As far as the Trinity, which I know you didn't mention, that's an antiquated model.
Yeah, that's pretty much the crux of the matter. The good thing about ignoring it is that players have the freedom to jump into any ship and use most abilities effectively save for career-specific ones and a handful of traits.
As someone else pointed out, most play STO to log in and enjoy some easy pew pew mayhem. So of course everyone is going to make a beeline for the stuff that promises more dakka. It's not perfect I suppose, but I think I'd prefer to have the choice than not have one at all.
You can still be the tank, healer or controller and plenty of situations crop up where you are needed, especially when pugging. You'll just have to accept the reduced rewards and potential negativity from fellow players...until you save their asses of course
I think that some of the newer content shows some intelligent ideas on how to try and make the current encounter system more interesting and varied, so it's not like they aren't trying.
Take the Voth, for instance. Their ability to bring up an invinci-shield means that they'll get a few second's worth of dealing damage before the shield either fails or the player manages to maneuver around them. When dealing with multiple Voth ships, being tanky helps, as does being able to placate or hold them in place. Also, those probes that occasionally pop in in the adventure zone would make for some really difficult encounters if they were paired up with the Voth cruisers.
The Undine are also pretty nasty. The yellow blobs the bigger ones generate are annoying. Plus, simple DPS isn't usually enough to prevent them from firing off their heavy beam attacks right at the start of combat.
Those two enemies do kind of point out interesting ways of making even timed objectives less about DPS. An objective that requires killing a LOT of relatively small, widely dispersed enemies is going to benefit from BFAW or grav well. Making the timed objective require a ship to reach a point on the map within a certain amount of time despite several kinds of obstacles that are best removed by science/engineering/cloaking would be grand. So is an objective that requires a member of the team to perform a task despite taking heavy fire from an functionally invincible enemy. In that case, being able to reliably draw agro and team-heal would be essential.
You can still be the tank, healer or controller and plenty of situations crop up where you are needed, especially when pugging. You'll just have to accept the reduced rewards and potential negativity from fellow players...until you save their asses of course
The problem with the trinity is that it's not properly implemented in STO.
For example, look at tanking - by (MMO) definition, you have to get/hold aggro and survive aggro. If you can't do either portion, you're not successfully tanking.
In STO, there are no hard threat control abilities. That means that after threat modifiers from both the tanks and strikers, the tanks still need to do comparable damage in order to actually tank.
The best tanks are basically DPS machines (get aggro) that don't die (survive aggro).
Boosting Cruiser (tank) toughness and Escort (striker) damage doesn't support the trinity, it actually makes it more difficult for the tank to tank.
(Yes, "striker" isn't the normal term, but it looked really confusing when I used it both as the noun and as the acronym, so I switched labels. :P)
I think a trinity is perhaps the wrong way of going about it. It's not about limiting players to specific classes. It should be more about introducing STFs, encounters, and PvE content with challenges who's optimal solutions aren't simply MOAR DPS.
There are plenty of ways of handling it without having to change any core game mechanics and it can reward different play-styles roughly equally overall. We can see some good ideas in the latest batch of content, and extending those ideas to more content would help considerably.
Also, holy trinity or not, there has to be a way for a ship to pull hard-aggro, to FORCE an NPC ship into attacking it. If the game programmers can't find that bit in the code (which is entirely possible), then a power that limits firing range to, say, 5 KM and itself only has a range of 3km, would be a way of handling it.
Gear shouldn't be gated through teaming exclusively. Unfortunately, to get the bits required for Borg and undine gear, there are no other options. As a result, we are being punished for wanting rep gear, rather than being rewarded for teaming. The newest STFs are no different.
Teaming should be a *faster* path, not the *only* path, but the Devs apparently feel that if they funnel us into it to get the gear, then they can tell their employers "Look! Everyone loves the new content! Just look at how many are participating in it!"
There are no dailys that reward one Borg neural processor, for instance...nor is there a means of trading in marks for them.
The same is true of the undine bits, and the new DR STFs.
Nukara doesn'thave this problem, nor does new Romulus.
