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Call out to the Devs: Why are you killing Science?
burstdragon323
Member Posts: 853 Arc User
I won't quote the multitude of threads here about this big issue that you seem to be ignoring. It just seems like that instead of putting science down, you shot it in the leg and are letting it bleed out. I was optimistic until I got a chance to test out Singularity Jump, but was disappointed to see it was just a very pretty Gravity Well II.
What I and other Science Captains wants to know is the following:
1-Why are you killing science? It seems all we can do reliably anymore is heal.
2-Why do you let one faction of your community who keeps crying rivers about "Science is OP! NERF!" dictate your decisions?
3-When did this game become "Escorts PvP Online"?
4-What Career will you add to replace Science after you kill it off completely?
What I and other Science Captains wants to know is the following:
1-Why are you killing science? It seems all we can do reliably anymore is heal.
2-Why do you let one faction of your community who keeps crying rivers about "Science is OP! NERF!" dictate your decisions?
3-When did this game become "Escorts PvP Online"?
4-What Career will you add to replace Science after you kill it off completely?
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Simple answer - Pew sells.
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Correction. STACKED Science will make dudes scream and throw **** at the screen, not SOLO Science. That's why you need 3 Science on your "ideal" PvP team instead of only 2 ... or 1 ... because "merely" 1 or 2 Science is NOT ENOUGH to get the job done, because you need *3* in order to make Science *effective* in combat.
Implicit in your statement is the "fact" that Tactical is +50% more effective than Science, by the way, because you only "need" 2 Tactical Ships to exploit the work of 3 Science Ships.
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Probably not.
Most people are playing headless chicken-fests in PUG arena, with no coordination of any kind.
If your team doesn't coordinate, it's hard to take advantage of what Sci has to offer.
It's one of the quirks of the game.
That's because stacking is intrinsic to Science Captains being a force multipliers.
You can't stack 5 Tac captains and get the same results.
Those 2 Tac captains you are screaming your head off about are only allowed to be effective because of what a good Sci captain brings to the table.
Namely, force multiplication in the way of debuffs and force multiplication in the way of buffs.
"Escorts always QQ and Win Online", indeed.
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We may not be getting the very badly needed science revamp, but we are getting some love in the new traits and some of the new consoles that have come out...it's not much, but it is something at least.....sigh....lol
That's all gone now, though.
STO's first month out of launch was probably the best for science vessels. After that it's just been going downhill.
The new Science Traits are useless. All we get is a buff to Particle Generators and Photonic Fleet's Cooldown. I've tested both thoroughly and both are horrible. The PGen bonus is so small that it has very little effect on powers. Photonic Capacitor is useless because it is only a 15s cooldown after using SCI Team and TSS, not to mention that Photonic Fleet is useless. It has no impact on combat against anything bigger than a frigate.
The problem is that big people like Branflakes support PvP, so it gives their arguments more latitude.
My biggest problem with the PvP community in regards to science is how they set the forums on fire with comments on Drain builds because they couldnt be bothered to swap out a few consoles for +Power Insulators and invest in the Insulator skill, so they effectively murdered drain builds with their mass QQ.
Its things like these that make me angry, on top of the fact that the devs just dont care about Science anymore.
'killing' ? how cute. Science was buried in the F2P patch. Its been garbage since then.
Side note.
Re-branding. What a load of politicaly correct horse droppings.
I do agree though that science seems weak and then somebody hits me with it in a team setting and its weakness seems to be not so much true.
Why and what aspects of Science or weak is my question?
R.I.P
You honestly expect a Dev to pop their head into a thread that starts with incendiary commentary, accusations and gross hyperbole? You named the gorram thread "Why are you killing Science?" and you want a Dev to actually answer you?!
Get your head outta the clouds, and quit with the entitlement issues. The devs aren't here to answer your "questions." This isn't really even a question - it's an accusation, and you're trying to subpoena Cryptic to the witness stand for your own personal mockery of a trial. More like a witchhunt.
And you know what's even more awesome about this whole thread? Not a single shred of concrete examples, or actual feedback.
Got a problem with the proposed Science traits? How about you say WHY instead of just throwing around statements of "this sucks" and "that sucks." Why do you think they suck? How should they be improved?
Upset about the fact that Science can't defeat enemies as easily as an Escort? What do you suggest to close this gap? Do Sci abilities need to deal more damage? Shorter cooldowns? How would you suggest this problem be solved?
REAL feedback will get a Dev response. Pay attention around here, and you would realize that.
Throwing a tantrum gets you exactly what you are truly entitled to - being ignored.
hmmm... such anger in you...oh well..
