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Good Times & Fake Difficulty
tau41
Member Posts: 70 Arc User
So, I got to 50 in about two weeks. Played a lot, had a lot of fun, lots of warm, fuzzy, Trekkie feelings were had. Made a lot of money on the exchange (like I used to on CO before you guys crashed the economy WORSE). Have... y'know, not the best, but very good equipment on my ship. Overall, my experiences have been positive, and I want to make that very clear here.
...but now I'm at 50, and I grouped with a few longtime friends to see what STO has to offer in terms of end game challenge. And the answer is one shots.
Now... it's not precisely 'likely' that I'm being hit with one single, 54k+ hit. But the things I'm talking about here have NO indication they are about to happen. What I'm ASSUMING is a torpedo spread off the Unimatrix has no graphic until I'm just surrounded in explosions AND dead. And I want to state very specifically I'm not talking about the giant Plasma ball that we can shoot down-that's a very GOOD mechanic. It's obvious, we can do something about it, and if we don't, we should be punished accordingly.
But there are other things happening inside of EXTREME burst windows that just outright destroy Escorts, although I doubt I'd survive these things in a cruiser unless I had a cooldown already popped, which would be a lot easier to do if there was any indication that something BAD was about to happen.
As a lifer on Champions Online, I can safely say you guys have a SERIOUS problem with invisible, get kicked in the face and DIE mechanics that you need to talk about inside your team. They aren't fun, and they lead to a whole room of people screaming "WTF!?" It's not cool.
...but now I'm at 50, and I grouped with a few longtime friends to see what STO has to offer in terms of end game challenge. And the answer is one shots.
Now... it's not precisely 'likely' that I'm being hit with one single, 54k+ hit. But the things I'm talking about here have NO indication they are about to happen. What I'm ASSUMING is a torpedo spread off the Unimatrix has no graphic until I'm just surrounded in explosions AND dead. And I want to state very specifically I'm not talking about the giant Plasma ball that we can shoot down-that's a very GOOD mechanic. It's obvious, we can do something about it, and if we don't, we should be punished accordingly.
But there are other things happening inside of EXTREME burst windows that just outright destroy Escorts, although I doubt I'd survive these things in a cruiser unless I had a cooldown already popped, which would be a lot easier to do if there was any indication that something BAD was about to happen.
As a lifer on Champions Online, I can safely say you guys have a SERIOUS problem with invisible, get kicked in the face and DIE mechanics that you need to talk about inside your team. They aren't fun, and they lead to a whole room of people screaming "WTF!?" It's not cool.
Post edited by tau41 on
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I get around it by using CSV and a hanger, which tends to destroy them without me ever even noticing their presence (though I certainly notice the lack of suddenly inexplicable death).
Torpedo spreads though are visible, but depending on your graphics you may not notice the green plasma torpedoes. Only way to really deal with that is make sure your shields are up and strong, and hit Brace For Impact.
I'm pretty sure that of you look at your combat logs the invisitorps are not HY Torpedos, they are in fact a bit of an enigma, and don't even state what damage type they are. It's more than "Rendering error" Cryptic had admitted as much but the person who really did extensive testing on them is Marie.
#2311#2700#2316#2500
Nah, I can soak the spreads, so long as I don't get hit with multiple spreads back to back (which has happened, first spread blew open my shields, second spread hollowed me out). But the rendering issue you speak of is clearly affecting all torpedo attacks from the Borg. Trust me here, it's not a settings issue (unless I need to turn stuff down). It's potentially a driver issue, though I've updated my card drivers in the last two weeks here.
But let me make a clear point here-you just told me, *basically*, 'Oh yeah, you have to know about this issue ahead of time and be equipped with this thing you may not otherwise care to use or die."
That's still not good design. >.>
Don't make excuses for them-when they TRIBBLE up, they SHOULD be held accountable for it. It's a great game, and I enjoy it a lot-but there's a few things here and there that just aren't cool. Like getting too close to the Borg core at the end of that mission and 'discovering' their point defense system. A little "Sir, the enemy vessel is powering a point defense system!" alert would be a good thing there AND keep it feeling Star Trek-ie.
