Yet another opinion based Guide to fixing STO

Hello Forum users and much rumored Cryptic Dev team that supposedly views these forums.

as a long time trekky and strong fan of STO, i'd like to suggest a few things to make this game alot better, and i hope to present this in a way to make it easily understandable.

First off, i want to say that while i love flying escorts, i do still use my science and cruisers, and do prefer the engineer class, at the same time as escorts. i dont believe in dedicated classes to ships, AKA, science characters in science ships, engineers in cruisers, etc. i've enjoyed my engineer in escort for a long time, as well as my tactical in cruiser.
Second, to all those people that make topics saying "nerf escorts, nerf tacticals, nerf! nerf! nerf!" i just want to say a very kind, GTFO. with all due respect, that word is far over used and i firmly believe a dev dies every time that word is said. so now that i've killed 5 so far with this introduction, let us continue.


Escorts:
there have been many things with escorts that have long made them a preferred class over the others. high damage, easy to make survive a while, and basically the best at soloing everything.
now there's a few issues i do have with this, even as an escort flyer. first, i believe escorts should be the squishiest class, as they are the smallest, some even smaller then intepid or Nova class science ships, and last alot longer too. this is a case where escorts should probably get a slight pinch to their primary defense, shields. alot of people complain how escorts with tactical team are virtually invulnerable. this is definitely true in some cases. the trick is not in "nerfing" tactical team, as that means putting a handicap on science, and cruisers and that's not what we want. instead a direct approach at the issue, by reducing the shield modifier on all escorts by 1/4th what they are currently. escorts currently use their shields to make themselves unstoppable by tanking all the things, and then exploiting their high DPS to kill everything.
now, while i am an engineer, i can personally show that this is a real problem. in ISE, i have, and constantly do tank large sections of the map while doing the top damage in the squad. this is partly player skill, (as the game should be) and also a case of escorts being overly favored by stats.


Cruisers:
as far as playability, these are currently in second place. they arent as fun as escorts, but should be. with the exception of DS9 and Voyager, all of Star Trek has focused on one cruiser or another, so we have alot to compare. they are slow, they are huge. however the current base turn for alot of cruisers could be bumped up by at least 2 points each. i believe most cruisers have between a 6 and an 8. if that number were to be between 8 and 10, this would be a bit closer to how it should be, and would allow them to be fun to fly. their momentum would also get slightly worse too, and could cause some fun with flooring your turnrate and watching your ship slide around like a car on ice.
Furthermore i believe beams should get a boost of 20%, with one thing. they fire a bit slower, but would get a higher burst.
it'd also be nice if they could get a bit more hull. when escorts have 31k, and cruisers that are built to be tanks and about 4 times bigger have 44k, there's something wrong. cruisers should have upwards of 50k, BASE hull. with the oddy being the biggest at 66k base hull.
in both PVP, and PVE, cruisers are considerably less enjoyable to use, and even harder to actually succeed with. i'm not saying you CANT succeed, infact i've taken the free oddy i got a year or so ago and actually beaten several really good escorts before. NOT the point.
without access to dual cannons, they cant do very much damage. and single beams, even dual beams, feel abandoned by the game. added at launch, left alone since, but i shall return to this in a bit.

science:
now, science ships have soo much controversy over. they used to be way OP, but then scaled back to the point where flying one is laughable. take the intrepid class, an otherwise great science vessel. it suffers greatly from one major flaw: it cant take much damage, and deals next to none as well.

now, this is sorta how it's meant to be, but is way screwed in how it's laid out. Science is the healer class, support, the guys at the back that make the magic happen. they arent at the front tanking, they arent in the middle prepared to rush forward to DPS, no. they sit at the back and make their allies really strong, and their enemies really weak.

science should be like this: they cant fight alone, however with a fleet, they are able to turn the tables of a war. with the exception of lockbox science ships and the vesta, there's no science build that is actually really effective in PVP and PVE. no one looks at an intrepid and says "oh no! its a intrepid! i must keep my ship away from that!" no cruiser, or escort takes it seriously. not even a vesta is concerned by one.
Escorts have 2 things going for them, high damage and speed. science should be able to use skills like gravity well to bring escorts to a stop in the hold effect. when an escort sees a science, it should be really nervous, not be thinking "lawl, free prey". the only reason you'd have a science ship right now is for the off chance you're really worried about cloak. since that's a hardly concernable feature of PVP, even with romulans, this is something that could use a change. even in PVE, enemies with skills like "emergency power to engines" ignore gravity well as if it isnt even there.
instead, gravity well should have a chance to take off the engines of any ship that is in range for 5 seconds, meaning a science ship has a good chance of being able to catch and stop escorts so their teams escorts can pin it and blow it up. other skills such as tykens rift needs more range, and to actually drain power instead of make the power bar of the target yawn.
repulsors should stun the target slightly. Viral matrix should take effect faster, with a longer stun time. science heals should be more AoE at higher levels.
lastly, Science ships deserve more shields. their hull already sucks, and this isnt likely to change, nore should it really. their shields on the other hand deserve to be higher then cruisers.


now that the general ship classes rant is over, i have some skills i want to point out for rethinking.

