Well you know the borg have been nerfed dozens of times and you'll still see people being blown up by a couple of spheres or complaining about high yield torps, or being killed by the gate in infected space "elite", so whatever the changes are, even if admiral ships had an instant "i win" button, people would still have trouble. That's why i consider this as a non-existent issue.
Heh, you remember the last time they boosted the NPC AI? OOOOooh man the rage threads about Donatra and the Tac cubes actually being intelligent with their abilities... It got to the point where they had to re-nerf it.
If they do boost NPC intelligence and/or (and preferred) toughness, I personally look forward to calling all the complainers wimps once more
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.
Folks just looking for some casual play, should be fine to play Normal.
Folks looking for a little challenge, should be fine to play Advanced.
Folks looking for the chance to fail, should be fine to play Elite.
How many folks run anything other than Normal for most content?
How many folks think ESTFs are closer to ASTFs?
How many folks think content set as Advanced is actually Normal or even easier?
There are folks at different levels of gearing and skill... but in many cases, the game just doesn't cater to that. For the most part, it doesn't take long to overgear everything.
Heh, you remember the last time they boosted the NPC AI?
I remember that. I was pleasantly surprised and changed my attack style to compensate.
I sure don't want them having a full compliment of consoles and boff powers to work from because that would start to become pretty painful pretty fast. But one defense and one offense? I could accpet that.
How many folks run anything other than Normal for most content?
How many folks think ESTFs are closer to ASTFs?
How many folks think content set as Advanced is actually Normal or even easier?
The current borg elite STF looks like normal gameplay to me. I completely agree about a 3rd difficulty level if the current elite content is being called "advanced". Advanced sounds better than "normal", i'm sure many people would still play it because they don't like great challenges but some here do.
The current STFs were designed for RA ships. They have been nerfed many times. We now have fleet ships. The STFs need some update and the admiral level could be a great opportunity.
How many folks run anything other than Normal for most content?
How many folks think ESTFs are closer to ASTFs?
How many folks think content set as Advanced is actually Normal or even easier?
Depends. Of the Borg missions I'd say that Infected Conduit (Elite) and Khitomer Vortex (Elite) are "Advanced"; they're definitely harder than the normal versions but with a decently equipped team that knows what they're doing it's fairly easy to get the optional objective most of the time without much trouble at all.
The Cure Found (Elite) I'd say is harder though as it's definitely possible to fail. Sure you can fail Khitomer Vortex as well but you have to be doing pretty badly to manage that, whereas with Khitomer Vortex a disorganised team will lose practically every time, even if they're equipped with the best items available. The invulnerable borg cubes that are often backed up by the ships they're spitting out aren't exactly the easiest things to survive against either; doable sure, but much harder than most other enemies in Elite STFs.
The Hive (Elite) is another weird one; the enemy difficulty is much higher but it doesn't seem to be possible to fail. You can get stuck constantly reducing the health of the Unimatrix ships only for them to heal again, but even a really disorganised team should wear them down eventually. The problem is that the (Elite) variant is pretty ridiculous in terms of enemy difficulty thanks to nearly everything being able to instantly kill you if you get caught with defensive abilities on cool down, and the horde of tactical cubes at the start seem to aggro as a mob every-time which can make picking them off individually extremely difficult.
The unimatrix ships are one of those enemies I would rather were more intelligent instead of simply having heaps of hit-points and instantly killing you with half of their attacks; while the regen probes add a unique challenge even they are over the top rather than enjoyably challenging as all it takes is for one of them to sneak round where the team can't kill it in time and the unimatrix ship is healing faster than you can hurt it. Sure a unimatrix ship should be tough due to its sheer size, but should it be killing ships so easily in a five-ship STF?
So I'm not sure where I'd rank The Hive (Elite); I'd probably lump it in its own category of "Pointlessly Annoying" as it's got true Elite difficulty enemies in a mission you can't actually lose (it can just take forever to finish).
I hope that increasing the level above 50 automatically increases difficulty from normal to advanced.
This will force people to learn healing items and improve their builds. one of the great annoyances is the ease with which people get to level 50 (just prior to X-mas i maxed out my new Klingon toon in less than 3 days).
If you go up in level one should expect increases in difficulty. To surpass this one should hone one's skill and build.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
I hope that increasing the level above 50 automatically increases difficulty from normal to advanced.