Theyre not invisible and they're not heavy torpedoes. Look at your combat log and you will see the real cause of the one-shot torpedoes.
They're regular plasma torpedoes that at random spike in damage to ungodly levels. You can even see them coming in too. One hit and POW they do 250k damage to your 100% shields and bleedthrough knocks your entire hull out of existence.
Then there's the heavy plasma cannon. It fires 6 to 8 bolts in a volley...each bolt hits you for 10k damage to the shields. At random just like the torpedo does. One bolt would do the normal ~800 dmg the next three spike to 10k damage and the last 2 go down to 800 again.
These are not (critical) hits either. The combat log clearly shows them as being normal hits. They just spike in damage for no reason.
Pretty much this... reg. plasma torps hitting all of a sudden for 150k+ is what kills me 99% of the time. There is no way to really avoid it. i'm to the point now as soon as a tac cube targets me I evasive out of range till he targets someone else just to avoid the instant deaths.
That sounds like a really serious bug. It also sounds like exactly what's going on (I would be fine sometimes, and other times just... DEAD). Except that there is DEFINITELY some kind of rendering glitch as well. This computer is a little old, and while I do run things on good settings and still maintain a reasonable framerate, it MIGHT be dropping some post effects.
I'd love to go into the combat log and figure it out, but I haven't gotten around to adjusting the log to display everything so I can appropriately filter info like I have it in CO.
The most egregious example of this though (and really, how's this for your first shot doing STF's), I actually dropped out of range with Evasive Maneuvers after taking a Torp Spread to the face, brought my shields back up, brought my hull back up-stayed out for a good 20-30 seconds, right? Got back in the fight... and immediately ate ANOTHER Torp Spread and just exploded. 100% shields, 90% hull, ONE SHOT *near as I could tell.*
Did not make for a good first impression.
Though, you know, if all those cruisers I see flying around me all the time would toss any rank of extend shields around the escorts, it suddenly wouldn't be much of an issue anymore. If those cruisers are there solely to dps, and nothing else...then they're flying the wrong ships. (Other types of cruisers that I don't have a problem with: Ones with support abilities, slows and snares like Eject Warp Plasma, tanks that can keep the attention of the mobs and keep themselves alive, and of course the ones that heal. I also won't complain about a cruiser if they out dps the escorts there, which some very good players can do.)
Romulans: left one homeworld, lost another, third time's the charm?
Thank you, Sussethrai. I feel less like I'm waving my arms around like a loony now. I'm glad to see that there's someone with serious experience calling this out as BS.
I have parsed the combat logs. I do so regularly while tweaking builds. In the last 50 eSTF runs, I've only been "one-shot" once - according to my parser it was from two torpedo spreads from Donatra within the same second, which hit for around 50k each.
It isn't as if the instant-kill attacks aren't being directed at me. I'm an Engineering captain in a JHEC, and average around 9.6k DPS for STFs. Consequently, I end up tanking most of the time. I haven't been one-shot by Tac Cubes at all since I've started having fighters on Intercept. Either they fixed it (unlikely given this topic), or the fighters are preventing the one-shot attacks in some way.
(Of course, after I post this I'll probably get one-shot repeatedly. :P)
While it's possible they screwed something up in the last patch, I ran an eSTF last night (only because one of our allied Fleets was looking for people) and we had zero problems - our allies said it was so quick they thought it was on Normal instead of Elite.
I will note that difficulty can be swingy sometimes - there are some days where it feels like the Borg have our shield frequencies and are just ripping everybody apart. Could just be luck?
Romulans: left one homeworld, lost another, third time's the charm?
It should not be taking this long to fix these graphical bugs. If they don't want to make new graphics for them just use another weapon graphics. Do something. Are they really doing anything about the problem or just BS'ing?
Also the 1 shot kill potential from torpedo spread is BS. Doing massive damage Ok but no 1 shots. 1 shot kills should only come from special weapons like a Lance or the special Plasma Bolt.
