You are lumping by claiming that the game is killing casual play when, in reality, the only thing being killed is terrible pew pew playing that terrible players expect to win. So, you claim that because YOU suck now that the difficulty requires you to think before you shoot, it must be because you are "casual" and therefore, all casuals must be sucking and suffering like yourself and since you're not having fun, the game has killed the casual playstyle.
But that is not a casual, but a terribad who THINKS himself casual because they have spent the last year facerolling content without having to fire off a single neuron in their head. They've done nothing productive to their own progression and somehow thought that meant, "Hey, I'm not bad, I'm just casual!".
No. Casuals eventually get stuff done. They don't sit in queues on their T3 Support Cruiser running Khitomer for the fifth time in a week. They don't log in and sit in orbit around the Dyson Sphere chatting until the next FE drops. They don't run the Summer Event dance competition and just type /dance_robot and walk away to grab a Sunny D. They get their T5. They queue for normals. They build up their ship. They enter STF's and kill the Borg/Voth/Undine dreadnought three way battle.
Why?
Because they got it done with they time they have.
Terribads, instead, chose to come here and cry. They wasted precious time, time that could have been spent getting Dil or crafting ship parts or running content to prepare them for the Advanced stuff. They wasted it to whine about how they suck and hate that the game reminded them that they suck.
That is the difference between a casual and a Terribad. And you lump them together by thinking that the casuals are suffering. They are not. They are fine and doing things at their pace. They may not be in the STF today or tomorrow, but they will get there when they get there.
So you've figured out my play style from one sentence?
You are frankly full of ****.
I'm not the best no, I've gone toe to toe and fought alongside (and even snuck kills in) with some great PvPers, in a match, I can hold my own.
So how does that make me terribad because the HP nerf in even basic fleet actions is TRIBBLE?
I'm just glad the real startrek community doesnt have assuming, self loving, elitest pricks like you in it.
Im a casual fleet player who is flying a upgrade JEM D C at the mo with upgraded fleet weapons-kit & a few upgrade R&D sci-eng consoles, xiii, its not the fact that im getting taken out in the new advanced im not its the fact that i cant seem to do any damage to anything any more & cant get anymore dps out of my builds, (prob me). Maybe need to rethink my builds.
Going to wait till I get to level 60 then try again but !!!!!.
We did warn you that Elite is not for everyone. Its pretty extreme. Seriously, most players should not be able to do it.
But please note, that have already had some pretty well organized fleets blazing through Elite with apparent ease. It kinda blows me away honestly. We have a lot of diversity on skill in STO, so finding the right balance point may take time. We want to make a real challenge for our top players, so if players are succeeding easily (and they are), expect it to probably get harder.
I'm sorry, Geko, but those "top players" aren't the ones you should be challenging. They made the choice to build to remove challenge, so the rest of the player base shouldn't have to suffer because they're complaining about the lack of challenge their choice created for them.
Some up-to-date info, about how i wasn't able to finish on advanced:
I have:
Ship: Fleet Avenger T5-U, with 2 tiers already achieved
Captain: Crit skill setup, + all intelligence specializations from level 1
Efficient boff, doffs
Pirate boff
Minimum power 90 on all subsystems (Weapons 125, shields 110, rest 90 each)
Mk XIII fleet Antiproton DHCs front (Ultra rare)
Mk XIII Cutting beam[rare], Mk XIII omni-directional antiproton beam[rare], mk XIII antiproton turret[Ultra rare] aft
Universal consoles:
Console - Zero-Point Energy Conduit Mk
Console - Tachyokinetic Converter very rare
Assimilated module
Nukara Particle Converter
Plasmonic Leech (epic)
Console - Engineering - Enhanced Neutronium Alloy mk XIII ultra rare (turn mod)
Field Generator MK XIII rare
All consoles Mk XIII
4x fleet antiproton consoles (CritH)
Fleet warp core mk xiii (W-A)
fleet shieds mk XIV
This build is around 15K build, with 20-30k spikes, and it's not a glass cannon. (Hull always at 100% and shields never below 30%), turn rate almost like a non-buffed escort
In the old elites, it took 5-6 firing cycles (all weapons fired once) to kill a sphere, in the current advanced, i didn't count (much much more). The spheres are 2x faster, 2x as many, and at least 10x more hull. Normal cube is as powerful as the Tac cube in the old Elite.
We failed at the second transformer.
Transformer hull didn't seem to be improved much.
At least two other guys had fleet setup, and the fourth guy had a well equipped scimitar.
The fifth player died several times, so he doesn't count, didn't do any considerable damage.
Your Plasma Torpedo - Heavy III deals 174321 (66343) Kinetic Damage(Critical) to I.R.W. Valdore.
All this complaining about the new difficulty levels it's very amusing. You see for a while we had all these blow hard complaining about how easy things were (well they were bragging actually) so they upped the difficulty and what do we have? The same blow hard crying all over the forums. Wah it's to hard,wah my shop can't do it. Wah wah.
