Every Cure Space Elite....EVERY Cure Space Elite....
And I myself don't even know what the problem is. On one hand I'm inclined to believe that there comes a point where its too much (and that point is when you, at full health, are 1 shot with a plasma torpedo with full shields and each shot against you deals 1500 damage - from RAPTORS) on the other hand, Every time I die in Cure Space and get all built up about it, I think to myself "What am I doing? Why do I expect to hold out against these odds?"
The hardest part about it is I fly a cruiser, and when I can't do the one thing I'm supposed to be good at (TANK) well....y'know, if I'm gonna die anyway what's the point of not flying an escort? I feel useless...
Every time he hit his Scatter Volley looked like a Pack of Skittles exploded
FUNNY!
I found myself in a Vesta in the Cure a while back taking out both the nodes and the outgoing ships because nobody, and I mean NOBODY would even acknowledge a hail. They were clustered together the whole time and yes plenty of captain planet colours being fired by some of the ships.
The worst in my opinion though is ppl bailing mid-game during the the attack on the Borg Queen. So much time wasted.... sigh.
"The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." - Rocky Balboa (2006)
Just gonna put this out there: The majority of your woes could be avoided by not pugging XD.
Anyways, here's a gem.
Was called into an IGE yesterday afternoon in one of the Elite STF channels (as per forum rules, not going to name which channel). I was thinking "Oh, it's guys from here, should be ok." Uh huh. XD. They needed a few more, so brought two of my friends with me.
We started out very well, I dropped mortars outside the starting force field, and the drones and my mortars got aggro'd. My EE procced, so I had 3 quantum mortars, which cleared out the first spawn literally in seconds. We drop the force field and we go, taking out that first hallway in about 5 seconds flat. I drop my next set of mortars and we begin the "snipe from hallway". One of my friends is half-trolling, so about 30 seconds after we start this and the borg are in full aggro, he runs in and rescues the survivor. Now this would have been bad if he had failed, but as is, he succeeded.
So we kept on going, got the first 3 survivors, no problem. Then we got to room 4, where there are 3 heavy tacs, 6 regular tacs, and that little doohicky thinkgymajig on the ground... um... node thingamawhatsit. Anyways, all of a sudden, out of the blue, one of the guys just runs in. He just runs in. Every drone is still alive, NONE of them are aggro'd. He just. Runs. In. Of course he is summarily terminated by the army of Borg, who then all begin to head towards the 4 of us sitting there in astonishment in the previous room. Sufficed to say, my two friends went down almost instantly, and I barely got away, courtesy of phaser turrets, my dedicated seeker drone, and a well WELL timed cover shield. Myself and the other survivor finished off the drones while my friends were asking this guy what he was on. And his reply "Oh, they were already assimilating him..." Which I know they weren't, since I was watching all the trigger lines, and HE WAS THE ONLY ONE TO EVER PASS THEM. -.-
Sufficed to say, we got to Becca pretty easily after that, since there were no survivors to rescue. And then in the room of plasma... well it was your typical horror story of IGE, idiots no targeting the same tac drone, idiot kirking it and trying to take on an entire platform by himself without a pulsewave (major fail there). And once we FINALLY got all the forcefields down at the same time, kirk was already dead, the other person from the channel was killed at the start, so my friends and I just slaughtered becca. 3 man kill on Becca. That and the actually decent drop was what made it somewhat worth it.
Buuuut yeah. Not pugging avoids most of this hell, but as I was reminded, sometimes even the non-pugs have that crouching stupid hidden moron in there.
It is said the best weapon is one that is never fired. I disagree. The best weapon is one you only have to fire... once.
Just finished one where two "experienced players" decided to do there own thing - No communication, no watching where the other players were going or doing, no teamsmanship...
Result was that there was too many nanite probes and spheres for the one remaining ship to deal with, heading to both generators at the same time... So the optional was lost
Of course it was not the two experienced players fault.....and they then moaned through the chat channel for the rest of the game. (and it was them who broke the 10% rule !!!)
I'm going to throw a few thoughts on slightly different topics but all concerning the PvE.
First - last night I had a little time to setup and try the Chel Gett. Did the same BOFF setup as my Fleet Cerberus, except that I exchanged the TS1 for EPtW - 3 cannons, Quantum torpedo and 4 turrets (I don't like the cutting beam because it's not buff-able). Took a run in KASE and the ship did pretty well. And a piece of advice - if you have a Lt.Cmd Science station on escort or cruiser - Gravity Well is a must - it can, and will make the difference between a failed and saved optional.
Second - "Don't PuG" is not an answer. It's boring. The one I don't PuG is ISE, because I don't run it at all. There are some bad PuGs, and some really good ones - like being done with 6-7 minutes on the timer in CSE. And this awesome topic wouldn't be here if we didn't
Third - Sometimes I think that there is definitely something off with the CSE - I usually dive under the cube and clear the probes from point blank. To do that I activate all my defensive buffs of course - most of the time I manage on time to intercept the freshly spawned BoPs and clean them, but sometimes I just get shot down. So...to the point - it was on 30th that I did my last full run of STFs - CSE - I dived and I got shot down, which in itself is not really surprising. I dived, and started to work on the first nanite - I swallow a Plasma HY, which takes my hull to about 75-80% - not a big deal - HE2 and continue. I proceed to the second nanite - it had around 10% left and the cube sent me a Plasma HY for a second time - right on schedule - it got me down to 45%....and less than 2 seconds later - Plasma HY again. I was like "Come ooon! You're kidding me!!!". I could't even activate RSP which I do in case that I receive a second HY so that I have enough protection to finish the last bottom nanite, but a third HY was just too much for me.
