I just played Fleet Alert and I can say it will discourage newbies and casual players. We only made it to round 2 and ran out of time. This is way harder for normal and for the fact that it is for level 5 to level 60.
AKA Primus01, Lifetime member since January 16, 2010
***********************************************************
Windows 10 Pro
Intel Core i7-5700
RAM 32 GB
2 Titan GTX 980M GDDR5 8 GB
***********************************************************
i realize they want to make some of the content harder , but this is taken a drastic turn , they might as well have done a complete character wipe and gotten the same amount of discontent .
the balance is all out of wack , the whole point of the expansion was to rase the cap , for new harder content for Elite level of play , what they forgot was the lower levels . hell i can barely finish a pug in a ISA let alone a NORMAL FLEET ALERT . both things my lvl 50 could easly do before .
the levels are supposed to be Normal Advanced and Elite . 3 tiers of difficulty for the the differnt levels of play 1-40 45- 50 51-60 . the old way was 1-40 and 45-50 , that is why those missions unlock at those levels . thats whats broken and this should have been discovered , this is what happens when testing is blocked but a small percentage LTS and gold subs . more looking at kobali prime not enough into the older content to see these issues . maybe they should have used REDSHIRT for LTS gold testing and put the old content upgrades only on TRIBBLE for the masses to test ? maybe then maybe all of this would have been addressed before Launch .
just saying .
Frankly, if it's supposed to be "endgame content" now then it should have already been restricted to endgame-level characters. Fleet Alert in particular is available to people well below that level. If you can get into the match and it's not a bug then you ought to be able to contribute something.
Even if it's just throwing your Miranda on an energy bolt so somebody else doesn't take the hit in Borg alerts.
USS Aratama: Draw The Blade!
USS Shigure: Washed Clean
USS Akizuki: A Light In The Dark
should but if you fail fleet alert... by wave 3... there's a problem
I have yet to complete wave 2, since the release of DR. In normal mode, for a FA, everything had their HP's tripled... except the starbase that is. It's a joke. I am running a complete kitted out T5 ship, something that took me months to build and God only knows how much FC, Dil, and EC.
We were told that scaling up in ships and gear would be optional, as long as you wanted to play normal content and whatnot, that there would be really no reason to upgrade, and that generic PvE stuff (and normal queueables) would not require a T6 ship.
This game is holding on only because it has "Star Trek" in the title. If this was a generic space MMO... yeah, it'd be long gone by this point. There is no way in Hades that I am going to throw money at Cryptic, just to get a T6 ship and then spend a million (or more) dil just to kit the damn thing out. Again.
No.
We were told that normal PvE content would be playable with the old, max level gear. It currently is not.
This is exactly what Cryptic wanted. Now go open your wallet for the shiny new T6 ships and have at it! :P
Holy HANNA. The game even before I've started playing Delta Rising despite being a LEVEL 52 engineering Captain has gotten CRAZY STUPID. My Tactical Captain is farther along in the episodes and having played him earlier and then decided to try engineering.
Yet it seems all the WARBIRDS of moderate to HIGH level's are practically impossible to beat unless your EXTREMELY PATIENT using a torpedo spread and then retreat strategy because the WARBIRDS are dealing like 35,000 Kinetic damage in a single attack if you look at damage history during the respawn dialog. Your whole ship only has 42000 armor and it's practically wiped out in one heavy plasma torpedo or volley from a single warbird while meanwhile your barely scratching the enemy you may as well be breathing on them.
???????
Say the game really didn't have much strategy before as it was just click, click, click but at least it was FUN to play and go through the episodes and experiences. But now it's just so impractical, meaningless, etc... I really don't care about level 6 ships or forking over money to Cryptic just so you have a small HOPE of fighting.
The way the game play has changed it's like you need 10 human players to beat a single warbird it which case the game has just gotten stupid. Say it's bad enough the Big Personal Tray / Power Tray's in SPACE is no longer saving any of your skills. They keep resetting every time you go to ground and given the only way to win almost every battle is to call fleet support when your playing by yourself it constantly requires you keep setting that option.
'
Given other comments I'm seeing from many other players over the last little while I can quickly see the popularity of this game eroding very FAST!!!
Holy HANNA. The game even before I've started playing Delta Rising despite being a LEVEL 52 engineering Captain has gotten CRAZY STUPID. My Tactical Captain is farther along in the episodes and having played him earlier and then decided to try engineering.
