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Need to skill point grind just to play the episodes
jagdhippies
Member Posts: 676 Arc User
So I now need to skill point grind just play the new episodes! Are they serious with this!
I don't mind grinding to upgrade gear, to fill a rep, etc. Even the prospect of grinding a bit to 'level up' my Chel Gret is not a big deal.
BUT WHY ON EARTH DO I HAVE TO GRIND JUST TO BE ABLE TO PLAY THE NEW EPISODES!
Guess that just leaves me with one less thing to do in this game, I was barely playing as it was.
I don't mind grinding to upgrade gear, to fill a rep, etc. Even the prospect of grinding a bit to 'level up' my Chel Gret is not a big deal.
BUT WHY ON EARTH DO I HAVE TO GRIND JUST TO BE ABLE TO PLAY THE NEW EPISODES!
Guess that just leaves me with one less thing to do in this game, I was barely playing as it was.
My carrier is more powerful than your gal-dread
Post edited by jagdhippies on
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Until that time, the patrol to the North East of the Jenolan sphere gives pretty good skill points at advanced and elite setting.
I will probably just get to level 53 or whatever for the new zone, check it out and be done for awhile again.
I am waiting until I am level 58 before starting the Delta story, so that I can try to enjoy it without breaks.
One new chapter, 17 new episodes...how many of those episodes are patrol type missions? how many breaks are there in the story? breaks where you have to do repeats, or other activities to get those skill points to get to the next episode?
Yah...pretty much what futurepastnow is what i'm thinking too. Maybe it wouldnt have been so bad if all 17 episodes were actual story episodes and not patrol episodes. They were just trying to stretch out the time it takes us to do content for as little effort/cost as possible.
I reckon it's to keep everyone occupied.
How it usually goes is that content is released, everyone rushes like hell to get through it all as fast as possible, then spend the rest of the time moaning they don't have enough to do.
Also considering it's going to be a long time until new content comes along (apart from the odd FE and holiday event) I'd recommend just playing the game as you would normally and just letting the levels come naturally, so to speak.
Set your difficulty to Elite and there are no breaks. The Patrol mission wrappers are part of the story...you've also got the story that takes place on Kobali Prime. At Normal, there's all sorts of breaks where you have to go replay this and that - do patrols - etc, etc, etc - yadda - yadda...but on Elite it has been smooth sailing.
That might work for you and me and any other skilled player. But cranking up the difficulty to elite is not for everybody. Especially for newer players who may be going right from the old episodes to the Solanae to the new DR episodes in whatever gear they happen to be wearing along the way.
Heh, I still ran into a hole all the same though...hit that speedbump what now hole with just under 24k to 59 before the next mission...meh.
Well i kinda want to stick with the story...i'm not in a rush, but i just want to stay with the story.
Ever since news of DR came out however long ago and up until release day i wasnt that excited for it. But that actually changed on DR release day. The DQ music set the mood pretty well, the first missions with Neelix were pretty cool. I actually started to get excited to see the rest of the story. But then i hit my first break in the story at level 50 cause i was 2 bars short of 51. But that only took 1 normal Borg D. run to fix. But as i get higher and higher the amount of time i spend doing non story stuff is increasing. I even had 1 break but i grinded long enough to get back into the story but the first mission back was a patrol mission! and that has happened a second time as i just went from 56 to 57. Finished grinding doing STFs and whatever else and as soon as i hit 57 BAM!!! patrol episode mission.
Any kind of excitement that i got on DR release day has faded now. I hit 57 an hour ago, i got the new patrol episode mission but my toon is AFKing in ESD and i'm on here talking to you guys and watching Voyager on DVD.
So just play more stuff.
If the only thing you are interested in is watching an exp bar fill up faster then its hard to image that you haven't already taken up a min-max playstyle that's capable of elite play (the two states of mind would seem to go hand in hand).
If on the other hand you're more interested in, for example, the setting of a star trek game then just play the damn patrols (they do a lot of the heavy lifting in that department, most of the factions are presented through them and so too is the major conflict. The dramatic moments happen in the episodes but the patrols hold the narrative together through visibly shifting agendas and conflicts), play the episodes, and spend the remaining time in PVE's and kobali ground zone (and if you're very unwilling to play a video game, go for strategic doffing.)
Its really not hard, at all, to occupy yourself in DR. You might want to just be conducting a single power grind through the main episode series but for whatever reason or another Cryptic said no this time. Solution? Don't play for a single power grind. Just adopt the customary habits of a reasonable gamer and TRIBBLE around with various components of the game for the hell of it. Its what we've been doing at 50 for quite some time and its what you will be doing at 60. Why stop just because right now there's a specified sequence of missions that you could technically get through right now if you adopted an entirely unnatural playstyle to end-game STO?
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!
The problem for me at least isnt that i am finding a lack of things to do. Its that i want to do the storyline because i am interested in it. When the pauses come right as i'm in the middle of an interesting story thats when i start having issues with it. If you are a huge Ironman fan and you are dying to see Ironman 18 you arent going to the movie theater on its release day and read a book that you've read 100 times before during the middle of the movie are you?
It would be nice to have a big content release that allows me to play through the storyline like i want to right from one episode to the next. But that wont happen for many various reasons which i wont try to argue cause i do think that they *are* legit reasons. They did the best they could what they had.
Although I'm of the line that we shouldn't be regrinding old missions to level to the new cap. This isn't a season update; this is an expansion. The content should have been in place or rewards tweaked.
It just goes to show the low maturity level, and lack of expertise from the design team.