Beam: Fire at Will:
want to agro everything in range? good! cause that's ALL this will do! seriously now, this skill has never made a noticeable impact in actual damage being done to a target, and is so rarely useful in PVP or PVE to kill stuff, its stupid. i know some people managed to do something that made it look like this skill is useful, but lets face it, how long did they spend thinking about how to do that?
instead: fire at will is still an AoE, however instead of hitting every target in 10k once, it has a max of 4 targets it can hit, (sorta like scatter volley for cannons) and increases the damage of beams by charging the beams a bit and making them stronger, while not firing as long. instead of "peeeewwwwwww peeeeeeewwwwww" they'd be more like "PEEW! PEEEW!" if you get what i'm trying to get across here. ...... excuse me, its text, this is very hard.

Beam: beam overload:
now, i realize you have to be careful as this could be so easily overused by escorts if you make it too good, however dont you think that this skill could effect more then one beam? like perhaps all 8 on the cruiser? i'm aware that a cruiser broadsiding with this skill would get more damage in one blast then an escort probably does in one second, however there's several reasons why this would be great.
cruisers NEED an option for damage, this would give them something.
since you are literally shoving your ships entire warp core of power into your weapons, and then blowing that energy out all at once, this skill would automatically drain all other power systems down to 5 for 2 seconds, causing a disable effect, and making your weapons stop shooting for 2-5 seconds.
lastly, Beam overload is already really hard to use, and this wouldnt change that, just make it actually worth while to use on cruisers. its not always easy to keep both your front and back beams on a target, and this change to BO would require that when you fire you're overloaded beams, that any beam bank that wasnt in a targeting arc to to fire, wouldnt still have BO after the other banks had fired. this means that you activate BO with the target infront of you, the buff would effect your back beams as far as them receiving the buff, however they wouldnt fire, nore keep the buff if they couldnt shoot when the front beams fired.


now, engineering skills,

i've long felt that skills such as the emergency power to X should be switched with the "auxilery to X" skills. iether that, or both of them made to be trainable onto ensign slots. no matter what ship you fly, there's simply not enough options for ensign engineering, and at high levels, there's certainly no shortage of weirdly under powered skills.



lastly, i know i already said what i thought about science, but i truely thnk there should be more higher level heals for science, as well as AoE heals for science. actual Skills, not consoles.


okay, long rant i know, almost done

this is more directed at the community, but i feel the devs should read this too.

to all those people who constantly keep saying "what about us casual players? cryptic has forgotten about us!"
1. no, they havent. infact, they're doing so much to make you happy, they're not doing nearly enough for those of us who are on here every day playing 8 hours a day, buying stuff from the C store so cryptic can afford to keep this game running.

2. how causal can you be to not be able to do a reputation system where you do 1 mark mission, start 2 simple projects with common buy-from-a-freighter easy drops, and let it run over night? yeah, granted you might not be able to log in every day, but guess what, if you go a month without logging in, your reputation doesnt reset, its STILL WAITING FOR YOU. no need to rush or anything, take your time.

3. if you're so causal that a log in for 15 minutes every 20 hours to to do a very simple reputation project, start it, and then go about you're merry way, why are you playing an MMO??


now, Cryptic, if you read this, stop doing everything to make the casual play for 15-minutes-a-week-players happy, and give us something hard for the play-for-8-hours-a-day-players to do. and by hard, i dont mean hive onslaught. yes, that's hard, and only beaten it about 1/4 times i try, but we want something to keep our minds busy for a while. most MMOs do this by making the player have to get to lvl 100 before they stop leveling. with STO we know this isnt really possible, so instead, please add something that does require alot of active work, with mile stone rewards, like the reputation, but less build around the idea of people spending only as much time on here as they do on farmville. this isnt a facebook app, its an MMO, and should be treated like one.

aka, dont play unless you have actual time to spend on the game.


and that concludes this simple rant.