Only way you could have all those abilities are with a Voldemort hack.
Maybe you meant crf1 or APB2.
Not necessarily. (Fleet) Norgh BoP could pull that off, I think. You'd be running 3 tac boffs and 1 other one, but that's okish in a hit&run BoP, potentially...
Having said that, I can't come up with other examples. But even with crf1 or apb2 that kind of setup tends to melt faces more quickly than practically anything else. *shrug* Haven't found a way to make a non-escort quite as quick a killer as an alpha-BoP or fully offensive escort.
Think escort dps is fine because it is a pretty accurate representation of what the ship should be like. I think it is cruisers that are inaccurate. They should be much much harder to bring down. The large slow cruisers should have shield mods of at least 2 and maybe double the hull hp considering 40k hull is about two bursts from DHCs.
that would be fine if a grav well with 6 in gens created at 50 power was a guarenteed way of even stopping those negs, ...
Wow, really? Here's a news flash - if you intend to use science powers effectively, you need to invest in them. 6 in gens and 50 in aux isn't going to cut it. Let me guess, you're also running Field Gen consoles, instead of graviton consoles, because you 'need' the shield hp. Try actually speccing into Gravitons (full skills and consoles), putting your aux to 125, and running the Gravimetric Doffs for a chance to proc extra Grav Wells, then try this again - works much better as an AOE hold.
Of course, putting that many resources into your sci powers probably means putting less into direct DPS, but that's working as intended. You don't get to have both, that's the essence of balance. The fact is, sci ships are always going to do less DPS than escorts or Cruisers, by design. This is supposed to encourage you to invest in the things sci ships are good at if you want to run a sci ship, but people are so caught up in DPS fever that they mis-spec for the ship, and then complain about being ineffective.
simple result of a balanced system would be that no ship would be 'needed' and it would be up to the player to choose how they want to play, reaching the same goal by different routes.
unlike the current broken mess of fecklessly unbalanced trinity herp-derp that is currently afflicting this game.
First, we already have a system where no ship is 'needed', at least in PVE. The only content that MAY require a specific team build is No Win Scenario, but I can't speak to that as I don't really run it. Any Elite STF, Fleet Action, or Story Mission, however, can be successfully completed (including optionals, if any) with any composition of ships, as long as the players know the mission and communicate with each other.
Second, your conception of 'balance' appears to be myopic. I say 'appears' because I can't be sure what you mean by 'same goal by different routes'. I think what you mean is that every ship should be able to finish every mission in the same amount of time, just with a different combination of powers. If you mean otherwise, please by all means clarify.
If I am right about what you mean, however, I have to say that I think you misunderstand the concept of 'different playstyles'. What you are talking about is different ways to accomplish DPS, which isn't really the same thing as playing a 'Tank' or 'Crowd Control' styles. Instead of talking about using a cruiser to soak up waves of firepower while slowly wearing down your enemies (Tanking, in other words), you are talking about climbing in a cruiser and doing escort level DPS by clicking on orange buttons instead of red ones. That may or may not be a legitimate design goal, but it is definitely NOT the same thing as a different 'playstyle', it's more like the difference between using phasers and disruptors.
Ultimately this discussion always circles back to this concept, I think - the 'balance' issues have less to do with Tanking or CC not working well, and more to do with players trying to shoehorn the 'wrong' playstyles onto classes and ships that were never intended to play that way.
Wow, really? Here's a news flash - if you intend to use science powers effectively, you need to invest in them. 6 in gens and 50 in aux isn't going to cut it. Let me guess, you're also running Field Gen consoles, instead of graviton consoles, because you 'need' the shield hp. Try actually speccing into Gravitons (full skills and consoles), putting your aux to 125, and running the Gravimetric Doffs for a chance to proc extra Grav Wells, then try this again - works much better as an AOE hold.
Of course, putting that many resources into your sci powers probably means putting less into direct DPS, but that's working as intended. You don't get to have both, that's the essence of balance. The fact is, sci ships are always going to do less DPS than escorts or Cruisers, by design. This is supposed to encourage you to invest in the things sci ships are good at if you want to run a sci ship, but people are so caught up in DPS fever that they mis-spec for the ship, and then complain about being ineffective.
First, we already have a system where no ship is 'needed', at least in PVE. The only content that MAY require a specific team build is No Win Scenario, but I can't speak to that as I don't really run it. Any Elite STF, Fleet Action, or Story Mission, however, can be successfully completed (including optionals, if any) with any composition of ships, as long as the players know the mission and communicate with each other.
Second, your conception of 'balance' appears to be myopic. I say 'appears' because I can't be sure what you mean by 'same goal by different routes'. I think what you mean is that every ship should be able to finish every mission in the same amount of time, just with a different combination of powers. If you mean otherwise, please by all means clarify.