This will force people to learn healing items and improve their builds. one of the great annoyances is the ease with which people get to level 50 (just prior to X-mas i maxed out my new Klingon toon in less than 3 days).
If you go up in level one should expect increases in difficulty. To surpass this one should hone one's skill and build.
No. If you want to play on advanced, you are free to do so. Those who prefer to play on normal should be able to as well. Some players don't play 24-hours a day and can take much longer to level when only playing episode missions.
Unfortunately, the Doff system itself makes it incredibly easy to level. Add in dailies and the like and it's even faster. However, since the missions scale to your level, that's not really a problem. If you took a mission at level 3 and hit level 50 without running it, just drop the mission and retake it; it will scale to your level.
THAT is one of the best upgrades they made to this game. It helps offset how ridiculously fast the leveling is via Doffs and other systems. The only real downside is that the low and intermediate level ships are pretty much worthless, since you will outlevel them without really getting to use them much. That's why I have a few characters that are leveling strictly through the Foundry -- it's much slower. Those characters do not Doff, either.
A raise in the level cap? Hmm... worked fine when they did it from 45 to 50, so I'm all for it provided they...
Add enough (real) content to justify the raise - I thought I was done with the mirror event and would seem silly if the current end-game content turned into midgame content because it just got rehashed into some 'super-elite' pretence of content. (sorry cryptic, I really appreciate the game and your work and all, and whatever you think about it, New Romulus is a work of art, but we REALLY need new stf type stuff - 8 maps are simply not enough for the 'difficult' content and making the borg more difficult to kill is missing the point)
Ideas (and requests that are totally understanding of the time and effort involved):
Find a way story wise to get the klingon war going again, finish the klingon faction and add a full (like fed is now) third one. Make some Romulan STFs - right now I'd settle for one space and one ground (with the hope for more) if the romulan rep rewards were the same as omega. Make (revamp) Undine, Dominion, Tholian STF content with sets and associated rep systems that look honestly at mistakes made (as well as the good) with the current rep stuff.
Add some more stuff to do while people are levelling up (level 1 up), get rid of the express routes to max level (unless you already have a max level character) and make our careers more full and engaging so that it means something to be max level because it was actually an effort - and I want to make clear that I'm not talking about difficulty level, but rather playtime.
Ideas:
Home faction, character race and class rep systems that take into account that most level 4 characters will not have anywhere near the resources that a level 50 has for rom/omega reps - in other words a CHEAP rep system that maybe grants powers and/or passives or doffs or whatever unique to that faction and that character's race and class. Whatever, just thoughts on how to make our characters a little more unique. Dimplomatic/Raiding rep? The doff system was a good start on this, being able to choose doffs for particular bonuses suited to how you play was genius - moar stuff like this please
DON'T give us a bunch of pets that are as easy to kill as the photonic fleet so that we can all be admirals running around with fleets of our own. If people want to fly around in a fleet, then they can join one and if they want their boffs to be captains, then it's easy enough to roleplay that by deleting the boff and making a new character with their saved appearance. It might be contentious to some, but I don't want to play a RTS. The away team makes sense, a space team doesn't. I would rather see the ranks renamed if people think it's silly (even if they're right) that admirals are running around farming space rabbits.
Don't make an extra tier of ship, but instead give us extra active boffs and/or an extra 3 or 4 power 1st officer Boff (based on your currently non-functional first officer slot in the doff window) slot bound to the character and not to the ship.
The overall point being that a increase in the level cap should not just be an extra 10 levels with a token reward at the end.
The overall point being that a increase in the level cap should not just be an extra 10 levels with a token reward at the end.
Which means, we don't really need more levels. It looks like it is in the pipeline and a lot of players expect it to happen, so the game designer might think there is no other option, but I really hope they are going to think outside the box.
Leveling goes fast in this game. 10 more levels will be a breeze and thus add no significant game content. Within a day, after release there will be a lot of level 60.
What will we do with the ships? A new top level, new rank, no new ship? I want my c-store ships on par at level cap. Can I get them upgraded for free or do I have to buy something in the c-store?
Admiral rank? Ok, but I will still function as a squad leader, a captain of a single ship, do stuff that an admiral, a highed ranked person in any organisation, will never do. The rank/title should we see just as a cosmetic thing.