But to my point that you seem to miss, we have been getting some love, those traits are SOMETHING, even if the are not that great by your standards, i'll take them. And then there are all those NICE Embassy consoles we got in Season 7.....yup, those just suck too huh?
I do agree with your general statement that science needs alot of work, our powers are weaker than the other classes to a point, but i don't seem to be having the same issues as most dedicated pvp ppl, my drains work ok, its our holds that can't hold a mouse, shield busting still works ok too....but yeah...not as good as the old days.
And one more thing OP, i do have to kinda agree with a few other posters in here, it kinda seems like your post is more a dedicated witch hunt against the devs instead of a constructive advice thread that they might actually READ. I know if i was a dev there i would have read about two words and left....just a thought.
one point in power insulators defeats 9 points in flow capacitor + 3 blue mk11 flow cap consoles + tier 3 drain ability (siphon/tyken for example) AND +100 to all sci stats tier 5 ability.
defeats how? The ability does not drain the target of power in any way or form close to the numbers it should. To give you an idea, if you use subsystem attack and tooltip states it should drain -70 power...yet when it hits it drains just -10 .. you know how utterly SCREWED the entire skill/stat line is.
Drains are non-functional.
How would escort/tactical captains like it if all damage boosting abilities were nullified by me having 1 point in 'super shield' skill box? Wouldnt THAT be a fun thing to have? Just look at how much they whine about people with fleet shields.. now imagine it being a game where escorts could NOT use fleet shields but everyone else could.
Gravity well? Yeah... well, you see.. it doesn't do squat vs ships that just fly out of it with no effort. Even when in 1/3rd impulse speed setting. And yeah.. about damage.. it decreases significantly ..down to zero.. when the ship moves 150m off the well's center. Damage is useless when it moves 50m out anyway. That graviton skill you spec to 9 which is supposed to have the well suck in the targets? Yeah, it aint working. At all. Not even with +100 to all sci stat ability boost. And why? The resist stat > graviton stat.
Sensor attacks.. one hit from anyone and its gone. Poof.
Viral matrix and all other debuffs... are cleansed instantly by tier 1 abilities...and its a joke to bother cleansing them because, once again, the resist stat brings the affected systems back online a second later.
The only sci abilities that are functional are healing abilities.
The one sci ability everyone complains about in 'team settings' is subnuke. A whining that is absolutely idiotic in nature when it comes to using it as an example of how 'sci is not useless' since its a CAPT ability not a BOFF ability.
Some Tac Buffed Photonic Shockwave to world-breaking levels with APA+GDF+Tac Fleet and caused a massive amount of QQing.
It seems to me like the weaknesses in science are in some of their control abilities versus other ships. I have noticed that Viral Matrix and Jam Sensors are virtually useless against anyone with Science and Engineering team. Science team clears Jam Sensors, and Eng. Team clears Viral Matrix.
Viable control methods include tractor beam, tractor beam repulsors, gravity well, and the sci captain abilities. Photonic shockwave has some limited use, and feedback pulse doesn't really seem to do a lot either. Tachyon Beam 3 can still be powerful when used correctly. Personally, I will wait until an enemy's shields on one side are significantly reduced, and use tachyon beam to open a hole in their defenses. I also use it against Borg cubes to hinder their shield regeneration so they go down faster.
To be honest, most science abilities are only useful in a coordinated team. I was fortunate enough to have been recruited into a large, high tier fleet as soon as I reached VA 50. From playing with them I learned how to really exploit my abilities as a science captain. Even in an escort I can use my captain abilities to make up for less DPS.
Lastly, science abilities are only useful if you use them "correctly". I don't want to define that word, because I cannot define it for everyone in a meaningful way. I posted this only in hopes of putting some helpful information up. If you play science, be prepared because alone you won't get much done quick, and your ground playing will suffer if you don't use a lot of heals. I made that mistake a lot, I hope others can learn from it. I still can't do ground STFs worth TRIBBLE. My ground PVP is even worse. But I have performed fairly well in space STFs and a little PVP. My recommendation for science players...search out a large fleet with smart players, and your skills will be of great help for them.
Disclaimer: I hope I didn't feed any trolls.
That's not 100% accurate. Ask anyone who's fought my I.K.S. Suckmaster 9000. It's damage output is pitiful but it's undefeated in 1v1 combat thanks to drains.
I do agree that the sci powers are under powered to an extent, but they shouldn't match the damage output of a tac which seems to be what many people want. As the previous poster mentioned, it's about how you use them. In 1v1, all other things being equal, a tac captain should rip a sci captain to shreds (IMO). By definition, a science captain isn't trained in combat, why should they be able to match a tactical captain? At best, the sci captain should be able to make it interesting and throw a curve ball or two. The problem is (IMO) that people seem to think all things should be even in every regards, that no one item/ship/race/etc should excel at something over everything else.