Forth - I left a STF in the middle of it for a first time for the last half an year, because I got annoyed (and me being annoyed is something very rare) with the misplaced humor of one of the players...and I wrote a three finger configuration and left....I hope I won't do that again because it wasn't a nice thing to do.....
That's my five cents at the start of the new year.
CSN, I tend to follow MRRMLL even though it's on Normal.
On a good day, and most of the time, I find that three will head Right, and one will head Left. The three usually blow the R probes and cubes while I still have around 3-4 of the M probes left (I'm an Eng in a Chimera for the record), then come over and we'll make short work of the M probes and cubes. Then the 4 of us go intercept the Borg Negh'vars before tackling L. On a really good day, whoever was covering L will be as least as competent as myself, and almost all of the probes will already be down. Generally though, it's pretty flawless - I head up M, others go R, and the last guy will see that and go L to cover that side.
So two nights ago I fly up the Middle, and I see two guys head Right, one head Left, and one follows me to Middle. That's fine, I quickly point out MRRMLL and that we're just taking out the probes, and I get an acknowledgement.
The guy with me (GC, the Glass Cruiser) has died twice by the time we'd taken out 2 probes, and GC doesn't come back to M after his 2nd death, joining the other 2 at R. I finish off the probes, and GC comes back alongside one of the other guys who were at R, and they start attacking the M cube. I tell them we're not supposed to blow the middle first, they ignore me, and I go join the player remaining at R (CC, the Competent Cruiser). At that point, I discover that only half the probes are done. That's right, three ships made less progress than me by myself. Me and CC finish off the probes around the time the M cube blows, and I'm thinking "Wait, that's pretty decent DPS". GC and the other guy come back and we blow the R cube in short order, at which point the four of us head over to L.
When we arrive I see that only one probe at L was taken down. I'm flabbergasted and we've got 3 minutes left for the Optional. After we very quickly take out the Negh'vars... I see everyone other than CC attack the cube. Ok, their autotargetting made them accidentally attack, right? CC and I take out another probe, I look over - and the other three are still attacking the cube! They actually took down a shield facing! I facepalm, and say "Guys, attacking the cube is pointless if the probes are up." CC comments "Yes, always take out the probes first." Then the probes quickly blow up, followed by the cube and carrier.
After the match, I have a short chat with CC and apparently GC blew up twice while at R, too. It also appeared that we very obviously had the DPS to do the optional. The reason the probes weren't down at R when I was done was because CC had been the only person actually shooting the probes - the other two went after spawns and then back to the cube. It's like it was the other three's first day or something, and they completely missed the fact that they weren't doing any appreciable damage to the cubes.
So I got my breen ship and fitted it out with brand new gear, so I decided to take it on some STF runs to put it through its paces. Over the past few days I had been doing CSN and ISN, so I decided to do KAN for a change. Instead of putting me in a new game, though, it put me into one that was already in progress, I presume replacing someone who had dropped. When I warped in it was apparent why whoever I was replacing had dropped?2 team members were AWOL (never did figure out where one of them was, I only ever saw 3 other players, and one of them was just sitting there doing next to nothing except firing the occasional rainbow beams), 6/10 probes had gotten through, naturally optional had failed. No one was guarding the gate on the right, none of the nanite generators where down on the right, and both gates had their transformers still up. I took up guard on the gate that had no one, assuming that someone else was working on the generators. They were, but were barely making a dent, and I realized that if *any* progress was going to be made I would have to help out. One of the guards on the right was getting beat up pretty badly by a sphere, so I ran over and took down the sphere?and at this point two more probes got through (my fault because I was trying to do too much at once), raising it to 8/10. By now, I knew we couldn't win, but I decided to stick it out to the end. I had a little bit of hope that it might still work, so I decided to try to help out the other side, which had all the generators down. I flew over as fast as I could to the nearest transformer, which this person had been working on for about 5 minutes but was at 75% still. I hit dispersal pattern beta, attack pattern alpha, dropped 3 tricobalt mines, and flew back to guard the gate. A few seconds later, the transformer blew behind me. I turned to see the other guard struggling to take down the probes, and I as I was flying over to help, I watched as a probe he was trying to take down barely made it through the gate, and then the one after it make it through as well, failing the mission. I never did figure out where the 5th player was in that team either.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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Darius (TAC VA) USS Gahreesen (Chel Grett Cruiser), Shomat (SCI VA) ISS Selentic (Mirror DSSV), Napoleon (ENG Capt.) USS Fists of Latinum (Exploration Cruiser), Gothmog (Tac Capt.) IKS Nazgul (Hegh'ta Heavy BoP), Aaesia (Reman Sci Capt) RRW Arien III (Ha'Nom Guardian)
Ignoring is OK, you won't get that bunch in your pug again. But Reported? It ain't gonna do no good of any kind. They are just playing the game poorly.
I've played many STFs over the past week and the half. Let me tell you all the ways you can die by instant kill.
Heavy plasma torpedo: yeah, we all know this one. What still shocks me even though it's happened several times is how I can instantly die by nothing (invisible torpedo).
ISE spheres: I have no idea how, but a few times I have gotten instant or near-instant killed in ISE when I'm out of range from the gate.
