Having played all three classes, I have to say that Tactical Captain's need to be reigned in. They should be limited to boosting Weapon Damage for their ships, Weapon and Melee Damage on the ground. Being an expert at firing handguns is not the same as knowing how to generate blackholes on command.
In thinking about this a bit more, it's hard for me to say what exactly needs to be done to bring everything together. If you go by DPS figures alone TAC has an edge but that does make a lot of sense considering it's tac. SCI and ENG do other things and it's difficult to incorporate that into one stat. Maybe that's just something people in the community need to keep in mind. Don't just use ONE number to evaluate all angles.
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
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Engineers should, in my opinion, have a Critical Hit and Critical Damage Buff. They do, after all, know starship designs better than the other two classes. Sisko even pointed out from time to time the weak points of enemy ships because being an engineer allowed him to tell by looking at the them what would be the best places to strike.
In thinking about this a bit more, it's hard for me to say what exactly needs to be done to bring everything together. If you go by DPS figures alone TAC has an edge but that does make a lot of sense considering it's tac. SCI and ENG do other things and it's difficult to incorporate that into one stat. Maybe that's just something people in the community need to keep in mind. Don't just use ONE number to evaluate all angles.
With DPS being the obvious metagame with all the new powers and toys being added it's just simply not acceptable to have one of three career choices being clearly superior to the rest.
The problem ultimately stems from rampant DPS creep and PvP crybabies in the early days of STO.
In the early days of STO the roles were pretty clearly defined. The baseline and starting point was Glass Cannon Tactical Escorts and Crowd Control and Debuffing Science ships and captains and Durable Engineers in Support Cruisers. Then there was the added freedom of being able to hybridize and create unique playstyles.
Unfortunately power creep made Escorts and Tactical captains tougher and gave them more staying power and as a result the need for Support Cruisers diminished, not to mention that said Tac Escorts became able to both outgun and outlast cruisers in PvP combat and no longer had to rely on them for PvE content. Science ships and their Captains had their powers absolutely destroyed through nerfs because PvP'ers whined that they were too good at doing thier jobs, debuffing and controlling, this of course spilled over into PvE as well. And I'm pretty sure their powers also got nerfed in PvE because Cryptic couldn't design content around controlling and locking down targets. But designing content around a DPS race, thats easy, just add damage sponges!
Like I said, either Sci, Tac and Eng need a major rebalance to redefine their roles and purposes or Tac Captains need to be equalized with Eng's and Sci's if DPS is to remain the meta.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
I don't know if you've even played science but there are three distinct categories of science and only one of them benefits directly from damage boosts.
Healer, drainer, controler, and EPG. I think you added wrong.
With DPS being the obvious metagame with all the new powers and toys being added it's just simply not acceptable to have one of three career choices being clearly superior to the rest.
I'm actually going to question that premise: why is DPS the "obvious" metagame? It's the easiest to think about and quantify (all you need is a DPS log) but is that really the only choice available or just a popular convention which has taken hold in spite of the available options (ex. exotic-tanking and control/drain)?
Unfortunately power creep made Escorts and Tactical captains tougher and gave them more staying power and as a result the need for Support Cruisers diminished, not to mention that said Tac Escorts became able to both outgun and outlast cruisers in PvP combat and no longer had to rely on them for PvE content.
If you can, I'd like you to take me through the mechanics on this one. How is an escort able to outlast a cruiser in combat? Specifically, how is having less hull and less defensive ability space trading off to more survival? There's traits which can compensate for a lack of defense otherwise but that's not intrinsic to the escort class.
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
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With the new Balance pass for space to come, I definitely would like Cryptic to make it so that Tac captain buffs apply only to tac abilities. It is silly that they buff everything. Make it so! I am just returning to the game and it seems that Tac captains are the jack-of-all trades - fly a tac in a tac ship - awesome - fly a tac in a science ship- also awesome. Something not right there.
Unless this has been thought of already - thanks.
Oh god this again? Instead of Tac lets nerf Sci and Eng (powers?) that make them pretty much
unkillable.
Genuinely curious what abilities you think we non-tacs have that rate all the way up at "unkillable". Scattering Field? Cat1 armor whose resist still caps at 75%. Science Fleet? Relatively weak shield HoT, with some decent skill boosts. Rotate Shield Frequency? Non-transferable shield buff approximate to Extend Shields, both of which fall by the wayside in the modern era of shield and hull armor penetration. Miracle Worker? Even with double-tap, it still won't prevent a stray embassy console proc from undoing all it's work.
