Season 7 is beautiful, but STF's are flawed

oridjerraa

Hi there, I'm Brody in game.

First off, allow me to compliment Cryptic for the visually stunning and fun season 7. Well done. However, it seems to me that one element is incredibly lacking, that being the STF mission. I did the Hive Onsaught space today with my fleet and had a blast, but the thrill of accomplishing that mission, as well as the others, feels lost. My favorite space STF is Cure, but why run anything other than Infected? Omega marks on their own do not intice me. It lacks that slim, yet powerful, feeling of oh wow-I'm sure you know what I mean.

STF's were being grinded for Dilithum, I liked getting a chunk of my daily done like that just as much as the next guy. But getting the optional and scoring a decent console or weapon, even if it was just going onto the exchange, also played a big part in my game.

I was doing some minefield/starbase 24 and had a first place and a couple second place finish, and it was nice to be awarded for my effort. STF's need that incentive.

Thank you,
Brody<ToS Veterens>

ashtaku

oridjerraa wrote: »

Hi there, I'm Brody in game.

First off, allow me to compliment Cryptic for the visually stunning and fun season 7. Well done. However, it seems to me that one element is incredibly lacking, that being the STF mission. I did the Hive Onsaught space today with my fleet and had a blast, but the thrill of accomplishing that mission, as well as the others, feels lost. My favorite space STF is Cure, but why run anything other than Infected? Omega marks on their own do not intice me. It lacks that slim, yet powerful, feeling of oh wow-I'm sure you know what I mean.

STF's were being grinded for Dilithum, I liked getting a chunk of my daily done like that just as much as the next guy. But getting the optional and scoring a decent console or weapon, even if it was just going onto the exchange, also played a big part in my game.

I was doing some minefield/starbase 24 and had a first place and a couple second place finish, and it was nice to be awarded for my effort. STF's need that incentive.

Thank you,
Brody<ToS Veterens>

Brody,

If you ask me, I'd say do the non-ISE STFs for two reasons:

1) Fun
2) Challenge

I suspect that the Devs never intended the STFs to be grind-houses, which is probably why the rewards were dialed back so sharply, and while I'll miss the mk XII gear drops, the 1100 dil reward, and the other goodies, I am kind of OK with the idea that the only reason I feel compelled to play Cure or Khitomer now is because I want to do something different and face a challenging mission with my friends.

I admit it, when I'm pugging for Omega Marks it'll be in ISE, but when I'm on with my fleet playing for fun, I'll definitely still play the other STFs from time to time.

That's my two cents at least. Having said that, though if the Devs want to put the Dilithium reward back in, I won't complain

maliusnight

Good Luck doing them alone, they just aren't going to happen like they used to once we figure out the number of omega marks needed it will simply be an achieved goal and no fleets do them. Maybe once ever now and then just show the newbs what they were like in the days it was worth while.

xantris

ashtaku wrote: »

Brody,

If you ask me, I'd say do the non-ISE STFs for two reasons:

1) Fun
2) Challenge

I suspect that the Devs never intended the STFs to be grind-houses, which is probably why the rewards were dialed back so sharply, and while I'll miss the mk XII gear drops, the 1100 dil reward, and the other goodies, I am kind of OK with the idea that the only reason I feel compelled to play Cure or Khitomer now is because I want to do something different and face a challenging mission with my friends.

I admit it, when I'm pugging for Omega Marks it'll be in ISE, but when I'm on with my fleet playing for fun, I'll definitely still play the other STFs from time to time.

That's my two cents at least. Having said that, though if the Devs want to put the Dilithium reward back in, I won't complain

According to their blog, this isn't the case at all. Feel free to read it.

And yes, Brody, STFs are now severely lacking. There is no reason to do anything other than ISE, you can easily make enough marks off that alone to meet your reputation grinds...and "fun and challenge" don't populate queues. On top of that, the new STF is completely invalidated by the new system. Why run the hardest STF when the rewards are simply not up to par for the difficulty?

