Hm in normal episodes kazon raider have ~41k hull, malon frigates too and a malon cruiser with 100k hull.
so if you have raider with 200k hull, maybe you did some advanced/elite difficulty missions
That would be what you would think but check the level. When you start out (ie. at 50-51) the game is still recognizably STO. By the time you hit 59-60 its a slog. This is because of scaling health, not outrageously high base figures.
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I understand what the OP means but at the same time STO needs this change of pace. Right now, even a very bad player with no gear, can easily do any of the FE's and story missions. It might be a little drastic but I believe it was much needed. Also, how many STAR TREK episodes did you watch where enemy ships were insta-killed?
And how many STAR TREK episodes (of all 726) had space battles? As a percentage, I'm thinking maybe less than 20%. The majority of the episodes involved the crew exploring the ground and interacting with different species. Even on "Star Trek: Voyager", they rarely had any battles in space, primarily because, before the enemy opted to fight, Janeway was diplomatic and was able to negotiate with the enemy vessel. Sadly, even though we are given that option, it never ever works out...leading me back to the OP's original point.
Placeholder (and/or bugged/unintentional code), yes most likely.
The problem is, with these forums, it's usually assumed what they're seeing now is set in stone. And that's what I meant by intentional; that these are the intentional final numbers, and nothing can change them.
I'd say 99% of what you see in Tribble ends up in Holodeck with very few exceptions. While they do adjust more than usual when it comes to Expansions, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
I'd say 99% of what you see in Tribble ends up in Holodeck with very few exceptions. While they do adjust more than usual when it comes to Expansions, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
This is why the OP wrote this particular thread...in hopes that a Dev will see it and comment on it (or possibly even agree and implement some changes). They'd noticed that Cooper's Bioship from "Mindscape" was high in health so they'd scaled that back; I'm hopeful they see this and do the same.
I'd say 99% of what you see in Tribble ends up in Holodeck with very few exceptions. While they do adjust more than usual when it comes to Expansions, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
I'm well aware of that, even if the figure you give is a bit exaggerated from my own experience. But when I said 'nothing can change them', I didn't just mean before DR's release onto Holodeck.
If they stay as they are when it goes live, the much larger outrage is likely to change things real quick. People just seem quick to assume that they won't be changed, period.
Was named Trek17.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
My only problem with the health numbers is - they don't make fights harder, just boring. Especially for a cruiser captain. In an Ambassador I can beat down 3 Vaad'waur Heavy Artillery ships on advanced or elite no problem. It might take me 18 minutes, but I can do it. On normal, it still takes several minutes.
Health scaling isn't helping the difficulty, it's just making the fights boring. Even the Vaad'waur. Their AI isn't difficult. 'blow up their capture probe, stay out of big shiny blue x's', and in two weeks 'hit int team 1 to clear debuffs'.
And outside TNG where Picard tried to talk down everything and it's mother - most Trek fights do end quickly. They're either: a couple volleys of phaser fire, starship wins, or 'We can't do squat to them! Plot armor engage, find us Mary Sue and a deux ex machina! HURRY!'
Though I will admit my problem might be I'm in a heavy AOE build. I might give it a try with high yield torps and overload instead of spread and faw 2 - but I can't see it making that much of a difference. faw2 and beta 2 is normally a much better bang for your buck then an overload ever 30 seconds.
The thread title could have done with a little less drama in it.
Could have, but didn't. :P
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Unfortunately, hiking health instead of making NPC's AI better is the lazy way to go around in making " harder" content. Forcing all ships to do DPS centric builds in order to get through content makes the game less fun.
Giving NPCs 12 abilities and hiking their HP only to keep up with new weapons would have been better.
I haven't even got past the first page, saw this post, and is summed up what I wanted to say.
A lot of you are coming in praising Cryptic for this, saying it'll be "harder".
No... it's not.
DPS scaled evenly. Which means if you foudn them easy pre-50 you'll find them easy post-50.... just with more HPs, meaning the threat's the same, the difficulty is the same, the length of the battle is just taking longer.
I like what they did with the Heirarcy. Ship scaling was not nearly as much as the Vaadwaur, but their abilities are more dangerous, making them more dangerous. They use them smarter too. I just wish they'd stagger their use of their tractor beams instead of every one of them using them at the same time, but I guess you can't have everything.
