That's because there seems to be a bug that happens where as soon as the bop cloaks the torpedos in route often do damage immediately instead of waiting until impact. So it's possible a bop can get insta-gibbed as soon as cloak engages.
I played a bop exclusively though open beta. I know them pretty well. And yes, they are squishy.
No BOPs right now are not squishy at all. And Maybe its a graphic bug but once a BOP is cloked my torps give no damage. I seen it happen may times. ONCE they are cloked not while cloaking they fixed that lol.
It might be latency related s well, since I've had torpedoes hit immediately even though they are still graphically en-route and I've had cases where i out ran them far enough to finish cloaking before they hit (i.e. evasive maneuvers with max engine power)
Equip Phaser Cannons - not the 45 degree ones - the ones that had 180 I believe or around there - now picture your escort broadsiding a BoP with Rapid Fire.
Bridge Officers - Tactical for offesnse (nuff said), engineer/science (defense) - Jam Sensors, Polarize hull, Reverse Shield Polarity, Science Team, and s on on. Torpede Spread - has so many nice uses - lost count on how many BoP's I bagged with this ability when they attempted to decloak or hide a downed shield from me Goto Love AoE.
Engineers can fly Escorts, Tactical can fly Cruisers, and Vice Versa. Some of the hardest escorts to take down were piloted by Engineers, and some of the most devastating cruisers were piloted by tactical officers.
@faithborn yes the tactic of hitting one shield side with cannons, then hy the exposed side is very sound. have you tried using mines?
mines allow you a little bit of battlefield control because most people will avoid them, thus allowing you to dictate a little bit of where they will maneuver. the advantage here is that they are on your terms not theirs.
@nyg316 i agree with you on the point that everyone is basing their fed escorts on the defiant. i would like to point out that in the DS9 episode when the Valiant (Defiant Variant) tried to go up against a Jem Hadar Cruiser, it got destroyed rather quickly. Mostly because it Captained by an overaggessive, non-tactically sound Cadet. So the two points I am trying to make with this are:
1. We are all playing with other people, who to some lesser/greater extent are just as sophisticated as us, and are going to use their tools to their advantage.
2. You will just need to wait and join Section 31 in order to get your cloaked Fed Escort. :)
You can't point out these differences and not take a look at some of the more major ones.
I'd trade my Fed escort for a BoP in 2 seconds.
The BoP is VASTLY superior to the Fed Escort and the Klingon Raptors for a variety of reasons.
The biggest one is the neutral BO slots. That makes the BoP the most versatile ship in the game; you can use any set of abilities you want. You can grab a bunch of Reverse Shield Polarities when every other escort can only use one. You could grab other high tier Engineering cooldowns and your survivability will be vastly superior to any other kind of escort. You can grab amazing CC like Viral Matrix.
Fed Escort and Raptor? Yay, you get to run Tactical Team and a bunch of Torpedo skills!
The BoP also has vastly superior maneuverability so in any kind of dogfight assuming you're a decent pilot you should be able to dominate the Fed Escorts or the Raptor.
And that's all without even mentioning the battle cloak. I'd give up 1 Ensign BO slot and a little bit of hull and shields for the BoP's maneuverability and neutral BO slots easily.
Neutral BO slots are so fricking amazing I can't believe so many Klingons actually complain about their ship. It's ridiculous.
you can do quite well as an escort/raptor pilot if you are an engi capt. and fokus your abilitys around survivability - and hope your pug consistsof not only of dmg fokused people...
even though i don´t understand the idea behind the raptor it is in every aspect worse then bops.
my suggestion is to change bops from 4:2 to 3:3 weaponload ability and restrict them to not beeing able to field heavy cannons.
what i would like to see for fed escorts is a kind of denerfing of MES - to work like it was when beeing used at 0 throttle.
Anyone feel being an engineer as your captain and taking an escort is probably better than being a tactical officer in a tactical ship?
I think it kind of gets overly redundant or even too specialized to have your captain as a tactical officer with two other tactical officers. My friend plays as a science captain career and he takes a tactical ship. IDK why but he seems to do very well. Personally I take a cruiser and i'm a tactical career captain. Point in case don't assume your captains career dictates what class ship he or she will best preform in. I see too many tactical career captains in escorts.
Got that combo Cruiser/Tactical aswell and in doubt if its the right way to go.
and idea, what id feds get something like an "all power to engines" move?
This would propel their ship forward with virtually no turning ability at an incredible speed and would be good enough to rapidly move them, say 15km or so.
Or something like the Picard maneuver? A tactical warp jump similar to WoW's "blink" ability. This would be enough to take you out of combat range, again to about 15 km out or so and would give you a give to run.
Both abilites should cut off weapon power for a few seconds so it can't be used to ambush targets.... or not, I mean klingons can us their cloak to ambush targets. Maybe have their shields weakened or something, who knows.
Following up one of these abilities with evasive maneuvers then full impulse could allow a federation pilot to escape combat or quickly join up with his fleet.
