I am an engineer/escort and I have a friend who couldnt beat me before he put dbb on his escort in conjunction with FAW3.

Since the dbb arc is narrow, even in pvp once you are facing your target or you set it up right its easier to get all strikes on one target, thereby increasing the damage out put of the power a lot. It's actually more powerful to have FAW3 with 4 dbb than using dhc's. since faw is what 15 second cool down?

whats the thoughts on this? clearly it upped his damage so much that our 1vs1 now instead of taking a few minutes where I normally win, he wins in under 1 minute or 1 minute 30 seconds.

I also saw an SOB raptor recently running DBB too and he was doing incredible damage, so are cannons now useless in the face of DBB's with FAW3?

edit did some testing on this. Using mark 11 uncommons, only 3 phaser relay tacticals and FAW2, not even 3. and thats the only phaser array power i had, i didnt take out my torpedo powers or my cannon rapid fire powers... damage potential is immense. IMMENSE!

Skill up time = 15 seconds, and down time = 30 seconds. so basically can be ON every 50% of the time?

Sure the damage potential of cannons with CRF is awesome... etc etc... but in terms of arc etc,, and the massive output of damage using FAW on one targetin front of you with DBB's outweighs CRF.

CRF has less up time too.

No wonder the more elite escort/raptor fliers are going this route. Question is was the use of DBB with FAW supposed to have these results?

Your welcome to test yourself and critique.

FaW is op'd against a single target. If your buddy uses FaW i recommend spamming mines

using DBB and making sure one target is in front of you especially with the current nice up time of this skill ensures that you USUALLY only have one target in front of you at a time as opposed to multiple ones.

I call unintended and over powered, reason? Anything that does more damage and easier at that than the use of cannons on escorts cannot be working as intended. People forget that one of the 'specialties' of escorts is it is the only type of ship out of cruisers/science that can use cannons weapons, which goes in line with their maneuverability and ability to keep people in arc and making them have the teeth they should have as opposed to cruisers..........now that whole 'bonus' is rather useless when you get more out of DBBs.

Not as easy as you think. You are getting the shaft in 1v1, now ask him to try it in a full 5v5 match. If you don't leave your team to chase him down, he won't be able to single target you with it. It's nothing new, players have been using it for a good long while now. It's only OP if you are dumb enough to let him single target you out. Otherwise it's only useful against carriers and mine spam.

i used it in a team, a pug, thats where i got my favored results.

the narrowness of the arc means theres not much i have to do to make sure theres only one target there, sometimes there isnt, but with the up time of the skill, i get alot of chances. its also very instant damage, no travel time of multiple bolts of cannons.

The *only* problem I see with FaW is the fact that it ignores targets behind you and to the left of you when you can get your Dual Beams focused within the firing arc of your ship. It would work as intended if it forced you to fire on *all* targets within range, then adjusted the damage output according to all targets in range.

For an example, if you have a single target in the front of your ship within the Dual Beam Firing Arc, and you have two ships off to the side and one ship off to the aft, then the damage should be divided among all four ships, not ignore them and fire only on the target in front of you. The damage should be divided by each ship within the 10K range, not just one target.

This way, people can not use it in a crowded situation and gain single target damage from this. At the same time, you would get the same damage as you get now, if you decide to run and some ship decided to leave the safty of his team to chase you down. Then and only then should you be allowed to get the full benifit of having the full damage potential of FaW against a single target. If two ships follow you, then that damage should be divided by a certain percentage by two ships, instead of one.

I think that would bring the ability within perfect balance. It would still be useful as hell but bring it in line with balance when several targets are within the 10K Range, not just within your firing arcs.

FaW is definitely not working as intended in my opinion. I know plenty of FaW users who will disagree and this discussion has been going on for some time. Its pretty damn easy to separate a target from the group using TBR so the argument of it not being that effective due to the difficulty of getting a single target in the arc is moot. Running beams right now offers more BoFF options/abilities, higher potential for single target damage, huge advantage in any 1v1 vs a non FaW build, ability to run APO3 or APB3 plus FaW3....obviously can't do that with cannons. My list of "complaints" regarding FaW is pretty long but I'm sure this is enough to get the flames going.

Read my post just above yours, and I think we could agree that this would be the way FaW should work.

I've been very vocal about this in the past, but I do wholeheartedly agree that the only way to use the 4DBB + FAW build is when you couple it with repulsors. In an escort this means you are giving away that all important lt. sci slot and gimping your survivability though. The ship that can really pull it off is the BoP (the high turn rate also helps the BoP to play with his firing arc), and that's what I use. Of course, TBR only becomes available every 45sec, and itself can be quite hard to use especially against small fast ships.

FAW3 + 4DBB offers more damage than CRF2 + 4DHC, but means that you can't equip turrets in the FAW boat (well, you can, but you actually lower DPS thanks to power drain mechanics). Stick turrets in the back of a CRF2 boat and you do very similar damage (slightly higher at close range, with more falloff the further off you get) but *always* hits the same target. CSV2 does more AOE damage than FAW and can deliver stunning damage with enough EPS consoles to mitigate the multi-target drain mechanic. Notice here I am using CRF/CSV 2 and not 3 because it is the level equivalent of FAW 3.

FAW seems artificially stronger becuase FAW boats tend to run all beams in front, or all beams and a torp. Cannon boats almost always run torps, and usually run a DBB as well for BO. So of course if you compare my FAW3 + 4DBB to someone else's CRF2/3 with two DHCs, 1 DBB, and a torp FAW is going to look OP.

FAW is very low skill point investment for the amount of damage it does. That damage is inferior to other types of damage because of the AOE mechanic, but there are ways to mitigate that (eg. TBR) but the 'quality' of my damage will always be worse than the 'quality' of your damage blackjack even if we get around the same numbers on the scoreboard. The main reason I run FAW + 4DBB isn't for the damage (although in the right situation I can get loads of it), but because as a BoP I have a lot of other things to spec into which the low investment cost of FAW lets me do.

in a 1v1 fight, FAW beats pretty much anything else. In a team however, it is far less efficient. Staying together is one way to completely ruin you damage output. Just having 2 targets makes you deal less damage to whoever you are focusing on than if you ran with unbuffed beams.

Also there is scramble sensors... If you are hit with that while running FAW, you basically have to run away. You can not stop firing, and will target friend and enemy alike.

I'm hoping that the occational FAW escort will make the cruisers start having Acetone Field at hand for matches where one may show up