Not saying I'm in full agreement for a cap increase. (I still remember all the hard work in WoW for Lick King gear, that all was trash when Cataclysm hit, which miffed me. Seeing a repeat of that in STO would cause less than savory thoughts to occur with my wallet.) I wouldn't mind such, IF, as many posted before me, in concern to their gear, begotten through more grinding that a cheese grater in a meat grinder, post tenderizing with explosives, have gone through, would see a way to upgrade. A possible solution would be the beyond outdated Crafting program, in conjunction with Dilithium costs. Given the costs and requirements alone for Fleet provision gear, seeing 'that' gear also go useless, would be equally pointless.
Use Crafting as a reasonable means to get gear, ships, whatever nigh or near desired, upgraded, especially for stuff that took either money, or a lot of danged time, to all acquire. Surely the Crafting system could be used to further effect, for other out of the box ideas, such as creating bridges for our ships, or more. Or use Crafting for something to an effect of bettering gear we have, along with new Mk XIV gear via an Iconian war reputation or something. Just making grind gear obsolite without much forethough, can't be good at all for the health of the game.
Comments
Heh, you remember the last time they boosted the NPC AI? OOOOooh man the rage threads about Donatra and the Tac cubes actually being intelligent with their abilities... It got to the point where they had to re-nerf it.
If they do boost NPC intelligence and/or (and preferred) toughness, I personally look forward to calling all the complainers wimps once more
Folks just looking for some casual play, should be fine to play Normal.
Folks looking for a little challenge, should be fine to play Advanced.
Folks looking for the chance to fail, should be fine to play Elite.
How many folks run anything other than Normal for most content?
How many folks think ESTFs are closer to ASTFs?
How many folks think content set as Advanced is actually Normal or even easier?
There are folks at different levels of gearing and skill... but in many cases, the game just doesn't cater to that. For the most part, it doesn't take long to overgear everything.
NSTFs, ASTFs, ESTFs...
NAlerts, AAlerts, EAlerts...
NActions, AActions, EActions...
I remember that. I was pleasantly surprised and changed my attack style to compensate.
I sure don't want them having a full compliment of consoles and boff powers to work from because that would start to become pretty painful pretty fast. But one defense and one offense? I could accpet that.
The current borg elite STF looks like normal gameplay to me. I completely agree about a 3rd difficulty level if the current elite content is being called "advanced". Advanced sounds better than "normal", i'm sure many people would still play it because they don't like great challenges but some here do.
The current STFs were designed for RA ships. They have been nerfed many times. We now have fleet ships. The STFs need some update and the admiral level could be a great opportunity.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
The Cure Found (Elite) I'd say is harder though as it's definitely possible to fail. Sure you can fail Khitomer Vortex as well but you have to be doing pretty badly to manage that, whereas with Khitomer Vortex a disorganised team will lose practically every time, even if they're equipped with the best items available. The invulnerable borg cubes that are often backed up by the ships they're spitting out aren't exactly the easiest things to survive against either; doable sure, but much harder than most other enemies in Elite STFs.
The Hive (Elite) is another weird one; the enemy difficulty is much higher but it doesn't seem to be possible to fail. You can get stuck constantly reducing the health of the Unimatrix ships only for them to heal again, but even a really disorganised team should wear them down eventually. The problem is that the (Elite) variant is pretty ridiculous in terms of enemy difficulty thanks to nearly everything being able to instantly kill you if you get caught with defensive abilities on cool down, and the horde of tactical cubes at the start seem to aggro as a mob every-time which can make picking them off individually extremely difficult.
The unimatrix ships are one of those enemies I would rather were more intelligent instead of simply having heaps of hit-points and instantly killing you with half of their attacks; while the regen probes add a unique challenge even they are over the top rather than enjoyably challenging as all it takes is for one of them to sneak round where the team can't kill it in time and the unimatrix ship is healing faster than you can hurt it. Sure a unimatrix ship should be tough due to its sheer size, but should it be killing ships so easily in a five-ship STF?
So I'm not sure where I'd rank The Hive (Elite); I'd probably lump it in its own category of "Pointlessly Annoying" as it's got true Elite difficulty enemies in a mission you can't actually lose (it can just take forever to finish).
Game Balance - Ship Size and Wingmates
This will force people to learn healing items and improve their builds. one of the great annoyances is the ease with which people get to level 50 (just prior to X-mas i maxed out my new Klingon toon in less than 3 days).
If you go up in level one should expect increases in difficulty. To surpass this one should hone one's skill and build.