Forcing "roles" on us *combined* with endless STFs is probably not the best plan for casual players.
The Devs have this idea that STFs *are* endgame content...but why go back and do them another 10,000 times? Surely we had enough getting our rep bits...and even then, not getting them all, but instead; making hard choices about what gear we *really* want, so as to do no more of them than necessary? Well, problem solved! Now the required bits are dropping in ESTFs for upgrade kits!
Because really, we weren't being punished enough with the rep bits, now the punishment can be everlasting!
.....and to top it off, they're looking for a way to require variety in ESTFs...and for ways to keep us in them longer?
What, we can't progress now until we find a Hobbit, Ranger, Wizard, and Dwarf to go hold our hands?
There is a reason people look for ways to blow through ESTFs in record time, Devs, and its not just showing off... Its because they don't want to spend one more nanosecond of their lives in them than necessary.
The content isn't too easy, the players just don't like it, and want it over with as quickly as possible.
The storyline is the "meat" in the sandwich.
The ESTF gating of rep gear? That's the Montezuma's revenge in the drink you got with your sandwich.
This is why Tac ships get damage boosts. This is why Cruisers get defensive boosts. I'm not saying the Trinity system is an accurate description, but they apparently don't want all ships to be super-DPS hogs.
Thoughts?
If they don't want all ships to be super-DPS hogs they're doing a HORRIBLE job of it. Kill fast or die slow is something I saw on this forums once, and it perfectly describes STO IMHO.
Lets be honest here, if the devs didn't want every ship to be super-DPS hogs, they'd stop shouting from the heavens every time they made a "tactically-orientated ship". Look at the BO and console lay out of the new heavily advertised Dauntless.
The devs are either incompetant, in the fact that they can't make STO live up to their desire to make ships have different roles, or they're lying.
Kill fast or die slow is something I saw on this forums once, and it perfectly describes STO IMHO.
The way STO handled it's trinity earlier on was a welcome change to the gaming community. It fell into a gravity well of DPS and elitists, however.
I posted something some pages back on how to help give some love to careers without forcing or breaking the trinity through Doff missions. I hope an employee of Cryptic read it. The ONE employee that would REALLY do anything about it doesn't normally reply in this area of the forum. This would be "Borticus", or "J-Man", or simply "Jeremy" of the old STOked.
I don't like to quote myself, but I'll do it anyway:
Tac/Engy/Sci would get access to Doff missions that reward disposable devices specific to their career. Also, which I would LOVE to see, are Doff mission chains that would reward career-specific Doffs.
Lol I don't want trinity. Why do you think I want trinity? You are the second person to do so now.
I am completely okay with redshirts doing some space magic. Better yet, give us ingame mission objectives that are engaging and interactive, no restrictions based on character class type, with optional failing conditions. Move away from the excessively boring DPS race.
Relax, these forums have very little reading and comprehension capacity...
The Trinity does not belong in either STO or the IP of Star Trek.
This is why Tac ships get damage boosts. This is why Cruisers get defensive boosts. I'm not saying the Trinity system is an accurate description, but they apparently don't want all ships to be super-DPS hogs.
Thoughts?
They can make the ships' roles anything they want, but if every damn mission heavily favors DPS, roles don't mean squat!
First off, I saw a comparison to the Battlefield series here. If I may draw from my experiences there...
Part and parcel of the "success" Battlefield has with "kirking" it, as it were (going lone wolf) is the following:
1. Offense and Defense are 100% "equal". Nobody has more HP than the other. Each player has a range where they, say, 3-hit kill, 5 hit-kill, and 7-hit kill.
I've played Battlefield: Play 4 Free. That game has 4 classes - medics were excellent (3-hit range) at longer ranges, passable (5 hit) at medium ranges, but sucked (7 hits needed to kill) at short range. Engies, on the other hand, were the inverse, great at SR, passable MR, sucky LR. Assaults weren't the guys you wanted spraying downrange (7 hit LR), but excelled at MR and were passable at SR...
Recons round out the playstyles with excellent LR, passable SR, and weak MR...