Tacs, with APA/GDF and damage-dependent sources of healing for both hull and shields still trump both other careers in practical difficulty to kill, coupled with the higher outgoing damage making it harder in PvP to survive long enough for differences to matter. The best abilities non-tacs have in PvP (imo) are not their heals, but stuff like Nadion Inversion, Photonic Fleet, and Subnucleonic Beam.
It's not as if the elephant in the room could be any more obvious than it is.
There is one profession that is overwhelming played by the majority of players because it has literally no downside.
RPGs are supposed to be about making choices. Every class should have a strength and a weakness. That is the point of a party or a team, others are strong where you are weak and vice versa.
No one cares about the few people who will make good on threats of pouting and leaving. Do you think it's a coincidence that this is happening after the console launch is finished and stable? No one cares if you leave, there are more than enough PS4 and Xbox players who will take your place in throwing their money at the screen to Cryptic. Anyone who loves the game and invested time and money in it will stay. Nobody likes a whiner, nobody will miss a whiner.
This will be a good thing for everyone.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."
This is hilarious. So people's are complaining about two abilities, Attack Pattern Alpha and Tactical Fleet with relatively long cooldowns?
And when it comes to ground combat I am personally jealous of the Engineer class that gets to spawn cool turrets, mortars, generators and drones of different sorts that last for a whole freaking minute. Oh not to mention that some of these affect your whole team.
Meanwhile the Tactical class generally gets silly grenades that don't hit their targets, and self buffs that last mere 10-15 seconds with 5 of those seconds lost because of animation and activation of multiple abilities. I guess all tactical can do is rely on firing their weapons and accumulate as much critical chance and severity as possible. At least we get to use cool weapons and amplify them. Oh wait, everyone else gets to use these weapons too except amplify them with insignificant 10-15 second buffs.
Yeah well then engineers should boost healing or armor resistances by 200% and science should boost drain and control.... But they don't. That is the problem, not that tactical captains are OP but that science and engineering just suck. In the grand scheme of things they play a tiny role in what has allowed damage levels to get so monstrous. They havn't changed in seven years they work the exact same way they have since launch. I know this because i've been here the whole damn time. Science and Engineering captains need to be redesigned from the ground up, that will get us much closer to some semblance of balance then nerfing a few damage boosts.
Exactly...differentiate the classes by giving them each a particular play-style that you pick them for. Make the 2 non-tac classes good enough at certain things that they become the most attractive options if you want to play in that niche. Sci should have control and exotic in their wheelhouse, and engineers should be healing/recovery and team support.
Main point of agreement with the OP, to go along with balance passes to make class playstyles more distinct, would be to simply remove any damage classified as exotic from the list of stuff tac captain abilities boost (and maybe give the other careers something like Tactical Initiative so that they can get the most from their matching profession abilities).
I find it hilarious people bemoan the disparity when
A. All of those DPSs are so large as to make nothing in the game matter
B. Tacs SHOULD do more damage then the other classes, just like a warrior should do more damage then a mage in an MMO
Those are the pinnacle. One could use those, as I did, to show maximum potential, not the norm- because everyone knows they're not averages. Not sure why you thought I was representing them as such. Perhaps I was unclear.
TAC should do the most raw damage. With weapons. But when a SCI captain boosted by 60% is still behind, something is obviously askew.
With the new Balance pass for space to come, I definitely would like Cryptic to make it so that Tac captain buffs apply only to tac abilities. It is silly that they buff everything. Make it so! I am just returning to the game and it seems that Tac captains are the jack-of-all trades - fly a tac in a tac ship - awesome - fly a tac in a science ship- also awesome. Something not right there.
Unless this has been thought of already - thanks.
Oh god this again? Instead of Tac lets nerf Sci and Eng (powers?) that make them pretty much
unkillable.
Genuinely curious what abilities you think we non-tacs have that rate all the way up at "unkillable". Scattering Field? Cat1 armor whose resist still caps at 75%. Science Fleet? Relatively weak shield HoT, with some decent skill boosts. Rotate Shield Frequency? Non-transferable shield buff approximate to Extend Shields, both of which fall by the wayside in the modern era of shield and hull armor penetration. Miracle Worker? Even with double-tap, it still won't prevent a stray embassy console proc from undoing all it's work.
