Guys the AI is good, these ships combat design is good, the environments are good, the writing is great, and the additional features (into which I include the VOY cast) are very compelling. You have just tweaked one scaling factor WAY TOO FAR for any of that to be enjoyable at higher levels. I want to love DR but with how badly combat progresses [on purely mechanical terms] I'm likely only to play through it on one character (for completion's sake), and then probably never again.
Its just such a terrible waste of content. You need to fix NPC health, desparately, or you will [without hyperbole] ruin STO.
I strongly believe that if you wrote this in a separate topic [aside from this one] with a eye-grabbing title to it, the devs would read it and respond.
Though I feel that, here, with it buried under everything else, they're unlikely to see it and, thus, unlikely to take action.
I strongly believe that if you wrote this in a separate topic [aside from this one] with a eye-grabbing title to it, the devs would read it and respond.
Though I feel that, here, with it buried under everything else, they're unlikely to see it and, thus, unlikely to take action.
Good idea!
[edit: done]
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Exactly the point though - "non tanks". One COULD interpret that as 'Sci ships not welcome". I know for a fact that my favorite ship, The Fleet Nova, won't last one minute in this scenario.
No offense here but you need to go back and think about what you're doing. I'm purposely flying a Fleet Long Range Science Vessel, only wth the Dyson and undine Rep weapons, and Solanae Gear. None of it is updated except the ship, which is a T-5u
The battles are longer but I yet have to leave a battle without full health and mostly full shields.
The trick was, I needed to redo my build a bit on my ship. You can't play the same way in the Delta Quadrant as you can in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant.
I've seen, more often than not [with the new content], multiple ships teaming up against my ship which makes it impossible to take on one at a time.
What would you advise us to do if we were in that situation?
Crowd Control is what I'd tell you to do. It's where science ships actually shine in this case. I don't use BFAW anymore, I don't even on this particular build use TBR. (I know the horror)
I find it fairly easy to stop just spamming abilities, and use them as they were intended... crowd control. Grab a couple in a grav well, use Tyken's Rift and energy siphon to stop a ship in it's tracks. Concider using target engines to stop a mob in it's tracks. Don't reverse TBR necessarily.
Stop relying on Aux2Bat and concider how we did it old school, with EPtS and A2Struc. Use your hull polarization,hazard emmiters, science team, and transfer shield strength.
On a cruiser, absolutely use BFAW. Think more tanky and less Escort.
Escorts I can't speak of, I don't fly escorts but on my BoP I do use Battle CLoak for more the Alpha Strike.
i don't think its that unreasonable for it to take that long to kill a cruiser level npc. people are spoiled by how easy the easy is. infected elite can be soloed, or done in about a minute, im sure there's a mandate that missions have to take longer across the board.
the problem is npcs are still so basic and simple, have no healing, no buffing, they just sponge. their hitpoints should be halfed, if not quartered, and they should be cycling resists and heals like a player ship can. if they did, then a sci cap nukeing them would SERIOUSLY effect their base performance. as of now, it doesn't effect an npc in the slightest. spike would mater too, you would try to kill them before they can heal, and you will have killed them before they fully access thier full hitpoint potential of their base hitpoints, and how much they can heal potentially over the course of the battle. this is what makes pve painfully boring, not how long it takes to kill 1 or 10 npcs, its this lack of basic depth.
this vid also points out the problem with the Vaadwaur's 'advanced AI', after receiving a certain amount of damage, they will turn and run, to do an attack run on you when they distance them selves from you a sufficient amount. but, if you just chase them, they never stop running, and they have this NPC evasive maneuvers thing going, so their defense score is actually pretty high. best to just let them get away so they can turn around.
was just about to make a little vid of me beating the zahn patrol in probably less then 20 minutes, but tribble suddenly went down about a minute into it :rolleyes:
I hate compareing this game to WOW. I think it may be one of the games everyone else has played so they will understand what I'm about to say.
Anytime a New expansion comes out and raises the level cap the enemies get super hard. That is until you reach the Level Cap of the expansion. When Cataclysm and Mist of Pandaria came out the first few starting zones were hard. PPl wrote in complaining that it was just to hard. After everyone hit level cap it was way to easy. So maybe STO is the same way. At level 60 it may be super easy. Just wait. I'm sure thats whats happening. Everyone is playing something that is meant for level 60 players in a level 50 ship.
I hate compareing this game to WOW. I think it may be one of the games everyone else has played so they will understand what I'm about to say.
Anytime a New expansion comes out and raises the level cap the enemies get super hard. That is until you reach the Level Cap of the expansion. When Cataclysm and Mist of Pandaria came out the first few starting zones were hard. PPl wrote in complaining that it was just to hard. After everyone hit level cap it was way to easy. So maybe STO is the same way. At level 60 it may be super easy. Just wait. I'm sure thats whats happening. Everyone is playing something that is meant for level 60 players in a level 50 ship.
problem is, you will probably hit level 60 long before you are gold mk14'ed out. i bet it would be basically fine if you got that from the get go, but you need bilions of EC and millions of dil to get all that done in a timely fashion.
i think you all will be happy with today's patch, the hitpoints remain but im pretty sure the built in armor that probably belongs only on elite is now gone from the npcs on normal. im guessing that was a bug.
that most reviled patrol of zahl has been toned down majorly too, its hardly note worthy in terms of difficulty now. all the different objectives were certainly an improvement over the typical defeat wave 1
and now defeat wave 2
and now defeat wave 3
etc, found in some missions
i made a vid! 1080p! nividia shadowplay is awesome
So i have been playing a while now and have several characters. Each of them are pretty advanced in their own right. Before Delta Rising, I could pug. for those of you who don't know what that is... it means pick up game. Now i can t PUG anything but a normal mission which has 1/4 the previous reward. How is that good? The mission queues are empty. It seems like every time I risk a stupid advanced mission, someone backs out right away and we are short a ship. the only mission that fills is the new one or bug hunt if you finished the campaign. Dilithium weekend just happened and the rewards there were still less than before DR. What a rip. All they did was increase the time it takes to play each mission with grinding which they hope you will replace with spending money and just buying all that equipment. let me save you the pain, I have the gear and its still too tough. As a older player, i cant get a group good enough to run the harder content with regularly like before. And I would not want to be a new player. Why Cryptic? Oh wait... money. f2p? nope. I am a lifetime subscriber, and i buy ships and zen. Don't press for more money ok... jeeeez.