2. The most successful teams are those that manage to make a "fire team" or two out of their playerbase, and said fire teams were built around the trinity system that sort of exists within Battlefield". Said fire teams had the damage ranges covered - assault for MR, sniper and medic for LR, engie for maneuver and SR, along with the obvious benefits of always being within supply (assault), healed (medic), mobile (engie) and informed (sniper). Fire team encounters a LR-oriented kill group? LR people kill the short range guard(s), then the assault & engie storm in for the close range kills. Fire team encounters an "urban combat" group? Let the LR boys spray downrange, while the shorter ranged folks keep everyone covered and take out the foolish. Make sure that said LR people are kept in supply and safe.
So, what battlefield teaches us in STO:
1. If "base offense and defense" are identical, whether through "escorts online-ing the game" (aka single-classing it) or a dedicated effort to make "separate but equal" offensive systems, then you don't need a "trinity" per-se, the goal of gameplay becomes to engage at the optimal range where player out-damages opposition, and/or be "more skilled / better geared" than the opposition that is identical to your class (where you hold no advantage of any sort).
2. In any system that has strengths and weaknesses, the best teams are those that can, and actually do, cover each other's weaknesses with their own strengths. The "trinity" system is just a convenient way to classify the strengths and weaknesses - and make playstyles "more diverse" than "get to optimal range, look down sight, shoot, kill"...
Detecting big-time "anti-old-school" bias here. NX? Lobi. TOS/TMP Connie? Super-promotion-box. (aka the two hardest ways to get ships) Excelsior & all 3 TNG "big hero" ships? C-Store. Please Equalize...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Lol I don't want trinity. Why do you think I want trinity? You are the second person to do so now.
I am completely okay with redshirts doing some space magic.
No no, I wasn't thinking you wanted trinity. In your argument against the trinity, it sounded like you were using Picard in a red uniform doing science as an example of "tactical" doing "science" stuff.
The red uniform from TNG onwards is Command Red, not Tactical Red, which is what I was quibbling about.
Yes! Because star trek is very consistent in that regard.:P
Hey engineers/science captains, gotta wear red now or ur doing it wrong.
The actual movies and series are consistent with regards to Command Red, Operations Gold, Medical/Sciences Teal. There has only ever been one Admiral portrayed as not wearing Command Red, in one episode, that might have been a costuming error.
There's no such thing as Tactical Career, Engineering Career, or Science Career in-character, it's Command Division, Operations Division, and Science/Medical Division. As far as I can remember, that's consistent in STO as well.
There's no such thing as Tactical Career, Engineering Career, or Science Career in-character, it's Command Division, Operations Division, and Science/Medical Division. As far as I can remember, that's consistent in STO as well.
As I understand it, careers 'exist' but aren't bound by division color.
Might help get everyone out of the "MOAR DPSes OR GTFO" mindset.
i dont mind that mindset me being a eng.....when they blow up which they do ..i just send them a tell saying ohhhh thats gonna leave a mark and continue on absorbing damage and killling at a steady pace....lol silly tacs trix are for kidsssss
Comments
Yeah, that's pretty much the crux of the matter. The good thing about ignoring it is that players have the freedom to jump into any ship and use most abilities effectively save for career-specific ones and a handful of traits.
As someone else pointed out, most play STO to log in and enjoy some easy pew pew mayhem. So of course everyone is going to make a beeline for the stuff that promises more dakka. It's not perfect I suppose, but I think I'd prefer to have the choice than not have one at all.
You can still be the tank, healer or controller and plenty of situations crop up where you are needed, especially when pugging. You'll just have to accept the reduced rewards and potential negativity from fellow players...until you save their asses of course
Take the Voth, for instance. Their ability to bring up an invinci-shield means that they'll get a few second's worth of dealing damage before the shield either fails or the player manages to maneuver around them. When dealing with multiple Voth ships, being tanky helps, as does being able to placate or hold them in place. Also, those probes that occasionally pop in in the adventure zone would make for some really difficult encounters if they were paired up with the Voth cruisers.
The Undine are also pretty nasty. The yellow blobs the bigger ones generate are annoying. Plus, simple DPS isn't usually enough to prevent them from firing off their heavy beam attacks right at the start of combat.
