test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Options
Isn't this the perfect time to remove the Trinity?
semalda226
Member Posts: 1,994 Arc User
With the new skill Revamp and the 3 trees it seems like the perfect time to remove the Trinity and allocate the class specific skills to the respective trees and just name it the Career Paths. If this is done it would eliminate the Trinity and make our Captians quite unique in that the career paths we have could wind up varying quite a bit outside of I'm red your blue and that guy is yellow. Anyone else think we should eradicate the Trinity at this time and make our Captians just Captians?
0
Comments
If I wanted Trinity, I'd go play WoW. No, thank you - there's a reason I like this game and not WoW. STO would be imho better off without that.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator
"bIghojchugh DaneH, Dumev pagh. bIghojqangbe'chugh, DuQaHlaH pagh."
"Learn lots. Don't judge. Laugh for no reason. Be nice. Seek happiness." ~Day[9]
"Your fun isn't wrong." ~LaughingTrendy
Find me on Twitterverse - @jodarkrider
To be honest its pretty canon too, as captains usually tend to have a background other than just being command officers.
Janeway was a science officer and Sisko an Engineer, etc.
A player could experience every class without having to roll a new toon.
There's a reason why cryptic won't do Captain Respec's.
Cryptic would rather you invest in the other captain class choices if you want to experience them.
Ie; the gear, the upgrades, the traits, etc.
But I don't think the Company would benefit, and people have asked for captain retrain tokens for a while. They're pretty adamant in not giving us that luxury.
Tacs online is real though. Can't deny that.
This is why I think it would be great to truly enforce the trinity. Again, I know not everyone likes that style, but it DOES prevent the mindless DPS race.
An example would be a lower point investment to get the Ultimate of your character career. Maybe lower that from 25 to 20-22/ It's not huge, but substantial enough for your character class to gain an advantage over other classes in your specific skill tree should you start a heavy investment on it.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
To fix that would require a new system, which could be designed as so:
1) Current (revamped) skill system would be renamed "Command Skills" or something
2) A new skill system called "Career Skills" or something would be created (similar to how there's a separate tree for ground), that would give you some career specific choices, allowing you to drop the healing Eng abilities for more DPS oriented ones, or drop DPS Tac abilities for survival ones, etc etc.
The problem is that, as everything is now, everyone would just go DPS, DPS, DPS, because there's no real incentive to go for anything else.
I have said it before and I say it again: Captain Tatical powers should be changed to enhance the damage and crit stats of weapons ONLY! Not exotic damage or consoles like embassy consoles or radiation damage etc.
And both Science and Engineering should get their own equivalents to tactical initiative, I.E captain powers that reduce the cooldown on science and engineering powers respectively.
This would go a long way to evening out the imbalance and leveling the playing field, AND it would go a long way to "encourage" people to use ships that suit their profession WITHOUT in any way penalizing those who don't.
As for the respec tokens they could easily make money off that as people would be more likely to pay $10 to save time and effort on a main character to try a new play style rather than spend weeks or months grinding reps and levels and gear.
Edit: going further on this it could actually reenergize the game quite a bit I'd they added a skill to engineering that increase their threat generation and reduced it for all allies in a 5km radius making them the TANK as it were with hull heals ,While leaving Sci with exotic damage and shield healing, and Tacs get all the weapons damage. And what we would see is a necessity for All 3 Careers again since a Tac focus would allow much healing Sci couldn't pump out massive DPS with weapons and Eng would need to Protect Tacs and Sci. What I'm suggesting here is a removal of Strict Classes and having your point investment show what your leaning is towards a specific Career of the Trinity.
That would basically remove careers from the game ... my idea would add a bunch of new abilities to each career and make you choose between them.
However, the problem isn't the classes themselves but the DPS race. Any skill/power/gear that doesn't boost DPS in some way is a waste. Even class orientated ships perform better with a tactical captain.
I don't think it's impossible to make systems without a trinity, but you must then design each class to provide equal abilities to boost DPS, in addition to whatever else they are associated with.
That being said, Sulu was a navigator and a botanist. Data was operations but also clearly the science officer. Command is not distinct - Picard and Janway started in Science. Also, these three branches are far more diverse than their grouping suggests - how much do helm officer and chief engineer have in common that the helm officer and botanist doesn't? I think what they have right now would be fine, if we had some way to branch out into the departmental specialities.
