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Why I don't like shuttle combat
chalpen
Member Posts: 2,207 Arc User
1) I am in my 40's and have a hard time with twitch combat. I cannot fly escorts or raiders either. But I don't have to fly raptors and raiders. I can choose cruisers. But in shuttle fighting there is no other choice. It is either fast shuttles or fast shuttles.
2) swarming. Being swarmed by a 5:1 ratio isn't fun IMHO in any game.
It just isn't fun.
2) swarming. Being swarmed by a 5:1 ratio isn't fun IMHO in any game.
It just isn't fun.
Should I start posting again after all this time?
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Having said that, i am glad i finished my marks grind for undine space/ground set since the shuttle combat was beginning to wear me down.
Vault one still feel confined in tight area all sorts of hitting surrounded my shuttle. I did try to get the next level-up in shuttles than the basic ones. To me those don't have much good handling again their not really for space battles.
I say play what you like to play in or with. I like the escorts right now because they're turn ratio is better. Full larger battleships turn ratio is smaller an at the space battle-zone at the sphere is tight also they then to get stuck sometimes.
Time will only tell!
The first time I flew a shuttle mission, I had no idea what I was doing. All I did was get killed a lot and not really contribute to the success of the team.
The next time I flew a shuttle mission I used the wingman concept. I picked out a team member and simply moved when and where he moved and shot when and at what he shot at. But this wasn't my primary focus. Which was to observe and learn from how he did things. Doing so took a great deal of the 'twitch' out of shuttle combat. I learned being a good shuttle pilot is more about precision than speed.
I'll never be Wedge Antilles in this game. But I am good enough to make the final cut for either Rogue or Wraith squadrons. And at 52, that's good enough to satisfy.
The shuttles are treated the same way as a large battle cruiser with the camera view, flight controls, etc. and to me it doesn't work very well.
It would be nice if the shuttles had their own camera angles, better flight controls (as in increased pitch angles from regular ships) and a little more customization and variation from different shuttles.
I don't see anything being done with them as they make up a fraction of content in the game right now and wouldn't really be worth it.
Don't feel bad. I do fly Tacscorts. Shuttles are paper bags, with warp cores.
I named my runabout Popcorn.Takes the sting out of it.;)
Shuttles should be balanced better, there are hardly any differences unless you fly a Delta Flyer or one with two boff seats. Fighter craft have a built in Cannon Rapid Fire ability so I wouldn't do much to them. Runabouts I would make an Engineering shuttle and give them one or two cruiser commands and a built in eng boff ability. Give Delta Flyers and similar two boff shuttles subsystem targeting like Science ships (They don't need a built in ability since the extra boff seat is Science). Of course, KDF and Rom would then need Delta Flyeresque shuttles of their own.
Course, they could get really fancy and revamp shuttle combat to be an arcade style flight sim game
Since I don't need the marks, switching to a shuttle isn't worth the potential, theoretical wasting of my time, and thus I choose to not play any shuttle things.
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I like them alright, but they are basically clown suits that you wear for a giggle every 6 months
fighting other fighters and shuttles MIGHT be fun sometimes, but fighting an entire fleet? and getting blown up awfully easily? lol.
Actually, I've always enjoyed shuttle content. I've been playing all of the new shuttle queues and the red alert one is my favorite, not because of the marks (though that is a nice bonus), but because you and 20 other people get to swarm capital ships like bees defending their hive.
And yes, you will die easily if you go out on your own and try to solo a squadron of capital ships. That's what makes it challenging. Like 0% of the rest of STO's content.
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
well, i did said "most", not all, otherwise we wouldn't have folks who actually bought things like the voth fighter, the aeon timeship, etc.
i thank them, they make the grind go faster with their uber shuttles.
My other Feds either use the Delta or Yellowstone. My KDF has an untested figther, and my Romulan has the Romulan Runabout. Thinking of getting the Scorpion at some point.
Somebody isn't playing the correct games then.
You might want to look into something different than MMORPG. Take Strategy, for example. Or FPS. Or MOBA. All great game types which don't rely on grinding.
Or just do what I did in STO. Smile at grindable things as they pass by, and get what you think is fun to play with. Ignore the rest. I'm now doing reputations on a new alt just for the dilithium reward. I ain't gonna spend a single ec on rep gear for that char, since the Exchange and the Solanae set provided all I need.
Join the Deltas today!
I wish we had shuttle content, and not content adapted to shuttles. Let me fly near the ground at high speed, inside an asteroid field, in the low orbit of some planet... Things a "standard" ship wouldn't do.
And I would like the shuttle to be different than just a highly maneuverable t1 ship.
Ironically, this type of game rely on grind. But you have to restart the grind every match
For missions like fleet alert, just stick with the crowd, don't try to solo anything bigger that a light cruiser and just watch where the majority of your team mates are firing, (and watch those core breaches, evasive is your friend). I've hammered out thousand upon thousand of marks of varying flavours and had a great time doing it over different toons with different shuttles and gear.