Well suck it up butter cups. What cryptic had done was a huge favor. This will weed out the wanna need and noobs. How many estfs have been ruined by dub 5000dps players messing things up? Quite allot actually. Nite you need a good build and time in game. So stop your belly asking level up and see things for what they really are
So onerats, do you run dual beams, or beam arrays on that Assault Cruiser with A2B & FAW? If I am going to make this stupid thread, I might as well try to learn something. Did Cryptic decide not to nerf you when the rest of us got hammered?
If you automatically assume A2B is necessary on the FACR, you have a lot to learn.
I pulled ~24k on a T5 FACR, and I've yet to use A2B on any ship.
Casual players will suffer because they can't put the time or the funds in to make themselves an elite like you so obviously are.
I normally average 1 hour a day on STO, none of it grinding. With my reputations maxed, I don't even do the dailies anymore, and I make like 2k Dil a day.
Sure, when new content comes out I spend more time because I'm going through the missions, but once the new missions are done I'll just taking my one character and doing dailies. Once I get the rep maxed out, I'll only be doing the occasional queue if I feel like it.
I think I'm pretty casual. Yet I'm in 30k.
(I'm also pretty rich just because I've played for so long with just one character that I had nothing left to upgrade. With the new increase in gear levels, I expect to be poor very soon, for a very long time.)
Elite (as opposed to terribad) is a measure of skill level.
Casual (as opposed to hardcore) is a measure of playstyle/time.
They are not mutually exclusive.
Saying that being casual means you can't be elite is just an excuse. It's an easy excuse so you don't have to admit to your own shortcomings, revise your build, and learn how to fly.
I thought I was great (with my self-made build) until I spoke to DPS channel people. I was too proud and stubborn to listen to them, but I was also enough of a geek to run my own tests. I still only parsed one thing a day, because I'm not hardcore enough to spend hours on it.
I discovered I was wrong. I asked questions, and listened to the answers. I changed my keybinds, I learned how to fly, and I doubled my DPS without sacrificing any durability.
Frankly, the more I read about the complaints, the more evident it becomes that we're seeing the weak players getting hit by the consequences of being weak.
Interesting. Now, if I recall correctly, when all the raging was going on about T6 and T5U ships we were told that all new content would be playable with a T5 ship. This thread sure doesn't sound like that's true. LMAO! Cryptic stikes (out) again.
No.
The new content is playable in a T5 ship. Every T5 ship is capable of easily doing over 10k DPS with completely free equipment.
The problem is (to be blunt) that many players suck. People were running around doing 3k-5k DPS in a T5 in Old-ISE. Those people never learned how to build and fly their T5 ships, because poorly flying bad builds used to be sufficient. It is no longer sufficient. It's time to step up their game.
Mind you, I'm not saying these people are militant about being bad, though we see plenty of those. Most of these unskilled players aren't the ones who'll argue till they're blue in the face that CRF does more DPS than CSV in PvE, or that beams have no damage drop off from distance. (Yes, I've spoken to people holding both those stances, though to their credit they did recant after being presented with overwhelming and undeniable evidence.)
I believe there are a lot of players who simply don't know what they're doing. I've seen someone with 7 Tac slots using seven different Tac abilities. Yes, a mix of 1 Tac Team, and a (random?) collection of attack patterns, cannons, torpedoes, and one beam ability. On a ship with all three weapon types.
He genuinely had no idea why we would carry both EPtW and EPtS, and was amazed when we explained (both the Dragon and Drake builds) how the cooldowns allowed them both to be active at the same time.
So yeah, we're hearing complaints about the difficulty of content now. We also never hear about their performance. At the same time, we're hearing from people who say that it's not difficult, and it looks like if the team is made up of people who do ~10k, it's fine.
Context is important. It's like hearing a bunch of people complain that a marathon is too long, without hearing that they're 250 pounds overweight and get winded walking to the kitchen.
SI'm not the best no, I've gone toe to toe and fought alongside (and even snuck kills in) with some great PvPers, in a match, I can hold my own.
So how does that make me terribad because the HP nerf in even basic fleet actions is TRIBBLE?
Your performance in PvP says nothing about your performance in PvE, and vice versa. PvP and PvE are different situations.
I do amazing in PvE, but I'm completely ignorant about the PvP meta (too casual to bother) and get obliterated.
I like what someone else said. Sure, make the hardest ones harder, but leave the squishy ones squishy. Let's be honest. We all enjoy some form of challenge, but there are days where we want to look at our powerful ships and think to ourselves "wow, today is a nice day for squishing things with FaW or Cannon Volley" just to make pretty fireworks in space. So, we take our ships to federation fleet alert and smash flies for fun. I never understood the point of a game that lets you get all sorts of upgrades if every thing around you gets stronger too (in this case, much stronger). Its a pointless rat race. Sure, bring on the elites and what not, but leave the squishables squishy.
We did warn you that Elite is not for everyone. Its pretty extreme. Seriously, most players should not be able to do it.