Donatra: Instant kill if there ever was. I found out she can decide to only stay cloaked for a few seconds. I was in a KASE and someone got too close so she cloaked. Donatra had actually been slowly chasing me, so I stopped my ship and started typing. "I've never been chased by donatra before... TRIBBLE." A few seconds after cloaking, she decloaked, green lines streaming. I was in the middle of typing and she was directly facing me, seconds from firing. I couldn't react in time and pull off a subspace jump.
Isometric charge: yeah, another one most of us have been on the wrong end of.
Third - Sometimes I think that there is definitely something off with the CSE - I usually dive under the cube and clear the probes from point blank. To do that I activate all my defensive buffs of course - most of the time I manage on time to intercept the freshly spawned BoPs and clean them, but sometimes I just get shot down. So...to the point - it was on 30th that I did my last full run of STFs - CSE - I dived and I got shot down, which in itself is not really surprising. I dived, and started to work on the first nanite - I swallow a Plasma HY, which takes my hull to about 75-80% - not a big deal - HE2 and continue. I proceed to the second nanite - it had around 10% left and the cube sent me a Plasma HY for a second time - right on schedule - it got me down to 45%....and less than 2 seconds later - Plasma HY again. I was like "Come ooon! You're kidding me!!!". I could't even activate RSP which I do in case that I receive a second HY so that I have enough protection to finish the last bottom nanite, but a third HY was just too much for me.
Maybe you should like.., I dunno... Shoot them down....
Maybe you should like.., I dunno... Shoot them down....
You got me here.
I can't always shoot them down (you know you can't target them when they're in front of the cube....and only the turrets can fire upwards)....but basically, I try to do the job as fast as possible and zip out of there. If needed, I can handle one lane in around 8-10 minutes (spawns, nanites, Negh'var and Raptor), but most of the time I prefer not to - it's far more hustle than doing probe guard (meanwhile destroying a cube and a transformer) in KASE
I warp into ISE with my Breen ship, there's one other Breen ship and an Ody, and that's it. Only three of us for a whole ESTF. We manage the initial cube and spheres easily enough, we all head left, get all 4 gens down to 10%, and take them down together. I EM out to hit the spheres with a GW and back to help with the transformer, we kill it in plenty of time, and start clearing spheres. I'm thinking, "Wow, this is a really great team, we might even get the optional with just the 3 of us." When the spheres are cleared we have about 9 minutes left on the clock, pretty good for so few people.
Then 2 more people warp in. Seems great, right? We're guaranteed to win it with the optional now. Except that 2 of them gang up on one gen and kill it before any others are close to dead. I kill my gen as fast as I can and then try to hold off the spheres and help with killing further gens, but one GW can't hold them for nearly long enough for us to kill all the gens and the transformer, and so we lose the optional.
Not my worst experience of course, that goes to the 1 hour KASE, but pretty remarkable how a team of 3 very solid players can get screwed by one or two morons. That said, kudos to the two who ran the first part with me, it was really beautifully done.
Not my worst experience of course, that goes to the 1 hour KASE, but pretty remarkable how a team of 3 very solid players can get screwed by one or two morons. That said, kudos to the two who ran the first part with me, it was really beautifully done.
Welcome to pugs.
It is said the best weapon is one that is never fired. I disagree. The best weapon is one you only have to fire... once.
This is a common thing in CSN. For whatever reason 4 of the team ships will think they need to protect the Kang. IF all 4 had any DPS at all they would be able to protect the Kang. But all to often they all have Rainbow/Technicolor beams and/or have their weapons set on stun and lose the optional.
In reality, it only takes ONE properly set up ship to protect the Kang. That ship should be able to keep anything from ever firing a shot at the Kang.
I stopped protecting the Kang long ago. In fact I don't even worry about going after any ships being spawned. I just kill nodes and cubes and fly on over to the next. Using this tactic I can usually clear out all the cubes in 9 minutes or less by myself.
If the others are helping out at the cubes like they should be, then I'll help kill the spawns, otherwise NO WAY. If we lose because 4 ships setting at the Kang can't protect it then so be it.
well imo the base ship for any stf should be one, that is able to defend the kang against raptors. and I can even lower my expectations, to CSN raptors (which are basically CSE BoPs). the problem is, most people cant even kill CSN BoPs, and they bring those ships to elite, and create stupid scenarios
and yeah, I am with you on just attacking, and ignoring the bops, it is just a waste for me to turn (in an escort I might not lose that much DPS, but even then it would be a loss)
Not really my worst, but definitely one of those ".....really?" moments.
Did ISN earlier, can't remember the exact setup we had and thankfully I haven't seen a skittle escort/carebear cruiser (so named for their firing rainbows) yet.
Anyway, we take out the first transformer...or at least try to. Soon as we drop the generators I start taking on the transformer (me in my Prometheus escort, non-MVAM sadly) and I drop its health....only to see it rise instantly. Okay, blown optional, but hey, I'm accustomed to that. No big loss.
Except that no one learned from that and continued to attack the transformer, completely ignoring the nanite ships. So we have to repeat this three more times--including a grand lapse of memory resulting in a full heal from 14% .
Finally we take out the first transformer. Luckily there was no repeat of such on the second transformer.
It could have been worse, true, but it was just one of those head-scratchers.
ISE - entered with my all-time favorite ship, my Fleet Rhode Island. I won't go off on one of my long rants, but the transformers were popped early, and we had a fool, flying a Sovereign class with all the Borg-visual nonsense enabled who obviously had a sci BOFF in the uni slot, and seemed to love popping GW at every oportunity.