Tacs, with APA/GDF and damage-dependent sources of healing for both hull and shields still trump both other careers in practical difficulty to kill, coupled with the higher outgoing damage making it harder in PvP to survive long enough for differences to matter. The best abilities non-tacs have in PvP (imo) are not their heals, but stuff like Nadion Inversion, Photonic Fleet, and Subnucleonic Beam.
Exactly. For everyone who wants to play stupid, there are others who are more than too happy to point out exactly what's broken. APA, GDF using Last Ditch effort, paired with Strategist/Threatening Stance, and Energy Refrequencer.
Can you honestly say with a straight face that you think this game design is working as intended when you can generate that incredible amount of multiplicative damage, stacking defense, cooldown reduction granting almost 100% uptime on those zero-drawback abilities, while simultaneously granting healing based on how much damage you're doing?
No one could be stupid enough to believe that is normal or intended. ISA should not take only 60 seconds, and only from rolling your face on a keyboard provided you're using the right profession with the right boxes ticked. Cryptic needs to fix its poor game design, and I think this is the time it is finally going to be addressed correctly. With wanting to recoup their investment on porting this game to console, I doubt they're rolling into this readjustment in an unprepared and cavalier fashion.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."
People against a change to having Tac captain powers only effect Weapon damage are just saying they want their Tac to do everything. That is not how the game was set up. Tac has gotten out of control. Will edit OP, but I think 2 things are clear:
1.change so Tac captain buffs only weapons damage
2. Reduce the percentage of the buffs. With all the upgraded gear and powers, one can say those percentage multipliers are too high now from when they were first put in place
Personally I would like to see nerfs across the board
I'm with you, but I don't think this community is hardcore enough. I want to nerf things so that EVERY STF takes a minimum of 45 minutes. And that there are multiple deaths per participant. And there's cascading death penalties. And overall I want this game made so challenging and so difficult that really only the "great" players can function in the missions anymore and all the n00bs and f33bs are left on ESD twiddling their thumbs in General Chat.
Who's with me?
Would you settle for 20mins, the risk of multiple deaths per participant, and injuries severe enough to make one think twice about zerging it? I think there's room for negotiation
This is hilarious. So people's are complaining about two abilities, Attack Pattern Alpha and Tactical Fleet with relatively long cooldowns?
And when it comes to ground combat I am personally jealous of the Engineer class that gets to spawn cool turrets, mortars, generators and drones of different sorts that last for a whole freaking minute. Oh not to mention that some of these affect your whole team.
Meanwhile the Tactical class generally gets silly grenades that don't hit their targets, and self buffs that last mere 10-15 seconds with 5 of those seconds lost because of animation and activation of multiple abilities. I guess all tactical can do is rely on firing their weapons and accumulate as much critical chance and severity as possible. At least we get to use cool weapons and amplify them. Oh wait, everyone else gets to use these weapons too except amplify them with insignificant 10-15 second buffs.
Ain't the world so unfair.
Both Attack pattern Alpha and Tactical Fleet are devastating when they are active though, and the long cooldowns are easily managed by a variety of traits. Overall the pro's outweigh any cons by a huge margin. And your also forgetting "Go Down Fighting".
As for ground, I find it quite fair and balanced, at least PvE wise. Each career choice offers quite different playstyles along with their pro's and con's.
Crit and Damage stacking is nothing to scoff at, and Tac's do it better than anyone, even being capable of one-shotting mini-bosses on Elite Difficulty. Play a Tac with the Boolean gun and you will be a god among men.
Engineers with all their toys rely very much on having to lure their targets and keep them in position or alternatively figure out/learn where the enemy is coming from and set up traps and choke points. So wake me when Engineers can pull off %400-500 crit damage.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
In thinking about this a bit more, it's hard for me to say what exactly needs to be done to bring everything together. If you go by DPS figures alone TAC has an edge but that does make a lot of sense considering it's tac. SCI and ENG do other things and it's difficult to incorporate that into one stat. Maybe that's just something people in the community need to keep in mind. Don't just use ONE number to evaluate all angles.
What are the other classes contributing to a team STF completion that is more than +60% of what a TAC captain can do?