But please note, that have already had some pretty well organized fleets blazing through Elite with apparent ease. It kinda blows me away honestly. We have a lot of diversity on skill in STO, so finding the right balance point may take time. We want to make a real challenge for our top players, so if players are succeeding easily (and they are), expect it to probably get harder.
The problem is you have not made it harder. You made it long and boring with worse rewards. There is no extra challenge just everything takes longer which is a very bad design. Running CE is just the same as before only half the reward and you take x4 longer. No extra skill needed just sit still and wait for the hitpoints to tick down which is boring. Terrible design move.
I like what someone else said. Sure, make the hardest ones harder, but leave the squishy ones squishy. Let's be honest. We all enjoy some form of challenge, but there are days where we want to look at our powerful ships and think to ourselves "wow, today is a nice day for squishing things with FaW or Cannon Volley" just to make pretty fireworks in space. So, we take our ships to federation fleet alert and smash flies for fun. I never understood the point of a game that lets you get all sorts of upgrades if every thing around you gets stronger too (in this case, much stronger). Its a pointless rat race. Sure, bring on the elites and what not, but leave the squishables squishy.
At the end of the day, I want to squish things.
Honestly, if Advanced were rolled back to exactly what the old Elite was, things would be just awesome.
Rewards for Normal should be the same as before with Advanced being the same reward as old Elite. The new Elite...well, leave it as it is but up the rewards to 2x what old Elite was. Doing this should help the majority of the player base actually be able to do public queues while the slim minority that is in the 30k channel subset of the "DPS League" have their e-peen difficulty level.
Casuals may have difficulty adapting but new players won't have poisoned themselves with years of complacency. They won't have to break the bad habits and overconfidence that was learned from grinding ridiculously easy content that was masquerading as elite difficulty.
New players will be starting from scratch with a fresh unbiased perspective and no bitter emotional handicaps.
I am, been playing the same way for so long & now have to rethink everything.....
I am, been playing the same way for so long & now have to rethink everything.....
It seems to me that the old MMO trinity may need to be looked at again by players. We may now need that tank to soak up damage and keep attention on them while the science confuses and controls them while the tac obliterates them.
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
It's my understanding that the new Advanced is a slightly buffed old Elite, so it is a bit tougher.
LOL!!! A bit? That is a monumental understatement. I ran the shipyard mission and it took us over 40 minutes to finish it. The team was an extremely well geared, group with top builds. For instance my ship was a full-on photon biotorp disruptor boat with full sets and Plas procs to boot and I was barely burning the paint off the ships with crits on full A-strike attacks. Hell at one point we had three CCs going on a couple of Hvy Ships and all of us where focused on ONE ship and it took us about 30 seconds to pop it - just think about that.... :eek:
Seconds later three of us popped nearly instantly. :mad:
If you are looking for an excellent PvE fleet consider: Omega Combat Division today.
Former member of the Cryptic Family & FriendsTesting Team. Sadly, one day, it simply vanished - without a word or trace...
Keep elite hard as hell for those who wanted a nightmare mode. Advanced is way off the scale and that's what people are upset about. Moreover, the "same people" are not saying two different things, different people are saying different things. I for one never asked for higher difficulty.
I never asked for higher difficulty or nerfed rewards. Nobody ever asked for that, but here we are. Takes way longer to do and you get half the reward.
I'll pretty much just doff until the winter event.
It seems to me that the old MMO trinity may need to be looked at again by players. We may now need that tank to soak up damage and keep attention on them while the science confuses and controls them while the tac obliterates them.
GEE DO YOU THINK THATS HOW IT?!?
Also, its not the 'old' trinity, it is the basic forumula for mmo's, and it will always be so, no matter how badly GW2 wants to tell you otherwise.
Also, its not the 'old' trinity, it is the basic forumula for mmo's, and it will always be so, no matter how badly GW2 wants to tell you otherwise.
whoa ease up...it's just a game
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
I don't recall this ever being said by a Dev. Do you have a link?
"What you used to refer to as Elite in our queued events and STFs is now known as Advanced. In the new Advanced versions of the queues you will see a similar level of challenge in the enemies that you are used to when the queues were labeled Elite."
Ok, the exact wording of the dev blog is slightly different, but still this is not the case for what the difficulty in these missions is now. If I had ran ISE with the team I was part of on Monday (2 Scimitars, Dauntless, Scryer, Undine Dreadnaught) then we would have pretty much a guarantee of winning and achieving the optional short of some major mess up which sometimes occurs. But instead, the mission was a complete failure in less than five minutes it had been failed.
Also it's worth noting that they've now made it so that you fail ISE (or ISA now) if either of the generators are repaired. But the text in the mission briefing and on your HUD to the right still list that as an optional objective.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
I like what someone else said. Sure, make the hardest ones harder, but leave the squishy ones squishy. Let's be honest. We all enjoy some form of challenge, but there are days where we want to look at our powerful ships and think to ourselves "wow, today is a nice day for squishing things with FaW or Cannon Volley" just to make pretty fireworks in space. So, we take our ships to federation fleet alert and smash flies for fun. I never understood the point of a game that lets you get all sorts of upgrades if every thing around you gets stronger too (in this case, much stronger). Its a pointless rat race. Sure, bring on the elites and what not, but leave the squishables squishy.