So when the time came to pop the generator, genius fires off his GW again - right at the generator. Suffice to say, the normal spheres that were hovering above the genny get pulled into the generator - needless to say, this caused targeting issues for some, and resulted in plasma spam for all.
I advise said fool to use GW for crowd control, and explain that it's usually better to fire it off at the approaching nanite spheres if you're going to use it at all.
Reply forthcoming? "GW causes kinetic damage and hurts the generator". I TRIED to explain that the kinetic damage it causes is not really significant in said context, and GW is far better utilised as a crowd-control measure. I proceeded to demonstrate by popping GWIII at the remaining nanite spheres, which bunched them together nicely - one blew and the resulting explosion severely damaged the others.
This was not, of course, sufficent to convince genuis who proceeded to do the exact same thing with the second generator. One of the other players present chastised him for it this time and I, again, tried to point out that his use of GW was far from useful.
"You don't know how to use GW" came the reply, despite my PROVING (earlier) that I was far more proficent with it than him. I actually pointed out that I was playing a Sci officer flying a pure sci ship, am very aware of Sci powers and their uses, and recommended that he either visit the forums or read up on them on the STO wiki. The reply? "The forum is for whiners and they don't know anything". I ignored the fool at this point - he clearly couldn't be taught and was either a troll, and idiot, or (probably) both.
So there you go - half the reason so many instances of ISE etc fail is because so many players fly in, thinking that they know SO much better than anyone else, and proceed to prove that they're actually WORSE than useless.
if your team had others with grav well, then he was right to use his grav well on the generator. it pulls in the spheres from above, which makes it easier to target them without moving, hence increasing group DPS. he was just far too good a player for you to notice
Yeah - the player in question proved how good a player he was numerous times. He was kind enough to explode frequently and spent healthy periods of time in respawn oblivion, where he was infinitely more useful to the mission. :P
nah. those were just a tactical uses of ramming speed
Have had folks GW spheres into the generators before. I just kill the spheres and AoE the whole clump when possible. Exploding spheres to a lot more damage to the generator than GW ever will.
Obvious stupid is obvious. I woulda just ignored him and moved on with my life. After warning everyone in the channel he joined from that he was an idiot. Or if this was a pug, then you kinda brought it on yourself.
It is said the best weapon is one that is never fired. I disagree. The best weapon is one you only have to fire... once.
I'm quite confident, that this tactics can work with three in CSE IF it's me, Ferdzso and some other hi-DPS-er fleet-mate (I don't include the Cobalt-3M miners, cause they're another matter). I switched to total AoE setup since last week, and I know that Ferdzso has a higher DPS in his Vesta than I do in my 5 Tactical consoles ship. But I wouldn't try it in a PuG (and I'm a PuG-er). As an example is the following story:
I joined in a CSE. 2 goes M, 1 goes L and I go R...in a few seconds I saw that the fifth did go L as well. No biggie, I can take care of R well before the timer's up...or so I thought. When you have 2 ships at a lane, you expect that they wouldn't miss the spam - wrong! I had to go to the Kang on a few occasions to clear BoPs...and yet I managed to do my job and do some more cleaning after that while waiting for the others to do theirs. Needles to say, we lost the optional by 20 seconds. Very inefficient.
My last fail was yesterday - I did ISE because it was late an I had to make my daily quota of dilithium.The team was a complete fail - all in rainbow colours (care bears sounds nice though ) and as you can all guess - non-existent DPS. I GW the bunch of spheres, but..I alone can't make a chain reaction as is expected. So..we chased the spheres and the cube for almost 30 minutes. I haven't tanked as much since the times in my star cruiser months ago - and the switch from resilient to covariant shield almost led me to tears - I'm still adjusting to it.
The thing in ISE is, that you can tell if the team is ok, good or very good by the time you have cleared the left side - 11 mins - ok, 12 mins - good, and everything faster means that there's nothing that can go wrong.
Again - 4 STFs today, and too many care bears fans in them.
I did a CSE yesterday that just seemed doomed to failure.
I warp in, people generally go in the direction of the right probes. I and someone else take care of the first BoP spawns, an then I decide to go help out with the probes and the Negh'var that will inevitably spawn. So we kill all right probes and this cruiser with every color of the rainbow firing is hacking away at the cube, slowly. We're shouting to him not to blow it and we quickly rush to take care of the middle probes.
Too late. Green flash as we start on them.
One guy gets angry and says "this is doomed I'm leaving." and he bails on us. Now we're down to four - one of which is full of rainbows and obviously doesn't speak English. So another escort and I continuously kill the raptors as the two other people slowly work their way through the probes. I notice Mr. Rainbows is sitting as far as conceivably possible from them, just making pretty lights (he is doing some damage, he blew the right cube himself after all).
So they finish the probes and I rush there to quickly pop the cube. We clean up the raptors and negh'vars, then the round goes as it normally would. We only lost the optional due to time.
So despite the awful start to an obviously terrible PuG, we made it with 3 & 1/2 effective players (I say 1/2 because Mr. Rainbows wasn't doing too much, but was doing something).
I have never been more ashamed of a group out of the PublicEliteSTF channel until last night. It was late, so I decided to do a nice easy ISE before hitting the sack. If only I knew what I was in for, I probably would have taken some liquid courage and a bong hit (and I don't do that kind of stuff to begin with). I'm still running my Chel'Gret through her paces on one of my toons, making sure I have all the bugs out of the system. So we start, and I am immediately laughing, because there are five. I say again, FIVE Breen warships in there.