If I am right about what you mean, however, I have to say that I think you misunderstand the concept of 'different playstyles'. What you are talking about is different ways to accomplish DPS, which isn't really the same thing as playing a 'Tank' or 'Crowd Control' styles. Instead of talking about using a cruiser to soak up waves of firepower while slowly wearing down your enemies (Tanking, in other words), you are talking about climbing in a cruiser and doing escort level DPS by clicking on orange buttons instead of red ones. That may or may not be a legitimate design goal, but it is definitely NOT the same thing as a different 'playstyle', it's more like the difference between using phasers and disruptors.
Ultimately this discussion always circles back to this concept, I think - the 'balance' issues have less to do with Tanking or CC not working well, and more to do with players trying to shoehorn the 'wrong' playstyles onto classes and ships that were never intended to play that way.
This Thread has been interesting, to say the least. I have 6 Fed Characters, and 4 KDF Characters, 2 of each with different roles.
If you have a good respec for your characters, then you should be able to use that across all your characters. For Example. One of my characters (Tac) flies a Tactical Odyssey that is probably my best ship PVE/PVP. The shields are over 16K, and the hull is 58K+, and knowing what skills to keep yourself alive is crucial to any ship with any captain. If you use multiple skills that share a cooldown, you might need it when it's not available.
It's not rocket science really, my other Tac officer flies the Jam'Hadar attack ship, and the difference is night and day. In my Odyssey, I have my threat control set to 6 because I want to be the one they shoot at. This saves my teammates from a certain quick kill and they can all use any heals to try to keep this massive ship alive. That's how it is supposed to work. If someone is putting threat in a little escort, (you say they are overpowered, but I really disagree) you will die a lot because you are the one getting targeted. Escorts are no better than their support ships. My Odyssey can heal around 27K with no cooldowns, almost a total defiant class heal but if you have threat on your escort, I heal you and you still blow up. Seriously, there are different styles for the different ways of play.
Escorts may have all the damage, but seriously... They can't take a heavy hit. Cruisers may not do all the damage but they can sustain damage for lots longer than a little escort.
One Simple Question: Is DPS all that matters to you?
FYI: true statement -- the longer you are in the battle the more damage you can do, effectively increasing standard dps.
Do you want to blow stuff up or survive? I outfitted my best cruiser with all the best heals that I could strap to it, and have run combat log parsers and it has taken over 1 million damage and not been destroyed. That is called TANKING, and escorts don't do that very well.
A lot of my fleet mates just want to go through rip some stuff up / one shot the enemy and that's when most of them are blown up 2 to 5 times. With the current STF penalties, a minute can drop your damage output several thousand.
My nickel's worth of free advice is: learn your skills that you require to stay alive. Train Eng Team 3/Haz emitter 3 and forgo some damage skills, like Grav well or scramble sensors or Eject plasma. Those won't keep you alive, the others do.
remember: engineering Team and Hazard emitters and aux to structural do NOT share a cooldown, Engineering team and tac team do. Emergency power to shields/Transfer Shield Strength do NOT share a cooldown. Energency power to Shields and weapons do.
Escorts are NOT overpowered. It's the players who spec for power and forget to plan for heals that are dangerous, but if you have heals to counter it, you can stay alive a lot longer.
Of course, putting that many resources into your sci powers probably means putting less into direct DPS, but that's working as intended. You don't get to have both, that's the essence of balance. The fact is, sci ships are always going to do less DPS than escorts or Cruisers, by design. This is supposed to encourage you to invest in the things sci ships are good at if you want to run a sci ship, but people are so caught up in DPS fever that they mis-spec for the ship, and then complain about being ineffective.
Too bad that the things Sci ships are good at are useless. Oh yes, Gravity Well. The only Sci power worth mentioning. And still, some more DPS is more valuable than it.
First, we already have a system where no ship is 'needed', at least in PVE. The only content that MAY require a specific team build is No Win Scenario, but I can't speak to that as I don't really run it. Any Elite STF, Fleet Action, or Story Mission, however, can be successfully completed (including optionals, if any) with any composition of ships, as long as the players know the mission and communicate with each other.
Second, your conception of 'balance' appears to be myopic. I say 'appears' because I can't be sure what you mean by 'same goal by different routes'. I think what you mean is that every ship should be able to finish every mission in the same amount of time, just with a different combination of powers. If you mean otherwise, please by all means clarify.
If I am right about what you mean, however, I have to say that I think you misunderstand the concept of 'different playstyles'. What you are talking about is different ways to accomplish DPS, which isn't really the same thing as playing a 'Tank' or 'Crowd Control' styles. Instead of talking about using a cruiser to soak up waves of firepower while slowly wearing down your enemies (Tanking, in other words), you are talking about climbing in a cruiser and doing escort level DPS by clicking on orange buttons instead of red ones. That may or may not be a legitimate design goal, but it is definitely NOT the same thing as a different 'playstyle', it's more like the difference between using phasers and disruptors.