At the end of the day, I want to squish things.
What we are doing is spending a considerable amount to upgrade ourselves back to where we were before, considering this is the same content not some new queue. It's so ridiculous I don't understand why more people aren't upset.
It's one thing if you have to spending hundreds of thousands of dilithium to tackle all new queues with even greater rewards, but it's another entirely to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dilithium to tackle the same queues you've been able to tackle for years no problem, for a halved reward.
Honestly, if Advanced were rolled back to exactly what the old Elite was, things would be just awesome.
Rewards for Normal should be the same as before with Advanced being the same reward as old Elite. The new Elite...well, leave it as it is but up the rewards to 2x what old Elite was. Doing this should help the majority of the player base actually be able to do public queues while the slim minority that is in the 30k channel subset of the "DPS League" have their e-peen difficulty level.
This is what a lot of us have been saying since it was first announced.
Normal = 480
Advanced = 960
Elite = 1440
And normal and advanced should be nearly identical to what they were last week and for years before.
But nope, dilithium is a money maker so now we have massive sinks. What I fear is they'll TRIBBLE up the voth ground zone since in my opinion it's the best dilithium grind in the game. ESTFs were great when you had limited time, voth is great when have like an hour or more. So naturally they need to massively buff the NPCs and probably nerf the rewards. Can't have efficient dilithium grinding after all.
Right now only the 1% who have spent a lot of money are able to do advanced and elite, for nerfed rewards no less. For those of us who aren't whales it's not worth queueing, and I guess we also aren't worth anything to cryptic.
I am seeing more and more veteran players just saying to hell with it and bailing. The PVE games are for the most part unplayable.
People are becoming frustrated, me included, with how bad the game play mechanics are working. When six ships ranging in size and DPS cannot take down a single BOP with combined fire power, than its safe to say **** is broken.
THIS IS NOT FUN... THIS IS FRUSTRATING.. and when players become frustrated they LEAVE THE GAME.. Is that what you want? People saying to hell with STO and just finding other games to play? Well that is what is going to happen if the balance issues in PVE are not corrected..
PVE is Broken.
What happened to those unique forum ranks I paid for?
What we are doing is spending a considerable amount to upgrade ourselves back to where we were before, considering this is the same content not some new queue. It's so ridiculous I don't understand why more people aren't upset.
Because the game is already dying, cryptic's bad decisions have kicked out most of the long term players and fans, the remaining really.. don't care anymore.
With the recent update, I have to echo some PvE mission concerns, what I say here has not improved the PvE missions.
All standard PvE missions i.e. Fed Fleet Alert is now only fit for upgraded Tier 5 ships or tier 6 ships, Tier 4 lower or C-Store ships (not upgraded) stand no chance in Fed fleet alert.
Scaling the npcs up is a good idea, but ONLY for Elite, for standard PvE missions all npcs ships should remain as they were before delta rising update.
I did Cure Found (Normal) and while the extra Borg ships attacking made it a bit more of a challenge, the fact remain's the standard mission is more like Elite now.
These standard PvE cue missions are supposed to help those players get up to level 50 and those just making level 50. As it stands now I no longer like doing PvE Fed Fleet Alert and such missions like it.
As I said I can understand increasing the difficulty level of Elite PvE mission, after all they are Elite, but the standard ones should remain as they were before Delta Rising. I know not everyone is happy with this as you have spoiled it for them, I just hope that like others you will produce a patch that will revert the 'Standard' PvE cue missions to what they were before.
Another issue is there is NO new ship at Level 60, this is wrong and by this being omitted you are coming over as only wanting money as if players are to really survive in the Delta quadrant they have to buy Tier 6 ships or upgrade Tier 5 ships.
I think there should be a new ship given at level 60 to players, and it could be a pre-upgraded ship, the option for players to buy Tier 6 ships would always be there, or even if you do not put in a new ship at Level 60, at least give players who reach Level 60 1 Free ship upgrade token for one of their C-Store ships. If they do not have such a ship then that free upgrade will be kept in their inventory until they can afford to buy a C-Store ship.
The way the game is now set up is aimed at players who spend lots of money to get the good stuff, as such the Free to play Players are being snubbed as not everyone can afford to spend real money on a game they like.
Be careful you do not drive anymore players away, I know some that have uninstalled STO because of unfavourable changes in STO with Delta rising update. Heck you lost some when you brought out the Disastrous 'Voth' Arc, this did not go down well with everyone.
I did a Fleet Alert with a Tier 4 ship last night and we beat it!
no, it is no longer a game, as of the new world order you are to port into the world wide web where all your disputes will be handled in text form, you will be forced to wage war with another random person for 1 hour a day.
if you do not comply the thought police will come by and replug you into the internet where you will receive a strict set of commands to preform server maintenance for 6 hours, you will then be allowed one free token for a ship upgrade and be ordered to play any game of your choice.