I agree with the others. It's more your ship build, space and passive traits.
Honestly, the Vaadwaur is not that hard to beat and no fight with them should last more then 5 mins. If good enougth, possible to beat them like any other ship.
Let me begin by saying that I like the direction the story is taking in Delta Rising. I like the gear and ship upgrades, I like the intel powers, and I like the ground combat missions. What I don't like is fighting the Vaadwaur in my ship.
Whenever I see more than one Vaadwaur ship, or even just a single one of those heavy artillery ships, I know instantly that it's going to be a long boring and tedious fight. I get that a main plot point is that the Vaadwaur suddenly have really advanced tech and are tough to kill from out of nowhere, and I get that one of the goals of this expansion was to make things more challenging, but those long fights against the Vaadwaur in space are just so boring. All they do is soak damage, fire off a volley of those tricobalt torpedo things, and use cannon rapid fire; unless of course it's a heavy artillery ship, in which case they also summon MORE ships to do that and drag the fight out longer. They don't do enough damage over time to be a real threat, and once you figure out their pattern they don't really bring anything interesting to the table other than what seems to be a ridiculous amount of hitpoints.
Surely I'm not alone in this. Is this really what more "challenging" gameplay is supposed to be in the single-player story? Because if so, I hate it.
Comments
borg cube with over 800k hp
http://youtu.be/5w-eA6c88iw
I strongly believe that if you wrote this in a separate topic [aside from this one] with a eye-grabbing title to it, the devs would read it and respond.
Though I feel that, here, with it buried under everything else, they're unlikely to see it and, thus, unlikely to take action.
Good idea!
[edit: done]
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
No offense here but you need to go back and think about what you're doing. I'm purposely flying a Fleet Long Range Science Vessel, only wth the Dyson and undine Rep weapons, and Solanae Gear. None of it is updated except the ship, which is a T-5u
The battles are longer but I yet have to leave a battle without full health and mostly full shields.
The trick was, I needed to redo my build a bit on my ship. You can't play the same way in the Delta Quadrant as you can in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant.
Crowd Control is what I'd tell you to do. It's where science ships actually shine in this case. I don't use BFAW anymore, I don't even on this particular build use TBR. (I know the horror)
I find it fairly easy to stop just spamming abilities, and use them as they were intended... crowd control. Grab a couple in a grav well, use Tyken's Rift and energy siphon to stop a ship in it's tracks. Concider using target engines to stop a mob in it's tracks. Don't reverse TBR necessarily.
Stop relying on Aux2Bat and concider how we did it old school, with EPtS and A2Struc. Use your hull polarization,hazard emmiters, science team, and transfer shield strength.
On a cruiser, absolutely use BFAW. Think more tanky and less Escort.
Escorts I can't speak of, I don't fly escorts but on my BoP I do use Battle CLoak for more the Alpha Strike.
i don't think its that unreasonable for it to take that long to kill a cruiser level npc. people are spoiled by how easy the easy is. infected elite can be soloed, or done in about a minute, im sure there's a mandate that missions have to take longer across the board.
the problem is npcs are still so basic and simple, have no healing, no buffing, they just sponge. their hitpoints should be halfed, if not quartered, and they should be cycling resists and heals like a player ship can. if they did, then a sci cap nukeing them would SERIOUSLY effect their base performance. as of now, it doesn't effect an npc in the slightest. spike would mater too, you would try to kill them before they can heal, and you will have killed them before they fully access thier full hitpoint potential of their base hitpoints, and how much they can heal potentially over the course of the battle. this is what makes pve painfully boring, not how long it takes to kill 1 or 10 npcs, its this lack of basic depth.
this vid also points out the problem with the Vaadwaur's 'advanced AI', after receiving a certain amount of damage, they will turn and run, to do an attack run on you when they distance them selves from you a sufficient amount. but, if you just chase them, they never stop running, and they have this NPC evasive maneuvers thing going, so their defense score is actually pretty high. best to just let them get away so they can turn around.
so patch incoming i guess
Anytime a New expansion comes out and raises the level cap the enemies get super hard. That is until you reach the Level Cap of the expansion. When Cataclysm and Mist of Pandaria came out the first few starting zones were hard. PPl wrote in complaining that it was just to hard. After everyone hit level cap it was way to easy. So maybe STO is the same way. At level 60 it may be super easy. Just wait. I'm sure thats whats happening. Everyone is playing something that is meant for level 60 players in a level 50 ship.
problem is, you will probably hit level 60 long before you are gold mk14'ed out. i bet it would be basically fine if you got that from the get go, but you need bilions of EC and millions of dil to get all that done in a timely fashion.
that most reviled patrol of zahl has been toned down majorly too, its hardly note worthy in terms of difficulty now. all the different objectives were certainly an improvement over the typical defeat wave 1
and now defeat wave 2
and now defeat wave 3
etc, found in some missions
i made a vid! 1080p! nividia shadowplay is awesome
http://youtu.be/N-f_flCQ5-I
Honestly, the Vaadwaur is not that hard to beat and no fight with them should last more then 5 mins. If good enougth, possible to beat them like any other ship.