Ultimately this discussion always circles back to this concept, I think - the 'balance' issues have less to do with Tanking or CC not working well, and more to do with players trying to shoehorn the 'wrong' playstyles onto classes and ships that were never intended to play that way.
No ships are needed? No, escorts are needed (unless you have some high DPS cruisers, you know, the ones which are played wrong by maxing DPS instead of tanking). Sci ships and cruisers are not needed, there you are correct.
Oh sure, a healer is nice. But a escort can heal just fine. No need to sacrifice DPS by bringing a Sci ship to do that.
The only playstyle STO rewards is DPS. You can not outtank STFs and CCing the enemies only delays them, but you still need good DPS to finish in time (which as you said Sci ships are not supposed to do). And most fleet actions flat out only reward DPS. Sci ships have flat out no chance in getting the 1st place.
And its not as if the escorts need any help. They might not be as durable as a cruiser, but with the right boffs and equipment they do well enough to not need a tank. And even if one of them dies once, the death penalty is nothing compared the the advantage of massive DPS escorts bring compared to a tank of sci.
But lets pretend that something else than just DPS was rewarded in STO. When every ship would perform their role as good as escorts do theirs, the game would be completely broken. Cruisers could sit between 4 tac cubes and never die and Sci ships could press a button and disable an enemy completely for a minute. Yes, escorts are that good in DPS (and not bad in healing and tanking either).
Making every ship as powerful in their respective roles as escorts are in theirs the last shred of challenge in STO would disappear unless you want even more 1 shot kills and CC immune enemies (were are the DPS immune enemies btw?).
Unfortunately the reason everyone has DPS fever is exactly because all content is allowed to be completed by "any team composition".
In this game its been taken to the extreme, where not even an ounce of crowd control is needed.
Thus we are brought to DPS fever, and everyone wishing their favorite ship type was capable of dealing it.
The game only has two damage modes:
1) Negligible.
2) One shot kills, may or may not be telegraphed with a huge glowing cone.
Result?
= Do not require tanks, and tanking does not function.
= No real reason to play support/healing.
Then there are the large pack of NPC encounters that have the following rules:
1) Gravity Well is sometimes nice to have, only in some spots in some missions.
2) AoE damage is universally useful.
Result?
= Control powers are not needed, required or even optimal.
Then there are "Boss" mob designs:
1) Giant sack of hull. Maybe has 1, or 2 buffs.
2) Giant sack of hull. Has a few buffs. Only appears in The Hive (Space).
3) Nearly immune to most control effects or debuffs.
Result?
= No reason for debilitation debuffs, no reason for subnuke. No reason to play a dedicated debuffer.
= Damage resist debuff is universally useful.
The issue is not Escorts.
The issue is PvE design.
I think at this point after endless threads on the subject over the past year alone, mountains of negative feedback and the fact that we continually get new content that follows the prior model of content that the devs are either unwilling to change this, or still simply do not recognize the issue.
Escorts and tac skills don't need nerfing. The eng and sci skills that were nerfed way back need to be restored thier former glory. There was a time when a sci captain in a sci ship could stop someone dead in his tracks and pick him apart at his leisure. Now, skills like gravwell are a minor nuisance at best.
As far as beams go, a little adjustment to their power drain and shield penetration mechanics, and they'd be as competitive as they once were.
Escorts in and of themselves are not overpowered but when you combine them with certain pieces of gear and certain boff/doff combos they are able to do more DPS than anything else going and between basic skills and speed they can be the best tanks in the game while doing this provided they are specced right. I've been known in my tac/scort to tank ESTF transwarp gates and tac cubes sometimes from beginning to end sometimes tanking up the job after the eng/cruiser had died.
Equally however I've been known to pull agro off escorts in my disable sci/sci (no threat control points)... and I have been known in my eng/cruiser to out DPS THREE escorts simultaneously on multiple occasions using beam arrays and still not die.
This goes to prove that while when specced right escorts ARE the kings of the game, if you can spec the others right escorts aren't the be all and end all of STO. The main thing is though as has been mentioned previously, DPS is the only thing that matters outside PvP lets face it, why spend 2 or 3 minutes pounding away at something and not die when you can shred the same thing in 5 seconds flat and not give it the chance to kill you?
I think at this point after endless threads on the subject over the past year alone, mountains of negative feedback and the fact that we continually get new content that follows the prior model of content that the devs are either unwilling to change this, or still simply do not recognize the issue.