It's not too hard, you are just too weak. Bad builds and lack of knowledge and mechanics no longer work on ADVANCED or ELITE and that is absolutely okay.
Damn. So hard to swallow that..
They said advanced would be near the same level as the old elites but instead they need 3-4 times the dps (old elites could be done with optional with a team doing 5k dps per person new advanced modes need players doing 15-20k per person)
The second big problem is normal mode rewards very little marks and no implants meaning you can't actully play normal and buy the rep items needed to improve your gear and dps.
Even if they decide to keep advanced queues the way they are they need to at least make normal queues reward the items need to advance the rep system and buy the gear.
What we are doing is spending a considerable amount to upgrade ourselves back to where we were before, considering this is the same content not some new queue. It's so ridiculous I don't understand why more people aren't upset.
It's one thing if you have to spending hundreds of thousands of dilithium to tackle all new queues with even greater rewards, but it's another entirely to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dilithium to tackle the same queues you've been able to tackle for years no problem, for a halved reward.
Re-gifting was annoying under a subscription model, it's borderline unethical to me under the current monetization system.
This is what a lot of us have been saying since it was first announced.
Normal = 480
Advanced = 960
Elite = 1440
And normal and advanced should be nearly identical to what they were last week and for years before.
But nope, dilithium is a money maker so now we have massive sinks. What I fear is they'll TRIBBLE up the voth ground zone since in my opinion it's the best dilithium grind in the game. ESTFs were great when you had limited time, voth is great when have like an hour or more. So naturally they need to massively buff the NPCs and probably nerf the rewards. Can't have efficient dilithium grinding after all.
Right now only the 1% who have spent a lot of money are able to do advanced and elite, for nerfed rewards no less. For those of us who aren't whales it's not worth queueing, and I guess we also aren't worth anything to cryptic.
Yeah, assuming they don't change these queues, I see a huge migration to BZs, which will be inevitably followed by a nerf to BZ rewards.
You need to play on advanced or better to get a lot of that best gear. No purple mats, damn near no neural processors, and much more limited avenues for the neural processor equivalents.
What's funny to me, as that the episode content actually did start to provide some real gameplay difficulty. I've gotten up to the vaadwaur, and they actually start to act like they have strategies. The episode stuff is actually much more fun than the new queue and the revamped "slightly harder" old queues.
Actually the Borg ones are hardest to get. Voth and undine you can get in their respective battle zones, you don't even have to participate, just shoot a trex or planet killer once and boom, 480 dil and 1-5 implants/isometrics. Delta things you can similarly get in the new ground zone. The borgneural processors are locked up tight.
So now only the 1% who spend money on the most DPS possible will earn the pitiful 960 dil reward. Even those who could handle old ESTF may not even be able to earn the even more pitiful 480 advanced reward in a timely fashion, making it 100% not worth queueing for.
Good way to chase players away and kill STFs. "Other queues also award dilithium" is not an excuse. We had the prior STFs for years. We've grown to really enjoy them. They were fast, efficient and enjoyable and completely worth running when you only a small amount of time to play. Guess fast, efficient and enjoyable isn't acceptable huh?
Make new queues this new difficulty, not existing queues.
Money has no relevance. And once more people are level 60 with all their captain and ship specializations (both free), the advanced queues will be farmed easily again. It took about two weeks on tribble.
The problem is that Advanced was only supposed to be slightly harder than Old Elite, so that new level 50s could actually sweat a little while working on their Reps and Rep gear. Now, the problem is that the badly skewed NPCs are way too tough to crack.
Cryptic needs to either:
1. Make BNP/VCIs drop from the Normal queues and make 3-5 drop from the Advanced, and allow Rep gear to scale to Mk XIV, since the queue rewards are TRIBBLE and the time spent simply not worth it on Advanced as they are now.
Or
2. Rebalance the enemies to being reasonable for level 50s, requiring only a little more chat-related teamwork and effort than Old Elites. Then BNP/VCI items can remain as Advanced-only rewards.
And both choices will leave the new Elite for level 60s looking for some masochistic fun and e-peen bragging rights.
My reasoning is to be fair to casual players like myself, who can't just spend 20 hours a day to grind towards 60 due to real life. Rep gear requiring the extra items are supposed to be some of the best gear that players can work towards between Crafting or Fleet gear at level 50, and it's unfair to the casuals and fresh level 50s to further inhibit access to them behind an unfairly scaled set of NPCs.
They shouldn't have to wait to 60 to start working on their Rep Gear; esp. not if they DO NOT SCALE TO Mk XIV. I do not see how anyone can possibly defend working on Dyson or Borg sets at level 60 when the items only scale to Mk XII, instead of allowing players to begin work on their sets starting at 50 and be close to completing them by 60. Don't give me the BS about "lolol Upgrade them then you stUUUpid casual l33t-wannabe". That option IS available for those to work with AS THEY LEVEL UP WHILE WORKING ON THEIR REP GEAR. It's not like those gears are the end-all gears for the game, but they are good, reliable gear while players works towards a more specialized set, whether it's crafting those with the right attributes for a build or working up the Fleet Cred and Dil for Fleet gear, and should remain as accessible upper tier gear.
