Ever get his thoughts on the "plucked chicken" dig?

Don't know about the "heavy beam array" (we do have DBB's), but I think there's a really good argument for turning high-end cruisers into cube-killer dreadnoughts.

However, we have the precedent set by the Defiant that skews what the role of an escort really ought to be. The thing was specifically designed to fight the Borg, whereas the cruisers aren't.

I really don't know what the secret sauce ought to be... I just know it isn't in there yet.

Maybe... maybe the trick is to give cruisers an advantage in weapon power (reduced power drain or reduced cooldowns, maybe?) but give escorts better crits?

Not entirely accurate. The Defiant class was originally conceived of as part of the Anti-Borg task force (along with classes like the Akira and Steamrunner for example), but the first prototype failed miserably and was repurposed into a warship aimed for service on the Dominion front.

That is indeed true, but ask the average DS9 fan what the Defiant was built for and see what answer you get. It's so inextricably tied in with Sisko's history that everybody most remembers that it's supposed to be a Borg-killer.

I'm convinced the entire escort class was built around this design, that there is a persistent perception tied to this particular ship that it should out-fly and out-gun everything else Starfleet has, and that this perception has bled over in some degree into every other escort in the game.

IMO, the only reason we even have "tactical cruisers" in the game is because it's obvious even to Cryptic that Tac ships have a combat advantage and not everybody in a cruiser wants to play "healboat".

Conceptually, cruisers should have enough firepower to do significant damage to escorts, even a "healboat". I run a pretty good Fleet Excel' cruiser skill/boff/doff/build and the outcome is more or less a foregone conclusion with guys I spar with in their escorts. And I am at least a "fair" cruiser commander, if not better. Most of the fights tend to be full time heals while hoping that they make a big mistake and I get some really awesome crits at the same time.

Right now cruisers can only "add" to fellow escorts damage instead of being a real threat out on their own (the majority of the time). Cruisers need a small tweak in firepower/capability to fend off escorts. Not totally out-damage them, or even match, but enough to give escorts reason for concern when engaging cruisers.

I've always wondered why science ships should be the only ones to get built in Boff powers: perhaps cruisers would be made somewhat more potent with innate 'emergency/auxiliary power to...' abilities.

Perhaps an innate 'beam overload' (what's the point of having high level tac beam powers anyway? Escorts don't get much use out of them); or make overload an engineering power (overloading a weapon sounds like something an engineer might do, rather than a tactical officer).

I'd also just plain buff beams, if it were up to me. DHCs don't need to be that good compared to other weapons; escorts still have more tac consoles, and higher level tac powers, so they still have the advantage in DPS even if they use beams like everyone else. Plus there are no beam powers that can really match CRF.

Just some thoughts that popped into my head as I read through this most excellent thread.

You have a very odd definition of excellent. And if you look at the Fleet Excel and Fleet Regent, they have equal number of tac consoles with a few of the upper echelon escorts (FPE, FHEC, etc).

As for the built in abilities, yeah, that one did confuse me for a little while. But it semi-sorta makes sense if you think about it. Sci ships have VERY strong sensors in comparison to the rest of the ships, so it would make sense that they would know where to fire to hit specific subsystems, and it would make sense that their sensors would be constantly scanning a target and know exactly where to hit to do more damage overall.

Maybe Emergency Power To Weapons should just be made as strong as Emergency Power To Shields is already.

Except for the fact that escorts can also use it. You already have them running around with those masses of tac consoles/BOff slots and DHCs. Now imagine if they got 30 seconds of an addition 20% energy damage from EPtW. Not a pretty sight.

The next recourse would be to make it cruiser only, but then you would have the masses of escort pilots making noise while the cruiser captains preened themselves, and the whole mess would just flip around as it became Cruisers Online once again.

Not a bad thought, but just to play DA, what innate ability would scorts get? Because you know if you're handing them out to Sci and Cruisers, the scort pilots will want one too.

Not to mention that the "Target Subsystem I" skills really don't seem to add a heck of a lot of benefit. The disable effect happens rarely enough that I normally don't bother adding them to my power bar. (I should get around to putting them in a keybind with "Fire all energy weapons" though...)