The thing is that Hive elite on Tribble during Beta testing didn't fit this model and actually made all classes useful for all of 2 missions, then there were calls for nerfs because 5 Tac/scorts specced for DPS alone were getting owned so the devs turned that into your standard DPS race
Escorts in and of themselves are not overpowered but when you combine them with certain pieces of gear and certain boff/doff combos they are able to do more DPS than anything else going and between basic skills and speed they can be the best tanks in the game while doing this provided they are specced right. I've been known in my tac/scort to tank ESTF transwarp gates and tac cubes sometimes from beginning to end sometimes tanking up the job after the eng/cruiser had died.
Equally however I've been known to pull agro off escorts in my disable sci/sci (no threat control points)... and I have been known in my eng/cruiser to out DPS THREE escorts simultaneously on multiple occasions using beam arrays and still not die.
This goes to prove that while when specced right escorts ARE the kings of the game, if you can spec the others right escorts aren't the be all and end all of STO. The main thing is though as has been mentioned previously, DPS is the only thing that matters outside PvP lets face it, why spend 2 or 3 minutes pounding away at something and not die when you can shred the same thing in 5 seconds flat and not give it the chance to kill you?
So escorts are ok because there are bad players out there?
I think that actuall lowering the NPCs extreme resistance to science skills would help fix the Sci's stf uselessness.
Borg spheres new emergency superspeed makes them able to escape gravity wells without trouble.
It really wouldn't. See ussultimatums post above.
The content is largely to blame, but also the constant increase in possible DPS over the years. At some point it has to be rebalanced if STO combat is to be more than just gimmicky.
A good start would be to re-balance the Attack Pattern abilities, those are a bit out of whack, but the core issue is far more widespread that just that.
So escorts are ok because there are bad players out there?
Blinders off please. The poster you're quoting is making the point that in the PvE realm escorts can be, and frequently are, outperformed by non-escorts. Or is that suddenly not good enough for you?
Blinders off please. The poster you're quoting is making the point that in the PvE realm escorts can be, and frequently are, outperformed by non-escorts. Or is that suddenly not good enough for you?
No, the poster says that, correctly equipped, escorts are the best of the best, able to outDPS everything in the game and being able to tank very well. But as not everyone plays escorts to their full potential all is well...
Fact is the game rewards DPS much more than everything else, escorts are the best at DPS and do not need support from anyone to be effective.
Thats not balance.
Fact is the game rewards DPS much more than everything else, escorts are the best at DPS and do not need support from anyone to be effective.
Thats not balance.
I didn't say it was balance and if I could influence decisions made in the STO systems department I would fix beams and make all healing percentage based which would make escorts severely less tanky, they would receive manoeuvrability buffs to compensate allowing for high damage hit and runs but denying them mobile turret status.
The thing is that Hive elite on Tribble during Beta testing didn't fit this model and actually made all classes useful for all of 2 missions, then there were calls for nerfs because 5 Tac/scorts specced for DPS alone were getting owned so the devs turned that into your standard DPS race
I remember the nerf calls... I also remember the small minority of us who argued to keep the difficulty level as is... we lost. Such a shame... I really enjoyed the hive for that reason.
I didn't say it was balance and if I could influence decisions made in the STO systems department I would fix beams and make all healing percentage based which would make escorts severely less tanky, they would receive manoeuvrability buffs to compensate allowing for high damage hit and runs but denying them mobile turret status.
Agreed... again I point out (or re-point out what USS_Ultimatum said above)... its not the ship... I have nothing against the escort (Hey I have a tac too... and yes I go for DPS)... its the content.
The issue is that with the PVE content "as is" doesn't require anything but an escort (or DPS, and the more the better). Almost to the point of being detrimental IF you bring another class ship.
Believe me, I've gone into STF matches as a Sci, and have gotten berated for not having an escort (before we actually started)... "Healers aren't necessary...". I'll tell you honestly, thats when I rolled a tac... because in the end... he or she was right. I don't require support on my Tac toon/escort I have plenty enough heals, and skill to keep myself alive... When I am on the sci, most of the time in any PVE content, there is no need to toss heals. So as a consequence, my sci resembles tac more and more... skills respec'd (less in sci, more in tac) etc. The PVE Ship is a destroyer (Mobius) and so on.
If it weren't for PVP, the sci toon would've been mothballed permanently, which is sad because I prefer the healer role.
I remember the nerf calls... I also remember the small minority of us who argued to keep the difficulty level as is... we lost. Such a shame... I really enjoyed the hive for that reason.
Do you also remember the week of wonder right before S7 came out? When the STF enemies were actually powerful and smart? And the cries for nerfs and removing the buffs? And how after S7 came out the enemies were even dumber and more pathetic? Especially Hive? Ugh... people these days. I don't know why they were calling it the week of hell, that was the most fun I'd ever had in STFs...