No. If you want to play on advanced, you are free to do so. Those who prefer to play on normal should be able to as well. Some players don't play 24-hours a day and can take much longer to level when only playing episode missions.
Unfortunately, the Doff system itself makes it incredibly easy to level. Add in dailies and the like and it's even faster. However, since the missions scale to your level, that's not really a problem. If you took a mission at level 3 and hit level 50 without running it, just drop the mission and retake it; it will scale to your level.
THAT is one of the best upgrades they made to this game. It helps offset how ridiculously fast the leveling is via Doffs and other systems. The only real downside is that the low and intermediate level ships are pretty much worthless, since you will outlevel them without really getting to use them much. That's why I have a few characters that are leveling strictly through the Foundry -- it's much slower. Those characters do not Doff, either.
Add enough (real) content to justify the raise - I thought I was done with the mirror event and would seem silly if the current end-game content turned into midgame content because it just got rehashed into some 'super-elite' pretence of content. (sorry cryptic, I really appreciate the game and your work and all, and whatever you think about it, New Romulus is a work of art, but we REALLY need new stf type stuff - 8 maps are simply not enough for the 'difficult' content and making the borg more difficult to kill is missing the point)
Ideas (and requests that are totally understanding of the time and effort involved):
Find a way story wise to get the klingon war going again, finish the klingon faction and add a full (like fed is now) third one. Make some Romulan STFs - right now I'd settle for one space and one ground (with the hope for more) if the romulan rep rewards were the same as omega. Make (revamp) Undine, Dominion, Tholian STF content with sets and associated rep systems that look honestly at mistakes made (as well as the good) with the current rep stuff.
Add some more stuff to do while people are levelling up (level 1 up), get rid of the express routes to max level (unless you already have a max level character) and make our careers more full and engaging so that it means something to be max level because it was actually an effort - and I want to make clear that I'm not talking about difficulty level, but rather playtime.
Ideas:
Home faction, character race and class rep systems that take into account that most level 4 characters will not have anywhere near the resources that a level 50 has for rom/omega reps - in other words a CHEAP rep system that maybe grants powers and/or passives or doffs or whatever unique to that faction and that character's race and class. Whatever, just thoughts on how to make our characters a little more unique. Dimplomatic/Raiding rep? The doff system was a good start on this, being able to choose doffs for particular bonuses suited to how you play was genius - moar stuff like this please
DON'T give us a bunch of pets that are as easy to kill as the photonic fleet so that we can all be admirals running around with fleets of our own. If people want to fly around in a fleet, then they can join one and if they want their boffs to be captains, then it's easy enough to roleplay that by deleting the boff and making a new character with their saved appearance. It might be contentious to some, but I don't want to play a RTS. The away team makes sense, a space team doesn't. I would rather see the ranks renamed if people think it's silly (even if they're right) that admirals are running around farming space rabbits.
Don't make an extra tier of ship, but instead give us extra active boffs and/or an extra 3 or 4 power 1st officer Boff (based on your currently non-functional first officer slot in the doff window) slot bound to the character and not to the ship.
The overall point being that a increase in the level cap should not just be an extra 10 levels with a token reward at the end.
Which means, we don't really need more levels. It looks like it is in the pipeline and a lot of players expect it to happen, so the game designer might think there is no other option, but I really hope they are going to think outside the box.
Leveling goes fast in this game. 10 more levels will be a breeze and thus add no significant game content. Within a day, after release there will be a lot of level 60.
What will we do with the ships? A new top level, new rank, no new ship? I want my c-store ships on par at level cap. Can I get them upgraded for free or do I have to buy something in the c-store?
Admiral rank? Ok, but I will still function as a squad leader, a captain of a single ship, do stuff that an admiral, a highed ranked person in any organisation, will never do. The rank/title should we see just as a cosmetic thing.
And finally, 50 is a nice number, nicer than 60.
Use Crafting as a reasonable means to get gear, ships, whatever nigh or near desired, upgraded, especially for stuff that took either money, or a lot of danged time, to all acquire. Surely the Crafting system could be used to further effect, for other out of the box ideas, such as creating bridges for our ships, or more. Or use Crafting for something to an effect of bettering gear we have, along with new Mk XIV gear via an Iconian war reputation or something. Just making grind gear obsolite without much forethough, can't be good at all for the health of the game.