Those two enemies do kind of point out interesting ways of making even timed objectives less about DPS. An objective that requires killing a LOT of relatively small, widely dispersed enemies is going to benefit from BFAW or grav well. Making the timed objective require a ship to reach a point on the map within a certain amount of time despite several kinds of obstacles that are best removed by science/engineering/cloaking would be grand. So is an objective that requires a member of the team to perform a task despite taking heavy fire from an functionally invincible enemy. In that case, being able to reliably draw agro and team-heal would be essential.
Just some thoughs.
The problem with the trinity is that it's not properly implemented in STO.
For example, look at tanking - by (MMO) definition, you have to get/hold aggro and survive aggro. If you can't do either portion, you're not successfully tanking.
In STO, there are no hard threat control abilities. That means that after threat modifiers from both the tanks and strikers, the tanks still need to do comparable damage in order to actually tank.
The best tanks are basically DPS machines (get aggro) that don't die (survive aggro).
Boosting Cruiser (tank) toughness and Escort (striker) damage doesn't support the trinity, it actually makes it more difficult for the tank to tank.
(Yes, "striker" isn't the normal term, but it looked really confusing when I used it both as the noun and as the acronym, so I switched labels. :P)
Thats because the trinity is basically an expression of a fundamental idea.
Rock, paper, scissors.
Games work best when each attack has a counter, when each strategy has a counter strategy.
Games do not work well with 'I Win' buttons, that cant be countered.
The old school RPG trinity is less about the details of those classes and how they interact and more about the pattern they made.
Rock, paper, scissors.
Fighter, wizard, thief.
Same thing, different clothes.
The trinity does need to be reimagined, but it cant be simply set aside.
that is not dead, which does eternal lie (at the root of good game design).
What does this have to do with anything?
Captains are predominantly part of Command Division, and should be wearing Command Red.
There are plenty of ways of handling it without having to change any core game mechanics and it can reward different play-styles roughly equally overall. We can see some good ideas in the latest batch of content, and extending those ideas to more content would help considerably.
Also, holy trinity or not, there has to be a way for a ship to pull hard-aggro, to FORCE an NPC ship into attacking it. If the game programmers can't find that bit in the code (which is entirely possible), then a power that limits firing range to, say, 5 KM and itself only has a range of 3km, would be a way of handling it.
Teaming should be a *faster* path, not the *only* path, but the Devs apparently feel that if they funnel us into it to get the gear, then they can tell their employers "Look! Everyone loves the new content! Just look at how many are participating in it!"
There are no dailys that reward one Borg neural processor, for instance...nor is there a means of trading in marks for them.
The same is true of the undine bits, and the new DR STFs.
Nukara doesn'thave this problem, nor does new Romulus.
Forcing "roles" on us *combined* with endless STFs is probably not the best plan for casual players.
The Devs have this idea that STFs *are* endgame content...but why go back and do them another 10,000 times? Surely we had enough getting our rep bits...and even then, not getting them all, but instead; making hard choices about what gear we *really* want, so as to do no more of them than necessary? Well, problem solved! Now the required bits are dropping in ESTFs for upgrade kits!
Because really, we weren't being punished enough with the rep bits, now the punishment can be everlasting!
.....and to top it off, they're looking for a way to require variety in ESTFs...and for ways to keep us in them longer?
What, we can't progress now until we find a Hobbit, Ranger, Wizard, and Dwarf to go hold our hands?
There is a reason people look for ways to blow through ESTFs in record time, Devs, and its not just showing off... Its because they don't want to spend one more nanosecond of their lives in them than necessary.
The content isn't too easy, the players just don't like it, and want it over with as quickly as possible.
The storyline is the "meat" in the sandwich.
The ESTF gating of rep gear? That's the Montezuma's revenge in the drink you got with your sandwich.
You seemed to imply that the Command Red uniform doing science stuff was out of the ordinary, no?
If they don't want all ships to be super-DPS hogs they're doing a HORRIBLE job of it. Kill fast or die slow is something I saw on this forums once, and it perfectly describes STO IMHO.