Also when you look at the scaling, the Vaadwaur at least have the same HPs on Normal as they do on Elite.
So no, just raising the HPs monstrous levels, while leaving the DPS scaling alone is kind of silly. It doesn't make it harder, just longer... which leads to it just becomign long, dull, and repetative.
This is why the OP wrote this particular thread...in hopes that a Dev will see it and comment on it (or possibly even agree and implement some changes). They'd noticed that Cooper's Bioship from "Mindscape" was high in health so they'd scaled that back; I'm hopeful they see this and do the same.
I obviously hope so too. By in large the feedback here is that the health scaling is a bit too much. I don't think anyone is asking that NPC's be maintained at their current level, only dialed back a bit (at the very least on normal) so we can find a better balance between more involving combat and good pacing as we hit level 60. This is especially important considering the position cryptic put itself in with ship and equipment upgrades. Neither was presented as required but once you hit the difficulty spike you can start to make the case that's only true in the strictest technical sense (if you're interested in maintaining the entertainment aspect of STO).
The've invested a lot in and around this situation and it would be an absolute shame to see it all spoiled because of what appears to be one wrong setting.
Also when you look at the scaling, the Vaadwaur at least have the same HPs on Normal as they do on Elite.
Um...if that's accurate that may be THE problem.
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I discovered that once, and bugged it. I haven't tried it since to be honest.
I just think the scaling is off. They scaled the DPS on a smooth curve, but the HPs shot up like by 10x's. I think someone just added an extra number to the scaling curve and didn't catch it, and it's multiplying wrong.
It's the same probably on Advaned and Elite s from what I can see. The DPS scales smoothly, and HPs do not.
I discovered that once, and bugged it. I haven't tried it since to be honest.
I just think the scaling is off. They scaled the DPS on a smooth curve, but the HPs shot up like by 10x's. I think someone just added an extra number to the scaling curve and didn't catch it, and it's multiplying wrong.
It's the same probably on Advaned and Elite s from what I can see. The DPS scales smoothly, and HPs do not.
I just checked. On elite [59] Vaad artillery ships in the Zalh system patrol have >500,000 health on elite and ~180,000 on normal. Scaling definitely seems to be off (but not in the way batman just posted, normal settings aren't just misapplied elite ones.)
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I haven't even got past the first page, saw this post, and is summed up what I wanted to say.
A lot of you are coming in praising Cryptic for this, saying it'll be "harder".
No... it's not.
DPS scaled evenly. Which means if you foudn them easy pre-50 you'll find them easy post-50.... just with more HPs, meaning the threat's the same, the difficulty is the same, the length of the battle is just taking longer.
I like what they did with the Heirarcy. Ship scaling was not nearly as much as the Vaadwaur, but their abilities are more dangerous, making them more dangerous. They use them smarter too. I just wish they'd stagger their use of their tractor beams instead of every one of them using them at the same time, but I guess you can't have everything.
Also when you look at the scaling, the Vaadwaur at least have the same HPs on Normal as they do on Elite.
So no, just raising the HPs monstrous levels, while leaving the DPS scaling alone is kind of silly. It doesn't make it harder, just longer... which leads to it just becomign long, dull, and repetative.
I'm afraid you have it somewhat wrong - we're not all praising Cryptic for the absurd HP values; in fact, a lot of usare saying it should be much less so. There are a number of posts saying how long such battles take, and how it's too much. HP and damage res should be higher, sure, but not to this level
And by no means are we all saying more health = more challenge/harder
Was named Trek17.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
I'm afraid you have it somewhat wrong - we're not all praising Cryptic for the absurd HP values; in fact, a lot of usare saying it should be much less so. There are a number of posts saying how long such battles take, and how it's too much. HP and damage res should be higher, sure, but not to this level
And by no means are we all saying more health = more challenge/harder
No not everyone is, quite a few aren't. But quite a few are. I've seen it in this post, and I've seen it on General, where they're praising Cryptic for uping the HPs to insane level claiming without actually playing it usually, that doing it was a good thing because it made things harder.
