It's pretty easy to set up chain heals in a cruiser, you have to pick abilities that don't have shared cooldowns. For instance, do you really expect to be able to use two engineering teams at the same time? No, just make sure you get an eng team, and aux to SIF, hazard emitters, miracle worker, and make dang sure you're using damage resist devices/abilities.

No, abilities as they are right now are quite good...power to shields makes shields harder. Power to weapons makes them hit harder. Power to engines and aux do their intended job. Healing and cleansing abilities are the most useful they've ever been.

The BIGGEST issue with PvP right now is the spam, and the devs have taken serious notice about this and have said they're going to give the whole system a tweak so we don't have mine clouds like we do now.

They've also un-nerfed the spinal lance on the Galaxy-X and they made gravity well what it should be. I guess I'm not sure what the issue is...nerfs come about because people find something aggravating or out of balance.

When it takes 4 people focus firing a cruiser for 20 minutes in a 4 to 1 battle to finally kill said cruiser it's time for a nerf. My Fleet mate did this in his Star Cruiser.

I am just glad they are not INVULNERABLE like they were before.

Funnily enough, I recently started using it again, on my healing Cruiser. The simple reason for using is that I spend most of my resources healing others - if I happen to be the sudden target of focused fire, RSP gives me a little more breathing room.

That said - not all nerfs are necessarily well-handled and lead to interesting or satisfying gameplay mechanics for the "nerfed" power. There were a ton of interesting and good ideas for how RSP could be changed, but we got the possibly most boring variation. But the game is still more fun now then it was with the old, so it's stil a net win.

As someone who was here from the beginning, if you'd like to go back to the various ways PVP was effed up over the past year you have a very short memory.

If you're going to insult people, you might at least learn to spell the insult correctly.

Instead of crying about a nerf, why not adapt like everyone else?

And I don't know what the deal is with that guy and his cruiser, but I just switched from escorts to cruisers and I have no problems. If ANYTHING needs to be de-nerfed, its the effing escort classes before we start crying about skills which, we all know deep down inside, were overpowered. And the people who then get into fits about a nerf or re-balancing are usually the ones who were abusing it in the first place.

They took an arguably overpowered skill and balanced it for pvp but ruined it for pve. It went from "must have" to "take it off of every ship you own". These are the reasons I continue to push for skills/items/etc. to work differently in pvp than in pve. I'm not for any skill being an I win button. But I'm against skills being gimped to the point where they clearly are not a valid choice anymore. The Vo'Quv in pve for example. Great going killing a whole ship choice there. And the answer to gimping the Vo'Quv to reduce pet spam was to give everyone pet spam. That seems counter-intuitive at the least.

Way past time to nerf things only for pvp as a start and then look at the skill/item/ship for pve separately. It's not like the dev team never plays pve and can't tell for themselves whether something needs adjusting there. Right now it's pvp balance overriding fun for everybody else, when we have 100 people doing pvp regularly out of 100,000. And forgive me if I don't believe in the altruism of the pvp community in balancing things properly for everyone in pve. They often hate pve already. We've had sci ships gimped, then finally buffed slightly to make them a valid choice for pve, after months, we've lost the Vo'Quv, we lost RSP, we lost other skills along the way, we're going to lose tractor mines, then fighters, all on the altar of about 100 people at the top tier of pvp. Way past time to change that.

These people you refer to are the same people who have been here since before launch. These people have already thought-tested the CTM before it came out. These people put those thought-test to use and within 2h, yeah, we knew it was bad.

These people are the ones who came up with the OP use of the item. One weapon slot means nothing to me in my cruiser I already have 5 beams and a dual dedicated to DPS. Looks like I've got two open slots for, hmmmmm, two CTM launchers. You need to play a PvP against a coordinated team that is using the spam-factor. You'll understand.

You don't want to, but if you do you can have a go at S.O.B. aka. Spam or Bust. :p

No, we're using it to demonstrate our point. Again, please refer to S.O.B. (or any premade) and they'll demonstrate for you.

It's not the n00bs crying. It's the ritual PvPer who are voicing their opposition to the item.

PvPers like the ships they are flying as well, so it doesn'T matter if they hate PvE or not. They can't "nerf" you for PvE if they don't nerf it for PvP as well.

But how do you determine something is balanced or not without PvP? Would a Super-Phaser Cannon that instantly destroys entire Borg Cubes be a real problem for PvE? Maybe someone would complain there is no reason to play anything but the super-phaser-cannon ship.

The only point where people really complain about balance issues for PvE is overpowered enemies that one-shot you, or ridicidilous Zerg Fest Raids. But the opposite direction - do people really complain stuff is too easy and suggest changes? Yeah, I hear it for the Borg (but I also hear a few opposing voices), but there clearly the expectation is different - the Borg are expected to be OP and unbeatable... Unlike every other race.

But how many complain that Klingon NPCs ships are lame-sauce? I mean, this is supposedly our major enemy currently. The ships seem to have the most generic and boring powers. The only thing vaguely intersting are the BoPs that occassionally cloak ineffectually.

I would argue that the changes to PvP could have made PvE worse - they made it too easy. I find it hard to believe there is anything in a regular mission that could threaten a Cruiser build for "tanking" or healing. The PvP enabled Cruiser is full of self-defense skills that have to deal with 3-4 enemies focusing fire on you - and survive. There aren't any NPCs in this game that can approach this degree of firepower. Possibly not even at Elite difficulty!

Switching to Champions Online was almost a shock for me! Suddenly there were dangerous and difficult enemies for my Single Blade Archetype toon! Of course, I am still wet behind the ears... But I noticed that I get the interesting and motivating mix of frustration and successes that I expect from a good game. I can't claim the same for PvE.

Ultimately often imbalances are irrelevant for Solo PvE. If you're just playing your Captain and ship, you got nothing to compare yourself to. But once you add additional players, balance becomes important. It matters whether anyone wants to have your Captain type and your ship in an STF, or if you can get the trophy and item reward for a Fleet Action.
If you actually have to beat other players in a direct fight, balance becomes even more important.

But - there is only a minority of players regularly involved with Raids or PvP. So it's no surprise that most people just see the nerfs the PvP community brings.

But there weren't just nerfs ...

Some PvP Buffs:

• Shield Power Grants up to 35 % Resistance.
• Hazard Emitters grants more healing then before
• Transfer Shield Strength finally provides its initial larger healing and a significant heal over time
• Auxillary to Structural Integrity Field was considerably buffed
• Emergency Powers can be chained perfectly and Emergency Power to Shields is a significant resistance buff
• Beam Fire At Will used to effect only a single beam
• Science Ships got the Sensor Analysis Power and +15 Auxillary Power instead of +10 (and even before the Science Powers were slaved to Aux, Science Vessel PvE was the slowest)
• Charged Particle Burst shield drain was increased
• Tachyon Beam shield drain was increased

Would any of this have been necessary for PvE alone? Would the great cooldown mechanical overhaul worked out so well in Season 2 without an active PvP community?

Today, almost all powers and abilities are actually useful, and the PvP communtiy is always suggesting how to improve the final few ones that still are not.

Yes, we also got a lot of stuff nerfed and changed. But the goal is to make all the various powers and equipment pieces useful. But none of them overpowered.

What only is left to do for the rest of the community - find some champions to finally give the NPCs some teeth, and not just some boring hit point sponges with the occassional instant-kill-crit possibility at higher difficulty levels - actually make those encounters dynamic and challenging.