Had a great time in my yellowstone with borg gear and fleet dual plasma beams. And got the voth fighter towards the end of the day. Tray cockups are getting annoying though.
I just hope they bring this event back again
"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!".
Time will only tell!
Why can't you have both? Play for fun AND get the rewards.
One thing people may want to try is using a joy-stick like used in plane-sim games. Set it up with your most used powers on the thumb buttons and the trigger for your weapons and there ya go. Should make shuttle/fighter content easier and a bit more fun. I would use my joystick, but I'm having some problems getting it to cooperate with STO's control setup.
in the old days, MMOs didn't even exist, f2p MMOs work exactly by forcing you to either grind, or shell out cash to get stuff so you can have fun in the way you want to have fun(hey dude you want to fly a d'deridex warbird? pay $20 dollars!), in a way we're all stupid for playing this, but its still fun, at least for me, also STO has the saving grace of not being as insane as other f2ps in forcing you to pay for stuff.
also rewards are part of the fun.
1. Your skill in flying the thing means nothing. If I could dodge an attack through piloting skill, that would be one thing. But I can't. Whether that attack hit me or not was determined by a virtual die roll at the instant the attack was launched. It doesn't matter how much TRIBBLE you kick at games like TIE Fighter or Rogue Squadron. If the die says you got hit, you get hit. This makes sense in a capital ship which, understandably, can't dodge around things easily, but has enough bulk to take some hits. But in a fighter, generally you get shot once you die. The goal there is to not get shot, period. But in STO, the dice land hits on us, and we're supposed to be able to absorb it. Which leads me to...
2. One, maybe two Boff powers (if in a Delta Flyer or a Lobi shuttle). Now, you can play some tricks with this. I tend to use transphasic torps in shuttles, which spares me the need for a weapon buff (a Breen cluster torp still kills everything you hit with it, even when fired from a shuttle). So, I'm free to stack 2-3 DCEs and run EPtS for defense/shield heal and be good to go right? Nope. You have to carry Hazard Emitters in case anything shoots a plasma torpedo at you. If you get the DoT from a plasma torp, especially a heavy one, you will die right through your shield. You MUST be able to cleanse it. So that's it, your one Boff ability is going to be HE1 unless you KNOW nothing is using Plasma. Or any other kind of DoT or shield penetration. And herein lies the problem, the game still expects you to be able to cope with DoTs, disables, holds, etc, plus healing and damaging your opponent with just your captain powers and one Boff skill. That must be one magical Boff skill. Where do I get the HE1/ET1/ST1/PH1 combo that sits in a single ensign slot? Is there somewhere to go where Jesus trains your Boff to perform actual miracles?
I fly shuttles for friendly PvP matches among my fleet, or when the story forces me to. And that's it. I did not touch a shuttle for this entire weekend, bonus marks be damned. The game is not set up for nor balanced around shuttles, and no amount of getting used to it will change that. I've "gotten used to" a lot of crappy Gundam and Kamen Rider games because I'm such a fanboy that I'll tolerate it, but I won't sit here and tell you they weren't broken.
- Judge Aaron Satie
I'm 50 and I find shuttle combat both exciting and interesting.
The lack of options make each choice a little more meaningful, and twitch combat in a shuttle is just the obvious strategy.
With the exception of close-in crits on my by enemies, it zips and unleashed grav-sheer spam on targets. I love it. It's fun, and storing enough marks to complete all resp on that toon, as well as enough for some additional rep gear.
Yup, not a shuttle fan (just too much '1 trick ponies' imo) but am a fan of large piles of marks and no cooldowns.
As for twitch combat... put on 2 turrets and fly in a circle. It will be over sooner or later.
The 360 AP beam and the KCB is a nice combination.
you can always put the romulan torpedo launcher+experimental beam array with 3 torp doffs, watch the endless spam of torpedoes larger than your shuttle emerging from it, even better with kinetic shearing, plus you get plasma hyperflux if you put the zero-point console to use it on the flagships.
only bad thing about this, is that you'll can aggro things awfully easy.
Instead of taking content obviously geared for actual ships and just throwing out a bunch of shuttles instead, I'd really like to see some more content made specifically for shuttle combat.
Example:
The mission starts off with two carriers 15km apart. They're to scale so from the perspective of a shuttle, they're absolutely huge. The objective of the mission is to destroy the opposing carrier before yours is destroyed.
It's a pretty simple premise, but it helps maintain immersion and hopefully would require some amount of teamwork (fighting past a bunch of fighters plus getting past the enemy carrier's defenses). What's even better is that something simple like this could be geared for PVE and PVP, with the opposing shuttles being NPCs or other players.
I really do think that shuttle combat has a lot of potential, but to tap it, more effort is gonna be needed than just tweaking ship content and saying it's for shuttles.