It's those people I'm talking to not to the rest of us (I'm included in your group by the way I think it's not hard at all and I'd rather see Heirarcy AI and HPs then Vaudwaar.)
Having done an advanced NWS, which we won, I find the new HP values absurd. Klingon Birds of Prey with 550k HP, Neg Vars with 750k HP, Dreadnoughts at nearly 3mil HP. This doesn't make it fun, this doesn't make it difficult, all it does it make it take FOREVER. The NPC HPs need some serious work, a bird of prey should not tank like a borg cube.
The HP scale is indeed out of control. Ran Sh'mar patrol on Tribble and Holo. A Galor class on Holo, normal difficulty, has 64k hull. On Tribble, normal difficulty, 230k! 3.5 times the health increase just for 10 levels up?! This is total lunacy! I would accept a 10k increase at the very most. Our ships don't get that much of an increase, even with the T5U ships. Not to mention the fact that the weapon damage increase is near to negligible to compensate for this dramatic increase in npc health. This mission takes me 3 minutes at the most to run as it is now. On Tribble, it took me near 11 minutes.
Cryptic, making the game harder is NOT increasing the health to absurd levels that drag missions out to where people get sick of being in the game! You want to kill the game, this is the way to do it.
I just played the Alliance mission and, not only do a Vaadwaur Assault Cruiser and a Vaadwaur Intercept Cruiser have the same HP (230,000 and change), but there's at least four or five in the area...all within 10 km of my ship 99% of the time.
With everything firing on me, I can barely get a shot off before I respawn.
I feel that, if they don't want several frustrated players, they should:
1) Scale the HP back...WAY back.
2) Only have us fight one ship at a time
If they want to beef up the HP and the number of ships on Advanced and Elite, more power to them. But this is NORMAL Difficulty. It can't GET any easier...literally! :mad:
If they keep this up for their next expansions, I feel people are going to start avoiding the missions on principle just because of what happened this time.
Unfortunately, hiking health instead of making NPC's AI better is the lazy way to go around in making " harder" content. Forcing all ships to do DPS centric builds in order to get through content makes the game less fun.
Cryptic's way is right. That which is on Holodeck currently, is much too simple.
I say only: Infected Space Elite in 1-2 minutes with optional or, a Scimitar clear the instance in a solo run. Here's something wrong.
The NPC'S now endure a lot more and those fighting take a little longer, is great.
The thing is 1 minute stf's are being done by 5 ships that have over 30.000 dps.
I do 40.000 dps the problem is fleet-mates doesn't.. they play for fun and don't grind all rep-systems or buy 10,20 or 30 mil doffs to use on there ships, some are at 2.000 dps to 10.000 dps.
If you going to make content for people like me +(dps-30000) lots of people can't finish it.
We of dps-30.000 was doing 1 of the new stf's and it took us days (in advanced settings) the finish it with optionals, going to be fun on elite !!
TBH, "normal" enemies shouldn't necessarily have that kind of health because they should be scaled to the leveling newbie in greens and blues.
That said, we DO need to see some increases to enemy health because those of us that are min/maxing our ships (as opposed to flying around with a Captain Smirk setup) are basically instantly killing things. While the average player doing god knows what with his build might be doing 4k dps, the ones doing it right are doing 10-20k. At 20k dps even a 188k health ship doesn't take that long to kill. Still though, counting shields and figuring that is a "normal" level enemy.. that seems a bit excessive.
.....Wow, I do absurd damage and it takes me forever to kill Vaadwaur ships. I can obliterate other ships like nothing. Whats with the scaling here?
My gut feeling tells me Cryptic will never fix this, and that asking them to do it will get a resounding No. Cryptic, this is honestly going to kill STO. It really is.
The HP and general difficulty of fighting especially Vaadwaur has already been reduced, October 3rd if not already in the patch before. They now die a lot faster.
They don't yet die like flies like most stuff on Holodeck does, but they shouldn't be too difficult or take too long to kill.
That's with Mark XII/XIII gear and abilities. We are getting better gear and specialization powers are also very powerful. So mobs are going to become even more trivial than they are already.