I had a little deadzone between 56.5 and 57... but that's it? Apart from that, I've had journal assignments all the way.
Possibly because I am running elite, but..
Actually that's a very basic narrative device. Have something interesting happen, then go to a different part of the story, and come back later to that original plot point to develop it further as you pull the same trick on the tangent. This CAN get out of hand (as it can easily result in a disjointed story where nothing is allowed to reach any sort of real climax, its just stunted rise after stunted rise) but I do not think that complaint is appropriate to level at DR (there's a lot of content here, its well developed, the tangents support the main arcs, and above all there's more story than we've seen previously, a lot more.)
The issue strictly seems to be that its not how STO has traditionaly done things.
People expected to go from one episode to the next like a DVD box set, when now STO is trying to play like a game instead and try to interject other activities into the sequential series of missions that directly build the setting or factions (however much those can be distinguished from each other) or the systems or the even just the view of available content. Its more functional, but because its different you CAN take the view that its not how it should be done.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Bingo, tldr the thread. But, I bet they planned on people playing them on elite. Which makes it not a problem. Even myself. I actually had to grind at like 52-53, then again 53-54. Then noticed when everyone started all the japori talk in game chat that my settings were on Normal. lol
Then I remembered why I did that. Episodes generally mix Space/Ground.....I HATE ground in this game. And the way you get points, you spend everything you can on space, then the rest on ground simply because you HAVE to.
The game shoulda had separate points for each category so you wouldn't gimp yourself as much in ground.
Maybe I should elaborate, I hate tacs on ground. Love being an engineer, but my main is a tac. And when episodes come out, not caring about XP, just wanting to do the new story and maybe grind the rewards I had it on normal to make it faster....my bad.
Absolutely... Throw in the revamped Doff system, R&D and item upgrades and it starts to paint the picture that much of the underlying problem is indeed more about people disliking change, as opposed to problems with the content itself - bugs aside of course...
I cant think of any other MMOs that do it though. Wildstar i think early on there were some complaints that if you missed a few quests along the way you might get to level 46 or 47 short of xp to get the next mission in the next zone. But other games like WoW dont have you doing it during its expacs, but there you could argue that they had more resourced. But SWTOR didnt do it either, in fact if you did every mission, mission bonus objective, bonus series, bonus series objectives and a lot more other stuff you could actually get overleveled. LOTRO, TSW, probably 1 or 2 others that i'm forgetting.
I just dont like being interrupted in the middle of a good story. I'm doing the first patrol mission episode at level 57 and i'm wondering: hmm i wonder how Harry Kim, Seven and the Doc are all doing...i wanna go visit Neelix...do they have Ski Slopes on New Talax...they should get Ski Slopes on New Talax.
I can say with absolute certainty that they did not think the majority of people would be playing story missions on elite; and as such build the system around it. I wouldn't be surprised if less then 10% of the population actually play normal missions on anything other then normal. Or even that there's a difficulty slider... in the first place. Circumstantial of course, but just take a look at zone chat ; or the forums and notice how many people just getting on the japori change are 'first hearing about difficulty' lol.
SWTOR did. You arrive at a planet to do the main thing but get sidetracked into a dozen other things, some of which help develop tangential plot threads or important pieces of setting (like our patrol missions), that you had to run through in order to get to that next bit of important story (and you can just find for yourself notable examples in, well just about every other RPG of this same narrative strategy).
In practice [in SWTOR] this also took a hell of a lot more explicit grinding for level than DR (particularly if you tried to take them up on their F2P scheme) and without any real choice in the matter either (there's only so many places you can go for XP there....)
Check what you think of as "a good story" (of this length/format.) I'll bet that it wasn't told all in one straight run.
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!
In SWTOR I dont really see it that way. Its 2-3 sometimes more separate stories being told on the planet but they usually have the same theme except maybe for the class story. Similar to how a TV episode will have 2-3 different stories going on at once sometimes related to each other, sometimes not. What i would consider a distraction in SWTOR is if i had to stop my class/planet/side missions to do a huttball pvp match or a quick space mission. In fact a few of the class stories on a planet have you doing so few tasks that it feels like it is the class missions that are the distraction. IIRC the Jedi Knight story on Taris you go from one quest hub to another and you do a bunch of stuff for the planetary side. But then for your class story you are just doing one thing.
Actually jumping into PVE to get around a much more protracted leveling scheme was how I kept up a decent pace in SWTOR (alternative: grind the same arbitrary fetch/kill quests and it is to STO's credit that it offers more choices.)
Anyway the problem you have here is considering scale. Within a single episode you have 2 or 3 stories going on but is the DR expansion (in its entirety) analogous to an episode or a season? Similarly while hopping planets isn't something that happens often in SWTOR except for a total change of scenery (the format of the game expects that you stay in the same place for a while), in STO we'll move between planets multiple times over the course of a single episode and even engage in a quick space mission sandwiched between ground story content. Then when that's over with we've always had the choice of what do we queue up next. Is it a fleet alert or the next episode? Patrol or doffing run? From the early levels STO is a lot more freeform and being able to level through STF's in DR is just a component of this game's structure (which IMO is a lot more appropriate to the interactive format of the video game.)
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!
Lol does nobody remember the old days? The level grind was insane and I'm talking about before the days of mirror universe. Be glad that a few patrols is all you need! ( it used to be a dozen or more)
I'd love to see a new player with leveling gear try that. Heck, let's see CaptainSmirk do it without cheats! I'm 100% sure they didn't plan on that.