Everything that matters to mission completion in STO (killing everything, for the most part) is done in every possible way better with one class, though there are three. Whether or not one cares about the imbalance, the imbalance remains.
Tanking requires DPS to draw threat, done better by TAC captains.
Exotic science damage is done better by TAC captains.
Weapon damage is done better by TAC captains.
All of which is moot, since everyone is quick to remind you that there is no "trinity" in STO anyway. So, there is- killing stuff. TACs do it in every possible way better than Engineers and Science captains.
Me, I'm used to it, and am not complaining. But saying that the massive imbalance doesn't exist is false. Pointing out a disparity =/= whining/complaining/bemoaning, just pointing out a (quite obvious) fact.
Because ISA runs already take less than 60 seconds to complete. You want it to get done in 15 seconds? 10?
I don't care how long it takes to run a que. You don't penalize an entire character class based on it. Your suggestion has far reaching consequences.
Blue DPS ships have three forward weapons and three aft weapons. Not only that, many torpedoes are energy/SCIENCE! hybrids that might arbitrarily fall on either side of the "no SCIENCE!" penalty. Why do you want Red DPS captains to only pilot Red DPS ships?
I think we can maintain build variety without telling players what ships they should pilot.
So the answer really is to penalize Red DPS captains for flying a Blue DPS ship?
Why?
Why not improve the ability of Blue DPS captains? Give them some functional uniqueness they can take to whatever color of ship they pilot.
No penalty exists or did science ships suddenly lost all of their weapon slots?
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
Because ISA runs already take less than 60 seconds to complete. You want it to get done in 15 seconds? 10?
I don't care how long it takes to run a que. You don't penalize an entire character class based on it. Your suggestion has far reaching consequences.
Blue DPS ships have three forward weapons and three aft weapons. Not only that, many torpedoes are energy/SCIENCE! hybrids that might arbitrarily fall on either side of the "no SCIENCE!" penalty. Why do you want Red DPS captains to only pilot Red DPS ships?
I think we can maintain build variety without telling players what ships they should pilot.
It's rather clear the problem with this particular dialogue is that your opinion is completely disconnected from reality.
No one is getting penalized, what is broken is getting fixed. You don't fix something that's broken by breaking everything else.
If you're that indignant that your unintended, unfair advantage is being taken away, resolving that emotion is a problem only you can fix yourself. If playing this game will be too hard for you after the broken things are fixed, maybe you might want to go to Amazon and order Candyland or Hungry Hungry Hippos.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."
So the answer really is to penalize Red DPS captains for flying a Blue DPS ship?
Why?
Why not improve the ability of Blue DPS captains? Give them some functional uniqueness they can take to whatever color of ship they pilot.
I thought the answer wasn't to penalize tac captains, but stop giving them the most advantages.
Judging by the max potential mission completion ability (killing NPCs/drawing threat), TAC captains bring more to a team than a SCI or ENG captain. Controls/disables/drains/etc. simply are not as useful in STO against NPCS as damage. In this area, the max potential (as evidenced by the top DPS numbers) shows that SCI captains would need a 60% increase to be close to TAC captains (yet still behind). Even if you cut TAC captain damage by 25% off the end result, they would still have around 30,000 DPS more max potential than the next highest, ENG.
Would it make more sense to add 40-50% damage potential somehow to SCI and ENG, in a game where the people doing the most damage are bored and saying the game is too easy, or cut TAC down by 10- 15% (still leaving them well ahead of the other 2 classes in terms of damage output)?
Should it be changed? Maybe. Maybe not. If "balance" is the desired result, then, yes. It would cause a lot of people's (rather expensive, and time intensive) TAC builds to be less effective, which is mostly why some claim there is no balance issue. The amount of time and money spent using the current meta is a valid argument against such a change.
It's rather clear the problem with this particular dialogue is that your opinion is completely disconnected from reality.
No one is getting penalized, what is broken is getting fixed. You don't fix something that's broken by breaking everything else.
If you're that indignant that your unintended, unfair advantage is being taken away, resolving that emotion is a problem only you can fix yourself. If playing this game will be too hard for you after the broken things are fixed, maybe you might want to go to Amazon and order Candyland or Hungry Hungry Hippos.
So neither of you are interested in a discussion, you just want those filthy cheating Tacs to get some come-uppance. Seems to be the case with most of this thread, really.
