocably.' ... The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. I fear that today--"
- (TNG) Picard, quoting Judge Aaron Satie
Comments
they still can redesign ships to fit current content. you can say im also fan of trinity, but i dont see why sto shouldnt be different, if they change ships to fit current content .. that works for me
it do, they are not just INTENdEd to have roles, they HAVE them.
if they didnt, you could play any ship and it wouldnt make difference, but it do.
and which system dont have flaws ? and still trynity system worked fine in like 90% of mmos.
the problem here is that ships are made to fit into it, but there isnt anymore content that support that.
Let me real quick list a few of the difference between STO and CoH and why they are not applicable to one another. Just a few.
1) No resource system. We have no mana, no energy, nothing like that. This is such a huge difference it is not even funny.
2) No hyper-specialization. In CoH a tank could mitigate double the amount of damage a blaster could. If you really think cruisers can take double the punishment of escorts you need to start doing some math. Escorts by themselves cannot even deal double the damage of a cruiser if the cruiser can pack DHCs or is properly min/max out with beams.
3) No exclusive capabilities. In CoH many toons lacked the ability to do something, be it a form of CC, debuff, buff, heal, etc etc. In STO every ship has at minimum enough ensign/lt slots to cover the basics that it will want/need.
Finally if you 'force' people to bring tanks you end up with one of two situations.
1) Only uber skilled/geared players can partake in the content via premades
2) Escorts that are properly setup will tank it anyway.
The difference in sustain and EHP between my steamrunner and a standard cruiser is about the same as the difference you see taking a standard Mk 10 purple shield and replacing it with a Mk 12 Maco.
O and the comment about them all having the same exact EHP, that was in reference to the base ships without buffs being applied to them. And guess what, I'm pretty sure an APO + EPTS 1 + Tac Team grants me more survivability than EPTS 3 + Tac Team. I would throw in an extra ensign engineer ability for the cruiser for sustain but yeah Tac team trumps Eng team.
Content changes will not fix the problem. Your options are to abandon the out-dated concepts of tanks and healers like the ARPG genre has already and instead focus on other things or the entire game would need a redesign. Although in the end it matters not what we think/suggest/etc as I don't really think it makes any difference.
so we both agree trinity system exist in sto, implementation of content to support it is other matter as i said several times.
you can have specialisation, and complete lack of balance, i never said trinity system ensure some balance, and yes i played a lot mmos, some of which that dont use this system, like guildwars
problem in sto inst trinity system, or content separated
problem is ships are made with roles, and content is made in such way it dont require such and favor dps. game gonna work fine if ether of that 2 is fixed to be compatable with others. ie change content to fit roles of the ships, or change ships in ways that they can perform nearly equal in any situation.
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
We're a lot closer to the second case since the first would require a total overhaul of the campaigns and AI, while the second is basically just numerical tweaks to existing systems.
[*]Tactical Team shouldn't be the go-to power for survival; escorts should be forced to turn to survive, with tactical team's distribution effect instead moving to a Lt. Commander or Commander engineering ability, but maybe give everyone access to some shield auto-distribution as an effect of shield distribution duty officers. This leaves Tactical Team to become a pure offence/repel boarders combo ability.[/list][/QUOTE]
The fundamental problem with Tactical Team is that it transfers shield power much much faster than is otherwise possible. Manual balancing, i.e. shield balancing based on player skill and awareness of the situation, simply can't keep up with the massive damage spikes. Especially when the NPCs start throwing torpedoes, because they cheat.
In an ancient thread about the roles of different ships, I argued that cruisers should balance shields nearly as fast as tactical teams can, if they use manual balancing to direct all their power in a specific direction. Cruisers should also have something like Sensor Analysis, but defensive and threat-generating in nature; basically the longer a cruiser is engaged with an enemy, the less damage that enemy would do to the cruiser and the less likely that enemy would ever change targets.