I'm REASONABLY sure that if I saw those things coming and popped my defenses, I'd survive. ...reasonably. The trouble is, again, I'm not being hit by antyhing that I *know* is coming. Suddenly, there's green explosions everywhere in space and DEAD.
Even then, I only really have two 'take less damage' buttons on my Escort due to the limitation of Engineering BOFF stations (unless there's a tactical buff I need to be taking as well which I very well might need).
I'm new to STO, sure. Not games of this kind, nor even events with high damage. The complaint, again, is that I can't defend against something I don't know is coming. It SOUNDS like it's buggy on a lot of fronts here-failure to render, random giant spike damage. Those are things that should be fixed anyway.
Now, if those two things are how it's supposed to be, then there's a different problem. That's making it hard because the game JUST kills you outright in a game where you otherwise take damage and are supposed to balance between defensive and offensive abilities. That's what's known as Fake Difficulty, HENCE the topic of the post. Not to be circular here, but if it's working as intended, it's full of fake difficulty, the devs should be ashamed, and their meta critic and review scores should all be docked 10%.
I know Delta does, now that you mention it. I could slide that on one of my Tac officers easily. Still, and this is definitely SOME of me being an STO noob, it's odd to have to expect to blow multiple active defenses to survive random "raid damage" if you follow my use of WoW terminology.
I'm not saying I shouldn't pop the CD's mind-just that it's odd that I should *have to* if I want to survive incidental, random raid damage.
Everything else though, well my tank can survive with a tactical cube and a gateway on it and not get one shot by invisitorps of doom (though I have hit 30% hll with full shields, think I survived it) and once again the escort and science vessel tend to either kill it faster or just survive based on damage mitigation.
To the OP make sure you have tactical team up as often as possible (every 15s) and having emergency power to shields constantly up can't hurt. If you think you're gonna get hit hard use brace for impact, transfer shield strength and the subspace field modulator, you should survive most things even super crits. If you get down to 50% health hit evasive and heal up, sometimes there are torps following you so distribute shields to the enemy and keep moving in a straight line away till you have full shields.
Hope it helps
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
Well, presently I'd just have to hit things when I THINK I'm about due to get torps to the face because there's no other indication (invisible torps and all that nonsense). It's good advice though, and I REALLY appreciate you not using a thousand acronyms that I have no idea what they are yet. ;p
Still, it's all academic at the moment, and it's disturbing to hear that even very experienced players who steamroll the content also occasionally get nuked into oblivion.
Again, I'm content to say that it sounds like the Borg are bugged-so long as that's the case. But if random proc omgwtfbbq is by DESIGN, we've got a problem where the dev team has embraced fake difficulty, probably because they made tanks TOO tanky compared to everyone else.
I could get into things I've heard about how DPS is king in STO, and that Cruisers actually CAN survive utterly ludicrous amounts of punishment, but I don't have the depth of experience with the game. What I know is that invisible, instant death moves are BS. They were all the way back in Gauntlet 2 when Sumner shouts "Beware the Invisible Death!", and they still are today.
Cheers
Sometimes I can see whats coming at me, and other times I don't. In the Hive eSTF I died so many times by invisible one shot kills I won't even play that STF anymore. Sometimes I don't even see the cannon fire from the tact cube in Infected. The only way I know it was a cannon that got me is if the first shot wipes out my shields, and a very quick second shot kills me.
I believe there is only a set amount of torps, cannon fire, beams ect that the game will render, and exceeding that amount through THYs and CSVs and FAWs is what is preventing those one shot kill weapons from being rendered. That's just my theory anyway.
Considering the engine is the same as CO's, which ALSO has certain particle/polygon limits in it, this would not surprise me in the least.
But yeah. Cannot survive invisible doom weapons. This rig IS a little older, but the video card in it clocks better cycles than many current cards, to the point that I think a lot of current cards are inferior quite honestly. But what IS holding this rig back is CPU, and there could be some kind of calculation dump taking place.
Either way, invisible, instant death torps and cannons kill every time. I don't mind the advice, but the advice doesn't help so long as I can't see it coming.
My point being is that it's possible to get used to dealing with them, but that doesn't make it right they are still in the game.
OP, not really much I can say to you that hasn't been said. I mean, how can you truly prepare for something you cannot see?
I've said in the past that a big boss like a Tac Cube needs heavy pressure damage. It needs SEVERAL beam arrays hitting one target for like 1000 damage before resists and shields. It needs to be using a variety of abilities to make someone keep sweating, and not just one-shot them like it's swatting a fly.
In order...
That was the reason I wrote this thing.
Thanks.
And that's exactly what I EXPECTED because it's a much better design as opposed to "Oh by the way, this attack will just end you... now. Because."
For as much polish as in this game, I really wasn't expecting cheesy, BS attacks, y'know?
These reasons are also why escorts can 'tank' so well in PvE content. Because most PvE enemies and bosses have so few weapons on them, and escorts often times have high defense values, most of these attacks end up missing. I'm not saying the escorts are invulnerable or anything, but a good pilot will just simply live even through the invisi-torps by dodging them.
If enemies had a bunch of weapons firing at the same time, then there's a whole lot more chances for hits, and more hits means more damage, and more damage means an escort cannot simply sit there and take it forever.
I do agree though, one-shots that you cannot counter outside of extreme-tanking are not difficult, they are annoying. This was even stated by devs while season 7 was in testing still. Now one-shots you can see and target, that's fine, but simply 'hi and die', is not really good game design.
If you run preventively defensive abilities it's ok, even in an escort. And if you keep moving you may avoid most of the damage.
Actually NPCs in this game are pretty pathetic and the devs don't know how to create bosses not using kinetic damage, which is mostly dangerous for noobs because it can be dodged really easily. You don't have a boss spamming energy damage like mad, and it's really extreme: get OS if you don't know how it works, or get bored buffing yourself and firing everything without further thinking.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
What they really need to do is fix the old content we do currently for month on end and not put in more (buggy) content with the same problems and a few new ones.
My argument has been and will continue to be that there's nothing to L2P about here because there's no learning curve (unless it looks a bit like EVE Online: http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/devblog/2011/eve-learning-curve.jpg ). ...if it looks like the EVE Online learning curve, then it is wrong ANYWAYS. ;p
The best advice I've gotten in here is "have your defensive CD's up and you won't die." ...so I'm supposed to *anticipate* those couple times a minute where I eat giga damage to the face and pop a CD and pray to God that I catch it while my CD is active? Terrible, terrible design.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
There is an indication: You will see the Unimatrix get the Torp Spread Icon if you pay attention. With Sub Nuke you can even stop it from firing.
I rarely if EVER die to this thing. Keep your shields up at all times and use Brace for Impact if it is about to fire that spread.
The invisible normal torps in Elite STF's that can deal upwards of 40K in a single shot and burn like thermate, on the other hand, are a big problem. Especially considering those ARE invisible.
I have played in games that I have used multiple abilities to help someone in need and then wile abilities are on CD I then become a target and get hit with massive damage and go boom. Some ships have fewer defensive abilities like Escorts and can't help allies wile still keeping themselves completely safe. L2P does not have anything to do with this.
STO learning curve... EVE learning curve...
I'd say they look about the same lol... the question with STO is what are they going to break in the next patch? or, what ability are they going to nerf without telling us? or, well... you get the picture I'm sure...
- An escort can easily stay alive on its own. It has to keep moving at max speed though. Cycling two tactical teams, two emergency power to shields and a TSS is more than enough not to die. An escort has to dogde damage. People playing escorts as if they were sieges ships flying at 0 speed are doing a mistake and it's not because the game has been badly designed.
- Cruisers can of course send extra heals if needed.
Of course there are some rare circumstances where you get hit by a mega torp by a gateway but again most of the times it's tankable or you can dodge it.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.