1. Tactical does normal damage better than Science, which is fine. 2. Tactical does exotic damage better than Science, which is not fine. 3. Engineering's innate powers and abilities in space are no longer good enough, with many universal traits and consoles outstripping them. 4. Engineering doesn't stand out from the other classes in space anymore, because it's defensive powers and abilities as stated above are not good enough. Since they aren't good enough, many people think that you can have enough defense on a Tactical character while having the innate damage boosts.
In my opinion: 1. Tactical's innate powers and abilities shouldn't be able to buff non-weapon damage (specifically exotic damage) more than Science can. 2. Engineering's innate powers and abilities need massive boosts/changes in the way they work so that Engineering outclasses the other careers in defensive and healing ability.
I'd be ok with them reducing the damage boosts of some tactical skills if neccesary but i still think the main issue is a poorly designed trinity. I am vehemently oppossed to limiting their damage buffs to only weapons as it would make that career choice useless for anything but a weapon focussed build. Tactical captains would be useless for EPG or Temporal builds not to mention Radiation and countless other sources of damage in the game. The whole point is that career choice shouldn't pigeon-hole you into playing one particular way and that change would accomplish only that. It is and always will be a stupid idea.
[quote="redvenge;13164302"][quote="alexraptorr;13164269"]Tac Captains only need "one" nerf. And that is tweaking their damage abilities to be "weapons damage" instead of "all damage". Solves pretty much most, if not all the problems with the Tactical captains without harming their original purpose.
All these secondary damage sources and procs that currently get buffed by Tac captain powers didn't even exist in the early days of STO![/quote] So, we need to reorganize the classes into "red DPS", "blue DPS" and "yellow DPS" (and to hell with the Romulans and Klingons, they can just deal with it). Additionally, we should penalize captains for NOT flying the appropriate color-associated ship. Red DPS captains ONLY in Red DPS ships. Red DPS captains should be heavily penalized for piloting Blue DPS ships.[/quote]
Comments
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
With DPS being the obvious metagame with all the new powers and toys being added it's just simply not acceptable to have one of three career choices being clearly superior to the rest.
The problem ultimately stems from rampant DPS creep and PvP crybabies in the early days of STO.
In the early days of STO the roles were pretty clearly defined. The baseline and starting point was Glass Cannon Tactical Escorts and Crowd Control and Debuffing Science ships and captains and Durable Engineers in Support Cruisers. Then there was the added freedom of being able to hybridize and create unique playstyles.
Unfortunately power creep made Escorts and Tactical captains tougher and gave them more staying power and as a result the need for Support Cruisers diminished, not to mention that said Tac Escorts became able to both outgun and outlast cruisers in PvP combat and no longer had to rely on them for PvE content. Science ships and their Captains had their powers absolutely destroyed through nerfs because PvP'ers whined that they were too good at doing thier jobs, debuffing and controlling, this of course spilled over into PvE as well. And I'm pretty sure their powers also got nerfed in PvE because Cryptic couldn't design content around controlling and locking down targets. But designing content around a DPS race, thats easy, just add damage sponges!
Like I said, either Sci, Tac and Eng need a major rebalance to redefine their roles and purposes or Tac Captains need to be equalized with Eng's and Sci's if DPS is to remain the meta.
Healer, drainer, controler, and EPG. I think you added wrong.
I'm actually going to question that premise: why is DPS the "obvious" metagame? It's the easiest to think about and quantify (all you need is a DPS log) but is that really the only choice available or just a popular convention which has taken hold in spite of the available options (ex. exotic-tanking and control/drain)?
If you can, I'd like you to take me through the mechanics on this one. How is an escort able to outlast a cruiser in combat? Specifically, how is having less hull and less defensive ability space trading off to more survival? There's traits which can compensate for a lack of defense otherwise but that's not intrinsic to the escort class.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Genuinely curious what abilities you think we non-tacs have that rate all the way up at "unkillable". Scattering Field? Cat1 armor whose resist still caps at 75%. Science Fleet? Relatively weak shield HoT, with some decent skill boosts. Rotate Shield Frequency? Non-transferable shield buff approximate to Extend Shields, both of which fall by the wayside in the modern era of shield and hull armor penetration. Miracle Worker? Even with double-tap, it still won't prevent a stray embassy console proc from undoing all it's work.