If you think about uptime you'd realize that if escorts really had to turn and do strafing runs their spike and innate DPS would have to 4 or 5 times what it is now, maybe even more. That just leads to an arms race between cruisers and needing ever higher defenses to survive such attacks and NPCs needing higher damaging powers to get thru those defenses... it becomes a scaling nightmare.
if you have a cruser to hold aggro, they wouldnt worry about turning, in ideal only dmg they gonna take will be from aoe atacks, and also that gonna make them think about aggro and ways to prevent taking it., also as many ppl already siad, its pure dps race right now, if escorts are to worry about dying, it will change in some way, it wont be just dps that matters, as for survival of crusers, i think they are just fine, may be ajust NPCS with a bit higher sustained dmg, and remove or greatly reduce their spike dmg, at best that dmg should be enough to one shoot kill you, but avoidable, like moving out of area, clearing buff/debuff in some short interval, or using some univerasl ability.
if we want to be made right, just numerical tweaks wont work, 95% of engineriing consoles are useless for example, to be honest is nearly same with sci ones. as someone said crew system is .. it isnt even broken, it should be remade too. i never ever paid attention or relayed on my crew on my cruser eng.
also they might have good formula to calculate difference between lower and higher arc weapons ... but with current high end weapons, diffrence become a bit too big. it was fine before we got all that purple mk12 weapons, fleet weapons and such, but that was like 2 yars ago.
formula is something like that if i remember correct
(MK0 Base Damage*(360-firing arc)/360) * (1 + (Weapon Skill / 100) + (Mark * 0.1))*(weapon power level/50)
and as you can see with all this multiplications with advancing of weapons, dmg gap becomes larger and larger. not to mention changes they made to weapon drains. wich favors uses of less energy weapons. crusers are way too slow to use anything but 8 beams.
i dont say its not possible, but the lack of ability to equip cannons. nearly same is situation with sci ships after all nerfs to sci abilities past year.
all in all in my opinion, entire content, or ship/boff powers systems should be remade to balance the game and bring all ships to bear.
in content may be, but in fact ships designs are already with clear role devision more or less.
No they were not able to hold their own. Thats just called television.
In every show every trek ship basically got their arses owned by whoever they were facing and they only won by some technobabble solution. Irony: They won through use of engineering and science skills not tactical.
The concept of trinity is a gameplay factor. If you have a game where players don't need the help of others and/or when DPS is the sole performing ability in the game you end up not with a game nor an MMO but with a game with little variety and lots of mind-numbing repetitive tasks. Sound familiar?
I remind you (or inform you if you weren't around pre-F2P) that STO used to have a very well balanced trinity. Each ship had a very specific role and while no ship was absolutely required to win a map, the lack of one said ship was noticeable.
For example, elite STFs type missions (hard) where a team was all escorts had great damage..but it took them a long time to finish off the mission since none of them could keep firing on a target for more than a few seconds or they died. They had to stay fast, moving and heal each other. Escorts were nowhere near as overpowered back then as they are now. Doing same said mission with just sci ships... the targets were debuffed till next friday but the sci ship low dps meant it took them time to bring it down. Cruiser teams fared a little better since they were more versatile..they could tank and they could dps but they couldnt do both at once. It was when you had 2 out of three in the trinity doing their jobs that the team had a noticeable improvement. Three present meant that if all three knew their jobs and did them things went smoothly.
Just the borg alerts back then were challenging..a single borg cube was challenging for a team. The sci ship was vital in disabling and debuffing it...the cruiser held aggro and tanked..the escort was the only one with speed and turn rate and firepower to keep hitting the same shield facing and slam the hull (back then neither players nor npcs had balance shield tac team). Ships were nowhere as fast as today either so the team actually fought and stayed together (within 5km) covering each other.
Why I remember flying my sci ship debuffing, covering my cruiser with aoe resist buffs & tossing them heals every now and then. Today doing that is a freaking waste of time. Cruiser doesn't need me and my sci ship has been nerfed (sci itself) so bad the only role that thing can do is toss damage as best it can. A wasted slot in the team actually, any ship with low dps.
captain specialization is not at all the same thing as forced grouping with trinity though
an eng captain can use his innates on an escort and a tac captain can use his innates on a cruiser, but forcing them to play "healer" and "hero" roles in a trinity system is something else entirely.
Trinity is wrong for this game. Period. It should be excised, from the space combat anyway.[/QUOTE]
I completely agree with this statement.
