A few weeks ago I started a new Klingon character (a science Orion) and on a lark, I decided to try playing only on Elite difficulty. The following are my thoughts on playing up through the end of the Breen series.
For the most part, I really didn't notice too much of a difference. The ships were a little harder to kill, the ground opponents were generally tougher (and often had shields when on normal they would not), but for the most part, especially as I got into the featured series, the differences weren't that great. Carefully making my way through missions, taking out small chucks rather than aggroing the entire room usually mitigated any damage. I normally do that anyway, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
Except, there were a few instances where the difficulty spiked horribly.
The first was very, VERY early, the Klingon mission "
The House Always Wins." The mission is rated for a level 22 character, so it should easily be within the range of the low (relative) level Orion. I got my butt beat, hard. I grabbed the second tier Raptor and went in without thinking much of it. Then the dying started.
I'm pretty sure I party wiped at least once at the Ketha Lowlands section of the mission. Lots of bad guys around, so not unexpected. The real pain began during the space mission, where I died, um, about 10 times. My Martok allies either didn't spawn properly, were destroyed quickly, or appeared and sat on their butts doing nothing. As such, I, in my lone Raptor, tried to clear the mission. I died a lot, and racked up a LOT of damage. I got through it, eventually, and beamed down to the surface for the last part of the mission. Where I was party wiped about 5 times.
This would have been fine, except there's some bugginess in that mission. On the first play through, I didn't "get the evidence" submission before confronting Torg, and when I realized I missed a step, went back to do it, I couldn't complete the mission any more. Annoyed. Beam out, heal injuries (I visited the med center in First City MANY times) then back in. 5 or so wipes later, and as I'm heading out, one of my bridge officers becomes "stuck" as they are wont to do. I went back to find her, couldn't see her, and then suddenly I was in a giant pipe in the ceiling! I couldn't get out (/stuck didn't work).
BTW, why doesn't /killme KILL me? It just says "type /stuck then just beam out." Um, if I wanted to beam out, I could do that, no big deal, but if I use /killme it means I don't want to lose my mission progress by beaming out! Easier to just die and respawn.
At that point I had had it with the mission and aborted, skipped it and moved on. I would come back a bit later (before heading into the Vault) and with a slightly different ground load out and the next tier battlecruiser I went back in and completed it. Still died more in this mission than in all the rest of the game. Not sure if it's just that the mission wasn't balanced for elite or if I just wasn't prepared properly.
The next issue didn't come up until Operation Gamma of the 2800 series. Specifically the first part, where you use the shuttle to disable the sensors on DS9. Did anyone else know Jem'Hadar fighters use RAM? I didn't. Initially I thought the shuttle just sucked (I had some difficulties in the Vault, nothing too terrible, but still). Then after having to start over for the 3rd time, I noticed that the Jem'Hadar's fighters were ramming me, which is why I was dying so damn quickly. On Elite, the damage is greater, so one ram was typically all that was needed to kill me out right. I don't think this was intended, and is merely a result of finally letting NPC's use all their abilities with the start of Season 6, but it made what is a usually a rather simple mission into a painful chore.
Boldly They Rode followed with the pain. Now in most ground missions, a group of enemies has 5 or 6 members, usually one being a real pain the butt, and I've had my bridge crew on hand to even the odds at least. The last part of Boldly They Rode removes the bridge crew and has the player go in alone. Against groups of 3 Jem'Hadar, with at least one being able to lay Houdini mines in each group. My only advantage was my Orion's Seduce skill which gave me a temporary ally. I died about 4 times trying to pick my way through, with one time being in Ops and that final fight.
Space combat, by that point, had been rendered rather easy since I picked up the Vo'quv Carrier and let the fighters do most of the work. So my next nasty fight ended up being solely on the ground, against the Breen. Specifically the "boss" fights of the last two missions of the Breen series. Both Thot's at the end carry the CRM 200, and that secondary fire WIPED my entire crew in a single shot. No less than 3 times did this happen in one form or another, twice in Cold Case, once in Cold Storage, possibly more given how often they use that damn thing. And this was after having the best supplied crew I could afford at that point. I managed it, and am now set to do the Borg/Undine stuff, but I'm not in a hurry for that.