Again, I don't recall the Devs saying that Advanced = old Elite, they used the word "similar". Similar does not mean "exactly the same" as noted in the sections you neglected to include from the blog, such as;
The person didn't suggest that similar means exactly the same, stop using the oldest trick in the book of overstating the other person's intent.
Similar is closer to "exactly the same" than it is to "twice to four times as long to complete".
That's like saying a sprinter with a time of 9.4 seconds had a "similar" performance to his opponent's 26.3 second time.
Your claim of "similar" fitting what we're seeing in game right now looks rather absurd compared to someone suggesting that if they could beat it (with plenty of padding) on Monday, failing miserably on Tuesday is no longer "similar".
All the changes are fine IMO, it's the reduced rewards that are the issue. Adding difficulty and reducing the reward doesn't add up to me.
Adding difficulty (especially in the form of 2-4x the time investment) IS reducing the reward already, because time is a finite resource.
Comments
So you've figured out my play style from one sentence?
You are frankly full of ****.
I'm not the best no, I've gone toe to toe and fought alongside (and even snuck kills in) with some great PvPers, in a match, I can hold my own.
So how does that make me terribad because the HP nerf in even basic fleet actions is TRIBBLE?
I'm just glad the real startrek community doesnt have assuming, self loving, elitest pricks like you in it.
Going to wait till I get to level 60 then try again but !!!!!.
I'm sorry, Geko, but those "top players" aren't the ones you should be challenging. They made the choice to build to remove challenge, so the rest of the player base shouldn't have to suffer because they're complaining about the lack of challenge their choice created for them.
I have:
Ship: Fleet Avenger T5-U, with 2 tiers already achieved
Captain: Crit skill setup, + all intelligence specializations from level 1
Efficient boff, doffs
Pirate boff
Minimum power 90 on all subsystems (Weapons 125, shields 110, rest 90 each)
Mk XIII fleet Antiproton DHCs front (Ultra rare)
Mk XIII Cutting beam[rare], Mk XIII omni-directional antiproton beam[rare], mk XIII antiproton turret[Ultra rare] aft
Universal consoles:
Console - Zero-Point Energy Conduit Mk
Console - Tachyokinetic Converter very rare
Assimilated module
Nukara Particle Converter
Plasmonic Leech (epic)
Console - Engineering - Enhanced Neutronium Alloy mk XIII ultra rare (turn mod)
Field Generator MK XIII rare
All consoles Mk XIII
4x fleet antiproton consoles (CritH)
Fleet warp core mk xiii (W-A)
fleet shieds mk XIV
This build is around 15K build, with 20-30k spikes, and it's not a glass cannon. (Hull always at 100% and shields never below 30%), turn rate almost like a non-buffed escort
In the old elites, it took 5-6 firing cycles (all weapons fired once) to kill a sphere, in the current advanced, i didn't count (much much more). The spheres are 2x faster, 2x as many, and at least 10x more hull. Normal cube is as powerful as the Tac cube in the old Elite.
We failed at the second transformer.
Transformer hull didn't seem to be improved much.
At least two other guys had fleet setup, and the fourth guy had a well equipped scimitar.
The fifth player died several times, so he doesn't count, didn't do any considerable damage.
Well suck it up butter cups. What cryptic had done was a huge favor. This will weed out the wanna need and noobs. How many estfs have been ruined by dub 5000dps players messing things up? Quite allot actually. Nite you need a good build and time in game. So stop your belly asking level up and see things for what they really are
If you automatically assume A2B is necessary on the FACR, you have a lot to learn.
I pulled ~24k on a T5 FACR, and I've yet to use A2B on any ship.
I normally average 1 hour a day on STO, none of it grinding. With my reputations maxed, I don't even do the dailies anymore, and I make like 2k Dil a day.
Sure, when new content comes out I spend more time because I'm going through the missions, but once the new missions are done I'll just taking my one character and doing dailies. Once I get the rep maxed out, I'll only be doing the occasional queue if I feel like it.
I think I'm pretty casual. Yet I'm in 30k.
(I'm also pretty rich just because I've played for so long with just one character that I had nothing left to upgrade. With the new increase in gear levels, I expect to be poor very soon, for a very long time.)
Elite (as opposed to terribad) is a measure of skill level.
Casual (as opposed to hardcore) is a measure of playstyle/time.
They are not mutually exclusive.
Saying that being casual means you can't be elite is just an excuse. It's an easy excuse so you don't have to admit to your own shortcomings, revise your build, and learn how to fly.
I thought I was great (with my self-made build) until I spoke to DPS channel people. I was too proud and stubborn to listen to them, but I was also enough of a geek to run my own tests. I still only parsed one thing a day, because I'm not hardcore enough to spend hours on it.
