Faw wasn't a risk before, if u run an intel ship surgical strikes is a fine replacement, but Bo isn't as good a replacement for the t5, and even the t6 ships. So dps is cut down because you can't use faw. The instance was generally balanced, though admittedly easy before. Now it's not balanced.
It's simply not worth the time and effort to try and do isa now. Unless you run pre-made which I don't.
I think Cryptic have pretty much removed all End Game content for a significant portion of the player base.
pre-DR you could do the Normal runs with very little knowledge of how the STF work and some decidely average gear. But doing those Normal runs was a decent way to gear up for the Elite level STF's.
post-DR Normal runs are relatively straight forward but because the rewards have been all but wiped out they no longer provide a path to the Advanced level and so are essentially pointless. The difficultly on Advanced level has been cranked up way too high, so that only team that spend every waking moment trying to squeeze the last 0.001 DPS out of a build have a realisitic chance of succesfully completing the STF. The problem is those DPS squeezers are real hardcore gamers, and it's mainly the real hardcore gamers that will have been doing the beta testing of DR on tribble which results in the new Advance level being way too hard for the majority of the player base making Advance level STF's pointless.
Normal STF's - pointless
Advanced STF's - pointless
End Game content - none existant.
It is bad enough that leveling from 50 to 60 is a ridiculously time-consuming grind, but the devs made it worse by messing with all the existing STFs and PVE queues. The EXISTING stuff should have NEVER been touched and needs to go back to the way it was.
If the devs want to add a new level of insanely hard queues with greater rewards that is fine, but make the old missions like they were. STO isn't fun anymore and if it doesn't get fun again we are going to hemmorrhage a lot of old players and lose the chance to get new players.
In the immortal words of Captain Sisko: "It may not be what you believe, but that doesn't make it wrong."
Don't believe the lies in this forum. I am NOT an ARC user. I play STO on Steam or not at all.
The problem is those DPS squeezers are real hardcore gamers, and it's mainly the real hardcore gamers that will have been doing the beta testing of DR on tribble which results in the new Advance level being way too hard for the majority of the player base making Advance level STF's pointless.
Those same hardcore players were actually here trying to tell both other players and cryptic about advanced. They provided numbers, parses, etc. Very few listened. Even in the face of those parses people did not believe them just kept sayin BS stuff along the lines of dev promised it would be like old elites i have faith in them.
Those same hardcore players were actually here trying to tell both other players and cryptic about advanced. They provided numbers, parses, etc. Very few listened. Even in the face of those parses people did not believe them just kept sayin BS stuff along the lines of dev promised it would be like old elites i have faith in them.
I'm not having a go at the people that did the testing, but the people who were looking at the results.
The people that did the testing are an abnormal group, not in negative sense but they are just not anyway near the norm, if you take a bell curve and look at the upper extremes those are the player testers. The devs, QA etc will be looking at their metrics etc to decide if the content is good enough to be released not logs and parses of players. The results of testing are based on a heavily skewed sample, which is always going to be a problem when the sample is self selecting.
YES! People with tricked out T6/T5U ships with MK 14 consoles and weaps should MORE OFTEN THAN NOT be able to successfully pug an advanced STF...Elite probably needs a bit of tweaking too, but probably should require the above AND voice chat/highly organized play....
Short answer, YES, yes, yes, a thousand times yes, advanced STFs need rebalanced.
Comments
It's simply not worth the time and effort to try and do isa now. Unless you run pre-made which I don't.
pre-DR you could do the Normal runs with very little knowledge of how the STF work and some decidely average gear. But doing those Normal runs was a decent way to gear up for the Elite level STF's.
post-DR Normal runs are relatively straight forward but because the rewards have been all but wiped out they no longer provide a path to the Advanced level and so are essentially pointless. The difficultly on Advanced level has been cranked up way too high, so that only team that spend every waking moment trying to squeeze the last 0.001 DPS out of a build have a realisitic chance of succesfully completing the STF. The problem is those DPS squeezers are real hardcore gamers, and it's mainly the real hardcore gamers that will have been doing the beta testing of DR on tribble which results in the new Advance level being way too hard for the majority of the player base making Advance level STF's pointless.
Normal STF's - pointless
Advanced STF's - pointless
End Game content - none existant.
If the devs want to add a new level of insanely hard queues with greater rewards that is fine, but make the old missions like they were. STO isn't fun anymore and if it doesn't get fun again we are going to hemmorrhage a lot of old players and lose the chance to get new players.
Don't believe the lies in this forum. I am NOT an ARC user. I play STO on Steam or not at all.
Those same hardcore players were actually here trying to tell both other players and cryptic about advanced. They provided numbers, parses, etc. Very few listened. Even in the face of those parses people did not believe them just kept sayin BS stuff along the lines of dev promised it would be like old elites i have faith in them.
I'm not having a go at the people that did the testing, but the people who were looking at the results.
The people that did the testing are an abnormal group, not in negative sense but they are just not anyway near the norm, if you take a bell curve and look at the upper extremes those are the player testers. The devs, QA etc will be looking at their metrics etc to decide if the content is good enough to be released not logs and parses of players. The results of testing are based on a heavily skewed sample, which is always going to be a problem when the sample is self selecting.
Short answer, YES, yes, yes, a thousand times yes, advanced STFs need rebalanced.