Yet it seems all the WARBIRDS of moderate to HIGH level's are practically impossible to beat unless your EXTREMELY PATIENT using a torpedo spread and then retreat strategy because the WARBIRDS are dealing like 35,000 Kinetic damage in a single attack if you look at damage history during the respawn dialog. Your whole ship only has 42000 armor and it's practically wiped out in one heavy plasma torpedo or volley from a single warbird while meanwhile your barely scratching the enemy you may as well be breathing on them.
???????
Say the game really didn't have much strategy before as it was just click, click, click but at least it was FUN to play and go through the episodes and experiences. But now it's just so impractical, meaningless, etc... I really don't care about level 6 ships or forking over money to Cryptic just so you have a small HOPE of fighting.
The way the game play has changed it's like you need 10 human players to beat a single warbird it which case the game has just gotten stupid. Say it's bad enough the Big Personal Tray / Power Tray's in SPACE is no longer saving any of your skills. They keep resetting every time you go to ground and given the only way to win almost every battle is to call fleet support when your playing by yourself it constantly requires you keep setting that option.
'
Given other comments I'm seeing from many other players over the last little while I can quickly see the popularity of this game eroding very FAST!!!
The NPC D'Deridex has always been like that long before DR, even long before LOR.
Tractor Beam
VM
HYT Plasma
Good night
This was even on normal difficulty content before DR. What you saw is nothing special, nothing new, nothing due to DR. It's simply you making the mistake of sitting in front of a NPC D'Deridex, nothing more.
Try moving around. Survivability works better that way.
sometimes i wonder why there is even a "test" server around if no actual testing takes place on the dam thing rather than "play new content early" and why the hell am i carrying a luitenant who keeps dieing every 20 seconds >_>
I see a sign that this isn't what was intended. First: I suck, my ship is only drops and sucks. But I had no problems before. After three fleet alerts - the first two failed at wave 2 and 3, the third was won against Tholians, when we blew the last ship of wave four with 0:00 to go - only four players though, the fifth disappeared early), I have one major observations though:
Fighters are somehow overpowered, I noticed the 17000 on them, too. The frigates are also ridiculous. The tarantula however was a blast. I wasn't even able to look at its stats, it went too fast. Battleships were taken out like you normally kill fighters. This cannot be what was intended.
Also, even if intended as is, this would not be a "challenge" anymore than writing your name 5000 times in a day. Which means: technically it is, but there's no skill involved other than building a high DPS ship. I could dive in the midst of the enemy lines, and if I am not mistaken, after three and a half minutes my health may even have dropped to 90%. No, the enemies do not do more damage nor are they smarter.
And to those high end players thinking this would somehow "teach others proper builds": not in the least, you're completely out of touch with "normal players". You teach by going just beyond the limit, not by showing what comes way later. You do not teach chess to new players using endgame studies which rely on weakening the pawn structure. You do not teach maths to first graders with Markov chains in discrete time. You do not teach ship building with enemies far out of my league. If I achieve 95% within time, I may be inclined to look for that extra edge. If I achieve 50% it really takes determination, not many will do that. If I don't even get this far - no use. So there must be options for players to scale their skills (also to scale their ships.- If I need fleet gear to get fleet marks - how should I ever get to the fleet gear). A game can not live off the top 1%, it needs the others as well.
As stated, I am certain Cryptic knows this, and FA is just bugged for now. See the normal fleet queues which do not seem much more difficult than they were. The featured Delta Rising Queue is no real problem, the Viscous Cycle does not seem to have changed much, if at all.
So let's wait for a week and see whether this gets fixed.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Fleet Alerts are difficult? Hell Yeah!!! I'm loving seeing all these fail posts. No offense. It just means we are actually getting a real challenge.
Edit: I will put this caveat in, I haven't played it yet, so there could be an issue but I will reserve my right to recant all over the place when the time comes.
LOL a challenge. This is not a challenge. This is saying "I will scale up the hull and shields of the enemy and make them harder to kill so players will just have to spend money to get better gear hehehehehe"
How is this in any way a challenge? Its plain and simple pew pew until dead. The only thing you need to win fleet alert is higher DPS now, the only challenge here is getting the better gear to beat it. There is no strategy either. Just pew pew. This isn't a real challenge. beating the alert is plain and simple if you have a high amount of DPS apparently now....
And no im not gonna pour in buckets of dilithium and other things to get new gear. The upgrade system is such a huge resource sink. but i could be wrong, this may not have been what cryptic was aiming for. We will see in time though.