I discovered I was wrong. I asked questions, and listened to the answers. I changed my keybinds, I learned how to fly, and I doubled my DPS without sacrificing any durability.
Frankly, the more I read about the complaints, the more evident it becomes that we're seeing the weak players getting hit by the consequences of being weak.
No.
The new content is playable in a T5 ship. Every T5 ship is capable of easily doing over 10k DPS with completely free equipment.
The problem is (to be blunt) that many players suck. People were running around doing 3k-5k DPS in a T5 in Old-ISE. Those people never learned how to build and fly their T5 ships, because poorly flying bad builds used to be sufficient. It is no longer sufficient. It's time to step up their game.
Mind you, I'm not saying these people are militant about being bad, though we see plenty of those. Most of these unskilled players aren't the ones who'll argue till they're blue in the face that CRF does more DPS than CSV in PvE, or that beams have no damage drop off from distance. (Yes, I've spoken to people holding both those stances, though to their credit they did recant after being presented with overwhelming and undeniable evidence.)
I believe there are a lot of players who simply don't know what they're doing. I've seen someone with 7 Tac slots using seven different Tac abilities. Yes, a mix of 1 Tac Team, and a (random?) collection of attack patterns, cannons, torpedoes, and one beam ability. On a ship with all three weapon types.
He genuinely had no idea why we would carry both EPtW and EPtS, and was amazed when we explained (both the Dragon and Drake builds) how the cooldowns allowed them both to be active at the same time.
So yeah, we're hearing complaints about the difficulty of content now. We also never hear about their performance. At the same time, we're hearing from people who say that it's not difficult, and it looks like if the team is made up of people who do ~10k, it's fine.
Context is important. It's like hearing a bunch of people complain that a marathon is too long, without hearing that they're 250 pounds overweight and get winded walking to the kitchen.
Your performance in PvP says nothing about your performance in PvE, and vice versa. PvP and PvE are different situations.
I do amazing in PvE, but I'm completely ignorant about the PvP meta (too casual to bother) and get obliterated.
At the end of the day, I want to squish things.
The problem is you have not made it harder. You made it long and boring with worse rewards. There is no extra challenge just everything takes longer which is a very bad design. Running CE is just the same as before only half the reward and you take x4 longer. No extra skill needed just sit still and wait for the hitpoints to tick down which is boring. Terrible design move.
Honestly, if Advanced were rolled back to exactly what the old Elite was, things would be just awesome.
Rewards for Normal should be the same as before with Advanced being the same reward as old Elite. The new Elite...well, leave it as it is but up the rewards to 2x what old Elite was. Doing this should help the majority of the player base actually be able to do public queues while the slim minority that is in the 30k channel subset of the "DPS League" have their e-peen difficulty level.
I am, been playing the same way for so long & now have to rethink everything.....
Dont like it but will try to adapt.
It seems to me that the old MMO trinity may need to be looked at again by players. We may now need that tank to soak up damage and keep attention on them while the science confuses and controls them while the tac obliterates them.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Seconds later three of us popped nearly instantly. :mad:
ingame: @.Spartan
Original Cryptic Forum Name: Spartan (member #124)
The Glorious, Kirk’s Protegè
I never asked for higher difficulty or nerfed rewards. Nobody ever asked for that, but here we are. Takes way longer to do and you get half the reward.
I'll pretty much just doff until the winter event.
GEE DO YOU THINK THATS HOW IT?!?
Also, its not the 'old' trinity, it is the basic forumula for mmo's, and it will always be so, no matter how badly GW2 wants to tell you otherwise.
whoa ease up...it's just a game
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
"What you used to refer to as Elite in our queued events and STFs is now known as Advanced. In the new Advanced versions of the queues you will see a similar level of challenge in the enemies that you are used to when the queues were labeled Elite."
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/7006643-queue-revamp
Ok, the exact wording of the dev blog is slightly different, but still this is not the case for what the difficulty in these missions is now. If I had ran ISE with the team I was part of on Monday (2 Scimitars, Dauntless, Scryer, Undine Dreadnaught) then we would have pretty much a guarantee of winning and achieving the optional short of some major mess up which sometimes occurs. But instead, the mission was a complete failure in less than five minutes it had been failed.
Also it's worth noting that they've now made it so that you fail ISE (or ISA now) if either of the generators are repaired. But the text in the mission briefing and on your HUD to the right still list that as an optional objective.
What we are doing is spending a considerable amount to upgrade ourselves back to where we were before, considering this is the same content not some new queue. It's so ridiculous I don't understand why more people aren't upset.
It's one thing if you have to spending hundreds of thousands of dilithium to tackle all new queues with even greater rewards, but it's another entirely to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dilithium to tackle the same queues you've been able to tackle for years no problem, for a halved reward.
This is what a lot of us have been saying since it was first announced.
Normal = 480
Advanced = 960
Elite = 1440
And normal and advanced should be nearly identical to what they were last week and for years before.
