It just seems like to me that the science class of ships are getting the short end of the stick in the games content and rewards.

When you do fleet enguagements the points only seem to figure in DPS; healing, buffing and debuffing dont seem to apply to your score. I did about 900 on the score chart i the beginning ship and now in the science ship the score for me has moved to only about 1200. While in my current sector of feel engaugement the escorts seem to bring in nearly 3x the score touching over 3000 sometimes, winning all the fancy loot and leavin me with white item i vendor for 500 energy credits.

Sure escorts are the DPS ships so they should do more damage, but 3x is crazy. It doesnt just impact the special fleet engaugements either. Take a the classic deep space encounters everyone farms. I warp into one and typicaly all the other ships in there are escorts. I fallow them around as they enguage the enemy but my DPS is so much lower then theirs I will never get a loot drop, which for me.. is half the fun of an MMO is to collect loot and stockpile your own inventory.

I cant compete with the escorts so I stray off on my own from them and take on targets by myself, I find im shooting a battlecruiser for nearly 2 minutes before I blow it up. While escort flys in and pops them in 20-30 seconds.

Anyone else feel like their science ship is the bottom of the totem pole?

Science Ships are suffering from the same thing every MMO support class suffers from...PITA to level but essential in end game. Difference is here we have no idea what end game is going to be like or how 'essential' they will be. All we can do is hope all encounters aren't going to be won by a Cruiser and then how ever many escorts you can find to zerg it. Unfortunatly it is very difficult to make a ship with that much utility also do alot of damage and it not just be the king of the hill in end game and all the sudden there won't be a point to the easy leveling of an escort.

Sadly, I realized that in order to have any chance for loot at all in these maps is to group with others, so the combined damage + round robin loot makes it so at least I get a few drops from ships here and there. Now as far as the final reward for the mission, get used to getting auxiliary batteries.

At the moment there is no need for science or cruisers in fleet actions - if you want to do lots of fleet actions and want to get decent prizes your going to need to get an Esort.

It's not because Escorts shouldn't be at the top for DPS: it's because It doesn't cost anything to die and only DPS counts towards the score - as you said healing, bluffing / debluffing, absorbing damage don't count towards anything. It's a bad design problem and won't change till Cryptic do something about it.

In the meantime; the only solution is to make friends with a lot of escorts that are willing to team up and share some of the loot with you. Of course it's easier said then done.

I personaly find it very hard to get people to team with me... I figured it would be like "Oh sweet someones actually rollin a science ship.. get him in our team" nope its like the opposite, I dont output as much dps so im like a shadow leaching off their work.

All the buffs and debuffs I can do are pretty nifty ill admit but they seem to be more of a DPS increase for the escorts vs myself, putting me farther behind on any scoring lol.

I also find that the sub system targeting a science ship can do to be kinda lame, at least for solo purpose I think its a DPS loss to use it since it puts one of your beams on a cooldown for idk how long.. 5-10 seconds? The effect isnt worth the phaser cooldown to me, but in a group focus targeting I can see how it would add up.. but again not being in a team.. your just benifiting everyone else. Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? lol : /

Cruisers have the same problem. You would think game developers would have learned to not make DPS classes even more desirable by implementing system like this by now...

I think fleet engaugements should reward 3 types of rewards to each of the classes. If your escort you should be competeing with everyone else flying escort in that fleet engaugement. Cruisers should be in their own catagory too along with science in theirs. That would give me a way better chance to place #1 in a fleet engaugement if my score was only against other science ships based on loot rewards.

I like this solution.

Yes, they'll need to do something such that actions other than direct damage result in points. There needs to be points for support of others, and potentially even damage taken (although I'm not sold on that one). All of them will need to be appropriately scaled though so that any ship has roughly an equal chance at max score.

Not sure I agree with this one, as there are not 3 distinct classes. There are numerous ways to outfit a science vessel, for example. I can outfit it to do good damage, or I can be more of a pure support ship. The current scoring will still strongly favor the damage builds.

I play science as my main and have no trouble being in the top 5 in fleet actions. Still haven't gotten #1 yet though.