Take for example, my Suckmaster. It's a pure power drain Kar'Fi build. It has one purpose and one purpose only. To drain every last bit of power from it's target as rapidly as possible. It does that exceedingly well. However, it comes at the cost of having no other qualities to speak of. It's damage output is marginal at best, it only has 2 actual heals, and it's not terribly agile. It will beat you in 1v1 every time (so far any ways), but it's going to take a while. It was really designed for fleet support. While not winning any damage medals, if I can lower the enemy's top 3 DPS captain's damage output by say 50%-75%, that gives my team a huge advantage without actually doing any damage. That's what a science captain SHOULD do IMO. Every STF I play, somebody tells the team to focus fire on the heavy damage dealers. Why? Because the few sci/eng captains are usually only really concerned with saving themselves and since they don't have the damage output of an escort, they aren't a threat. That's partly the games fault and partly the players fault.
I can already feel people getting ready to say I'm one of "those" people and dismiss or ridicule me. You're running one of those cheese builds, etc. Maybe I am. But I'm a hardcore strategy gamer (table and electronic). Balance isn't about making everything absolutely even (that's called boring). It's about being able to counter it. The Suckmaster CAN be countered. It, however, takes somebody with an equally focused counter build. If I was to ever enter a match with somebody running a suitable counter-build, I'd be worthless.
Look at it from outside the STO world. Say, Supreme Commander. A nuke is an awesomely powerful weapon. A single one will lay waste to your base and conventional defenses do nothing to stop it. By the reasoning I see a lot of people use, that would make it a completely OP weapon. However, it has a weakness. An anti-nuke missile silo will neutralize it and make your nukes worthless. That restores balance to the system. That's the way it should be (IMO). It's not about nerfing the nukes, it's about having a means to counter it. Does that stop you from building nukes? No, because if by chance your opponent doesn't build anti-nuke defenses, you've got a huge advantage.
Combat is not supposed to be generic and level across the board. Be it fantasy or real world, sides usually have strengths and weaknesses. There's a reason countries train their special forces in different manners. Strengths and weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses are well integrated in Star Trek lore, STO just doesn't make good (often any) use of it.
If you go into battle ill prepared to counter your opponents strengths, that's not an issue with the game's balance, that's an issue with your tactics. I foresee Legacy of Romulus causing a shift in PVP (and much compaining) because of this. In PVP, the KDF pretty much assume they don't have to fight any ships with a cloak and even if they do, it's not a battle cloak so it's limited usefulness. Therefore the KDF typically has few if any players to detect/damage cloaked ships. If you end up fighting a match against a FED fleet heavy on the Romulan assistance, you are going to have quite the fight on your hands.
Now, you're probably sitting here wondering what I'm going on about or if I forgot the subject. I have not. I suspect with Romulus coming out, we are going to see a renewed interest in Science captains for their ability to reveal and/or damage cloaked enemies. Could science abilities use some buffs? Yeah, probably a little. But more importantly science abilities need captains who know how to use them. Those seem to be few and far between.
I've been here since season 2 and I can tell you science now is nothing...absolutely nothing to what it used to be.
'Correctly' doesn't matter. The fact is the effect the science abilities have now are massively nerfed. You use the example of tachyon 3 in waiting for the shield to be weak to hit it... that right there is a big problem because that is not the 'right' way to use it. Remember, its all math based. The shield you drain when it is full shield is the same you drain when it is nearly gone. Using the ability to give yourself the perception (flawed) that the ability is doing something more than it really does is no more than a desperate attempt at finding some way to put a completely borked ability to use.
As I said earlier, science is nothing like it used to be. To give you an idea:
Science ships used to be very dangerous opponents. Not because of DPS (they always were the worst at dealing damage) but because a science ship could weaken and disable opponents to the point where the sci ship's weak (oh SO weak) damage could knock the target out. One science ship literally turned what is now an elite tac cube into the equivalent of a sphere if the sci ship has the time to apply its debuffs. In PVP sci ships were not exactly hard to destroy by an escort...but the escort was in great danger if the sci ship ever got inside 5km range (tractor) or if the sci ship aimed its forward arc to the escort. Back then a gravity well could only be escaped by using polarize hull or evasive maneuvers. Nothing else worked. The well sucked you in and kept you inside even if at full speed and engine power. It did a lot of damage too (1600 a tick if i remember right).
Drains were incredibly potent.... hitting someone with an engine subsystem 2, a siphon and once tractored, a tyken's rift ... used to shut down ships completely and the sci ship could then just thump them dead.