Hell, they even made Cure Space Elite harder than it was, which normally I'd be a fan of, but I have a feeling people are going to stop playing it altogether under the new system. It's just very counterproductive to do more than 1 or 2 STFs a day.

On top of that, the dilithium exchange beyond T5 for marks is atrocious. There is literally zero reason to run STFs once you actually completely your rep grind and get the gear you want. They are basically digging a deep grave for STFs.

I can't even fathom how these made it past a developers meeting. It's so shortsighted.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

oridjerraa

ashtaku wrote: »

Brody,

If you ask me, I'd say do the non-ISE STFs for two reasons:

1) Fun
2) Challenge

I suspect that the Devs never intended the STFs to be grind-houses, which is probably why the rewards were dialed back so sharply, and while I'll miss the mk XII gear drops, the 1100 dil reward, and the other goodies, I am kind of OK with the idea that the only reason I feel compelled to play Cure or Khitomer now is because I want to do something different and face a challenging mission with my friends.

I admit it, when I'm pugging for Omega Marks it'll be in ISE, but when I'm on with my fleet playing for fun, I'll definitely still play the other STFs from time to time.

That's my two cents at least. Having said that, though if the Devs want to put the Dilithium reward back in, I won't complain

Number 1 reason for running Cure and KA with my fleet was helping gear eachother up. Taking the time to build a private challenge and fill slots requires much more incentive than challenge. Why, you ask? Because all of us in ToS Vets have run Cure and KA elite many, many times. We have the optionals, we have fast complete times.

Number 2 reason to run any STF besides Infected was to help gear up new members of the fleet, some of which never been in a STF before. Even if only the new member needed an upgrade that was enough to spur the Vets to building teams and running them repeatedly.

That is gone now.

I would love to do Hive Onslaught again but I can't for the life of me come up with a reason to. It's not so much about challenge or fun, but simply don't want to bother my fleetmates to run something that an Infected pug can provide statistically.

innuwarrior

I am with most of you, Hive onslaught is bad, and with bad I mean way too hard. I did it with my fleet last night on Elite difficulty and we took a beating, those Unimatrix ship are way too powerful. Fully buffed Jem'Hadar Attack ship and 30 sec and boom, I use to be able to tank tac cube for good while so I'm not a new player and I know how to handle my ship. Than you have that damn respawn timer that keep getting longer. I kept having to bug out or just kept blowing from those Torpedo volley or those Lance, what can you do when you have 5 or more torp hit you for about 20k hit each torp, no matter what you have its bye, bye baby, same goes with lance, 50k hit and up, even my engineer in full buffed Odyssey wouldn't be able to survice long. I've even been hit by I honestly don't know what, while taking care of probes, at more than 15k from Unimatrix ship, and I never even went in my weapon range from it and I'm pretty sure it wasn't a probe hit that killed me.

There is no challenge, this is just plain and simple mayhem. Like it is now, I won't play it again, way too much trouble to get a few Omega marks and maybe Neural proc. We had 2 engineer with odyssey with us, 2 fleet members I know real well that can Tank Donatra, tac cube all day and survive without dying before S7, they weren't doing any better than the escort so its not a ship problem but really the NPC being way too much overpowered. So much that we all ended quitting, just not worth the trouble and the reward plain and simple. To top it off, borg now have reflect damage, feedback something can't recall the name a science boff power. Once you start getting into respawn hell it just keep gettin worse from there as timer get longer and longer.

Just gonna do Infected and alerts, maybe kase and cure with fleet team, I'll get only what I need for Omega Mark and do something else. It was challenging before but not unduly so, some may even say not enough but if you had a bad team you could expect to do it anyway.

Now they took the difficulty to insane level which doesn't scale with the reward. I may try it again on normal but elite forget it until they tone it down some. Right now I don't see why I would spend more than an hour for what little they're offering for loot and reward.

Give more loot or tone down the mission, give an incentive to do the mission on elite because as it is, that's one mission where you wont see many ppl queuing for if any at all, at least on elite.