I will say one thing, my experience with The House Always Wins forced me to actually learn how to play ground, specifically what the different armor types were and did. There's no in game guide for this, and the armors are so similar to each other, just looking at them didn't tell me much. I found a nice
guide to help, and while older, it gave me at least enough information to actually get going. Learning about the keybind to the "everyone attack this guy" button helped IMMENSELY.
I also learned a more painful lesson: Apparently Elite difficulty is contagious. A few of my fleet mates and I went into a Foundry "kill them all" mission, that was already going to be ridiculous because it was full of Scimitars, but when we started dying, EVERYONE took damage. The TEAM difficulty was set to normal, but because I was on elite, EVERYONE took damage. It was initially frustrating, then it was just stupidly funny. Eventually we had to abort the mission, and we were comparing battle damage afterwards (20 or 30 each). Still, WHY would my choice of playing on Elite effect them? That's a nasty bug there and a painful surprise to anyone who teams up with a crazy elite player. And NO, I was not the team leader.
So I will eventually finish the story missions on Elite, because why the hell not? That said, there's no point in it. Oh, the missions are a bit harder, some much more than others, but while the game CLAIMS the drops are worth more, I didn't see that. Until I hit 50, my best gear was being bought from the vendor in First City, common gear. After that, I hit the exchange for my stuff. The gear wasn't better, the rewards were the same, and my level progression was the same as it would have been on Normal without grinding levels. Playing on Elite gave a minor challenge boost, but that was about it.
In conclusion: There's no point in playing Elite difficulty. You won't get anything out of it you're not getting on Normal.
I know there is a method but all I see is madness.
Comments
What were the drops like on Elite? Did you get any rare/very rare MK. XII gear?
I didn't get anything. At all. I had to either run around with vendor gear (common, rank appropriate) or snag things off the exchange (which I did after I hit 50). There was no useful gear, no nice weapons or equipment. Hell, the common equipment was often BETTER than even the stuff I got as mission rewards.
the only time i actually played advanced difficulty was when i leveled a toon together with a friend...i think it rewarded more XP, and the mobs did not die after 2,5 seconds...so we both had something to shoot at.
Yeah, you die more often but makes it a bit more of a challenge. :-)
you're not alone on that one
So much bugginess with KDF
i.e. starting missions.. the t4 maurader boff... the transporter officer in our HOME HUB... jeez
But back to the main topic, i remember playing on elite on a fed with a friend, it was either very easy or randomly impossible where we both died multiple times (e.g. romulans sometimes with thalaron ground devices, sometimes just the damage they dished out)
and i remember the very first 'elite' mission i tried, an explore delta volanis mission, 5groups of orions, the matriarch destroyed me.. so hard
Didn't notice any difference in leveling. I hit the levels I should have just playing the normal story missions. I think I took two side trips to gain levels, once just after the debacle of The House Always Wins, and then later at level 48 so I could start getting Mark XI gear out of the Breen series. Neither went more than a level or two.
Maybe the drops were better, but I didn't notice it, and hardly any of it was useful to me. There was ONE very rare drop I can remember getting, a Mark V Phaser Array. That was it. Everything else was generally vendor trash.
This is probably true. All I ended up doing to deal with ground was picking general purpose armors and learning that the Y key told everyone to target your target. Saying I "learned" ground is just a way of saying that I UNDERSTAND the basics now. Before, it was "toss on a set and lets roll!" I'm disturbed by the fact that there are FIVE different armors. Hell, ship shields come in only 4 flavors (one generic), and the engines and deflectors have 3 each. And the differences between the armors is difficult to suss out of the description box because there are SO many numbers in there. I know why, but it's still a pain to parse through without any basic knowledge of what the names of the armor mean.
This ^
A friend and I have leveled a few captains doing elite the whole way through.
It felt like the rewards were the same. And, not much harder.
Next time, I'll probably just leave it on normal just to blow through it slightly faster.
It's me, Chrome. [Join Date: May 2009]
"Oh, I may be captain by rank... but I never wanted to be anything else but an engineer." ~Montgomery Scott~
A number of KDF missions have been bugged for a long while, or are UI laggy as heck. The one where you go to Gre'thor and confront the various bosses is always annoying. If you're laggy on ground, trying to avoid lava, avoid falling off edges, and otherwise maneuver in a sensible fashion is always irritating. Not to mention your boffs tend to just sit in one place clustered together, and get wiped out in 2's and 3's by AoE boss attacks.