Then his damage is straight on the money and there is nothing wrong.

Question: How do the different difficutly levels effect the comparitive performance of the different ship types? Does anybody know? Because I know in ESTFs even if I didn't have the same DPS in a cruiser I had a lot more staying power than I did in an escort and felt like I contributed more over the course of the mission than I did in an escort that was either dying every other minute or having to break away every 30 seconds to spend 60-90 seconds healing. While some of that could be down to my (lack) of skill as an escort pilot it does make me wonder.

In elite STFs my Tac/scort can hold it's own in the face of most things usually it's a 'lucky' crit from whatever I'm killing that does me in.

If damage from NPCs get's much greater I'll go for 2 EPtW instead of EPtS and do as much DPS as I can before I die

I dropped my cruiser for an escort a while ago and only feel regret when I remember I like larger ships.

There are a few extra reasons I'd like to add to the OPs post.

1. Way way back in season 1, when weapon power wasn't instantly replenished upon the end of a firing cycle, cruisers energy management abilities and consoles allowed them to be pretty competitive when it came to damage dealing.

2. The devs moved the shield consoles to science, effectively giving sci focused ships even tankier shields and taking away a good portion of tank from cruisers.

3. Devs halved the power boosting consoles.

4. The only really useful consoles engineering wise for cruisers are neutronium, the rest are traps for new players.

5. The difference between a cruiser and an escorts shields is tiny.

They don't effect them at all really. Elite difficulty isn't really all that different from normal difficulty, they just upped the hull, shields and damage dealt of NPCs. Since tanking is as insane as it is, an escort can happily tank an elite mob, with the only real visible difference being it takes 4 seconds to kill a ship rather then 3. Cruisers infact come off worse in elite difficulty, since they probably won't be able to get a shield down before the target has regenerated some of it. As such elite difficulty just compounds the cruiser issue.

As stated in a previous post (the one right above this one I believe), NPC Shields, Hull, and weapons are all significantly buffed between elites and normals. Also npcs have stronger damage resists on elite than on normal.

Ex.
Conditions:
No EPtW
Weapon Power at 125
Distance: 4k

Zilant Battleship on Normal: 1 mk XII AP BA shot: 1000 on hull
Zilant Battleship on Elite: 1 mk XII AP BA shot: 850 on hull

Lastly, NPCs on elite tend to be more proactive with their BOff abilities, and their AI is improved.

Sad thing is though that in reality with a dedicated support/healer an escort would be a better tank than a cruiser too. But I have yet to gather the ambition to do the math.

The main problem is that in Trek cruisers are the biggest and baddest kids on the block. It is a cruiser universe.

Escorts like the defiant only look that way because they are shown beating up smaller ships.
Remember the battle with the Lakota? A 80 year cruiser with a noname crew against the hero Worf commanded defiant. and all he managed was a stalmate.
Ingame? defiant is a death machine that can tank exceptionally well.

The super bug ship? they are just better fighters, once their special weaponry was equalized with adapted shields they went straight to cannon fodder material unless they rammed their way through the screen. Even stronger then the defiant.

And the list goes one.

Ships are setup to be mostly equal in power, even when they are not. You can fit the same weapons on all ships, even when some of those weapon systems are bigger then the entire ship they are fitted on. MK12 phaser array on a shuttle? Escort? no problem, whiel that array is bigger then those ships by itself.

Same number of weapon systems, basically, while cruisers can sport 8, escorts get 7 and sci ships 6. While in Trek cruisers have more like 2-4 times as many as an escort.

And the list goes one.

Make all ships equal is the problem.

I think there should be STFs tharequire all the specialties. a DPS fest for the escorts, and then STFs where engineers/cruisers are required and finally one that is sci power required.

Give escorts an inhate malus to all healing done by themselves (50%).



People always talk about how cruisers are healers. so ok, lets be healers. first step: make sure we are needed by taking away the sufficient self healing escorts are capable of.

You want the damage? ok you get it- but you wont get the healing.


Escort heals both shield and hp wise should get crippled thus making sure that they actually need a crusier hanging around.

Better idea, just make all heals percentage based, job done