Also, in STO role/class division offers variety in the methods we use to defeat the enemy but does not require us to conform to the typical trinity system. There are far to many different combinations of skills, abilities and equipment to be put into such a small box. However a player should be required to play to his strengths in order to excel. Someone said that each role should be able to defeat another using there own strengths, I agree but I would rather see 2 players of different roles that are equal in skill, experience, rank and equipment both in game and out, reach a stalemate. 1 on 1 pvp should be a testing ground only. No 1 role should be dominant.
You can still have teams with focused roles, but you dont break the whole game getting there.
Also! there is an optional possibility of implementing rock-paper-scissors into this kind of arrangement. It's not required, its just an option that allows for more variety in battle scenarios. sci>tac>eng>sci, with 5-10% inherent advantage in simulator, enough to be overcome with skill
Ships should be more like this
CRUISERS:
Big, powerful all-round ships, strategic oriented playstyle
Boff Slot emphasis:
Tactical 5/10
Engineering 5/10
Science 5/10
Hull 10/10
Maneuverability 5/10
ESCORTS:
Fast and nimble, action oriented playstyle
Boff Slot emphasis:
Tactical 10/10
Engineering 5/10
Science 0/10
Hull 5/10
Maneuverability 10/10
SCIENCE:
Science Magic and crowd control
Boff Slot emphasis:
Tactical 1/10
Engineering 5/10
Science 10/10
Hull 6/10
Maneuverability 8/10
Additionally, each ship class should get adequate Console layout and a additionaly universal Lt BOFF slot.
I think Escorts and Cruisers should be quite similar in Survivability and Firepower, just with other means.
While Escorts should have their primiary firepower to the front, and be able to maneuver very fast (just as the do already), cruisers should be able to do just as much damage. Balanced this way, ships in STO would be much more like ships in the shows. It is not about making any ship type over powered or superior to another, but to make them more equal. But in no way a ship should be put into a role of a passive teethless healer, the Galaxy Class being the most extreme example of this. All Cruisers should get at least +2 turnrate and Starfleet Cruisers should get acess to Dual Cannons.
The most important thing would be to rework some BOFF powers and to add some additional ones, to give every branch a much wider array of possible offensive and defensive powers.
For example, almost all low level Engineering powers share the same cooldown and are either passive or heals.
In my opinion Engineering powers should support Beam weapons much more, like a "Beam Weapon: Rapid Fire" power or something similar.
I think the Trinity just doesn't work with Star Trek ships. As we saw in the shows and Movies, Star Trek ships where generalists, not specialists. Of course some where more focussed on a certain field, like the defiants tactical focus, but still it could do some recon missions. The Galaxy Class is a more extreme example, being able to do almost every type of mission and being highly adaptable to refits and modifications, this ship should have a science/engineering/tactical version by default.
So Star Trek ships are not like BSG or Star Wars ships, they are much more versatile.
Cryptic should make them equal strong in offensive and defensive, just supporting different playstyles.
Character class PLUS BOFF powers PLUS the Ship should define the "role" of the ship, but not the ship alone.
Ships should rather support varius playstyles.
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
The only thing to do is, to bring Cruisers and Science ships offensive capabilities on par with it, to make them a viable alternative.
That would mean, Cruisers should get something like more power, acess to DHCs or something else that increases their Weapons offensive capabilities. Science ships need their Damage Powers buffed, like Charged Particale burst and things like that.
The tricky thing about it is not to make anthing too strong, because nerfing something should always be the very last option IMO.
Once they are all on the same level Cryptics devs should be very, very careful when introducing anything that could destabilize that balance, but in my experience Escorts are always be OP in this game....
Really now?
What do cruisers have as a role?
Trinity got thrown out of the window once carriers and lockbox ships started coming into play.
And it's not like birds of prey ever followed it in the first place.
If you're referring to the trinity, no thanks. At least not a forced one.
Ideally Cryptic would've implemented an equal but different approach right from the start. At least more recent ships feel better thought out to be closer to hybrids than pures.
I would have loved if we got the opportunity to just put the BOFF & Console Layout of a Lockbox Cruiser (science or Escort) onto a T5 Cruiser (science or Escort).
It always shudders me seeing a Galor or Ferengi D'kora being able to outgun a Galaxy Class or Sovereign. Since Ships are supposed to be highly modular in STO, BOFF and Console Layout shouldn't be restricted to one Cruiser, Escort or Science Ship alone.