I ran a couple of these last night. failed against gorn on wave three while i was using my T5-U Jem'nought complete with MK13 fleet and rep gear. (I put out over 20k dps before the upgrades), but I can't speak for the rest of the team.
won a couple more, one with my voth bastion and another with my tac ody (4 tactical consoles, it SO TOTALLY needed that!)
Something isn't right, as others have stated, it was not uncommon to see a miranda or some other low level ship in these before.
Heaven help the poor newbie who decides to try one of these in his lvl 20 ship or something, only to be blamed by the rest of the team for their failure on the second wave. Even I have done it in lower ships before (though I do make sure I am equipped) they are a nice break from the story, or if you need a little xp before the next mission opens up.
I can only hope someone has messed up here. Myself, personally, I can slog through anything. Although i am casual (sometimes not logging in for days, and even then only playing an hour or so) I do like to grind out powerful ships in the end, so i'm sure if things stay this way, I will be fine, but for the new person, starting out in STO, this could be a horror.
I haven't even subjected myself to a Fleet Alert yet, I did a Crystalline Entity on advanced because hey, they said that Advanced was the old Elite, I've beaten it hundreds of times across my four characters on elite standard Op.
This was not the old elite. The Entity's health is fourteen times what it was.
For those already at level 60, do you do fourteen times more DPS?
Why did the Large Fragments have more HP than my ship?
You're supposed to be able to deal with those by yourself and move on. You shouldn't need to focus fire with your whole team in order to destroy one, especially when doing meaningful damage to the Entity will spawn them like crazy.
The interesting side of it is that I only died twice in half an hour before everyone quit. Even when the Entity put on ten stacks of damage buff, dying was never the issue...it was the fact that it didn't die. Who the hell wants to spend twenty or thirty minutes fighting something that was a ten minute job last week?
The game is about the grind, fine we get that it's an MMO. But the way the grind is kept from being tedious is for it to be efficient. This is not efficient for the vast majority of players.
As for Fleet Alerts, if they've undergone a similar transformation then this could grind small fleets and new player fleets to a halt as far as earning Fleet Marks.
My experience thus far is this is pretty brutal. You can't design your game around your elite players, they don't have the money to carry the game. And for a game that's supposed to support different play styles funneling the mission objectives to a point where only one play style, in this instance DPS, is viable doesn't even seem remotely fair or fun.
Nintendo Hard is not the path forward.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
I see a sign that this isn't what was intended. First: I suck, my ship is only drops and sucks. But I had no problems before. After three fleet alerts - the first two failed at wave 2 and 3, the third was won against Tholians, when we blew the last ship of wave four with 0:00 to go - only four players though, the fifth disappeared early), I have one major observations though:
Fighters are somehow overpowered, I noticed the 17000 on them, too. The frigates are also ridiculous. The tarantula however was a blast. I wasn't even able to look at its stats, it went too fast. Battleships were taken out like you normally kill fighters. This cannot be what was intended.
Also, even if intended as is, this would not be a "challenge" anymore than writing your name 5000 times in a day. Which means: technically it is, but there's no skill involved other than building a high DPS ship. I could dive in the midst of the enemy lines, and if I am not mistaken, after three and a half minutes my health may even have dropped to 90%. No, the enemies do not do more damage nor are they smarter.
And to those high end players thinking this would somehow "teach others proper builds": not in the least, you're completely out of touch with "normal players". You teach by going just beyond the limit, not by showing what comes way later. You do not teach chess to new players using endgame studies which rely on weakening the pawn structure. You do not teach maths to first graders with Markov chains in discrete time. You do not teach ship building with enemies far out of my league. If I achieve 95% within time, I may be inclined to look for that extra edge. If I achieve 50% it really takes determination, not many will do that. If I don't even get this far - no use. So there must be options for players to scale their skills (also to scale their ships.- If I need fleet gear to get fleet marks - how should I ever get to the fleet gear). A game can not live off the top 1%, it needs the others as well.
As stated, I am certain Cryptic knows this, and FA is just bugged for now. See the normal fleet queues which do not seem much more difficult than they were. The featured Delta Rising Queue is no real problem, the Viscous Cycle does not seem to have changed much, if at all.
So let's wait for a week and see whether this gets fixed.
Funny thing, I can park my Palisade in the middle of a bunch of NPCs, and they can barely put a dent on it. My shields and hull remain fine. On the other hand, killing stuff takes forever.
