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Go escort or go home?
queeg9000
Member Posts: 39 Arc User
I'm pretty new so forgive me if I get anything wrong its just an observation of some one who has just leveled 2 chars to 50.Not talking elite STF's or anything anything advanced just the leveling experience. I leveled A Klingon in BOP's exclusively and starfleet in only cruisers Both tac officers.
Lets start with a little background about why I have come to this conclusion.Keep in mind I had no clue what I was doing until level 30 in my BOP so it should be at major disadvantage right? RIIIGHT?
BOP.Had a blast,it had great survivability great damage and flew like a fighter jet.I died like twice in my whole 1-50 journey (not including buggy STF's).
I spent hardly any skill points I didn't retrain my BOFF's and I dismissed the DOFF system totally as I couldn't be bothered.
It was mostly in greens and whites.At around level 30 ish I decided I liked the game and should learn how to play properly so looked up some guides specced properly got appropriate BOFF skills assigned DOFFs etc.
Basically after learning how to play I was killing anything in missions before my cloak had fully wore off.
Cruisers....wear to start.Keep in mind I knew exactly what I was doing right off the bat,I spent skill points every time I had some to spend and actually put them in the right places. my BOFF setup has been almost perfect from the start,I actually assigned DOFF's for the lovely bonuses they provide.At level 30 I even bought some top of the line gear for it off the exchange.
Lets compare how both ship types performed at level 30.
The cruiser has a big fat 0 things it performs better then my BOP at.Its just as squishy,it does less damage,slower.The cruiser was all purple and BOP was in garbage I can't stress this enough.
I know someone will come here quoting max level with the best gear/ships etc but this is not what this post is about hence why its posted in the academy section not general.
Lets start with a little background about why I have come to this conclusion.Keep in mind I had no clue what I was doing until level 30 in my BOP so it should be at major disadvantage right? RIIIGHT?
BOP.Had a blast,it had great survivability great damage and flew like a fighter jet.I died like twice in my whole 1-50 journey (not including buggy STF's).
I spent hardly any skill points I didn't retrain my BOFF's and I dismissed the DOFF system totally as I couldn't be bothered.
It was mostly in greens and whites.At around level 30 ish I decided I liked the game and should learn how to play properly so looked up some guides specced properly got appropriate BOFF skills assigned DOFFs etc.
Basically after learning how to play I was killing anything in missions before my cloak had fully wore off.
Cruisers....wear to start.Keep in mind I knew exactly what I was doing right off the bat,I spent skill points every time I had some to spend and actually put them in the right places. my BOFF setup has been almost perfect from the start,I actually assigned DOFF's for the lovely bonuses they provide.At level 30 I even bought some top of the line gear for it off the exchange.
Lets compare how both ship types performed at level 30.
The cruiser has a big fat 0 things it performs better then my BOP at.Its just as squishy,it does less damage,slower.The cruiser was all purple and BOP was in garbage I can't stress this enough.
I know someone will come here quoting max level with the best gear/ships etc but this is not what this post is about hence why its posted in the academy section not general.
Post edited by queeg9000 on
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I would like to find someone you define as a 'noob' to out do my cruiser. Yes there are some extremely good escorts that can do twice the damage my cruiser can do, but at end game any ship can put out a lot of DPS.
CRUISERS NEED A 206% HULL BUFF
Read the whole thing and what I just said makes sense.
Also please keep the boasting to a minimum.
CRUISERS NEED A 206% HULL BUFF
For example the LtCmdr. Nova refit. I can make it a very nice shield tank using a cannon build. It still turns fast enough for me to keep my sides/front on target and have all 4 cannons going. While rotating EPS1 and either TSS1 or 2.
My shields barely go down. Unless I get focus fired Alpha strike in PvP.
Mind you I havent used the Cmdr. Cruiser for a while now. So I can't recall the build I had going on it. But for a Dps cruiser using a 2 canon 1 torp fore /3 turret aft.
Opting for either CRF or THY. Still gives that nice burst damage.
And instead of TSS 1 and 2 you simply swap to EPS 1 and 2.