Lets be honest here, if the devs didn't want every ship to be super-DPS hogs, they'd stop shouting from the heavens every time they made a "tactically-orientated ship". Look at the BO and console lay out of the new heavily advertised Dauntless.
The devs are either incompetant, in the fact that they can't make STO live up to their desire to make ships have different roles, or they're lying.
I'm not sure which one I'd prefer.
The way STO handled it's trinity earlier on was a welcome change to the gaming community. It fell into a gravity well of DPS and elitists, however.
I posted something some pages back on how to help give some love to careers without forcing or breaking the trinity through Doff missions. I hope an employee of Cryptic read it. The ONE employee that would REALLY do anything about it doesn't normally reply in this area of the forum. This would be "Borticus", or "J-Man", or simply "Jeremy" of the old STOked.
I don't like to quote myself, but I'll do it anyway:
Relax, these forums have very little reading and comprehension capacity...
The Trinity does not belong in either STO or the IP of Star Trek.
They can make the ships' roles anything they want, but if every damn mission heavily favors DPS, roles don't mean squat!
Part and parcel of the "success" Battlefield has with "kirking" it, as it were (going lone wolf) is the following:
1. Offense and Defense are 100% "equal". Nobody has more HP than the other. Each player has a range where they, say, 3-hit kill, 5 hit-kill, and 7-hit kill.
I've played Battlefield: Play 4 Free. That game has 4 classes - medics were excellent (3-hit range) at longer ranges, passable (5 hit) at medium ranges, but sucked (7 hits needed to kill) at short range. Engies, on the other hand, were the inverse, great at SR, passable MR, sucky LR. Assaults weren't the guys you wanted spraying downrange (7 hit LR), but excelled at MR and were passable at SR...
Recons round out the playstyles with excellent LR, passable SR, and weak MR...
2. The most successful teams are those that manage to make a "fire team" or two out of their playerbase, and said fire teams were built around the trinity system that sort of exists within Battlefield". Said fire teams had the damage ranges covered - assault for MR, sniper and medic for LR, engie for maneuver and SR, along with the obvious benefits of always being within supply (assault), healed (medic), mobile (engie) and informed (sniper). Fire team encounters a LR-oriented kill group? LR people kill the short range guard(s), then the assault & engie storm in for the close range kills. Fire team encounters an "urban combat" group? Let the LR boys spray downrange, while the shorter ranged folks keep everyone covered and take out the foolish. Make sure that said LR people are kept in supply and safe.
So, what battlefield teaches us in STO:
1. If "base offense and defense" are identical, whether through "escorts online-ing the game" (aka single-classing it) or a dedicated effort to make "separate but equal" offensive systems, then you don't need a "trinity" per-se, the goal of gameplay becomes to engage at the optimal range where player out-damages opposition, and/or be "more skilled / better geared" than the opposition that is identical to your class (where you hold no advantage of any sort).
2. In any system that has strengths and weaknesses, the best teams are those that can, and actually do, cover each other's weaknesses with their own strengths. The "trinity" system is just a convenient way to classify the strengths and weaknesses - and make playstyles "more diverse" than "get to optimal range, look down sight, shoot, kill"...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
No no, I wasn't thinking you wanted trinity. In your argument against the trinity, it sounded like you were using Picard in a red uniform doing science as an example of "tactical" doing "science" stuff.
The red uniform from TNG onwards is Command Red, not Tactical Red, which is what I was quibbling about.
The actual movies and series are consistent with regards to Command Red, Operations Gold, Medical/Sciences Teal. There has only ever been one Admiral portrayed as not wearing Command Red, in one episode, that might have been a costuming error.
There's no such thing as Tactical Career, Engineering Career, or Science Career in-character, it's Command Division, Operations Division, and Science/Medical Division. As far as I can remember, that's consistent in STO as well.
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i dont mind that mindset me being a eng.....when they blow up which they do ..i just send them a tell saying ohhhh thats gonna leave a mark and continue on absorbing damage and killling at a steady pace....lol silly tacs trix are for kidsssss