But nope, dilithium is a money maker so now we have massive sinks. What I fear is they'll TRIBBLE up the voth ground zone since in my opinion it's the best dilithium grind in the game. ESTFs were great when you had limited time, voth is great when have like an hour or more. So naturally they need to massively buff the NPCs and probably nerf the rewards. Can't have efficient dilithium grinding after all.
Right now only the 1% who have spent a lot of money are able to do advanced and elite, for nerfed rewards no less. For those of us who aren't whales it's not worth queueing, and I guess we also aren't worth anything to cryptic.
People are becoming frustrated, me included, with how bad the game play mechanics are working. When six ships ranging in size and DPS cannot take down a single BOP with combined fire power, than its safe to say **** is broken.
THIS IS NOT FUN... THIS IS FRUSTRATING.. and when players become frustrated they LEAVE THE GAME.. Is that what you want? People saying to hell with STO and just finding other games to play? Well that is what is going to happen if the balance issues in PVE are not corrected..
PVE is Broken.
Because the game is already dying, cryptic's bad decisions have kicked out most of the long term players and fans, the remaining really.. don't care anymore.
Completed Starbase, Embassy, Mine, Spire and No Win Scenario
Nothing to do anymore.
http://dtfleet.com/
Visit our Youtube channel
I did a Fleet Alert with a Tier 4 ship last night and we beat it!
no, it is no longer a game, as of the new world order you are to port into the world wide web where all your disputes will be handled in text form, you will be forced to wage war with another random person for 1 hour a day.
if you do not comply the thought police will come by and replug you into the internet where you will receive a strict set of commands to preform server maintenance for 6 hours, you will then be allowed one free token for a ship upgrade and be ordered to play any game of your choice.
*snickers*
They said advanced would be near the same level as the old elites but instead they need 3-4 times the dps (old elites could be done with optional with a team doing 5k dps per person new advanced modes need players doing 15-20k per person)
The second big problem is normal mode rewards very little marks and no implants meaning you can't actully play normal and buy the rep items needed to improve your gear and dps.
Even if they decide to keep advanced queues the way they are they need to at least make normal queues reward the items need to advance the rep system and buy the gear.
Re-gifting was annoying under a subscription model, it's borderline unethical to me under the current monetization system.
Yeah, assuming they don't change these queues, I see a huge migration to BZs, which will be inevitably followed by a nerf to BZ rewards.
Actually the Borg ones are hardest to get. Voth and undine you can get in their respective battle zones, you don't even have to participate, just shoot a trex or planet killer once and boom, 480 dil and 1-5 implants/isometrics. Delta things you can similarly get in the new ground zone. The borgneural processors are locked up tight.
Money has no relevance. And once more people are level 60 with all their captain and ship specializations (both free), the advanced queues will be farmed easily again. It took about two weeks on tribble.
Cryptic needs to either:
1. Make BNP/VCIs drop from the Normal queues and make 3-5 drop from the Advanced, and allow Rep gear to scale to Mk XIV, since the queue rewards are TRIBBLE and the time spent simply not worth it on Advanced as they are now.
Or
2. Rebalance the enemies to being reasonable for level 50s, requiring only a little more chat-related teamwork and effort than Old Elites. Then BNP/VCI items can remain as Advanced-only rewards.
And both choices will leave the new Elite for level 60s looking for some masochistic fun and e-peen bragging rights.
My reasoning is to be fair to casual players like myself, who can't just spend 20 hours a day to grind towards 60 due to real life. Rep gear requiring the extra items are supposed to be some of the best gear that players can work towards between Crafting or Fleet gear at level 50, and it's unfair to the casuals and fresh level 50s to further inhibit access to them behind an unfairly scaled set of NPCs.
They shouldn't have to wait to 60 to start working on their Rep Gear; esp. not if they DO NOT SCALE TO Mk XIV. I do not see how anyone can possibly defend working on Dyson or Borg sets at level 60 when the items only scale to Mk XII, instead of allowing players to begin work on their sets starting at 50 and be close to completing them by 60. Don't give me the BS about "lolol Upgrade them then you stUUUpid casual l33t-wannabe". That option IS available for those to work with AS THEY LEVEL UP WHILE WORKING ON THEIR REP GEAR. It's not like those gears are the end-all gears for the game, but they are good, reliable gear while players works towards a more specialized set, whether it's crafting those with the right attributes for a build or working up the Fleet Cred and Dil for Fleet gear, and should remain as accessible upper tier gear.
The person didn't suggest that similar means exactly the same, stop using the oldest trick in the book of overstating the other person's intent.
Similar is closer to "exactly the same" than it is to "twice to four times as long to complete".
That's like saying a sprinter with a time of 9.4 seconds had a "similar" performance to his opponent's 26.3 second time.
Your claim of "similar" fitting what we're seeing in game right now looks rather absurd compared to someone suggesting that if they could beat it (with plenty of padding) on Monday, failing miserably on Tuesday is no longer "similar".
Adding difficulty (especially in the form of 2-4x the time investment) IS reducing the reward already, because time is a finite resource.