Another thing which lets me hope that there is some error going on is my experience today. I played the mission "The Vault" (regular play at lvl 52 - since grinding isn't available and I finally hit Ambassador level, why not continue the soryline? - not replay). And the fightercraft I encountered was deadly, it was really a struggle to wear them down without getting blown up. The T'Var at the end, which should be more difficult, however wasn't at all.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
I agree, Fleet Alert was never like this! "normal" difficulty it is not! Even with upgraded ships and equipment. Time was, when a fleet needed some marks for a project you could team up and run fleet alert and it was enjoyable as well as worthwhile. Not so now.
Comments
***********************************************************
Windows 10 Pro
Intel Core i7-5700
RAM 32 GB
2 Titan GTX 980M GDDR5 8 GB
***********************************************************
the balance is all out of wack , the whole point of the expansion was to rase the cap , for new harder content for Elite level of play , what they forgot was the lower levels . hell i can barely finish a pug in a ISA let alone a NORMAL FLEET ALERT . both things my lvl 50 could easly do before .
the levels are supposed to be Normal Advanced and Elite . 3 tiers of difficulty for the the differnt levels of play 1-40 45- 50 51-60 . the old way was 1-40 and 45-50 , that is why those missions unlock at those levels . thats whats broken and this should have been discovered , this is what happens when testing is blocked but a small percentage LTS and gold subs . more looking at kobali prime not enough into the older content to see these issues . maybe they should have used REDSHIRT for LTS gold testing and put the old content upgrades only on TRIBBLE for the masses to test ? maybe then maybe all of this would have been addressed before Launch .
just saying .
Frankly, if it's supposed to be "endgame content" now then it should have already been restricted to endgame-level characters. Fleet Alert in particular is available to people well below that level. If you can get into the match and it's not a bug then you ought to be able to contribute something.
Even if it's just throwing your Miranda on an energy bolt so somebody else doesn't take the hit in Borg alerts.
USS Shigure: Washed Clean
USS Akizuki: A Light In The Dark
I have yet to complete wave 2, since the release of DR. In normal mode, for a FA, everything had their HP's tripled... except the starbase that is. It's a joke. I am running a complete kitted out T5 ship, something that took me months to build and God only knows how much FC, Dil, and EC.
We were told that scaling up in ships and gear would be optional, as long as you wanted to play normal content and whatnot, that there would be really no reason to upgrade, and that generic PvE stuff (and normal queueables) would not require a T6 ship.
This game is holding on only because it has "Star Trek" in the title. If this was a generic space MMO... yeah, it'd be long gone by this point. There is no way in Hades that I am going to throw money at Cryptic, just to get a T6 ship and then spend a million (or more) dil just to kit the damn thing out. Again.
No.
We were told that normal PvE content would be playable with the old, max level gear. It currently is not.
Yet it seems all the WARBIRDS of moderate to HIGH level's are practically impossible to beat unless your EXTREMELY PATIENT using a torpedo spread and then retreat strategy because the WARBIRDS are dealing like 35,000 Kinetic damage in a single attack if you look at damage history during the respawn dialog. Your whole ship only has 42000 armor and it's practically wiped out in one heavy plasma torpedo or volley from a single warbird while meanwhile your barely scratching the enemy you may as well be breathing on them.
???????
Say the game really didn't have much strategy before as it was just click, click, click but at least it was FUN to play and go through the episodes and experiences. But now it's just so impractical, meaningless, etc... I really don't care about level 6 ships or forking over money to Cryptic just so you have a small HOPE of fighting.
The way the game play has changed it's like you need 10 human players to beat a single warbird it which case the game has just gotten stupid. Say it's bad enough the Big Personal Tray / Power Tray's in SPACE is no longer saving any of your skills. They keep resetting every time you go to ground and given the only way to win almost every battle is to call fleet support when your playing by yourself it constantly requires you keep setting that option.
'
Given other comments I'm seeing from many other players over the last little while I can quickly see the popularity of this game eroding very FAST!!!
The NPC D'Deridex has always been like that long before DR, even long before LOR.
Tractor Beam
VM
HYT Plasma
Good night
This was even on normal difficulty content before DR. What you saw is nothing special, nothing new, nothing due to DR. It's simply you making the mistake of sitting in front of a NPC D'Deridex, nothing more.
Try moving around. Survivability works better that way.
This new HP scaling is terrible.
Extra challenge is fine for the new "Elite", but put everything back the way it was for normal and advanced.