So we slaughter the first patrol with almost obscene ease. We breeze through the gens and transformers, and then slaughter the spheres. 12:35 left on timer. We do a rinse and repeat on the other side. Transformer goes down with 10:24 left on timer. And then it all goes horribly wrong.
We start on the spheres, but then someone activates their scorpion fighter device. I thought they were doing it for the lulz, and the fighters didn't do anything other than aggro the remaining spheres over to us. We all laugh at the guy and someone else launches them for lulz too. The little romulan *******s fly straight at the tac cube and die. I noticed and called out "tac cube on the move". The rest of the team acknowledges and we redouble our efforts on the gate... who suddenly decides we all need to die. One second we're all sitting at 7km blasting away at the gate, it's only shooting pot shots back, then all of a sudden the gate goes bat **** crazy.
It's BAs suddenly start doing 3k damage per hit, which on my borg shields don't mean much since I can regen that pretty quickly, but the other warships not doing so well, start to pull back, but the gate is merciless. It practically destroys one of the other breen ships with a quick cannon into torp combo, all of us shoot him a HE, and he's good, then the tac cube shows up. Sufficed to say, the tac cube and gate focus fire us down one at a time, even with energy dissipators and borg tractor beams and breen energy siphons and regular energy siphons goin on the tac cube, the thing just kept on coming.
The two boss class enemies relentlessly destroyed us, one right after the other. I was killed twice, most of my team more than that (I was the only engi, so I had MW to let me live long enough to hit EM3, aka the GTFO button). We finally kill the gate after 5 minutes of this hell, with 4 minutes left on the timer, we turn our attention to the tac cube.
Sufficed to say, that tac cube had it's hagus that morning, cuz it tore us a new one like a scots berserker on an english battle-line. We finally brought that monster down with 20 seconds left on the timer. Between the two of them, the gate and cube must have racked up 20 kills or so. My total death count was only twice, so after the game the team stayed back and chatted about what went wrong.
Those 4 other guys weren't regulars on the PESTF channel, since I hadn't seen them before, and I found out they were ALL running the breen set on the breen ship. And it was only then that I also found out that NONE of them had ANY neutronium or monotanium. One of them had a mk XI blue electroceramic, but apparently all of them were running some sort of power booster in their engi consoles. They were also running flow caps as their sci consoles (no shield emitters, or any actual utility), and NONE of them had the assimilated module.
And as they were listing abilities to each other, the fail was complete. Their BOff setup made me click on leave, it was so terrible.
So yeah... 5 breen warships... not such an easy win after all...
But my next ISE was much better, cleared in 10 minutes flat.
It is said the best weapon is one that is never fired. I disagree. The best weapon is one you only have to fire... once.
I've got one. Not really an epic fail or anything, but... it figures the one time the Borg's healing doesn't work in ISE is one of those times I pug a team who ignores the chat completely. We could have killed the gate first, easily, instead I tanked the bloody thing alone until they finished everything else the normal way without a word. Shame I couldn't destroy it.
Comments
And I myself don't even know what the problem is. On one hand I'm inclined to believe that there comes a point where its too much (and that point is when you, at full health, are 1 shot with a plasma torpedo with full shields and each shot against you deals 1500 damage - from RAPTORS) on the other hand, Every time I die in Cure Space and get all built up about it, I think to myself "What am I doing? Why do I expect to hold out against these odds?"
The hardest part about it is I fly a cruiser, and when I can't do the one thing I'm supposed to be good at (TANK) well....y'know, if I'm gonna die anyway what's the point of not flying an escort? I feel useless...
FUNNY!
I found myself in a Vesta in the Cure a while back taking out both the nodes and the outgoing ships because nobody, and I mean NOBODY would even acknowledge a hail. They were clustered together the whole time and yes plenty of captain planet colours being fired by some of the ships.
The worst in my opinion though is ppl bailing mid-game during the the attack on the Borg Queen. So much time wasted.... sigh.
Anyways, here's a gem.
Was called into an IGE yesterday afternoon in one of the Elite STF channels (as per forum rules, not going to name which channel). I was thinking "Oh, it's guys from here, should be ok." Uh huh. XD. They needed a few more, so brought two of my friends with me.
We started out very well, I dropped mortars outside the starting force field, and the drones and my mortars got aggro'd. My EE procced, so I had 3 quantum mortars, which cleared out the first spawn literally in seconds. We drop the force field and we go, taking out that first hallway in about 5 seconds flat. I drop my next set of mortars and we begin the "snipe from hallway". One of my friends is half-trolling, so about 30 seconds after we start this and the borg are in full aggro, he runs in and rescues the survivor. Now this would have been bad if he had failed, but as is, he succeeded.
So we kept on going, got the first 3 survivors, no problem. Then we got to room 4, where there are 3 heavy tacs, 6 regular tacs, and that little doohicky thinkgymajig on the ground... um... node thingamawhatsit. Anyways, all of a sudden, out of the blue, one of the guys just runs in. He just runs in. Every drone is still alive, NONE of them are aggro'd. He just. Runs. In. Of course he is summarily terminated by the army of Borg, who then all begin to head towards the 4 of us sitting there in astonishment in the previous room. Sufficed to say, my two friends went down almost instantly, and I barely got away, courtesy of phaser turrets, my dedicated seeker drone, and a well WELL timed cover shield. Myself and the other survivor finished off the drones while my friends were asking this guy what he was on. And his reply "Oh, they were already assimilating him..." Which I know they weren't, since I was watching all the trigger lines, and HE WAS THE ONLY ONE TO EVER PASS THEM. -.-
Sufficed to say, we got to Becca pretty easily after that, since there were no survivors to rescue. And then in the room of plasma... well it was your typical horror story of IGE, idiots no targeting the same tac drone, idiot kirking it and trying to take on an entire platform by himself without a pulsewave (major fail there). And once we FINALLY got all the forcefields down at the same time, kirk was already dead, the other person from the channel was killed at the start, so my friends and I just slaughtered becca. 3 man kill on Becca. That and the actually decent drop was what made it somewhat worth it.
