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Why are STO's Borg so weak?
betawatcher
Member Posts: 2 Arc User
Yes, I realize Voyager brought back some anti-Borg tech, but shouldnt the Borg have adapted by now? The very first Fed ship they assimilate should have given them access to whatever modern tech Starfleet is using and then they would have developed a way to adapt to it. What gives?
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From a canon perspective, like antibiotics, Starfleet has a large arsenal now, and keeps many weapons in reserve as a last line against the borg. Many other technologies have been developed specifically to counter the borg and adaptation, and the end of voyager set the borg very, very far back.
had the borgs gotten the ability to adapt, and have primarily abilities instead of insta kill weapons then it might be more challenging and worth while to fight.
My character Tsin'xing
This basically.
Go fight one alone in an eSTF and we can talk again.
You can beat it, but it certainly isn't weak. I'd say they're the Borg equivalent to a player - so there's no need to measure against anything less.
The individual common drone isn't very powerful in canon.
A much bigger problem is space, where 2 ships can blow up an Elite Tactical Cube and Spheres aren't really considered a threat - even on Elite difficulty.
He's dead, Jim.
Indeed.
It would be neat, though, to have a 20-player fleet action that pits 20 players against one "realistic" Borg Cube.
This, and enemies using many beam arrays with fire at will and overload instead of 50 torp banks.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
I'd like for them to not only be NOT cool but for people to stop WANTING them to be cool. I feel like they allow people who like Star Trek (which is about Collectivism) to demonize collectivism and play out quasi-fascist war and power fantasies.
I'd like it if someone just said, "They don't adapt. They assimilate. And they've assimilated everything they can that gives them an edge, shy of maybe the Preservers or a Q. They'll never get tougher. From this point going forward, it's a long endless cycle of the Borg getting outclassed unless the Queen starts embracing values like individuality and creativity. In a hundred years, they will be irrelevant. A footnote."
-Gameplay considerations (There's no fun in being blown up all the time by a powerful enemy)
-A rushed schedule (daedulus307 mentioned this, though he's got a bit of the wrong idea; STO was rushed in a lot of aspects at launch, and endgame was one of them... they didn't have time to give the Borg adaptation, or possibly not the tech to do so. But it's hardly 'didn't think this through')
-Canon weakness (also mentioned above; Voyager considerably set the Borg back, and not just at the end)
I think that's all of it, but I feel like I'm missing something...
Anyway, the Borg are a threat in-story, even if gameplay hasn't quite caught up to that yet. The Borg can adapt on the ground now, and the Elite drones deal plenty of damage (the bosses even more so), so they're not just another enemy at this point. But until the Borg ships adapt as well, and possibly more is added to them, they're just kinda stuck as they are.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
It also has the advantage of not being completed easily and thus has high (theoretically infinite) replay value.
Similar to No Win Scenario but actually unwinnable and open ended.
One could argue that the content that is not reached because of difficulty has been wasted:
Maybe, but it's a rather dubious and irrelevant argument based on speculation.
There certainly are players that think higher difficulty = more fun and more of a sense of achievement.
All you need is a gradual slope in increasing challenge and reward - until the players inevitably fail.
The most tricky part is making the slope smooth - as smooth as possible - so players can actually "ladder up" instead of hitting the same brick wall every time.
... and I'm not saying it should be utterly unwinnable:
Sometime someone will figure something out - or there is new gear - and they miraculously last through the whole 2 hours of incessant ever increasing onslaught.
Such a thing might actually present an incentive for people to buy C-Store ships, et cetera.
He's dead, Jim.
Indeed!
a really big one that is to scale
Memory tells me that the Ent-D looked pretty small to the first cube encountered
Ignoreing any fleets that attempted to stop them
They think one cube is enough.
For everything.
Basicly: they're dumb.
He's dead, Jim.
You think the Borg are easy now, guess you never fought the original STO Borg drones. They were immune to attacks until you destroyed the internlink node, then they were easy pickings.
As for the storyline, you forget the Borg did adapt and went to the new model. Which required Starfleet to adapt to use the Omega Gear. But the Borg Adapted, literally. So you required to change frequencies to work around their shielding.
Former Drones retain all of the Borg knowledge they are exposed to. They know the strengths and weaknesses of the Borg ships and technology. With the right equipment (or implants active) they can still hear and tap into the Collective Hive mind. That's the Borg's greatest strength as well it's greatest weakness. The more drones that are separated from the Collective the stronger the forces of the Alpha Quadrant become.