All Fed Escort class ship should have a seperate and distinct armor module that does not count as a regular console.
The Defiant had ablative armor out of the shipyard. O'Brien didn't have to take TRIBBLE out of engineering so he could install, fix, replace the armor after every battle. It should be an inate feature to the escorts from tier II to tier IV
Hey it could be worse. At least you get your shields up the moment someone started to attack you. If we were really sticking gungho to the ST universe, when attacking from cloak you would get at least a 1 sec window where the other guy would be WTF and be sitting there with no shields.
And MES was horribly broken. The stuff I could do in my Science Ship with MES, like Drop Mines without breaking stealth while at Full Impulse too.
I don't know what pvp you guys are playing, but I see a lot of escorts. And a fair amount of cruisers. The only ships I rarely see fighting against me are the science vessels. I guess they are off pveing or something.
But I see many escorts on the feds side in the pvp arenas...
I think a big problem is a lotta escort players focus purely on DPS, I know I'm gonna be snagging science team and emergancy power to sheilds to keep my survivability in an escort as high as I can
I'm not sure how other Escort players play, but even though those things help in some regards...it doesn't help with focus firing. When I went from T2 to T3 PvP, I became frustrated due to being the first or head of the list of being focused fired when Klingon players decloaked.
Let's admit it, cloaking gives enormous benefits (beyond ignorant PuGs) to positioning, target coordination, and over all stealth for Klingons. Klingons can decloak in a pack and burn down 1-2 Fed Escorts quickly if they really focused on it before Feds had much time to react.
When being focused fired as such, those abilities will rarely save you. I have tried. Escorts are not tanks.
1v1, I can manage myself much, much better. It doesn't mean that I don't die but I have a fighting chance.
@faithborn yes the tactic of hitting one shield side with cannons, then hy the exposed side is very sound. have you tried using mines?
mines allow you a little bit of battlefield control because most people will avoid them, thus allowing you to dictate a little bit of where they will maneuver. the advantage here is that they are on your terms not theirs.
1. We are all playing with other people, who to some lesser/greater extent are just as sophisticated as us, and are going to use their tools to their advantage.
2. You will just need to wait and join Section 31 in order to get your cloaked Fed Escort. :)
mines, in past experience, really SUCK in terms of damage if they hit a shielded area. I think my t4 defiant in open beta smashed through about 15 of them once and didnt even scratch the shields. the main two benefits of mines are that they can target cloaked people (FTW) and that they do as you said restrict movement.
in my honest opinion for an escort the three big defense BoFF abilities you can get are emergency power to shields, reverse shield polarity, and jam targetting sensors. the first two prevent you from getting instagibbed in a couple seconds, and the third confuses the **** out of people and also breaks tractor beams, which are killer if you cant get out of them.
I love my escort... lets me get things done quickly. Those patrol missions are a breeze... problem is that people don't know how to survive. I've been in some large battles and have yet to die in battle. The trick is to have an Engineer background so you can beef up your shields. Also my science BO has the science team ability... that gives me 2 great shield recharges. I used to have an engineer BO with emergency power to shields (so i had 3 shield buffs) but i found this to be overkill and opted instead for emergency power to weapons. All i can say is i hope they don't nerf cannon rapid fire lol... that thing is soooo OP.
I love my escort... lets me get things done quickly. Those patrol missions are a breeze... problem is that people don't know how to survive. I've been in some large battles and have yet to die in battle. The trick is to have an Engineer background so you can beef up your shields. Also my science BO has the science team ability... that gives me 2 great shield recharges. I used to have an engineer BO with emergency power to shields (so i had 3 shield buffs) but i found this to be overkill and opted instead for emergency power to weapons. All i can say is i hope they don't nerf cannon rapid fire lol... that thing is soooo OP.
I love my excort... wait did i say that already?
pass on the engineer background, it makes getting the mk3 abilities extremely hard. You really don't need engineering selection in order to survive.
pass on the engineer background, it makes getting the mk3 abilities extremely hard. You really don't need engineering selection in order to survive.
Yeah, your absolutely right... maybe just a preference thing. You see my plan was to roll Eng in an escort and Tac in a cruiser. Should balance out the survivability/dps
Also... this is because i get 2 tac consoles and only 1 eng on an escort... this way i have 2 tacs and 2 eng (inclucing myself).
I have seen more escorts than any other ship so far....which happened about the time everyone figured out that only escorts get loot in deepspace and fleet actions.
Escorts are stupid for a very simple reason: They should play like fighters, they play like turrets.
There is just no reason to make attack runs on the enemy because your cannon cycles so quickly that you do more damage by just sitting there and keeping them square in your sights.
Comments
I played a bop exclusively though open beta. I know them pretty well. And yes, they are squishy.
It might be latency related s well, since I've had torpedoes hit immediately even though they are still graphically en-route and I've had cases where i out ran them far enough to finish cloaking before they hit (i.e. evasive maneuvers with max engine power)
Equip Phaser Cannons - not the 45 degree ones - the ones that had 180 I believe or around there - now picture your escort broadsiding a BoP with Rapid Fire.