If they still take too long, it's time to wake up and start playing. Just like this one random group with Smirk did, died to wave 1/8 of the Vaadwaur in Korfez while the 2nd group made it through all 8 and further with 2:32 minutes left.
Vaadwaur and Co can already be defeated by the often mentioned "faceroll" and even then it won't take an unreasonable time to kill them.
No reason to assume people won't improve their gear and their tactics and knowledge of the game mechanics/combat as well. DR isn't too difficult, mobs are a step up from STO-BorglulzfestSTF, and that is fine.
This will make STO a better game and the Vaadwaur have already been adjusted, they don't last half as long as they did when people were crying about them especially in the Zahl system.
Honestly? ...I agree. Biggest letdown in Delta Rising for me. I was looking forward to better NPC tactics and more diverse abilities. Instead, we got cookie cutter HP-scaling with the same mediocre NPC abilities.
Cryptic, if you add ANYTHING us players annoy you about, please let it be better NPC abilities. I understand that you don't know where to begin or end with it. But you have us, the players, and we can help you guys out with it. You're SO close to it... please consider it.
The HP and general difficulty of fighting especially Vaadwaur has already been reduced, October 3rd if not already in the patch before. They now die a lot faster.
They don't yet die like flies like most stuff on Holodeck does, but they shouldn't be too difficult or take too long to kill.
That's with Mark XII/XIII gear and abilities. We are getting better gear and specialization powers are also very powerful. So mobs are going to become even more trivial than they are already.
If they still take too long, it's time to wake up and start playing. Just like this one random group with Smirk did, died to wave 1/8 of the Vaadwaur in Korfez while the 2nd group made it through all 8 and further with 2:32 minutes left.
Vaadwaur and Co can already be defeated by the often mentioned "faceroll" and even then it won't take an unreasonable time to kill them.
No reason to assume people won't improve their gear and their tactics and knowledge of the game mechanics/combat as well. DR isn't too difficult, mobs are a step up from STO-BorglulzfestSTF, and that is fine.
This will make STO a better game and the Vaadwaur have already been adjusted, they don't last half as long as they did when people were crying about them especially in the Zahl system.
Difficulty of korfez was increased after the stream (coincidence? ).
No reason to assume people won't improve their gear and their tactics and knowledge of the game mechanics/combat as well. DR isn't too difficult, mobs are a step up from STO-BorglulzfestSTF, and that is fine.
Again DIFFICULTY isn't the question here. Can the Vaadwuar be defeated with VR XII gear? Yes, but that doesn't justify cryptics decision (since playable is a very low bar indeed for game design.) The more important question is does fighting them result in an enjoyable experience?
Even after the recent changes, not really because while the AI has more time to react what combat often boils down to, even with good DPS, is pointing your ship at the enemy until it blows up while spamming healing, buffs, and debuffs as they become available. With short combat times this results in a very quick pace of rapidly changing gameplay as you bounce between explosions but with DR this same model getting violently locked down in overly-protracted fights where what gameplay STO has (which was adequate to fill shorter combat times) is being ground down to the nub.
There's a better optimum just a little further back between fighting space-borne packages of C4 and fighting brick walls with a tea-spoon. I, and I don't think anyone else here, has been advocating for a return to explosive STO form. BUT as it stands, combat times because of inflated NPC health are inappropriate for STO's combat mechanics. There's just a bit too much time and too little to meaningly fill it with to make this a fun/strategic game. Its just second-by-second grinding and though that may appeal to you in preference to point-click-die-repeat we can still do better with more thoughtful rebalancing.
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wow, and i thought some of my friends were childish...
That would be what you would think but check the level. When you start out (ie. at 50-51) the game is still recognizably STO. By the time you hit 59-60 its a slog. This is because of scaling health, not outrageously high base figures.
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And how many STAR TREK episodes (of all 726) had space battles? As a percentage, I'm thinking maybe less than 20%. The majority of the episodes involved the crew exploring the ground and interacting with different species. Even on "Star Trek: Voyager", they rarely had any battles in space, primarily because, before the enemy opted to fight, Janeway was diplomatic and was able to negotiate with the enemy vessel. Sadly, even though we are given that option, it never ever works out...leading me back to the OP's original point.