So let's put it this way:
Tacscorts are very powerful and incredibly effective in the right hands. But they are nothing more than flying guns. If you CC them (which isn't hard, I would recommend a VM or severely buffed GW or ES), and SLOW THEM DOWN, suddenly, they aren't nearly as "impossible to kill/beat/be massively outdone by". I have seen one of the best PvP Tacscorts get slapped into oblivion by an angry Tac Cube (no uber torp, it just siphoned off his shields, slapped him a few times with those god awfully powerful BAs, then torped him to the face a few times), only to turn on my Cruiser and do the same thing, only barely dent me. It's all about situation. The reason that tacscorts own in PvE is because in end-game PvE, like STFs and the like, most of your targets DON'T SHOOT BACK. So the tacscorts can get up close and personal and blast them to oblivion. Which is why Hive was considered so hard, because EVERYTHING SHOT BACK. And all of a sudden, tacscorts were shown that they were squishy. Surviving a shot every 10 seconds from the old Tac cubes/regular cubes was nothing. But the Queen and her Unimatrices fired more often, and hit harder, a lot harder to survive. Hell, even cruisers have trouble staying alive at times in that mission. And the new Donatra, the IRW Valdore? She slaps escorts aside like they are nothing more than paper bags. It's hilariously awesome. Tacscorts may be strong, but they aren't invincible.
tl;dr, they are strong, but they are not so strong as you think.
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.
The best way to balance this game is make a death penalty. When your ship gets poped kill off a duty officer or 2 or cause ship damage which can only be repaired buy spending EP (depending on difficulty level). Once you blow up 8-9 times all your ships energy system will be set to half power and you can limp back to the nearest star base for repairs this will serve several key functions.
1) bringing the trinnity back into the game. Cruiser Tank/dps, Science heal/dps, Tactical dps. Cause chain wiping cost too much.
2)Open up the ability to sell more duty officer packs on the store side and offer a EP sink in the way of player repairs.
Ships that you fail to kill before you wipe should return to there patrol/postion with full health and shilds and there escorts whatever they may be, (respawned ships do not drop loot they just have to be killed again, no farming).
The run in guns blazing isnt rewarded in other MMOs and it shouldn't be here. Team work and skill should.
The best way to balance this game is make a death penalty. When your ship gets poped kill off a duty officer or 2 or cause ship damage which can only be repaired buy spending EP (depending on difficulty level). Once you blow up 8-9 times all your ships energy system will be set to half power and you can limp back to the nearest star base for repairs this will serve several key functions.
Umm... Escorts can tank as it is if played right and if Trinity was put into the game with the above proposed death penalty we would end up playing cruisers online because escorts would die a lot and science ships would suffer from their low hulls so anyone NOT flying a cruiser lands tons of death penalties and only cruisers would be played and content would go unplayed due to the cruiser's lack of damage output.
Congratulations you proposed the destruction of STO...
The duty officer deaths would only happen on Advanced and Elite Fleet Content. Most MMOs have a death penalty and get along just fine. Some fine tuning in the Escort department like lowering there shield value slightly to make them less Tanky.
Its a trade off to bring balance into the game. The higher rewards the more risk you should be expected to take.
On normal missions a simple durability loss would be just fine.
But hey if i sucked at playing id worry about a death penalty too.
Trinity 101 Tank goes in grabs aggro, healer heals, dps kills tank targets.
If the healer dies its the tanks fault, if the tank dies its the healers fault, if the dps dies its there own fault.
The best way to balance this game is make a death penalty. When your ship gets poped kill off a duty officer or 2 or cause ship damage which can only be repaired buy spending EP (depending on difficulty level). Once you blow up 8-9 times all your ships energy system will be set to half power and you can limp back to the nearest star base for repairs this will serve several key functions.
1) bringing the trinnity back into the game. Cruiser Tank/dps, Science heal/dps, Tactical dps. Cause chain wiping cost too much.
2)Open up the ability to sell more duty officer packs on the store side and offer a EP sink in the way of player repairs.
Ships that you fail to kill before you wipe should return to there patrol/postion with full health and shilds and there escorts whatever they may be, (respawned ships do not drop loot they just have to be killed again, no farming).
The run in guns blazing isnt rewarded in other MMOs and it shouldn't be here. Team work and skill should.
No.
If you can't make a sci vessel or cruiser work there are several guides that might be of some benefit to you. Bringing back a hard trinity just because some players like the idea of being indispensible is BAD and DO NOT WANT.
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USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
Not necessarily. (Fleet) Norgh BoP could pull that off, I think. You'd be running 3 tac boffs and 1 other one, but that's okish in a hit&run BoP, potentially...
Having said that, I can't come up with other examples. But even with crf1 or apb2 that kind of setup tends to melt faces more quickly than practically anything else. *shrug* Haven't found a way to make a non-escort quite as quick a killer as an alpha-BoP or fully offensive escort.