Fed phasers do a terrible amount of damage to borg ships when they can actually connect properly, as demonstrated in the first encounter with the borg.
Damn, finally someone after my own heart. I've been asking for that for some time now. Borg battles should be epic like in the folms, not easy cannon fodder with 5 ships.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
~That~ I want to play. I hope they put it in.
Heck, you could even use it as a PvP variant where one player is assigned the Super Cube and the other nineteen have to try to kill him. Doubly fun with a No Respawn rule.
While I agree in theory, after seeing how much people complain about the Crystalline Entity encounter, I don't think people would be loving a 20-Player Borg cube fight in practice.
Depends how they do the encounter.
The CE wasn't a hard encounter, it was done groups as low as 6 people. But what made the CE a painful encounter was the shards and people not knowing what to do.
With a Super Borg Cube, I doubt there would be shards, but more like the Borg Queen's Diamond on steroids. Which if there are some warning signs, could be doable. But personally, I think this game needs less PuGable events, because sometimes we lower the bar too much.
Insert Hive Onslaught and oh my, the borg bar has been raised. A PUG isn't very likely to complete it in elite mode, and a dedicated group will still find it packs a punch but it's not overly hard for them to beat. Even then, remember what happened with Picard. He told the fleet to all fire in the same spot and they destroyed that cube like it was yesterday's news. The borg aren't really this all powerful species anymore to the federation. All they can resort to now for an offensive is to just keep sending ships and drones to attack in the hope that the federation runs out of bodies before they do.
At some point though, with a Queen in charge, you'd think she would eventually one day go, "man, **** this it's time to move on to somebody that can't fight back" For a chick who's on top of her little universe she ain't too bright if she thinks there's still some kind of "perfection" to pursue involving the federation. She openly thinks people are below her and weak so why even bother anymore? And why try to assimilate Earth in the past? Isn't that sort of bypassing the point of their perfection goals and becoming more about conquering the human race to prevent starfleet from forming? You shouldn't want that in the least as the borg. Oh wait this is getting too deep into the flaws of Star Trek writing, I suppose.
Anyway, like I was saying, the borg are no longer to be feared technologically speaking, at least in space. Now they're just a constant annoyance that you have to deal with until, if ever, they go away. Granted, they're still a force to be dealt with on the ground thanks to their shielding but even then you just throw grenade after grenade at them and whatnot. Hell go back to the previous thousand years on Earth, dump your worthless energy weapons and BREAK OUT THE STANDARD PROJECTILE WEAPON CALLED A GUN. See how well the borg defend against lead bullets being fired at them. Picard showed there was nothing better to pwn a borg with than with a good ole fashioned tommy gun. Geez StarFleet could learn a thing or two still against the borg.
BTW if the borg have personal shields that can adapt to energy weapons then how come their ships don't use it? Sure would be useful like on the ground. Aaaaah whatever nevermind.
JustGaming4US - https://www.youtube.com/user/JustGaming4Us/
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Indeed, and keep in mind it only took 4 Quantum Torps from the Enterprise-E to destroy one Borg Sphere. So there is your baseline now with new weapons. Then consider STO is 50 years in advance of that, so Borg should be a bit easier now.
The OP is obviously thinking of the Borg from TNG, but a lot has changed since then, we are no longer in that era. Again, Enterprise-E = 4 Quantum Torps = Sphere Blew Up, so if anything, Quantum Torp High Yield should take out a sphere in-game. Plus, this is 50 years from that, so with advancements we've made, maybe even better.
JustGaming4US - https://www.youtube.com/user/JustGaming4Us/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/Brent_Justice
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And we'll probably get some cannon-fodder Iconian NPC battleships you can almost one-shot in space with a couple of torp high yield III like borg cubes.
Agreed. I really like the concept of the no win scenario. We need some challenges to keep us busy for months.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
Then they made them harder. Real hard.
But if you remember the angry guy in the first part of the dominion series saying that the feds needed more time to get the new tech online....well that is now. All the new tech one-shots the borg.
So it is all going as planned.
My character Tsin'xing
That's the thing: How can they assimilate a ship that vaporizes cubes with little effort? And it's unlikely the local powers sat on the tech and didn't bother improving it over three decades. The Borg left and came back stronger. Now everyone can go toe to toe.