I'll put this very simply: the game is intentionally designed so you can see which NPCs are medics and engineers. The reason it is designed this way is so you can know which NPCs to take out to allow you defeat the group. When you rename NPCs then the player no longer has any idea which are medics or engineers, and which results in a never-ending battle. If you have to choose to between having NPCs showing up with their standard names or having the problem I just mentioned, the standard names is the lesser of 2 evils.

While I understand your sentiment you don't need a name to tell you what is what. If you have played the game for more than a month it's fairly easy to figure out who is who. For one thing any engineer will also put down turrets...that's a dead give away. The medics tend to buff they heck out of their own helath, so if you can take down their shields easily, but not their health then guess what it's a medic.

Renaming things for story telling is important. An obvious alien that says Starfleet engineer would be the one getting 1 star.

Besides I never say any of Kirks, or Picards, or Siskos, or Janeways enemies go hay I am engineer kill me first.

Sorry to say but not a fan of this thought of yours.

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Authors at some point for story purposes will need to name NPCs in combat groups, but yes this is still a game and mob names mean something.

I think it should be done similiar to the shows.... the main bad dude and other enemy/fighting characters important to the story should/could be named but everyone else should be nameless redshirts.

I've named 'Captain' level fighting NPCs but I think that's it.

I am guilty of this.

But in my opinion, having an NPC fit into my story is very important. And to be honest, I play STO since launch and I never realized that people target the healer first. Well, I suck at fighting and this might just be one of the reasons why.

In over 70 reviews, I've been told do revert the NPCs once and I understand why. However, I tried to find out which one of the NPC is the healer and give him an appropriate uniform. Trouble is, that seems to change sometimes. So what am I supposed to do? The type of uniform these NPCs wear is a vital clue not only for this mission but for future missions as well.

I decided to still use the appropriate uniform but color or slightly different and also giving unnamed NPCs numbers. So, a player will see that "Security Hologram 3" is the healer and be able to target him first, if he wants to do that.
It might not be a perfect solution but as long as Cryptic randomizes these kind of things, there is no real way to prevent this.
Besides, my missions don't emphasize combat so any fight will be comparatively easy anyway.

Really any mission worth doing will have renamed pc's its a necessary evil. Your post shows a lack of understanding of the foundry and story, as well as of the game itself.

On Elite you literally will not be able to win some fights without taking the medics out first. For one thing, they heal other enemies, but more importantly than that even if you take an enemy down they can resuscitate them. It's not possible to win without removing the medics from the equation so that enemies stay dead.

I understand the OP's frustration, and in a combat heavy mission I might find it extremely annoying if every single group had renamed NPCs. However, I don't think figuring out who the medic is that hard in itself. The problem would be if the NPCs all had identical uniforms and names so that you couldn't track any of the NPCs.

So I'll agree with the OP to the extent that we need to at least be able to distinguish between NPCs.

If your playing on Elite you dont have time to stand around figuring out which NPCs are doing what. You have to know that before going into the fight and target the healer first. In this case actual gameplay > immersion.

Regardless of your personal opinion, the game is designed so you can see who the healer is. That is how the Devs intended it to be.