Tacs, with APA/GDF and damage-dependent sources of healing for both hull and shields still trump both other careers in practical difficulty to kill, coupled with the higher outgoing damage making it harder in PvP to survive long enough for differences to matter. The best abilities non-tacs have in PvP (imo) are not their heals, but stuff like Nadion Inversion, Photonic Fleet, and Subnucleonic Beam.
There is one profession that is overwhelming played by the majority of players because it has literally no downside.
RPGs are supposed to be about making choices. Every class should have a strength and a weakness. That is the point of a party or a team, others are strong where you are weak and vice versa.
No one cares about the few people who will make good on threats of pouting and leaving. Do you think it's a coincidence that this is happening after the console launch is finished and stable? No one cares if you leave, there are more than enough PS4 and Xbox players who will take your place in throwing their money at the screen to Cryptic. Anyone who loves the game and invested time and money in it will stay. Nobody likes a whiner, nobody will miss a whiner.
This will be a good thing for everyone.
And when it comes to ground combat I am personally jealous of the Engineer class that gets to spawn cool turrets, mortars, generators and drones of different sorts that last for a whole freaking minute. Oh not to mention that some of these affect your whole team.
Meanwhile the Tactical class generally gets silly grenades that don't hit their targets, and self buffs that last mere 10-15 seconds with 5 of those seconds lost because of animation and activation of multiple abilities. I guess all tactical can do is rely on firing their weapons and accumulate as much critical chance and severity as possible. At least we get to use cool weapons and amplify them. Oh wait, everyone else gets to use these weapons too except amplify them with insignificant 10-15 second buffs.
Ain't the world so unfair.
Exactly...differentiate the classes by giving them each a particular play-style that you pick them for. Make the 2 non-tac classes good enough at certain things that they become the most attractive options if you want to play in that niche. Sci should have control and exotic in their wheelhouse, and engineers should be healing/recovery and team support.
Main point of agreement with the OP, to go along with balance passes to make class playstyles more distinct, would be to simply remove any damage classified as exotic from the list of stuff tac captain abilities boost (and maybe give the other careers something like Tactical Initiative so that they can get the most from their matching profession abilities).
Those are the pinnacle. One could use those, as I did, to show maximum potential, not the norm- because everyone knows they're not averages. Not sure why you thought I was representing them as such. Perhaps I was unclear.
TAC should do the most raw damage. With weapons. But when a SCI captain boosted by 60% is still behind, something is obviously askew.
Exactly. For everyone who wants to play stupid, there are others who are more than too happy to point out exactly what's broken. APA, GDF using Last Ditch effort, paired with Strategist/Threatening Stance, and Energy Refrequencer.
Can you honestly say with a straight face that you think this game design is working as intended when you can generate that incredible amount of multiplicative damage, stacking defense, cooldown reduction granting almost 100% uptime on those zero-drawback abilities, while simultaneously granting healing based on how much damage you're doing?
No one could be stupid enough to believe that is normal or intended. ISA should not take only 60 seconds, and only from rolling your face on a keyboard provided you're using the right profession with the right boxes ticked. Cryptic needs to fix its poor game design, and I think this is the time it is finally going to be addressed correctly. With wanting to recoup their investment on porting this game to console, I doubt they're rolling into this readjustment in an unprepared and cavalier fashion.
1.change so Tac captain buffs only weapons damage
2. Reduce the percentage of the buffs. With all the upgraded gear and powers, one can say those percentage multipliers are too high now from when they were first put in place
Would you settle for 20mins, the risk of multiple deaths per participant, and injuries severe enough to make one think twice about zerging it? I think there's room for negotiation
Both Attack pattern Alpha and Tactical Fleet are devastating when they are active though, and the long cooldowns are easily managed by a variety of traits. Overall the pro's outweigh any cons by a huge margin. And your also forgetting "Go Down Fighting".
As for ground, I find it quite fair and balanced, at least PvE wise. Each career choice offers quite different playstyles along with their pro's and con's.
Crit and Damage stacking is nothing to scoff at, and Tac's do it better than anyone, even being capable of one-shotting mini-bosses on Elite Difficulty. Play a Tac with the Boolean gun and you will be a god among men.
Engineers with all their toys rely very much on having to lure their targets and keep them in position or alternatively figure out/learn where the enemy is coming from and set up traps and choke points. So wake me when Engineers can pull off %400-500 crit damage.