Now why does this matter. If you can tank the Escorts or what ever it is you happen to be fighting. And with the right weapon powers/consoles etc. You can still do as much dps as an escort.
Anyway thats my two cents on the matter from my experince. I hope that helps
First off, who cares about level 30? Level 50 is really all that matters
I completely disagree with your entire outlook and I think this mentality is quite rampant among both new and experienced players. Escorts are not always all they are cracked up to be. In a firefight with a dreadnought class npc like a tactical cube or tholian tarantula, escorts often cannot hold their own and end up getting ripped apart by just a few torpedos. If more players looked at KDF battlecruisers like the Vor'cha or the Tor'Kaht, they would see that most of them can be much more formidable than escorts with comparable damage potential.
Personally, I use the Kar'fi Battle Carrier, which in many cases, outperforms most escorts in all categories except turn rate. Players like you underestimate or do not consider the effectiveness of things like carrier pets and Science or Engineering BOff powers.
In a situation like this, it helps to be open minded. Damage is not everything.
Ajma420 - Lv 50 Tac - Pride of the Federation
Catherine The Great - Lv 50 Tac - Pride of the Empire
Vladimir - Lv 50 Tac - Pride of the Rihannsu Empire
1. In regular mission-based solo PvE it doesn't matter how much you perform compared to others. You'd have to be pretty badly built to get wiped by the enemy A.I. and even if it takes a bit longer to get a kill, you still get a kill. True, some things are a bit unfair like RomuBorg ships decloaking on top of you right after you fought off a previous wave, but otherwise you can handle anything in the game.
2. KDF ships perform better. That's their main selling point.
5 waves of attackers
The escort finishes the mission in a few minutes and goes and does another patrol
The cruiser is still working on the first patrol mission
Thats just how it is
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
your sig is so cool but cant decide if you troll in the post or in the sig :rolleyes:
in pvp even if the nOOb is a pro a sci ship/cruiser will still kill it .(of course without the run away tactic )
As to the broad point, yes its a problem. Increased power production capabilities for engineers have made it less of a problem, but it is still a problem.
I love my sig too.
I am quite serious about cruisers. Yes they take more work to get good but when doing elite STFs I can take out things as fast as most escorts in the game (yes that includes people in the ELITESTF channel save a few) and I can handle my own. I do it in a different way but it works just as well. As an example, more times than not when I am doing an STF, the cure space as an example, I will take on the Kang, the rest of the group will do the rest and a lot of the time, while defending the Kang, I will have taken out 3-5 of the nanite generators before the other four players have taken out the other two cubes. This is not always but it happens quite often.
CRUISERS NEED A 206% HULL BUFF
*claps* a man that seems like he didn't read only the tl'dr...Deleting the tl'dr as we speak
Lets take that Captain level Galaxy class ship and make it viable for PVE at Level 30. You have the following:
Lt Tac
Cmd Eng
Lt Eng
Lt Sci
Ok, how do we make this viable with these slots? Quite easily actually. Fill it in with this, all of which can be done for under 100k ec:
BFAW1 and APB1 (No Tactical team needed since they will die pretty fast anyways)
EPtS1, ET2, Aux to Dampeners 2, Warp Plasma 3 (2 will work if you can't get 3)
EPtS1, EPtW2
HE1, TSS2/FBP1 (Either one, they targets won't live long enough to last through it all anyways.)
With all of that, you get 7 beam arrays of the same type, load up on 2 consoles of the same weapon type as your beams, and have at 'er. You can either aim right through them all and use warp plasma or go across from them all . Either way you will get most of your targets in the first salvo of FAW and all of those abilities can be bought (save for warp plasma 3) from the BOFF trainer. Go along, broad side them till they are dead and you probably will not even need to turn. Should you need to turn, evasive and Aux to Dampeners will work great for it.
CRUISERS NEED A 206% HULL BUFF
A Cruiser is not a Escort.
PVE is DPS designed.
PVE is easy to overpower and kill.
Escorts create amazing DPS.
Escorts have an easy time against PvE.
None of this is new.