I'd say 99% of what you see in Tribble ends up in Holodeck with very few exceptions. While they do adjust more than usual when it comes to Expansions, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
This is why the OP wrote this particular thread...in hopes that a Dev will see it and comment on it (or possibly even agree and implement some changes). They'd noticed that Cooper's Bioship from "Mindscape" was high in health so they'd scaled that back; I'm hopeful they see this and do the same.
If they stay as they are when it goes live, the much larger outrage is likely to change things real quick. People just seem quick to assume that they won't be changed, period.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
Health scaling isn't helping the difficulty, it's just making the fights boring. Even the Vaad'waur. Their AI isn't difficult. 'blow up their capture probe, stay out of big shiny blue x's', and in two weeks 'hit int team 1 to clear debuffs'.
And outside TNG where Picard tried to talk down everything and it's mother - most Trek fights do end quickly. They're either: a couple volleys of phaser fire, starship wins, or 'We can't do squat to them! Plot armor engage, find us Mary Sue and a deux ex machina! HURRY!'
Though I will admit my problem might be I'm in a heavy AOE build. I might give it a try with high yield torps and overload instead of spread and faw 2 - but I can't see it making that much of a difference. faw2 and beta 2 is normally a much better bang for your buck then an overload ever 30 seconds.
Could have, but didn't. :P
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I haven't even got past the first page, saw this post, and is summed up what I wanted to say.
A lot of you are coming in praising Cryptic for this, saying it'll be "harder".
No... it's not.
DPS scaled evenly. Which means if you foudn them easy pre-50 you'll find them easy post-50.... just with more HPs, meaning the threat's the same, the difficulty is the same, the length of the battle is just taking longer.
I like what they did with the Heirarcy. Ship scaling was not nearly as much as the Vaadwaur, but their abilities are more dangerous, making them more dangerous. They use them smarter too. I just wish they'd stagger their use of their tractor beams instead of every one of them using them at the same time, but I guess you can't have everything.
Also when you look at the scaling, the Vaadwaur at least have the same HPs on Normal as they do on Elite.
So no, just raising the HPs monstrous levels, while leaving the DPS scaling alone is kind of silly. It doesn't make it harder, just longer... which leads to it just becomign long, dull, and repetative.
I obviously hope so too. By in large the feedback here is that the health scaling is a bit too much. I don't think anyone is asking that NPC's be maintained at their current level, only dialed back a bit (at the very least on normal) so we can find a better balance between more involving combat and good pacing as we hit level 60. This is especially important considering the position cryptic put itself in with ship and equipment upgrades. Neither was presented as required but once you hit the difficulty spike you can start to make the case that's only true in the strictest technical sense (if you're interested in maintaining the entertainment aspect of STO).
The've invested a lot in and around this situation and it would be an absolute shame to see it all spoiled because of what appears to be one wrong setting.
Um...if that's accurate that may be THE problem.
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I discovered that once, and bugged it. I haven't tried it since to be honest.
I just think the scaling is off. They scaled the DPS on a smooth curve, but the HPs shot up like by 10x's. I think someone just added an extra number to the scaling curve and didn't catch it, and it's multiplying wrong.
It's the same probably on Advaned and Elite s from what I can see. The DPS scales smoothly, and HPs do not.
I just checked. On elite [59] Vaad artillery ships in the Zalh system patrol have >500,000 health on elite and ~180,000 on normal. Scaling definitely seems to be off (but not in the way batman just posted, normal settings aren't just misapplied elite ones.)
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And by no means are we all saying more health = more challenge/harder
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
No not everyone is, quite a few aren't. But quite a few are. I've seen it in this post, and I've seen it on General, where they're praising Cryptic for uping the HPs to insane level claiming without actually playing it usually, that doing it was a good thing because it made things harder.
It's those people I'm talking to not to the rest of us (I'm included in your group by the way I think it's not hard at all and I'd rather see Heirarcy AI and HPs then Vaudwaar.)
At least for normal story missions they should scale it back to 50-75% which would battleships in the 120k range which is good enough for normals.
Including some of the improved behaviors of some factions people will even have trouble there.
Cryptic, making the game harder is NOT increasing the health to absurd levels that drag missions out to where people get sick of being in the game! You want to kill the game, this is the way to do it.
