But it adds nothing to your durability. Since I slant my cruiser towards DPS I find the extra protection afforded by cycling APO and APD makes a huge difference... while simultaneously adding to my damage potential. The rest of the team will have to learn to live with providing their own attack pattern bonuses lol.

APD is great, you just have to have aggro so you debuff the enemy for the team. That is, if there actually was a PvE content, where you could really need tanks.

This amuses me.

I, the escort pilot packs APB because I don't need the defensive benefits of APO or APD typically.

You, the cruiser pilot finds the extra protection from them to make a huge difference I'm assuming in the defensive department.

That makes perfect sense to me!

Delta is overall better. In PVE, escort outdps everything, thus tanks anyway (because majority of "cruiser-tanks" cannot hold agro), debuffin all targets that shoot on it. In PvP everyone does spam TT and clears the debuff, so at least the defensive portion remain.

It's kind of a paradox. With the speed bonuses and possible resistance capabilities out there, there are several escort players I know there that out resist damage more than a well built cruiser and have no need to boost their defense, namely the Fleet Defiant.

Accounting from personal experience,I know that my Fleet Excel can barely scratch some of the escorts I spar with and I'm not exactly using bottom of the shelf weapons and consoles and builds out there, I'm sure that others can speak the same as well. The HEC is so much easier to damage stuff and almost as able to soak damage as my Fleet Excel'. The 10k or so hull difference and the extra crew don't seem to make as much of a difference as speed does in PvP. The idiom "speed is life" is a good idiom, but it seems to make more of a difference than other factors in STO space combat.

I often find that cruiser pilots have a BAD tendency to sit still.... my Regent never stops moving.... EVER. I always have it moving as fast as its turning will allow. Escorts get a free 10%, but cruisers can also get some defense from movement.

I'd just like to point out that the slower the turn rate, the greater the radius you must maintain in order to broadside a target, which directly translates into less damage dealt.

My fleet corsair (base turn 8) runs beams, but thanks to the plasmonic leech I'm also running somewhere around 60 power to engines with only 25 invested, so it moves fast and turns easily. Good luck with that on Fed side.

What's wrong with sitting still? I'd rather be jamming the innate/boff/console activation buttons than lazily holding down the W/A/S/D keys and hoping the enemy fires on the shield facing I want them to.

Not gonna happen. Although some crafty piloting is needed, it shouldn't be the primary concern when flying a cruiser. Your primary concerns should be healing teammates, and reallocating the shields to the correct facing (Tactical Team helps with this).

Your taking nearly double the damage that someone with a positive defense score takes on average over time.

I agree with you. My Fleet Excel' doesn't stop moving. I do an imitation of erratic maneuvering , using both forward and reverse directions. But even with that, and a fully loaded Starship Maneuvers skill, the speeds that the cruisers move doesn't grant them too defensive bonus. Cruisers still take a ton more damage per hit than their escort counterparts, more than the 10k-ish hull points can provide for.