R.I.P
the idea around cruisers is to tank not to grind for tech doffs to a2b and do more damage overtime than escorts. people want to turn cruisers into dps ships (escort class is or was the dps class ship) and that requires more effort but to use cruisers as tanks they dont need more effort than a escort.Thing is tanks are useless because theres no mission or thing to do for that type of gameplay...even in pvp.
its a tier 5 shuttle with battlecloak lol
This is probably the most accurate statement you'll see about it. Escorts require a cookie cutter set up, do very well on cheap gear. The cruiser is all about weapon power drain, and you need some serious set up and gear to consistently fight that.
That said I can take my eng cruiser in a fight and come out roughly as fast as my tac escort, sometimes faster. It all depends on location of the enemies, spread out that cruiser is faster, bunched up the escort blasts them in one scatter volley.
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so you dont fly a escort because you want your cruiser to be a escort .They should release cruiser holoemitters because clearly the problem is the way the ship looks.
Cruisers are the tanky ships not the dps ships.If you want dps fly escort but dont QQ about how hard is to get dps from a cruiser.
1.its pretty much the same just more squishy and with a battle cloak.splitting hairs much?
2.really? who knew?
3.Thats what I was getting at.
4.no **** but much more painful in a cruiser
5.a dps ship that does good dps?well I never.
6.again that's my point.
7.not new to you but new to someone who has played for under a month.
why did you bother taking time to post that rubbish?
Do I have to remind the vets posting here that this is a thread in the new comers forum?
Instead of useless posts saying "this is so misinformed" inform me like empireofsteve did instead of making poor attempts at trolling.
empireofsteve I have pretty much exactly that setup but thanx.
I just found it shocking that I would die alot more in a tankie ship with a tankie build in 10 times better gear and setup than I would in a squishy ship with awful gear just mashing space bar and neglecting key parts of the game like BOFF ability's and DOFF's.
I never complained about a tank ship not out damaging a dps ship once.More complaining about dieing alot more in my "tank ship"
1) The Sovereign tactical assault cruiser is good, thanks to the additional tac console the DPS is quite high for a cruiser. However, she wont last as long as...
2) The star cruiser. Give it a covariant shield array and consoles for additional max shield and wait. It?l take a while until science team 2 and emergency power to shields are needed. Reverse shields always first. However, the DPS is...not impressive and playing episodes become a pain in the TRIBBLE
3) Now it is time for the tough guys: The Odyssey class cruisers :eek: I tested every cruiser for a long time. But the Odyssey class beats them all (every test on elite STFs, the most time vs Borg) The tactical Odyssey has a massive console layout, combining max hull resistance with 4 tac consoles. Except i guess a klingon carrier, there is no (playable) ship equal in health and dmg resistance. I am using science team 2, emergency power to shields, reverse shield polarity, rotate shield frequency, engineering team 2, aux power to structural integrity, miracle worker and hazard emitters.
Combined with the Odysseys universal consoles and set bonus, the resulting resistance to any kind of damage is just rediculous. Even a borg cube on elite does not have the power to overwhelm this massive defense. Duty officer skills improve the reload time for miracle worker almost to zero. Work bees can heal you or an ally.
Offense skills: High density beam, torpedo spread and tactical team 1, thanks to the increased crit hit chance of the antiproton beam arrays, the DPS is high enough to kill the most enemies sooner or later. Launching the Odysseys escort ship (console) further increases the DPS.
The tactic is always the same: Get side by side with the enemy and fight it out on point blank range, just like two old ships :cool: Except via instantkill, there is no chance to take this ship out. Escorts? Pff...eat dust and try again :rolleyes:
Can you play the game as a cruiser? Sure, but you're either a wannabe escort or a cheerleader throwing Attack Pattern Beta and Beam Fire at Will so that the grown-up ships can kill stuff faster.
Really? Cheerleading?
1. Someone is not a team player. Mass debuffs like APB augment your TEAM's DD potential and BFAW and CRF draw aggro so you and your toilet paper hull don't get ripped apart by a few spheres.