Specialisation seems a little too grand for that (I can't imagine what the starship trait for botany would be) but it would be cool to express all those different ways in some manner - perhaps via your boffs rather than your captain, that might come into a revamp of that department head screen? Appointing boffs to lots of different departments as heads that impact stats. You can have your key departments, minor departments and acting captancy of your admiralty ships and who you put where gives you various bonuses in admiralty, doffs, ground and space. That way we can keep departments relevant in the game without it curbing our freedom in skill trees?
The majority of people like to blow things up. This is why there are more Tactical toons.
This isn't unique to STO either.
From my limited experience in STO; Tanks and Heals aren't needed for a lot of the content, which there isn't really all that much of, I've noticed.
If more content were added where a meat shield and the like were needed, than we'd see more people playin' those toons. Which I'm all in favour for; let people play how they want to play, within reason.
I like the trinity, as a concept but I don't like bein' limited in what I can do, I'm not an alt kinda person.
Rift had Warrior and Rogue Healers with melee Mage Tanks which completely broke the mold and it was awesome for us players. Sadly, I don't see this happenin' in STO because, ultimately, Cryptic would lose money and that's just what today's gamin' scene has become. Sadly.
It's that tacs can boost every kind of damage. Right ? And Tacs being better science ability users the Science captains ?
I know that feeling.
On captain abilities alone Tacs have by far the best endgame advantage (because we all know the endgame is DPS or space Barbie).
My hope for the Skill Tree revamp (even though I never wanted it and think it was a huge waste of time and resources) was that the Captain classes would be brought more into line with each other. Where one couldn't feel the Tac advantage so distinctly....
But from what I've read, I'm not sure that's the case (granted I have not tried it on tribble).
So how do we solve this problem ?
The simplest thing I can think of is to give Sci captain ability "Sensor Scan" a +10% Damage on use.
For Engi's a +10% damage on either "EPS Power Transfer" or "Nadion Invertion".
This alone would go a long way in resolving some of the frustration with the "Tac Advantage". And perhaps even drive people back to their old Engi's or Sci's that are languishing.
It wouldn't be perfect, and Tacs would still have that End Game DPS advantage BUT I think it could be a simple solution to an age old problem in STO. And bring the classes a little closer together, while still maintaining their unique flavours.
i completely agree, i'm hopeful that the new skill tree's with their career path specialisations are a large step towards the mmo trinity.
^^ this...I dont think they should force the holy-trinity but encourage it. If you do to much dps, then you should be less tanky then you are now, thus having a healer que with you would not be must have, but would be nice to have one to keep you alive and going.
The new threat ability does go along to help tanks carry aggro (dps is still needed) but +300% add with attract fire makes +400%, does create a place for tanking.
That thing is uniformity, where everyone is essentially a Tac doing as much DPS as possible in whatever the flavour of the month ship is. This is already pretty apparent with cookie cutter fits which have been around for years.
We need more of trinity, otherwise we might as well just forcibly remove non Romulan Tacs from the game and be done with it.
And there is a place for tanking and healing and debuffing, but they only become truly important in Elite. I'd never play an HSE for example without a dedicated tank. You can finish it with DPS yes, but you'll rack up a large number of deaths.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
It was kind of like this in the beginning. You had players running a Science Captain in Science Ships and Tactical Captains in Escorts with Engineering Captains in Cruisers almost exclusively. The Skill Tree forced you to make a choice in what type of ship you wanted to fly at endgame.
But a lot of the newcomers to the MMO Genre who were here just because it had Star Trek in the title wanted things to be changed. For starter they hated the idea of having to share any space outside of the Social Zones (which even there they were unhappy) with other players. They wanted to be able to jump into an instance and not be matched up with another player. The trauma of jumping in with another player you didnt know....Oh god the horror. They wanted to treat the game very much like a single player game. And this is where it started to spin the game from a Trinity Based game to one where the almighty DPS was King.
PvP effectively killed Science early on when it was discovered that some of the abilities like Viral Matrix was OP. And instead of finding a way to bring the ability in line took the easy route and nerfed it into the ground.
Back on the PvE front players were discovering without the Tactical Captains who would be teamed up with other Cruiser and Science Captains in random instances. Those instances were taking longer and longer to do compared to those Tactical Captains who could blow through the mobs like it was nothing. Escorts had the advantage here since they got their Captain through the content fast enough that they were at an advantage to anyone not running one.
This would create a demand for change that would lead to the first Skill Revamp and the beginning movements to the BFAW/Cruiser dominated game we've seen over the last few years.
I can still remember players moaning that Science Captains and Engineer Captains deserved a Alpha Strike ability so they werent 'gimped'. Ever since that change I've treated this MMO more like a single player Theme Park than an MMO.