With everything firing on me, I can barely get a shot off before I respawn.
I feel that, if they don't want several frustrated players, they should:
1) Scale the HP back...WAY back.
2) Only have us fight one ship at a time
If they want to beef up the HP and the number of ships on Advanced and Elite, more power to them. But this is NORMAL Difficulty. It can't GET any easier...literally! :mad:
If they keep this up for their next expansions, I feel people are going to start avoiding the missions on principle just because of what happened this time.
Agreed, indubitably.
The thing is 1 minute stf's are being done by 5 ships that have over 30.000 dps.
I do 40.000 dps the problem is fleet-mates doesn't.. they play for fun and don't grind all rep-systems or buy 10,20 or 30 mil doffs to use on there ships, some are at 2.000 dps to 10.000 dps.
If you going to make content for people like me +(dps-30000) lots of people can't finish it.
We of dps-30.000 was doing 1 of the new stf's and it took us days (in advanced settings) the finish it with optionals, going to be fun on elite !!
That said, we DO need to see some increases to enemy health because those of us that are min/maxing our ships (as opposed to flying around with a Captain Smirk setup) are basically instantly killing things. While the average player doing god knows what with his build might be doing 4k dps, the ones doing it right are doing 10-20k. At 20k dps even a 188k health ship doesn't take that long to kill. Still though, counting shields and figuring that is a "normal" level enemy.. that seems a bit excessive.
My gut feeling tells me Cryptic will never fix this, and that asking them to do it will get a resounding No. Cryptic, this is honestly going to kill STO. It really is.
They don't yet die like flies like most stuff on Holodeck does, but they shouldn't be too difficult or take too long to kill.
That's with Mark XII/XIII gear and abilities. We are getting better gear and specialization powers are also very powerful. So mobs are going to become even more trivial than they are already.
If they still take too long, it's time to wake up and start playing. Just like this one random group with Smirk did, died to wave 1/8 of the Vaadwaur in Korfez while the 2nd group made it through all 8 and further with 2:32 minutes left.
Vaadwaur and Co can already be defeated by the often mentioned "faceroll" and even then it won't take an unreasonable time to kill them.
No reason to assume people won't improve their gear and their tactics and knowledge of the game mechanics/combat as well. DR isn't too difficult, mobs are a step up from STO-BorglulzfestSTF, and that is fine.
This will make STO a better game and the Vaadwaur have already been adjusted, they don't last half as long as they did when people were crying about them especially in the Zahl system.
Cryptic, if you add ANYTHING us players annoy you about, please let it be better NPC abilities. I understand that you don't know where to begin or end with it. But you have us, the players, and we can help you guys out with it. You're SO close to it... please consider it.
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Now you'll be forced to min-max and pay a lot out of your wallet. This game is casual no longer.
Will this work and bring PWE loads and loads of money? Or will they loose a lot of players and be forced to nerf things?
Only time will tell.
Difficulty of korfez was increased after the stream (coincidence?
Again DIFFICULTY isn't the question here. Can the Vaadwuar be defeated with VR XII gear? Yes, but that doesn't justify cryptics decision (since playable is a very low bar indeed for game design.) The more important question is does fighting them result in an enjoyable experience?
Even after the recent changes, not really because while the AI has more time to react what combat often boils down to, even with good DPS, is pointing your ship at the enemy until it blows up while spamming healing, buffs, and debuffs as they become available. With short combat times this results in a very quick pace of rapidly changing gameplay as you bounce between explosions but with DR this same model getting violently locked down in overly-protracted fights where what gameplay STO has (which was adequate to fill shorter combat times) is being ground down to the nub.
There's a better optimum just a little further back between fighting space-borne packages of C4 and fighting brick walls with a tea-spoon. I, and I don't think anyone else here, has been advocating for a return to explosive STO form. BUT as it stands, combat times because of inflated NPC health are inappropriate for STO's combat mechanics. There's just a bit too much time and too little to meaningly fill it with to make this a fun/strategic game. Its just second-by-second grinding and though that may appeal to you in preference to point-click-die-repeat we can still do better with more thoughtful rebalancing.
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!
Advanced and elite should be "lets actually play the game" mode.