2. So every ship that isn't an escort, but has the DPS of an escort, is just emulating an escort? If I really wanted to act like an escort, I would take off all my Eng consoles and use abandon ship every chance I get just to die more often.
3. If someone is competent in a cruiser, they probably aren't complaining. A WELL BUILT cruiser or carrier can outmatch an escort in DPS with the use of exotic damage like Grav Well.
I'm not complaining about how OP escorts are or how weak cruisers are because neither are true. Just don't go writing off cruisers because we save your a** more than you could ever know
Ajma420 - Lv 50 Tac - Pride of the Federation
Catherine The Great - Lv 50 Tac - Pride of the Empire
Vladimir - Lv 50 Tac - Pride of the Rihannsu Empire
You had me going till this.
No, just no. Even a rainbow escort shooting skittles out of every orrifice(assuming 3/4 DHC/3turret) will still out DPS a CRUISER trying to use sci skills.
I've got a sci capt whose built around pretty much nothing but sci flourishes and the few dps skills we do have; and even I couldn't get anywhere near the dps of an okay escort. The only exception to that is when I'm in my vesta pewpewing with DHC's. Then I have a 50/50 of out parsing because of the ADDED damage of exotic abilities.
As for curisers 'saving my butt' -- wtf? Nothing in this game requires survivability. You ever see 5 GOOD escorts do an elite stf? Everything litterally melts before they can do damage. Don't really need heals if everything dies. The only time I could see a cruiser or sci being useful is on elite hive. So congratulations on being more useful(argubaly) on ONE encounter in the entire game.
Anyone trying to say that a crusier or sci is more effective at getting through content (assuming same player with same gear) is just ignorant to game mechanics.
It is unfortunate, but game mechanics heavily favor high weapon power, fast turning, and front facing weapons. That's not to say you can't do well with any other ship configuration, but why spend a bunch of time trying to put together that elite aux build or some indestructible cruiser when it won't really outperform the most basic escort.
In my view, the developers need to improve gameplay as to increase the appeal of other types of ships, builds, and strategies. Maybe improve synergy to abilities that tie in to class powers and system power levels. For example extra bonuses for Sci Officer / Science Ship / Max Aux or Engineer / Cruiser / Max Shield configurations that make them look more appealing than Any / Escort / Max Wpn builds.
Example:
[Engineering Captain] [Cruiser] Extra 1.5 seconds duration for emergency power to weapons (for every +5 power over 100 in shields)
[Science Captain][Science Ship] Decrease recharge time of feedback pulse 3 seconds for every 5 power over 100 in aux.
These could also mix and match like special buff for [Tactical] + [Cruiser] + [Max Engine] combo. A few strategic tweaks could help diversify gameplay a bit and open up new possibilities.
'nuff said.
OP: People keep talking about the issue at max level because the leveling phase is and always was a joke. You need to have done something wrong if you had so much problems with a cruiser. Heck, if we are strictly taking leveling, a cruiser is probably even easier to do good in than an escort, since you just FaW your way to victory with no fancy flying or chasing enemies around required. Yes it might take 4 seconds more, but you just can't fail at it.
As for cruisers "needing" 20M EC builds with A2B to be competitive that is also utter BS. Competently flown, and properly build, old fashioned dragon flagship style still deals twice as much damage as the average EliteSTF channel inhabitant in their escorts. I do it all the time. Yes A2B is even more effective, but only to get that last 2k or so DPS boost if yuo really need it to pat yourself on the back, but even without you can easily do 8k in anything but a Galaxy (the average in EliteSTF is ~3-3.5k in general, 4.5k if you are lucky for escorts; for pugs it is ~2k) without A2B.
This is strictly speaking PvE, not taking PvP into account in any way.
I can understand why you say that building a escort is easier than building a cruiser or a science vessel, however flying a escort is not so simple. What you said about escorts works for some pve content only, but playing a stf using a escort is not just sitting and firing because you can't tank as much as a cruiser or a sci vessel and you do not have as much healing abilities as a cruiser or a sci vessel can. However since many players do not have dps (and not because they fly a cruiser or a sci vessel), you have to take some more risk: a few cruiser/sci vessel tank and no one heal you. And if you want to play pvp than building a escort is very different than building it for pve content.