Buuuut yeah. Not pugging avoids most of this hell, but as I was reminded, sometimes even the non-pugs have that crouching stupid hidden moron in there.
Result was that there was too many nanite probes and spheres for the one remaining ship to deal with, heading to both generators at the same time... So the optional was lost
Of course it was not the two experienced players fault.....and they then moaned through the chat channel for the rest of the game. (and it was them who broke the 10% rule !!!)
First - last night I had a little time to setup and try the Chel Gett. Did the same BOFF setup as my Fleet Cerberus, except that I exchanged the TS1 for EPtW - 3 cannons, Quantum torpedo and 4 turrets (I don't like the cutting beam because it's not buff-able). Took a run in KASE and the ship did pretty well. And a piece of advice - if you have a Lt.Cmd Science station on escort or cruiser - Gravity Well is a must - it can, and will make the difference between a failed and saved optional.
Second - "Don't PuG" is not an answer. It's boring. The one I don't PuG is ISE, because I don't run it at all. There are some bad PuGs, and some really good ones - like being done with 6-7 minutes on the timer in CSE. And this awesome topic wouldn't be here if we didn't
Third - Sometimes I think that there is definitely something off with the CSE - I usually dive under the cube and clear the probes from point blank. To do that I activate all my defensive buffs of course - most of the time I manage on time to intercept the freshly spawned BoPs and clean them, but sometimes I just get shot down. So...to the point - it was on 30th that I did my last full run of STFs - CSE - I dived and I got shot down, which in itself is not really surprising. I dived, and started to work on the first nanite - I swallow a Plasma HY, which takes my hull to about 75-80% - not a big deal - HE2 and continue. I proceed to the second nanite - it had around 10% left and the cube sent me a Plasma HY for a second time - right on schedule - it got me down to 45%....and less than 2 seconds later - Plasma HY again.
Forth - I left a STF in the middle of it for a first time for the last half an year, because I got annoyed (and me being annoyed is something very rare) with the misplaced humor of one of the players...and I wrote a three finger configuration and left....I hope I won't do that again because it wasn't a nice thing to do.....
That's my five cents at the start of the new year.
On a good day, and most of the time, I find that three will head Right, and one will head Left. The three usually blow the R probes and cubes while I still have around 3-4 of the M probes left (I'm an Eng in a Chimera for the record), then come over and we'll make short work of the M probes and cubes. Then the 4 of us go intercept the Borg Negh'vars before tackling L. On a really good day, whoever was covering L will be as least as competent as myself, and almost all of the probes will already be down. Generally though, it's pretty flawless - I head up M, others go R, and the last guy will see that and go L to cover that side.
So two nights ago I fly up the Middle, and I see two guys head Right, one head Left, and one follows me to Middle. That's fine, I quickly point out MRRMLL and that we're just taking out the probes, and I get an acknowledgement.
The guy with me (GC, the Glass Cruiser) has died twice by the time we'd taken out 2 probes, and GC doesn't come back to M after his 2nd death, joining the other 2 at R. I finish off the probes, and GC comes back alongside one of the other guys who were at R, and they start attacking the M cube. I tell them we're not supposed to blow the middle first, they ignore me, and I go join the player remaining at R (CC, the Competent Cruiser). At that point, I discover that only half the probes are done. That's right, three ships made less progress than me by myself. Me and CC finish off the probes around the time the M cube blows, and I'm thinking "Wait, that's pretty decent DPS". GC and the other guy come back and we blow the R cube in short order, at which point the four of us head over to L.
When we arrive I see that only one probe at L was taken down. I'm flabbergasted and we've got 3 minutes left for the Optional. After we very quickly take out the Negh'vars... I see everyone other than CC attack the cube. Ok, their autotargetting made them accidentally attack, right? CC and I take out another probe, I look over - and the other three are still attacking the cube! They actually took down a shield facing! I facepalm, and say "Guys, attacking the cube is pointless if the probes are up." CC comments "Yes, always take out the probes first." Then the probes quickly blow up, followed by the cube and carrier.
After the match, I have a short chat with CC and apparently GC blew up twice while at R, too. It also appeared that we very obviously had the DPS to do the optional. The reason the probes weren't down at R when I was done was because CC had been the only person actually shooting the probes - the other two went after spawns and then back to the cube. It's like it was the other three's first day or something, and they completely missed the fact that they weren't doing any appreciable damage to the cubes.