Sounds like very powerful...but it wasnt. It was balanced. The sci ship could only focus on one or two types of debuffs so anytime you faced a sci ship you knew what he was kitted for in the first few seconds and there were many counters to the different builds. Drain build counters for example was a simple polarize hull or repulsor beam.. as drains build only got you if it tractored you and held you in place for the tyken to shut you down.
Back then escorts were not the uber damage vomiting ships they are now. They did 2nd best damage (cruisers were highest) but they had the unique advantage of speed and turning ability plus spike damage to focus on one shield and slam through it.
oh..yes.. back then tac team did not autobalance shields.
Cruisers were very hard to bring down..tough,durable heal monsters with 8 freaking beam arrays of pain. Bad thing was they turned like arthritic space whales and were slow... a fact that enabled escorts to take them down and science ships to debuff them down to the level of..well, a science ship.
Today however.. escorts are the best dps, best defense, best crowd control...cruisers are still there though their role and purpose is largely ceremonial...and science ships are a wasted slot in a team.
The only sci skills that function are the healing ones. The ones that escorts can use in tier 1 and 2 to keep themselves alive when their massive speed tank takes a hit or two.
Its about science ships being able to DISABLE, HOLD, JAM and DEBUFF targets with the same potency that escorts can put out damage.
Like pre-f2p actually.
The reason why science has been so nerfed is because its BY DESIGN. F2P changes were focused towards the monetization of the game. Guns, tactical consoles, ships..all that sells. Science abilities are boff based and dont have a fraction of the monetization potential tac stuff has.
Its an established pattern from Perfect World. Every..single.. game they buy up, gut and re-vamp into F2P follows the exact same pattern: the games focus entirely on DPS.
STO ceased to be STO when PW bought out Cryptic. It became one of their clone games. This cow will be milked and squeezed and milked until (like every other PW game before it) it reaches a point where pay 2 win becomes so absurd players leave the game. When that happens they shut the game down, copy paste the entire game code into another game that will use different theme (replace starships with flying dragons for example) and use the same interface...will have the same bugs, the same issues. But hey, people will flock to it, play it for a few years until it again becomes p2w absurdity and collapses. Cycle repeats.
PW bought out Cryptic and other companies as it broke into the NA market. Cryptic isn't Cryptic anymore. The huge loss in quality, game design and customer service following the F2P patch is enough to prove it.
Just because there is ONE Sci Captain ability (SNB) that makes them deadly for PvP doesn't mean it makes Sci a great choice in anything else. The other Sci captain abilities are "meh" and underwhelming, not to mention the length of nerfs Sci Captains suffered waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy early in the game and have never recovered.
A bunch of whiners got onboard the forums, and were simply aghast that Science was a bonafide, alternate, VIABLE form of combat. People were upset that you can destroy things that didn't involve shooting phasers, disruptors, or torpedoes, and that it could be done in PVP also. People whined that Science should only be debuffs and support, and the real fighting should be left to the chest-thumping TAC captains.
Again, SNB is the *only* powerful ability Science has. You know it, I know it, any experienced STO player knows it. But the rest of it, namely the Science BOFF abilities, have been repeatedly nerfed to oblivion since the early days of STO.
Oh, and OP, there is an error to your thread title. It's not that the devs are killing Science. That implies that they are in the process of destroying the class. But the fact is, they killed it long, long ago. That body's been buried in the woods since 2009.
I think they have nerfed just about all of them now because they refuse to address the real problem.
Science Characters in general?
Or Science Boff Abilities like Tykens Rift, Tachyon Beam, Viral Matrix etc?
Both should be really considered separate in all honesty. For example, Science Characters seem a bit weaker with somewhat pointless albeit sometimes very useful abilities.
Science Boff Abilities on the other hand I can clearly understand why there is a lot of anger since unless they are heals, you may as well not bother using them. It is somewhat of a joke if you can heavily spec in draining abilities and barely tickle an opponent.
What Cryptic should consider before releasing anything.
There really is no good answer.
If they nerfed because of PvP... really? Make a whole class worthless in all other aspects of the game because of PvP? Holy-hell, if PvP is that important to the bottom line, then shut the rest of the game down. Why waste the time, money and effort on developing non-PvP content?
If they nerfed because of monetization... really? You can't think of ways to make money off of the science class? Just give this one to the community. You'll be swamped with ideas. There are already science ships I would consider purchasing for a science captain, but with 6 weapon slots and a neutered captain... why would I?
Finally, if it is that PWE has them by the balls on this, then all they can really say is, "yeah, we're killing Science, kthxbye!"