Wow, really? Here's a news flash - if you intend to use science powers effectively, you need to invest in them. 6 in gens and 50 in aux isn't going to cut it. Let me guess, you're also running Field Gen consoles, instead of graviton consoles, because you 'need' the shield hp. Try actually speccing into Gravitons (full skills and consoles), putting your aux to 125, and running the Gravimetric Doffs for a chance to proc extra Grav Wells, then try this again - works much better as an AOE hold.
Of course, putting that many resources into your sci powers probably means putting less into direct DPS, but that's working as intended. You don't get to have both, that's the essence of balance. The fact is, sci ships are always going to do less DPS than escorts or Cruisers, by design. This is supposed to encourage you to invest in the things sci ships are good at if you want to run a sci ship, but people are so caught up in DPS fever that they mis-spec for the ship, and then complain about being ineffective.
First, we already have a system where no ship is 'needed', at least in PVE. The only content that MAY require a specific team build is No Win Scenario, but I can't speak to that as I don't really run it. Any Elite STF, Fleet Action, or Story Mission, however, can be successfully completed (including optionals, if any) with any composition of ships, as long as the players know the mission and communicate with each other.
Second, your conception of 'balance' appears to be myopic. I say 'appears' because I can't be sure what you mean by 'same goal by different routes'. I think what you mean is that every ship should be able to finish every mission in the same amount of time, just with a different combination of powers. If you mean otherwise, please by all means clarify.
If I am right about what you mean, however, I have to say that I think you misunderstand the concept of 'different playstyles'. What you are talking about is different ways to accomplish DPS, which isn't really the same thing as playing a 'Tank' or 'Crowd Control' styles. Instead of talking about using a cruiser to soak up waves of firepower while slowly wearing down your enemies (Tanking, in other words), you are talking about climbing in a cruiser and doing escort level DPS by clicking on orange buttons instead of red ones. That may or may not be a legitimate design goal, but it is definitely NOT the same thing as a different 'playstyle', it's more like the difference between using phasers and disruptors.
Ultimately this discussion always circles back to this concept, I think - the 'balance' issues have less to do with Tanking or CC not working well, and more to do with players trying to shoehorn the 'wrong' playstyles onto classes and ships that were never intended to play that way.
THIS.... So Much This! Very well put...
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
If you have a good respec for your characters, then you should be able to use that across all your characters. For Example. One of my characters (Tac) flies a Tactical Odyssey that is probably my best ship PVE/PVP. The shields are over 16K, and the hull is 58K+, and knowing what skills to keep yourself alive is crucial to any ship with any captain. If you use multiple skills that share a cooldown, you might need it when it's not available.
It's not rocket science really, my other Tac officer flies the Jam'Hadar attack ship, and the difference is night and day. In my Odyssey, I have my threat control set to 6 because I want to be the one they shoot at. This saves my teammates from a certain quick kill and they can all use any heals to try to keep this massive ship alive. That's how it is supposed to work. If someone is putting threat in a little escort, (you say they are overpowered, but I really disagree) you will die a lot because you are the one getting targeted. Escorts are no better than their support ships. My Odyssey can heal around 27K with no cooldowns, almost a total defiant class heal but if you have threat on your escort, I heal you and you still blow up. Seriously, there are different styles for the different ways of play.
Escorts may have all the damage, but seriously... They can't take a heavy hit. Cruisers may not do all the damage but they can sustain damage for lots longer than a little escort.
One Simple Question: Is DPS all that matters to you?
FYI: true statement -- the longer you are in the battle the more damage you can do, effectively increasing standard dps.
Do you want to blow stuff up or survive? I outfitted my best cruiser with all the best heals that I could strap to it, and have run combat log parsers and it has taken over 1 million damage and not been destroyed. That is called TANKING, and escorts don't do that very well.
A lot of my fleet mates just want to go through rip some stuff up / one shot the enemy and that's when most of them are blown up 2 to 5 times. With the current STF penalties, a minute can drop your damage output several thousand.
My nickel's worth of free advice is: learn your skills that you require to stay alive. Train Eng Team 3/Haz emitter 3 and forgo some damage skills, like Grav well or scramble sensors or Eject plasma. Those won't keep you alive, the others do.
remember: engineering Team and Hazard emitters and aux to structural do NOT share a cooldown, Engineering team and tac team do. Emergency power to shields/Transfer Shield Strength do NOT share a cooldown. Energency power to Shields and weapons do.
Escorts are NOT overpowered. It's the players who spec for power and forget to plan for heals that are dangerous, but if you have heals to counter it, you can stay alive a lot longer.
Too bad that the things Sci ships are good at are useless. Oh yes, Gravity Well. The only Sci power worth mentioning. And still, some more DPS is more valuable than it.