What are the other classes contributing to a team STF completion that is more than +60% of what a TAC captain can do?
Everything that matters to mission completion in STO (killing everything, for the most part) is done in every possible way better with one class, though there are three. Whether or not one cares about the imbalance, the imbalance remains.
Tanking requires DPS to draw threat, done better by TAC captains.
Exotic science damage is done better by TAC captains.
Weapon damage is done better by TAC captains.
All of which is moot, since everyone is quick to remind you that there is no "trinity" in STO anyway. So, there is- killing stuff. TACs do it in every possible way better than Engineers and Science captains.
Me, I'm used to it, and am not complaining. But saying that the massive imbalance doesn't exist is false. Pointing out a disparity =/= whining/complaining/bemoaning, just pointing out a (quite obvious) fact.
Why?
Why not improve the ability of Blue DPS captains? Give them some functional uniqueness they can take to whatever color of ship they pilot.
Because ISA runs already take less than 60 seconds to complete. You want it to get done in 15 seconds? 10?
Blue DPS ships have three forward weapons and three aft weapons. Not only that, many torpedoes are energy/SCIENCE! hybrids that might arbitrarily fall on either side of the "no SCIENCE!" penalty. Why do you want Red DPS captains to only pilot Red DPS ships?
I think we can maintain build variety without telling players what ships they should pilot.
No penalty exists or did science ships suddenly lost all of their weapon slots?
It's rather clear the problem with this particular dialogue is that your opinion is completely disconnected from reality.
No one is getting penalized, what is broken is getting fixed. You don't fix something that's broken by breaking everything else.
If you're that indignant that your unintended, unfair advantage is being taken away, resolving that emotion is a problem only you can fix yourself. If playing this game will be too hard for you after the broken things are fixed, maybe you might want to go to Amazon and order Candyland or Hungry Hungry Hippos.
I thought the answer wasn't to penalize tac captains, but stop giving them the most advantages.
Judging by the max potential mission completion ability (killing NPCs/drawing threat), TAC captains bring more to a team than a SCI or ENG captain. Controls/disables/drains/etc. simply are not as useful in STO against NPCS as damage. In this area, the max potential (as evidenced by the top DPS numbers) shows that SCI captains would need a 60% increase to be close to TAC captains (yet still behind). Even if you cut TAC captain damage by 25% off the end result, they would still have around 30,000 DPS more max potential than the next highest, ENG.
Would it make more sense to add 40-50% damage potential somehow to SCI and ENG, in a game where the people doing the most damage are bored and saying the game is too easy, or cut TAC down by 10- 15% (still leaving them well ahead of the other 2 classes in terms of damage output)?
Should it be changed? Maybe. Maybe not. If "balance" is the desired result, then, yes. It would cause a lot of people's (rather expensive, and time intensive) TAC builds to be less effective, which is mostly why some claim there is no balance issue. The amount of time and money spent using the current meta is a valid argument against such a change.
1. Tactical does normal damage better than Science, which is fine.
2. Tactical does exotic damage better than Science, which is not fine.
3. Engineering's innate powers and abilities in space are no longer good enough, with many universal traits and consoles outstripping them.
4. Engineering doesn't stand out from the other classes in space anymore, because it's defensive powers and abilities as stated above are not good enough. Since they aren't good enough, many people think that you can have enough defense on a Tactical character while having the innate damage boosts.
In my opinion:
1. Tactical's innate powers and abilities shouldn't be able to buff non-weapon damage (specifically exotic damage) more than Science can.
2. Engineering's innate powers and abilities need massive boosts/changes in the way they work so that Engineering outclasses the other careers in defensive and healing ability.
And that is tweaking their damage abilities to be "weapons damage" instead of "all damage".
Solves pretty much most, if not all the problems with the Tactical captains without harming their original purpose.
All these secondary damage sources and procs that currently get buffed by Tac captain powers didn't even exist in the early days of STO![/quote]
So, we need to reorganize the classes into "red DPS", "blue DPS" and "yellow DPS" (and to hell with the Romulans and Klingons, they can just deal with it). Additionally, we should penalize captains for NOT flying the appropriate color-associated ship. Red DPS captains ONLY in Red DPS ships. Red DPS captains should be heavily penalized for piloting Blue DPS ships.[/quote]
This ^^