So I got my breen ship and fitted it out with brand new gear, so I decided to take it on some STF runs to put it through its paces. Over the past few days I had been doing CSN and ISN, so I decided to do KAN for a change. Instead of putting me in a new game, though, it put me into one that was already in progress, I presume replacing someone who had dropped. When I warped in it was apparent why whoever I was replacing had dropped?2 team members were AWOL (never did figure out where one of them was, I only ever saw 3 other players, and one of them was just sitting there doing next to nothing except firing the occasional rainbow beams), 6/10 probes had gotten through, naturally optional had failed. No one was guarding the gate on the right, none of the nanite generators where down on the right, and both gates had their transformers still up. I took up guard on the gate that had no one, assuming that someone else was working on the generators. They were, but were barely making a dent, and I realized that if *any* progress was going to be made I would have to help out. One of the guards on the right was getting beat up pretty badly by a sphere, so I ran over and took down the sphere?and at this point two more probes got through (my fault because I was trying to do too much at once), raising it to 8/10. By now, I knew we couldn't win, but I decided to stick it out to the end. I had a little bit of hope that it might still work, so I decided to try to help out the other side, which had all the generators down. I flew over as fast as I could to the nearest transformer, which this person had been working on for about 5 minutes but was at 75% still. I hit dispersal pattern beta, attack pattern alpha, dropped 3 tricobalt mines, and flew back to guard the gate. A few seconds later, the transformer blew behind me. I turned to see the other guard struggling to take down the probes, and I as I was flying over to help, I watched as a probe he was trying to take down barely made it through the gate, and then the one after it make it through as well, failing the mission. I never did figure out where the 5th player was in that team either.
I get a kick out of "Ignored and Reported"
Ignoring is OK, you won't get that bunch in your pug again. But Reported? It ain't gonna do no good of any kind. They are just playing the game poorly.
Heavy plasma torpedo: yeah, we all know this one. What still shocks me even though it's happened several times is how I can instantly die by nothing (invisible torpedo).
ISE spheres: I have no idea how, but a few times I have gotten instant or near-instant killed in ISE when I'm out of range from the gate.
Donatra: Instant kill if there ever was. I found out she can decide to only stay cloaked for a few seconds. I was in a KASE and someone got too close so she cloaked. Donatra had actually been slowly chasing me, so I stopped my ship and started typing. "I've never been chased by donatra before... TRIBBLE." A few seconds after cloaking, she decloaked, green lines streaming. I was in the middle of typing and she was directly facing me, seconds from firing. I couldn't react in time and pull off a subspace jump.
Isometric charge: yeah, another one most of us have been on the wrong end of.
Pugs are the best entertainment in this game.
So.....
There I was.
I went over to do some of the new Romulus missions and started with the space daily.
I buzzed into the first planet I came to and healed the satellites like I was supposed to.
Then it says I have to defeat the two flights of ships incoming.
They never showed.
So I bailed and started over.
I zip back in and healed the satellites and then I'm supposed to kill off the 2 flights of incoming ships.
Well, it wasn't two flights, IT WAS FOURTY FLIGHTS!
There were several battle ships, a dreadnought, and about two dozen smaller ships along with a couple carriers.
The best I could do was get right out on the fringe of the group and drag them out one or two at a time.
I managed to get through the first group after dying one or two times in about 30 minutes.
Now for the dreadnought.
45 minutes after killing all the others the dreadnought finally dies and I won.
I tHink the game must have thought I was flying in with a fleet or something.
But HOLY ?@?&!
Maybe you should like.., I dunno... Shoot them down....
You got me here.
I can't always shoot them down (you know you can't target them when they're in front of the cube....and only the turrets can fire upwards)....but basically, I try to do the job as fast as possible and zip out of there. If needed, I can handle one lane in around 8-10 minutes (spawns, nanites, Negh'var and Raptor), but most of the time I prefer not to - it's far more hustle than doing probe guard (meanwhile destroying a cube and a transformer) in KASE
I warp into ISE with my Breen ship, there's one other Breen ship and an Ody, and that's it. Only three of us for a whole ESTF. We manage the initial cube and spheres easily enough, we all head left, get all 4 gens down to 10%, and take them down together. I EM out to hit the spheres with a GW and back to help with the transformer, we kill it in plenty of time, and start clearing spheres. I'm thinking, "Wow, this is a really great team, we might even get the optional with just the 3 of us." When the spheres are cleared we have about 9 minutes left on the clock, pretty good for so few people.
Then 2 more people warp in. Seems great, right? We're guaranteed to win it with the optional now. Except that 2 of them gang up on one gen and kill it before any others are close to dead. I kill my gen as fast as I can and then try to hold off the spheres and help with killing further gens, but one GW can't hold them for nearly long enough for us to kill all the gens and the transformer, and so we lose the optional.
Not my worst experience of course, that goes to the 1 hour KASE, but pretty remarkable how a team of 3 very solid players can get screwed by one or two morons. That said, kudos to the two who ran the first part with me, it was really beautifully done.
Welcome to pugs.
well imo the base ship for any stf should be one, that is able to defend the kang against raptors. and I can even lower my expectations, to CSN raptors (which are basically CSE BoPs). the problem is, most people cant even kill CSN BoPs, and they bring those ships to elite, and create stupid scenarios
and yeah, I am with you on just attacking, and ignoring the bops, it is just a waste for me to turn (in an escort I might not lose that much DPS, but even then it would be a loss)
10k DPS Vesta threads: 1; 2
Did ISN earlier, can't remember the exact setup we had and thankfully I haven't seen a skittle escort/carebear cruiser (so named for their firing rainbows) yet.
Anyway, we take out the first transformer...or at least try to. Soon as we drop the generators I start taking on the transformer (me in my Prometheus escort, non-MVAM sadly) and I drop its health....only to see it rise instantly. Okay, blown optional, but hey, I'm accustomed to that. No big loss.
Except that no one learned from that and continued to attack the transformer, completely ignoring the nanite ships. So we have to repeat this three more times--including a grand lapse of memory resulting in a full heal from 14% .