No ships are needed? No, escorts are needed (unless you have some high DPS cruisers, you know, the ones which are played wrong by maxing DPS instead of tanking). Sci ships and cruisers are not needed, there you are correct.
Oh sure, a healer is nice. But a escort can heal just fine. No need to sacrifice DPS by bringing a Sci ship to do that.
The only playstyle STO rewards is DPS. You can not outtank STFs and CCing the enemies only delays them, but you still need good DPS to finish in time (which as you said Sci ships are not supposed to do). And most fleet actions flat out only reward DPS. Sci ships have flat out no chance in getting the 1st place.
And its not as if the escorts need any help. They might not be as durable as a cruiser, but with the right boffs and equipment they do well enough to not need a tank. And even if one of them dies once, the death penalty is nothing compared the the advantage of massive DPS escorts bring compared to a tank of sci.
But lets pretend that something else than just DPS was rewarded in STO. When every ship would perform their role as good as escorts do theirs, the game would be completely broken. Cruisers could sit between 4 tac cubes and never die and Sci ships could press a button and disable an enemy completely for a minute. Yes, escorts are that good in DPS (and not bad in healing and tanking either).
Making every ship as powerful in their respective roles as escorts are in theirs the last shred of challenge in STO would disappear unless you want even more 1 shot kills and CC immune enemies (were are the DPS immune enemies btw?).
I have to agree, that poster nailed it.
Unfortunately the reason everyone has DPS fever is exactly because all content is allowed to be completed by "any team composition".
In this game its been taken to the extreme, where not even an ounce of crowd control is needed.
Thus we are brought to DPS fever, and everyone wishing their favorite ship type was capable of dealing it.
The game only has two damage modes:
1) Negligible.
2) One shot kills, may or may not be telegraphed with a huge glowing cone.
Result?
= Do not require tanks, and tanking does not function.
= No real reason to play support/healing.
Then there are the large pack of NPC encounters that have the following rules:
1) Gravity Well is sometimes nice to have, only in some spots in some missions.
2) AoE damage is universally useful.
Result?
= Control powers are not needed, required or even optimal.
Then there are "Boss" mob designs:
1) Giant sack of hull. Maybe has 1, or 2 buffs.
2) Giant sack of hull. Has a few buffs. Only appears in The Hive (Space).
3) Nearly immune to most control effects or debuffs.
Result?
= No reason for debilitation debuffs, no reason for subnuke. No reason to play a dedicated debuffer.
= Damage resist debuff is universally useful.
The issue is not Escorts.
The issue is PvE design.
I think at this point after endless threads on the subject over the past year alone, mountains of negative feedback and the fact that we continually get new content that follows the prior model of content that the devs are either unwilling to change this, or still simply do not recognize the issue.
As far as beams go, a little adjustment to their power drain and shield penetration mechanics, and they'd be as competitive as they once were.
Escorts in and of themselves are not overpowered but when you combine them with certain pieces of gear and certain boff/doff combos they are able to do more DPS than anything else going and between basic skills and speed they can be the best tanks in the game while doing this provided they are specced right. I've been known in my tac/scort to tank ESTF transwarp gates and tac cubes sometimes from beginning to end sometimes tanking up the job after the eng/cruiser had died.
Equally however I've been known to pull agro off escorts in my disable sci/sci (no threat control points)... and I have been known in my eng/cruiser to out DPS THREE escorts simultaneously on multiple occasions using beam arrays and still not die.
This goes to prove that while when specced right escorts ARE the kings of the game, if you can spec the others right escorts aren't the be all and end all of STO. The main thing is though as has been mentioned previously, DPS is the only thing that matters outside PvP lets face it, why spend 2 or 3 minutes pounding away at something and not die when you can shred the same thing in 5 seconds flat and not give it the chance to kill you?
The thing is that Hive elite on Tribble during Beta testing didn't fit this model and actually made all classes useful for all of 2 missions, then there were calls for nerfs because 5 Tac/scorts specced for DPS alone were getting owned so the devs turned that into your standard DPS race
Borg spheres new emergency superspeed makes them able to escape gravity wells without trouble.
So escorts are ok because there are bad players out there?
It really wouldn't. See ussultimatums post above.
The content is largely to blame, but also the constant increase in possible DPS over the years. At some point it has to be rebalanced if STO combat is to be more than just gimmicky.
A good start would be to re-balance the Attack Pattern abilities, those are a bit out of whack, but the core issue is far more widespread that just that.
Blinders off please. The poster you're quoting is making the point that in the PvE realm escorts can be, and frequently are, outperformed by non-escorts. Or is that suddenly not good enough for you?
No, the poster says that, correctly equipped, escorts are the best of the best, able to outDPS everything in the game and being able to tank very well. But as not everyone plays escorts to their full potential all is well...