Moreover some equipments for escorts are much more expensive (DHC, turrets), expecially for pvp content.
The difficult in building (for example) a sci vessel is that every science ability need more than one science skill. Building a escort is much more intuitive, but you can't build a science vessel if first you do not learn what skills are required for a science ability. A lot of player do not pay attention to that and do not specialize theri sci vessel on a few abilities, the result is a sci vessel which can do nothing as good as the player need because his skill points are not enough to cover enough every skill they need.
Moreover the most of players try to build their ships thinking too much to dps. The best science ship is not the one which has a "great" dps, so the cruiser. My sci vessels do not focus on dps, I usually use my tactical consoles slot for some usefull universal consoles. When I fly my sci vessels I only focus on debuffing/turning off the enemy, moreover since I have a great shield and hull regeneration, I also use threat control and threat scaling consoles to tank, so escorts can do their job better and faster... enough to compensate 10 times more the dps my sci toons do not have.
To be onest, before last patch, my sci fed toon uses the hyperplasma romulan torpedo, 2x purple projectile officer and a lt cmd tactical boff with TT1, THY2, THY3. That worked very well in stf against every enemy. Actually it do not work well against pheres because they are faster, but still work very well to deal great damage against slower (and bigger) targets like normal and tactical cubes or gates. However you really do not need it, my kdf sci toon only use a lt tactical BOff with TT1, TT2 and 6x beam array and still work great.
The point is: if you want to deal dps, then fly escorts... but if you fly cruiser or science vessel your role first is support, even if there are ways to have high dps (and belive me, there are...).
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
aux2bat cruiser with FAW outdps 4dhc escorts.Join PvP bootcamp to see how many myths PvE has.
escorts are good at doing spike damage or damage on point (crf),but for overall damage a cruiser with FAW will win.
A few members in my fleet fly those. . . those abominations! Those things are EVIL! EVIL, I say! What is a slap to the face is that, while we escorts are at our best while facing a target, they just have to fly like bums and coast around the battle field and throw out their evil ways. . . painful evil ways, I should say.
Member since early 2011
Eeehhh... I am still waiting to see FAW mean something other than Fail At Will. I mean it is good for spam clearing but the actual damage it produces is notably weak. Even if you are doing with DBB you really need to be hitting frequent Crits with Antiprotons to see any sort of real damage.
You are correct that Cruisers can deal more DPS than an Escort but that Escorts have much higher Burst Damage. However... DPS in PvP is irrelevant. I know I will get chewed on for this but let us be honest... If you can dish out 10K DPS as a constant that is all fine and well but a good tank can tank it all day long. You need that 80K direct to hull at a moment's notice if you really want to blow a ship up. This is even noticeable in PvE.
Carriers though... Those are not to be in this conversation... Carriers are a TOTALLY different monster and trust me... They can perform both DPS and Spike if you know what you are doing and they are utter BEASTS. They turn like Moons but they do not NEED to be facing you.
People use them to win purple stuffs in fleet events (pve) and to clean spam (by doing beam spam lol ) in pvp.
Yes people time their spike damage in pvp.damage over time means nothing now thanks to 1000 rep passives.Sure is good for cleaning pets ,spamming attack engines or apb ,but you cant use that damage for spike damage e.g between 2 TT
Aux2bat ,marion doff ,dem ,borg cutting beam with FAW will outdps any escort ,at least in the parser.Why you think technician doffs cost more than weapons :rolleyes:
I personally dont like that because (again IMO) cruisers should be tanky .I want a role (as in maps ,game modes) for a tank not to turn a tank into a escort.
not so unintuitive...
I do not know how exctally it works, cause I do not fly cruisers... however, remeber that some cruisers have 3 tactical consoles, beam array have a wide firing angle, BFaW hits multiple targets at the some time, there are fleet threat scaling consoles which give 9% extra plasma energy weapons damage... Some fleetmates of mine can deal about 18-20k dps in pve scenarios..
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves