I mean, Cryptic's doing it wrong again. They've introduced a really fun and cleverly designed mission only to make it a daily grind with per-character rewards, and then remove it after three weeks.
The mission is long. It's about 20 minutes without any means of making it shorter. The cut-scenes are either unskippable, or hidden behind artificial timers. Regardless of how well the team performs the timers still have to come down to 0:00. I've had a run where no MU ships appeared for THREE MINUTES, because we've cleared out everything, it would seem. But we still had to wait for the boss to appear...
20 minutes means the mission is alt-unfriendly, which is even more ridiculous, since the event and its rewards are on per-character basis. So it's yet another example of Cryptic clearly being against alting.
In short, leave it to Cryptic to suck out all the fun from their game. The mission is great - I'll give them that - I would see myself playing it from time to time as I do with borg STFs. But making it a 20 minute alt-unfriendly daily event grind simply kills all the enjoyment I could otherwise take out of it. At least with CCE you could complete it in 5 minutes or so, even with pugs. Here they've put everything behind timers.
I don't know why I still bother with this game. I think I'm gonna pass this event completely, or do it only a bit and finish the rep project next time it'll run. The grind is simply too much.
playing normal you can get 2-3 typhoons in one rift if left unchecked long enough, i would imagine its a lot more uglier with elite difficulty as well as the accumulation on other mirror vessels elsewhere.
Yeah, Elite difficulty really brings home the Typhoon bacon. Hell, I've gotten MVAEs in mine a few times.
I've seen a mirror oddy and mirror Dreads. Mission is long and it's quite easy to lose where you are and go "oh TRIBBLE, I'm surrounded BOOM!"
I mean fun mission tad too long and way too many NPCS, I can't even see clearly to mark targets to hit half the time just a jumble of red.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
after running thru it multiple times (cycling alts)... really, really like having the choice of marks (and the varying reward amount to promote teamwork) and also find the mission quite fun. I am glad there is a timer because some of the random groups wound up in have been crazy and few in elite that probably shouldnt be there as well as an afk peep here and there (afk to the extent that they dont do anything cept need on loot).
Miss the leveling event, but this is quite nice, thanks
edit.. only glitch was on the ODDY, the saucer functioned normally but the aquarius bugged on both my toons that use it. after launch, it gets destroyed and then the saucer is greyed out and the aquarius shows deployable, but it isnt and just resets timer making both saucer and aquarius unusable
I like it, yeah it's a bit long but at least there's a structure to the length. The only thing that bothers me is that I can't close rifts whilst under fire; normally that's not a problem as one destroys the enemy before closing the rift, but if enemy numbers get too high before the rifts can be closed it creates a self-perpetuating nightmare bazillion ships with no way to stop more from spawning.
Second this comment, I have run it 3 times and with each run the number of ships tend to become too much on elite.
Even under fire you should be able to close the portals, and not have to rely on a some form of stealth or masking to get close only for them to shoot you at 90% completion and poof got to kill them all first.
Dilithium and mark rewards stink for elite completion with a fairly high difficulty, considering you can easily get more in less time per elite breach run.
However the full range of marks to choose from is perfect as is.
A complete negative that this will only be an event as of right now, and not something more permanent for those who desperately need expertise.
It is a fresh new mission which is always welcomed, so it gets a + there.
Second this comment, I have run it 3 times and with each run the number of ships tend to become too much on elite.
Even under fire you should be able to close the portals, and not have to rely on a some form of stealth or masking to get close only for them to shoot you at 90% completion and poof got to kill them all first.
Dilithium and mark rewards stink for elite completion with a fairly high difficulty, considering you can easily get more in less time per elite breach run.
However the full range of marks to choose from is perfect as is.
A complete negative that this will only be an event as of right now, and not something more permanent for those who desperately need expertise.
It is a fresh new mission which is always welcomed, so it gets a + there.
I think there is a simple solution for the problem:
Make science ships "immune" to enemy fire in terms of closing the portals. So science ships could close the portals even if they are under fire.
Also cruisers could send energy to the power relays even if they are under fire.
On my last ride I was the only cruiser who bothered with the power relays - and at the 4th relay there was 2 rifts nearby the relay... it made it impossible to do my job.
Imo the event seems to be well designed but the power creep is making it unbalanced - I can easily solo not just the rift packs but the dreadnought as well, but I've also been in groups with people who might not be ready for elite difficulty and they get themselves blown up and eventually overwhelmed by the number of portals. I can see a good fleet group closing down all the rifts and not having anything left to do until the timer counts down, yet at the same time I've seen people getting overwhelmed by the number of rifts. Dunno what the solution is tho
I think there is a simple solution for the problem:
Make science ships "immune" to enemy fire in terms of closing the portals. So science ships could close the portals even if they are under fire.
Also cruisers could send energy to the power relays even if they are under fire.
On my last ride I was the only cruiser who bothered with the power relays - and at the 4th relay there was 2 rifts nearby the relay... it made it impossible to do my job.
Same for me when I am trying to shut down the portals, only for 3 more to pop up right near me making it virtually impossible to close them without having to try, and kill off some 15 ships or so at once.
easy and fun in my scimitar because it wipes everything out fast enough to let me close portals, not so fun in a lower dps ship like a sci ship. Jam and scramble sensors need to work better there to let you close the portals without having to blow everything up.
Ran for the 1st time on elite and it was fun and something different. I was in a sci ship and thought i'd be good for closing rifts and healing whilst the dps heavy ships killed the bad guys.
Wrong...:eek:
The sheer number of ships comming through open rifts can pile up real quick (don't know if its the same on normal). And as there's only 5 of you that means the enemy are often spawning on the opposite side of the station with nobody to combat them or close the rift meanng they come pilling through.
Most of the ships i saw were Mirandas but there were a lot of typhoons too and the sheer volume of what looked to me like BFAW was killing the team in seconds. Maybe it wasn't BFAW but when you've got 5-10 cruisers shooting at you it feels that way.
Also the mirror guys seem to easily escape any grav well or tykens rift i threw out so that meant most of my sci tricks were useless.
I can see FAW cruisers doing well in this as they can take the hits from multiple ships at once and hit back too.
Escorts will do ok too i guess but sci ships i reckon are gonna struggle. The sheer enemy/ally ratio seems off to me. Cloaked sci ships might fare quite well though.
Maybe in a few days tactics will start to circulate that'll make it go better.
Edit: Wish I could delete it, I see some similar threads got all moved.
I really like this new event.
The combat is not too hard but the pressure goes up slowly if the team doesn't destroy ships quickly enough.
But killing rifts is kinda superfluous in most cases, in fact the most successful teams I were in killed the least rifts.
Activating the station defenses is nice, one question though:
What kinda of ship counts as cruiser? Is my Jem'Hadar Dreadnought a Sci ship due to sci abilities or...? Is a Scimitar nothing or a cruiser? Are cruiser commands a requirement to count as cruiser?
The fight against the Dreadnought is nice, the bug that it doesn't reappear when all Rifts are closed gets hopefully fixed ASAP.
What are your experiences?
I miss a bit the mass carnage of the old MUI, but otherwise this one is really nice and better, fixing of the major respawn bug shouldn't take too long.
Activating the station defenses is nice, one question though:
What kinda of ship counts as cruiser? Is my Jem'Hadar Dreadnought a Sci ship due to sci abilities or...? Is a Scimitar nothing or a cruiser? Are cruiser commands a requirement to count as cruiser?
If it doesn't have cruiser commands, it isn't a cruiser. JHDC is a carrier and the scim is a warbird. So those don't count toward faster rifts or defenses.
Decent, though gets a little long for something that needs to be ground out repeatedly. Cool the first time, but I think I'm gonna be burned out on Closing Rifts well before the event is over. Normal is perfectly free for all, but on Elite, you really need or organized group with a strategy, or you just get overwhelmed. Neat little mission, but I still prefer the simple craziness of the old one.
Also one more bug: hit the Dreadnought with so much firepower it never has a chance to retreat and there are still rifts open, it'll just hang out at 0% health but not actually die, forcing you to warp out and do the whole 15 minute run all over again. Yeesh.
Decent, though gets a little long for something that needs to be ground out repeatedly. Cool the first time, but I think I'm gonna be burned out on Closing Rifts well before the event is over. Normal is perfectly free for all, but on Elite, you really need or organized group with a strategy, or you just get overwhelmed. Neat little mission, but I still prefer the simple craziness of the old one.
Also one more bug: hit the Dreadnought with so much firepower it never has a chance to retreat and there are still rifts open, it'll just hang out at 0% health but not actually die, forcing you to warp out and do the whole 15 minute run all over again. Yeesh.
No you dont have to warp out. leave one person to pound on it to keep it at 0 then the rest can find and close the rifts. Also the scan feature does point you to the open rifts. When the last rift closes the dread blows up instantly.
(Ive had this happen twice today and both times I scanned found the rifts and closed them allowing us to complete it.)
Yes I ecountered the bug where the dread does not reappear if the rifts are all closed.
Whilst amusingly being flamed for being in "a team full of idiots" by some guy who simply refused to admit there even was a bug lol!
Otherwise I love the mission, great fun in any ship I've taken there thus far, (jem dread, scimitar, dyson destroyer and b'rel retrofit bop).
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
Yeah, Typhoon's definetly need a nerf. Not neccessarily a big one, but either cut back on the number that can spawn in a single instance or flat-out remove their TBR power.
Because frankly, do you know how annoying it is when you're facing something like nine Typhoons and all of them use TBR at the same time?
For everybody upset that the mission will only be around for 3 weeks, rest assured. When Crystalline Catastrophe was overhauled, they did the same thing. Brought the new version online for a couple weeks, and attached it to the CC event to make sure lots of people played it. They then took all the data they got from that, plus feedback from players, made some tweaks, and added it on a permanent basis later. They wouldn't put all the effort into an elaborate queue like this, just to run it for 3 weeks. Consider it to currently be in "public beta".
If you didn't kill a lot of rifts you weren't successful. Part of your mark reward depends on the number of rifts closed. Theoretically you can gain a lot of marks with very few ship kills.
The biggest problem I've seen so far is that nobody bothers with rifts. You know how many people say "why is it stuck at 0%"? because they don't pay attention to the mission briefing and thus don't bother with rifts?
Agreed, some people seem to think that activating the stations defenses will mean it will gun down everything,meaning the rifts get ignored and the station gets pummelled.
And another poster is right when they say elite difficulty requires a certain co-ordination.
I have found that in my jem dread I do best at tackling groups of enemies on a single rift on my own, with my scimitar I've found my best roll is standing above the station healing it and blasting anything that comes near. Whilst with my science destroyer crowd control with grav well and support is where it excels.
Oddly enough I had the most fun in my tiny klink raider sneaking and hiding behnd the generators for cover, its so tiny you can use the generators to block incoming fire lol! I can shout the team that I can activate the weapons whilst they hammer on the rifts.
I think this particular event is all about knowing your role. If I tried solo'ing a well established rift in my b'rel I know I'd be smashed, but its all about the tactics.
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
If you didn't kill a lot of rifts you weren't successful. Part of your mark reward depends on the number of rifts closed. Theoretically you can gain a lot of marks with very few ship kills.
The biggest problem I've seen so far is that nobody bothers with rifts. You know how many people say "why is it stuck at 0%"? because they don't pay attention to the mission briefing and thus don't bother with rifts?
I'm that guy that flies around when the dreadnought appears looking for rifts to close. One time I didn't even get the chance to shoot at the dread. I was called a moocher for not helping with it. :rolleyes: They would never have figured out how to kill it if I hadn't been there. :P
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
This event is just stupid. Its literally the same crappy design that puts dps and speed above all else. Ergo, its designed primarily for escorts.
The 'sci ships close rifts faster and cruisers recharge the stations faster' is pointless and absurd. Its like at the end of it they tossed that garbage in just to give sci and cruisers without lt cmdr tactical slots something to do while the escorts ravage the mirror ships.
Finally, saddest of all, the return of 'to make npcs harder just multiply their damage output and hitpoints' approach. Its just dumb to see players ships dying from one hit when they are 100% shields and armor no matter what ship they're in.
I expected to be disappointed and in that at least, cryptic consistently delivers.
This event is just stupid. Its literally the same crappy design that puts dps and speed above all else.
If it just were that.... but its some scripted nonsense gated by a timer. The old mirror was so much better at least you got to complete it depending on how fast you actually killed stuff. So a great team was able to complete it in a few seconds. This new event with its fixed timer is rather poor design.
Comments
I mean, Cryptic's doing it wrong again. They've introduced a really fun and cleverly designed mission only to make it a daily grind with per-character rewards, and then remove it after three weeks.
The mission is long. It's about 20 minutes without any means of making it shorter. The cut-scenes are either unskippable, or hidden behind artificial timers. Regardless of how well the team performs the timers still have to come down to 0:00. I've had a run where no MU ships appeared for THREE MINUTES, because we've cleared out everything, it would seem. But we still had to wait for the boss to appear...
20 minutes means the mission is alt-unfriendly, which is even more ridiculous, since the event and its rewards are on per-character basis. So it's yet another example of Cryptic clearly being against alting.
In short, leave it to Cryptic to suck out all the fun from their game. The mission is great - I'll give them that - I would see myself playing it from time to time as I do with borg STFs. But making it a 20 minute alt-unfriendly daily event grind simply kills all the enjoyment I could otherwise take out of it. At least with CCE you could complete it in 5 minutes or so, even with pugs. Here they've put everything behind timers.
I don't know why I still bother with this game. I think I'm gonna pass this event completely, or do it only a bit and finish the rep project next time it'll run. The grind is simply too much.
the I.S.S Sisko appeared as a Gal-X, Vanished and came back again as an Oddy O.o
Yeah, Elite difficulty really brings home the Typhoon bacon. Hell, I've gotten MVAEs in mine a few times.
I mean fun mission tad too long and way too many NPCS, I can't even see clearly to mark targets to hit half the time just a jumble of red.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
The Dreadnought is a shapeshifter!
Speaking of ship names, how many are there? I've seen the old Stadi, I've seen the Spock, I've seen the Kirk...
Miss the leveling event, but this is quite nice, thanks
edit.. only glitch was on the ODDY, the saucer functioned normally but the aquarius bugged on both my toons that use it. after launch, it gets destroyed and then the saucer is greyed out and the aquarius shows deployable, but it isnt and just resets timer making both saucer and aquarius unusable
Second this comment, I have run it 3 times and with each run the number of ships tend to become too much on elite.
Even under fire you should be able to close the portals, and not have to rely on a some form of stealth or masking to get close only for them to shoot you at 90% completion and poof got to kill them all first.
Dilithium and mark rewards stink for elite completion with a fairly high difficulty, considering you can easily get more in less time per elite breach run.
However the full range of marks to choose from is perfect as is.
A complete negative that this will only be an event as of right now, and not something more permanent for those who desperately need expertise.
It is a fresh new mission which is always welcomed, so it gets a + there.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
I've seen something starting with a "V" don't remember the whole ship name.
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
I do believe I have seen either a mcoy, or a scotty.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
I think there is a simple solution for the problem:
Make science ships "immune" to enemy fire in terms of closing the portals. So science ships could close the portals even if they are under fire.
Also cruisers could send energy to the power relays even if they are under fire.
On my last ride I was the only cruiser who bothered with the power relays - and at the 4th relay there was 2 rifts nearby the relay... it made it impossible to do my job.
Same for me when I am trying to shut down the portals, only for 3 more to pop up right near me making it virtually impossible to close them without having to try, and kill off some 15 ships or so at once.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Had an I.S.S. O'Brien.
Wrong...:eek:
The sheer number of ships comming through open rifts can pile up real quick (don't know if its the same on normal). And as there's only 5 of you that means the enemy are often spawning on the opposite side of the station with nobody to combat them or close the rift meanng they come pilling through.
Most of the ships i saw were Mirandas but there were a lot of typhoons too and the sheer volume of what looked to me like BFAW was killing the team in seconds. Maybe it wasn't BFAW but when you've got 5-10 cruisers shooting at you it feels that way.
Also the mirror guys seem to easily escape any grav well or tykens rift i threw out so that meant most of my sci tricks were useless.
I can see FAW cruisers doing well in this as they can take the hits from multiple ships at once and hit back too.
Escorts will do ok too i guess but sci ships i reckon are gonna struggle. The sheer enemy/ally ratio seems off to me. Cloaked sci ships might fare quite well though.
Maybe in a few days tactics will start to circulate that'll make it go better.
I really like this new event.
The combat is not too hard but the pressure goes up slowly if the team doesn't destroy ships quickly enough.
But killing rifts is kinda superfluous in most cases, in fact the most successful teams I were in killed the least rifts.
Activating the station defenses is nice, one question though:
What kinda of ship counts as cruiser? Is my Jem'Hadar Dreadnought a Sci ship due to sci abilities or...? Is a Scimitar nothing or a cruiser? Are cruiser commands a requirement to count as cruiser?
The fight against the Dreadnought is nice, the bug that it doesn't reappear when all Rifts are closed gets hopefully fixed ASAP.
What are your experiences?
I miss a bit the mass carnage of the old MUI, but otherwise this one is really nice and better, fixing of the major respawn bug shouldn't take too long.
If it doesn't have cruiser commands, it isn't a cruiser. JHDC is a carrier and the scim is a warbird. So those don't count toward faster rifts or defenses.
Mine Trap Supporter
Sorry for using that overrated meme, but it's true. There's WAY too many of them.
Also one more bug: hit the Dreadnought with so much firepower it never has a chance to retreat and there are still rifts open, it'll just hang out at 0% health but not actually die, forcing you to warp out and do the whole 15 minute run all over again. Yeesh.
No you dont have to warp out. leave one person to pound on it to keep it at 0 then the rest can find and close the rifts. Also the scan feature does point you to the open rifts. When the last rift closes the dread blows up instantly.
(Ive had this happen twice today and both times I scanned found the rifts and closed them allowing us to complete it.)
Fleet leader Nova Elite
Fleet Leader House of Nova elite
@ren_larreck
Whilst amusingly being flamed for being in "a team full of idiots" by some guy who simply refused to admit there even was a bug lol!
Otherwise I love the mission, great fun in any ship I've taken there thus far, (jem dread, scimitar, dyson destroyer and b'rel retrofit bop).
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
Because frankly, do you know how annoying it is when you're facing something like nine Typhoons and all of them use TBR at the same time?
I'll tell you. It's "andjhandjnajsn-ing" annoying.
The biggest problem I've seen so far is that nobody bothers with rifts. You know how many people say "why is it stuck at 0%"? because they don't pay attention to the mission briefing and thus don't bother with rifts?
And another poster is right when they say elite difficulty requires a certain co-ordination.
I have found that in my jem dread I do best at tackling groups of enemies on a single rift on my own, with my scimitar I've found my best roll is standing above the station healing it and blasting anything that comes near. Whilst with my science destroyer crowd control with grav well and support is where it excels.
Oddly enough I had the most fun in my tiny klink raider sneaking and hiding behnd the generators for cover, its so tiny you can use the generators to block incoming fire lol! I can shout the team that I can activate the weapons whilst they hammer on the rifts.
I think this particular event is all about knowing your role. If I tried solo'ing a well established rift in my b'rel I know I'd be smashed, but its all about the tactics.
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
I'm that guy that flies around when the dreadnought appears looking for rifts to close. One time I didn't even get the chance to shoot at the dread. I was called a moocher for not helping with it. :rolleyes: They would never have figured out how to kill it if I hadn't been there. :P
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
The 'sci ships close rifts faster and cruisers recharge the stations faster' is pointless and absurd. Its like at the end of it they tossed that garbage in just to give sci and cruisers without lt cmdr tactical slots something to do while the escorts ravage the mirror ships.
Finally, saddest of all, the return of 'to make npcs harder just multiply their damage output and hitpoints' approach. Its just dumb to see players ships dying from one hit when they are 100% shields and armor no matter what ship they're in.
I expected to be disappointed and in that at least, cryptic consistently delivers.
If it just were that.... but its some scripted nonsense gated by a timer. The old mirror was so much better at least you got to complete it depending on how fast you actually killed stuff. So a great team was able to complete it in a few seconds. This new event with its fixed timer is rather poor design.