Bridge Officers - Tactical for offesnse (nuff said), engineer/science (defense) - Jam Sensors, Polarize hull, Reverse Shield Polarity, Science Team, and s on on. Torpede Spread - has so many nice uses - lost count on how many BoP's I bagged with this ability when they attempted to decloak or hide a downed shield from me
Engineers can fly Escorts, Tactical can fly Cruisers, and Vice Versa. Some of the hardest escorts to take down were piloted by Engineers, and some of the most devastating cruisers were piloted by tactical officers.
@faithborn yes the tactic of hitting one shield side with cannons, then hy the exposed side is very sound. have you tried using mines?
mines allow you a little bit of battlefield control because most people will avoid them, thus allowing you to dictate a little bit of where they will maneuver. the advantage here is that they are on your terms not theirs.
@nyg316 i agree with you on the point that everyone is basing their fed escorts on the defiant. i would like to point out that in the DS9 episode when the Valiant (Defiant Variant) tried to go up against a Jem Hadar Cruiser, it got destroyed rather quickly. Mostly because it Captained by an overaggessive, non-tactically sound Cadet. So the two points I am trying to make with this are:
1. We are all playing with other people, who to some lesser/greater extent are just as sophisticated as us, and are going to use their tools to their advantage.
2. You will just need to wait and join Section 31 in order to get your cloaked Fed Escort.
and no idea how you came up with the idea that nobody likes em. seen more than enough in beta :>
If you like it that much, go kling tbh.
even though i don´t understand the idea behind the raptor it is in every aspect worse then bops.
my suggestion is to change bops from 4:2 to 3:3 weaponload ability and restrict them to not beeing able to field heavy cannons.
what i would like to see for fed escorts is a kind of denerfing of MES - to work like it was when beeing used at 0 throttle.
Got that combo Cruiser/Tactical aswell and in doubt if its the right way to go.
I remember the end of one episode where Kirk ordered Scotty to activate their new cloaking device.
This would propel their ship forward with virtually no turning ability at an incredible speed and would be good enough to rapidly move them, say 15km or so.
Or something like the Picard maneuver? A tactical warp jump similar to WoW's "blink" ability. This would be enough to take you out of combat range, again to about 15 km out or so and would give you a give to run.
Both abilites should cut off weapon power for a few seconds so it can't be used to ambush targets.... or not, I mean klingons can us their cloak to ambush targets. Maybe have their shields weakened or something, who knows.
Following up one of these abilities with evasive maneuvers then full impulse could allow a federation pilot to escape combat or quickly join up with his fleet.
According to the Treaty of Algeron, the Federation agreed not to develop or use Cloaking Technology. The game is following ST canon.
The Defiant had ablative armor out of the shipyard. O'Brien didn't have to take TRIBBLE out of engineering so he could install, fix, replace the armor after every battle. It should be an inate feature to the escorts from tier II to tier IV
And MES was horribly broken. The stuff I could do in my Science Ship with MES, like Drop Mines without breaking stealth while at Full Impulse too.
But I see many escorts on the feds side in the pvp arenas...
I'm not sure how other Escort players play, but even though those things help in some regards...it doesn't help with focus firing. When I went from T2 to T3 PvP, I became frustrated due to being the first or head of the list of being focused fired when Klingon players decloaked.
Let's admit it, cloaking gives enormous benefits (beyond ignorant PuGs) to positioning, target coordination, and over all stealth for Klingons. Klingons can decloak in a pack and burn down 1-2 Fed Escorts quickly if they really focused on it before Feds had much time to react.
When being focused fired as such, those abilities will rarely save you. I have tried. Escorts are not tanks.
1v1, I can manage myself much, much better. It doesn't mean that I don't die but I have a fighting chance.
mines, in past experience, really SUCK in terms of damage if they hit a shielded area. I think my t4 defiant in open beta smashed through about 15 of them once and didnt even scratch the shields. the main two benefits of mines are that they can target cloaked people (FTW) and that they do as you said restrict movement.
in my honest opinion for an escort the three big defense BoFF abilities you can get are emergency power to shields, reverse shield polarity, and jam targetting sensors. the first two prevent you from getting instagibbed in a couple seconds, and the third confuses the **** out of people and also breaks tractor beams, which are killer if you cant get out of them.
I love my excort... wait did i say that already?
pass on the engineer background, it makes getting the mk3 abilities extremely hard. You really don't need engineering selection in order to survive.
Yeah, your absolutely right... maybe just a preference thing. You see my plan was to roll Eng in an escort and Tac in a cruiser. Should balance out the survivability/dps
Also... this is because i get 2 tac consoles and only 1 eng on an escort... this way i have 2 tacs and 2 eng (inclucing myself).
There is just no reason to make attack runs on the enemy because your cannon cycles so quickly that you do more damage by just sitting there and keeping them square in your sights.