Not that I use them, but Polarize Hull breaks the hold of tractor beams. And CPBurst + FAW would clear them. That sounds like a counter to me.

Love the new UI!
Looking at where to spend the points now, but I do like the Green-Yellow-Red indicators on the diminishing returns on skill advancement- Very Nice Touch!

I agree here. I had skills in ground anyway, and I basically got the same build post-split. Not totally to be sure, but I felt that the sacrifices I had to make are reasonable MMO-style choices. "This skill or that skill, only so many points to go around".

And I also think it feels more Trek. Was Kirk all ground or space spec? Picard? I dare say that Sisko punching Q was a definite "Combat Specialist" move.
Janeway... Okay she may have been less ground speced in a combat sense, but nobody wanted to cross her before her coffee.


P.S., I think the new UI rocks. Just a personal preference.

Another good point. Even in Space, a Tac/Escort can get by with very few Engineering and Science skills compared to a Sci captain or a Sci ship. On ground, this is even more true. For a Sci's Thermal Vent to compete with a Tac's Operative Kit, a Sci would have to invest far more points. Yes, it's an apples to oranges comparison, but you get the point.

That would make sense, if everyone was doing both ground and space. However, there are LOADS of people that do purely space and people that do only ground. This change is forcing them to change their builds and sacrifice some skills for pretty much no reason at all.

What you're seeing now is what's remaining after both the CTMs and FAW were changed. Originally, CTM spawned 5 mines, each with a full starship strength Tractor Beam and benefited from Dispersal Patterns like any other mine. Polarize Hull only has a 33% uptime and it was nowhere near enough to combat just one spawn of mine clusters, let alone the multiples that would produced over it's CD from a single ship (let alone others). Furthermore, it's quite difficult for Cruisers and Escorts to make room in their builds just for Polarize Hull, which would only really serve to combat this one type of weapon, when Sci BOs are at such a premium for them. Also, at the time, FAW was a complete random fire; in order to effectively clear the mines, you'd have to have either a dedicated Sci or Cruiser FAW'ing at every opportunity - essentially decreasing their offensive DPS to 0 and effectively giving the enemy team a 1 ship advantage over you. And for the record, CPB does no damage, you're thinking of Photonic Shockwave And even then, PSW wasn't a real counter since the CTMs had a range of 5KM and PSW is only 3KM.

Not seeing these two items yet in my skill tree.
Are these for a lter update?

Fire On My Mark uses Sensors now, according to the skill tree. Whether that's been implemented or not yet, I don't know. But, it seems even Tac captains might want it now.

Remove more choice from your customers! Force them into specializing into parts of gameplay they do not enjoy!!!

There is a disconnect between the developer and the gamer here... Allow me the freedom of choice to specialize in what I want.

As a developer, YOUR job is to make things simple stupid for us to understand. If casual players are having trouble with the trees, make them SIMPLER. Keep the choice in. Or don't.

Quite frankly, there are 2 ways you can do things; QUICKLY, with much bloodshed, or SLOWLY, with more happy results.

Your choice. (I realize that Cryptic is banking on an influx of new players... do you think they will enjoy being caged into ground if they just wanted to play space?)

I guess the split is ok, really does make you balance things out, and I am good with that.

BUT BUT BUT BUT you should drop the caps a little bit if you keep the split, not asking for a lot, maybe 3 or 4 "points" (can't think of a better way to say it) for each level. It's a totally pain in the a%& for commander, captain, and VA skills.

I found myself wasting points in skills that I'm not that interested in to get to the next level

Just doing some counting.. 108 posts here so far:

Posts that are for the forced split: 15

Posts that are against the forced split: 57

Posts that are neutral or off topic: 36

I really hope Cryptic is paying attention here.


On a good note, it seems almost everyone likes the new UI.

The split seems to work fine. I'm equal or more effective in space and definitely more effective in ground.

I like it so far. It may need some tweaks, but so far so good.