Fact is the game rewards DPS much more than everything else, escorts are the best at DPS and do not need support from anyone to be effective.
Thats not balance.
I didn't say it was balance and if I could influence decisions made in the STO systems department I would fix beams and make all healing percentage based which would make escorts severely less tanky, they would receive manoeuvrability buffs to compensate allowing for high damage hit and runs but denying them mobile turret status.
I remember the nerf calls... I also remember the small minority of us who argued to keep the difficulty level as is... we lost. Such a shame... I really enjoyed the hive for that reason.
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
Agreed... again I point out (or re-point out what USS_Ultimatum said above)... its not the ship... I have nothing against the escort (Hey I have a tac too... and yes I go for DPS)... its the content.
The issue is that with the PVE content "as is" doesn't require anything but an escort (or DPS, and the more the better). Almost to the point of being detrimental IF you bring another class ship.
Believe me, I've gone into STF matches as a Sci, and have gotten berated for not having an escort (before we actually started)... "Healers aren't necessary...". I'll tell you honestly, thats when I rolled a tac... because in the end... he or she was right. I don't require support on my Tac toon/escort I have plenty enough heals, and skill to keep myself alive... When I am on the sci, most of the time in any PVE content, there is no need to toss heals. So as a consequence, my sci resembles tac more and more... skills respec'd (less in sci, more in tac) etc. The PVE Ship is a destroyer (Mobius) and so on.
If it weren't for PVP, the sci toon would've been mothballed permanently, which is sad because I prefer the healer role.
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
Do you also remember the week of wonder right before S7 came out? When the STF enemies were actually powerful and smart? And the cries for nerfs and removing the buffs? And how after S7 came out the enemies were even dumber and more pathetic? Especially Hive? Ugh... people these days. I don't know why they were calling it the week of hell, that was the most fun I'd ever had in STFs...
So let's put it this way:
Tacscorts are very powerful and incredibly effective in the right hands. But they are nothing more than flying guns. If you CC them (which isn't hard, I would recommend a VM or severely buffed GW or ES), and SLOW THEM DOWN, suddenly, they aren't nearly as "impossible to kill/beat/be massively outdone by". I have seen one of the best PvP Tacscorts get slapped into oblivion by an angry Tac Cube (no uber torp, it just siphoned off his shields, slapped him a few times with those god awfully powerful BAs, then torped him to the face a few times), only to turn on my Cruiser and do the same thing, only barely dent me. It's all about situation. The reason that tacscorts own in PvE is because in end-game PvE, like STFs and the like, most of your targets DON'T SHOOT BACK. So the tacscorts can get up close and personal and blast them to oblivion. Which is why Hive was considered so hard, because EVERYTHING SHOT BACK. And all of a sudden, tacscorts were shown that they were squishy. Surviving a shot every 10 seconds from the old Tac cubes/regular cubes was nothing. But the Queen and her Unimatrices fired more often, and hit harder, a lot harder to survive. Hell, even cruisers have trouble staying alive at times in that mission. And the new Donatra, the IRW Valdore? She slaps escorts aside like they are nothing more than paper bags. It's hilariously awesome. Tacscorts may be strong, but they aren't invincible.
tl;dr, they are strong, but they are not so strong as you think.
Neither of those are likely to happen. Tacscorts rule PvE. You just get used to it.
1) bringing the trinnity back into the game. Cruiser Tank/dps, Science heal/dps, Tactical dps. Cause chain wiping cost too much.
2)Open up the ability to sell more duty officer packs on the store side and offer a EP sink in the way of player repairs.
Ships that you fail to kill before you wipe should return to there patrol/postion with full health and shilds and there escorts whatever they may be, (respawned ships do not drop loot they just have to be killed again, no farming).
The run in guns blazing isnt rewarded in other MMOs and it shouldn't be here. Team work and skill should.
Umm... Escorts can tank as it is if played right and if Trinity was put into the game with the above proposed death penalty we would end up playing cruisers online because escorts would die a lot and science ships would suffer from their low hulls so anyone NOT flying a cruiser lands tons of death penalties and only cruisers would be played and content would go unplayed due to the cruiser's lack of damage output.
Congratulations you proposed the destruction of STO...
Its a trade off to bring balance into the game. The higher rewards the more risk you should be expected to take.
On normal missions a simple durability loss would be just fine.
But hey if i sucked at playing id worry about a death penalty too.
GG.
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
If the healer dies its the tanks fault, if the tank dies its the healers fault, if the dps dies its there own fault.
No.
If you can't make a sci vessel or cruiser work there are several guides that might be of some benefit to you. Bringing back a hard trinity just because some players like the idea of being indispensible is BAD and DO NOT WANT.