Finally we take out the first transformer. Luckily there was no repeat of such on the second transformer.
It could have been worse, true, but it was just one of those head-scratchers.
ROLL TIDE ROLL
if your team had others with grav well, then he was right to use his grav well on the generator. it pulls in the spheres from above, which makes it easier to target them without moving, hence increasing group DPS. he was just far too good a player for you to notice
10k DPS Vesta threads: 1; 2
nah. those were just a tactical uses of ramming speed
10k DPS Vesta threads: 1; 2
Obvious stupid is obvious. I woulda just ignored him and moved on with my life. After warning everyone in the channel he joined from that he was an idiot. Or if this was a pug, then you kinda brought it on yourself.
I joined in a CSE. 2 goes M, 1 goes L and I go R...in a few seconds I saw that the fifth did go L as well. No biggie, I can take care of R well before the timer's up...or so I thought. When you have 2 ships at a lane, you expect that they wouldn't miss the spam - wrong! I had to go to the Kang on a few occasions to clear BoPs...and yet I managed to do my job and do some more cleaning after that while waiting for the others to do theirs. Needles to say, we lost the optional by 20 seconds. Very inefficient.
My last fail was yesterday - I did ISE because it was late an I had to make my daily quota of dilithium.The team was a complete fail - all in rainbow colours (care bears sounds nice though
The thing in ISE is, that you can tell if the team is ok, good or very good by the time you have cleared the left side - 11 mins - ok, 12 mins - good, and everything faster means that there's nothing that can go wrong.
Again - 4 STFs today, and too many care bears fans in them.
I warp in, people generally go in the direction of the right probes. I and someone else take care of the first BoP spawns, an then I decide to go help out with the probes and the Negh'var that will inevitably spawn. So we kill all right probes and this cruiser with every color of the rainbow firing is hacking away at the cube, slowly. We're shouting to him not to blow it and we quickly rush to take care of the middle probes.
Too late. Green flash as we start on them.
One guy gets angry and says "this is doomed I'm leaving." and he bails on us. Now we're down to four - one of which is full of rainbows and obviously doesn't speak English. So another escort and I continuously kill the raptors as the two other people slowly work their way through the probes. I notice Mr. Rainbows is sitting as far as conceivably possible from them, just making pretty lights (he is doing some damage, he blew the right cube himself after all).
So they finish the probes and I rush there to quickly pop the cube. We clean up the raptors and negh'vars, then the round goes as it normally would. We only lost the optional due to time.
So despite the awful start to an obviously terrible PuG, we made it with 3 & 1/2 effective players (I say 1/2 because Mr. Rainbows wasn't doing too much, but was doing something).
So we slaughter the first patrol with almost obscene ease. We breeze through the gens and transformers, and then slaughter the spheres. 12:35 left on timer. We do a rinse and repeat on the other side. Transformer goes down with 10:24 left on timer. And then it all goes horribly wrong.
We start on the spheres, but then someone activates their scorpion fighter device. I thought they were doing it for the lulz, and the fighters didn't do anything other than aggro the remaining spheres over to us. We all laugh at the guy and someone else launches them for lulz too. The little romulan *******s fly straight at the tac cube and die. I noticed and called out "tac cube on the move". The rest of the team acknowledges and we redouble our efforts on the gate... who suddenly decides we all need to die. One second we're all sitting at 7km blasting away at the gate, it's only shooting pot shots back, then all of a sudden the gate goes bat **** crazy.
It's BAs suddenly start doing 3k damage per hit, which on my borg shields don't mean much since I can regen that pretty quickly, but the other warships not doing so well, start to pull back, but the gate is merciless. It practically destroys one of the other breen ships with a quick cannon into torp combo, all of us shoot him a HE, and he's good, then the tac cube shows up. Sufficed to say, the tac cube and gate focus fire us down one at a time, even with energy dissipators and borg tractor beams and breen energy siphons and regular energy siphons goin on the tac cube, the thing just kept on coming.
The two boss class enemies relentlessly destroyed us, one right after the other. I was killed twice, most of my team more than that (I was the only engi, so I had MW to let me live long enough to hit EM3, aka the GTFO button). We finally kill the gate after 5 minutes of this hell, with 4 minutes left on the timer, we turn our attention to the tac cube.
Sufficed to say, that tac cube had it's hagus that morning, cuz it tore us a new one like a scots berserker on an english battle-line. We finally brought that monster down with 20 seconds left on the timer. Between the two of them, the gate and cube must have racked up 20 kills or so. My total death count was only twice, so after the game the team stayed back and chatted about what went wrong.
Those 4 other guys weren't regulars on the PESTF channel, since I hadn't seen them before, and I found out they were ALL running the breen set on the breen ship. And it was only then that I also found out that NONE of them had ANY neutronium or monotanium. One of them had a mk XI blue electroceramic, but apparently all of them were running some sort of power booster in their engi consoles. They were also running flow caps as their sci consoles (no shield emitters, or any actual utility), and NONE of them had the assimilated module.
And as they were listing abilities to each other, the fail was complete. Their BOff setup made me click on leave, it was so terrible.
So yeah... 5 breen warships... not such an easy win after all...
But my next ISE was much better, cleared in 10 minutes flat.
Slightly off topic, sure, but....that should so be the icon for EMWhatever. Just a big red button that says either "Haul TRIBBLE$ NOW" or "GTFOD"
ROLL TIDE ROLL