Fighters are somehow overpowered, I noticed the 17000 on them, too. The frigates are also ridiculous. The tarantula however was a blast. I wasn't even able to look at its stats, it went too fast. Battleships were taken out like you normally kill fighters. This cannot be what was intended.
Also, even if intended as is, this would not be a "challenge" anymore than writing your name 5000 times in a day. Which means: technically it is, but there's no skill involved other than building a high DPS ship. I could dive in the midst of the enemy lines, and if I am not mistaken, after three and a half minutes my health may even have dropped to 90%. No, the enemies do not do more damage nor are they smarter.
And to those high end players thinking this would somehow "teach others proper builds": not in the least, you're completely out of touch with "normal players". You teach by going just beyond the limit, not by showing what comes way later. You do not teach chess to new players using endgame studies which rely on weakening the pawn structure. You do not teach maths to first graders with Markov chains in discrete time. You do not teach ship building with enemies far out of my league. If I achieve 95% within time, I may be inclined to look for that extra edge. If I achieve 50% it really takes determination, not many will do that. If I don't even get this far - no use. So there must be options for players to scale their skills (also to scale their ships.- If I need fleet gear to get fleet marks - how should I ever get to the fleet gear). A game can not live off the top 1%, it needs the others as well.
As stated, I am certain Cryptic knows this, and FA is just bugged for now. See the normal fleet queues which do not seem much more difficult than they were. The featured Delta Rising Queue is no real problem, the Viscous Cycle does not seem to have changed much, if at all.
So let's wait for a week and see whether this gets fixed.
LOL a challenge. This is not a challenge. This is saying "I will scale up the hull and shields of the enemy and make them harder to kill so players will just have to spend money to get better gear hehehehehe"
How is this in any way a challenge? Its plain and simple pew pew until dead. The only thing you need to win fleet alert is higher DPS now, the only challenge here is getting the better gear to beat it. There is no strategy either. Just pew pew. This isn't a real challenge. beating the alert is plain and simple if you have a high amount of DPS apparently now....
And no im not gonna pour in buckets of dilithium and other things to get new gear. The upgrade system is such a huge resource sink. but i could be wrong, this may not have been what cryptic was aiming for. We will see in time though.
I ran a couple of these last night. failed against gorn on wave three while i was using my T5-U Jem'nought complete with MK13 fleet and rep gear. (I put out over 20k dps before the upgrades), but I can't speak for the rest of the team.
won a couple more, one with my voth bastion and another with my tac ody (4 tactical consoles, it SO TOTALLY needed that!)
Something isn't right, as others have stated, it was not uncommon to see a miranda or some other low level ship in these before.
Heaven help the poor newbie who decides to try one of these in his lvl 20 ship or something, only to be blamed by the rest of the team for their failure on the second wave. Even I have done it in lower ships before (though I do make sure I am equipped) they are a nice break from the story, or if you need a little xp before the next mission opens up.
I can only hope someone has messed up here. Myself, personally, I can slog through anything. Although i am casual (sometimes not logging in for days, and even then only playing an hour or so) I do like to grind out powerful ships in the end, so i'm sure if things stay this way, I will be fine, but for the new person, starting out in STO, this could be a horror.
This was not the old elite. The Entity's health is fourteen times what it was.
For those already at level 60, do you do fourteen times more DPS?
Why did the Large Fragments have more HP than my ship?
You're supposed to be able to deal with those by yourself and move on. You shouldn't need to focus fire with your whole team in order to destroy one, especially when doing meaningful damage to the Entity will spawn them like crazy.
The interesting side of it is that I only died twice in half an hour before everyone quit. Even when the Entity put on ten stacks of damage buff, dying was never the issue...it was the fact that it didn't die. Who the hell wants to spend twenty or thirty minutes fighting something that was a ten minute job last week?
The game is about the grind, fine we get that it's an MMO. But the way the grind is kept from being tedious is for it to be efficient. This is not efficient for the vast majority of players.
As for Fleet Alerts, if they've undergone a similar transformation then this could grind small fleets and new player fleets to a halt as far as earning Fleet Marks.
My experience thus far is this is pretty brutal. You can't design your game around your elite players, they don't have the money to carry the game. And for a game that's supposed to support different play styles funneling the mission objectives to a point where only one play style, in this instance DPS, is viable doesn't even seem remotely fair or fun.
Nintendo Hard is not the path forward.
Funny thing, I can park my Palisade in the middle of a bunch of NPCs, and they can barely put a dent on it. My shields and hull remain fine. On the other hand, killing stuff takes forever.