I am a tactical cruiser pilot. Or maybe I should say I am a part time "TAC ship" pilot because I make an effor to play all 5 ship classes evenly so I don't get caught by the weird misconceptions various specialists have of other ships. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, it seems.
One of my first complaints: if Tacs are really so powerful then why aren't more people actually piloting them? All too often I end up in teams where the only allied healer ship I see is the one I'm in. Considering the side with healers has a big advantage over the side without, in theory, it tends to really become irritating to see nobody else doing the job on your own teams.
Speaking of "in theory." The average HPS of a Koschei is 820 and the Aion is 670. The heavy beam of the Koschei can get up to 1800 HPS at close range. But close range means you are as exposed to enemy fire as the people you are healing. So that's a lot harder to do in practice than one would think. Complicating this, the optimal DPS of most tier 4 ships starts at 1500, is usually around 1800, and can get as high as 4000 DPS. The only way these healing beams are of any help at all is because people have shields and other specific modules that can reduce the damage taken. A healer can keep an ally alive facing a single opponent, and a healer-dreadnought combo can absorb fire from several opponents at once. But the reality is that the solo oponent taking on a healer-DPS combo is fighting 1 vs. 2, and the healer-dreadnought combo tends to lack the firepower to take down enemies fast. 3 attackers at the same time can be seriously frustrating to the 2 person dreadnought-healer combo.
Another frustration I often have is the frequent "armies of one" that I see. Setting up a proper healball requires coordination. Loose cannons that go off and do their own thing can singlehandedly lose the match for their entire team. Sorry Vindicta and corvette pilots. If you don't know how to keep yourself alive, your suicide runs are a liability to the enitre team no matter how high your personal score is. (And I've been guilty of that myself on occaion.)
So what I am seeing is that the so called "TAC ship expliot" is actually they have a proper team and you don't. Teamwork aided by a voice-chat application and proper coordination and planning really is OP when facing eight little "armies of one," and there is little any developer can do about it. Perhaps an ELO system for matchmaking could help, but I'm worried the Dreadnought playerbase might not be large enough for that to be viable yet.