I just tried Crystalline Catastrophe Advanced PuG and honestly I saw no difference other then people not sitting inside the entity when it channels. (Fine by me cause I always ran out not trusting that trick.) We blasted through it pretty quickly and the rewards are still pretty decent for what was there. I can't complain honestly.
But even your goofball builds (I've read a few) still have a dedicated purpose and all your experience at using it. When I mean Wheeee players, I don't know about you but I'd never played an MMO before STO, and so I built my ship according to what I'd seen on the show not any minmax theory. Weapons were selected to match cannon as close as I could Emergency Power To X powers were for emergencies, carried all three -Team skills because Jean-Luc Picard had all three at his disposal, ran Aceton Field 3 in my Cmdr slot because A2SIF3 was redundant with ET and Boarding Party 3 seemed like a Zapp Brannigan tactic, and all my power settings at 50 because a proper flagship should be a well-balanced machine.
I had no clue what I was doing, but I was enjoying myself anyways because I was the Captain Elizabeth Shaw of the Federation Starship Callisto *adjusts shirt* and the nemesis of B'Vat and Kar'Ukan and thats all that mattered. And when I started doing STFs against the dreaded Borg it was a squeeze in Normal and for Elite I had to learn things like changing power settings and 'you can use two copies of the same power???' and dropping two of my torpedoes for more beam arrays. I wasn't gonna take on a Cube by myself but I could handle Kang duty or probes on a side of KASE and at least let the more experienced players focus on teardown. If you took that same supergreen player from 3 years ago (and everyone is that green at some point) and dropped them in the game today, they wouldn't really have that ignorance-is-bliss enjoyment phase, but instead will get their aft shot off unless they hit fleet chats and wikis and forums straight in short order and become a Gamer about it.
You pride yourself on odd layouts and laid back piloting, and I'm pretty much intentionally lazy in my own piloting style (keybinds? hotkeys? too much work), but we are both a HELL of a lot more knowledgeable than a truly casual player. For an actual casual, with no knowledge no gaming experience just a love of some cheesy old TV shows, STO as it is today is not particularly welcoming to them; they're expected to either become Gamers or to get lost, and personally I'm sorry to see that change.
I still don't change power settings. I still take way too wide arcs on things. I still have torps on all my builds outside of specific all energy test builds looking at something particular.
It's a trip if I do a search for my posts, sorting by ascending on the date and searching for "fore" to find the way I used to list builds...and well, it's along the same lines as what I run.
It's part of the reason that I didn't break 10k in ISE before DR. It kind of irritates me that I got 22k in ISA off a build I was testing some tanking stuff on...meh, it was a WTF kind of thing. Hell, it was like when I first hit up an ISA on Dec 30th, cause I hadn't wanted to run it because I didn't think my build was ready for it - but enough folks had said it had been nerfed into the ground that I went ahead and did...and got irked by doing 17k. Cause I'm still doing the same kinds of builds that I was running back in 2012...what's changed is having VR14 instead of VR12, broken things like Enhanced Armor Penetration, etc, etc, etc.
Yes, there is definite min/maxing of a sort going on with my builds, I like to play a certain way - I'm not a DPS guy, I like stuff shooting at me instead of other players, I like having to charge in there to do some suicidal crowd control, and well - that stuff, so I tend to build for survival first. There's also going to be the PvP background bit going on, where it was that survival stuff and playing more of a support role there - so that's what I've done in PvE. I didn't switch builds from one to the other. Most of my builds (outside of testing specific things) are still running [Acc]x2 or [Acc]x3 weapons.
I try not to let what I know get in the way of having fun most of the time. Yesterday I hit up an ISA in a Fleet Nebula with both 3pc Borg sets...cause it looked cool. When I hop from the Benthan to the Apex, I don't change how I fly...and the Apex turns like it's waiting for the Universe to move around it. I'll get back to the fighting eventually...er...eventually, just how wide is this turning radius? Wheeeee! And that's what I mean by wheeee...I'm just doing my thing.
I try to make sure I'm meeting the content's requirements, and then it's whatever goofy thing comes to mind. I spend most of my time off in non-group content doing things that aren't optimal in the least. Cause it's just a game. And imho, there's just so much powercreep that it's allowing for even goofier things to do while still meeting the content's requirements.
When it comes to "knowledge", I think part of what you mentioned there with the Subsystem Power (not the switching, but just setting them in the first place) as well as the combination of positioning and range penalty would take a lot of folks from where they are to places they couldn't imagine without making any other changes.
1) Each point of Weapon Subsystem Power is 2% pre-damage resistance final damage. Somebody firing at an average of 50 Weapon Power is doing 100% of their damage, somebody firing at an average of 100 Weapon Power is doing 200% of their damage.
2) Somebody sitting just inside 5km with beams is doing ~84% of their damage. Somebody sitting just inside 10km with beams is doing ~64% of their damage. For Cannons that's ~72.5% and ~40% of their damage.
3) If you're sitting in the middle of nowhere and not shooting at anything with a bit of a distance to fly before you've got something to shoot at...you're not doing any damage. So watching videos for how the flow of a run might go or watching what folks are doing around you so you can try to better position yourself or follow that invisible path (variable) through the instance, is going to affect damage.
Cause regardless of what they're running (as long as they're running Energy, mind you); those three things can make a major difference.
Say we go with a completely random number of 10,000 (not completely random, but random easy).
50 Weapon Power, just inside 10km, with half the time spent doing nothing:
10,000 * 1 * 0.64 * 0.5 = 3,200
100 Weapon Power, just inside 5km, with about 10% time spent doing nothing:
10,000 * 2 * 0.84 * 0.9 = 15,120
3,200 vs. 15,120...because of setting Weapon Power and doing some stuff to keep it within a certain range, trying to stay within 5km of targets more than staying within 9km, and having a path of some sort planned out (while also adjusting based on what others are doing)...
Say it was 5,000? 1,600 vs. 7,560
Say it was 20,000? 6,400 vs. 30,240
Those simple, imho, things can just kill what folks otherwise might be doing.
Then yeah, beyond that, you get into doing all the other stuff - paying better attention to activations, what durations will mean in the run, when to trigger stuff - getting into potential better gearing selections...and all the rest. It's an ongoing learning process, no doubt. But it's why I say you could drop me in one of those DPS League guy's builds and have me run with them...and it would be pretty lol just how poorly I did. Cause I'm just kind of going wheeee...
I'm not perfect by any means on my Weapon Power, my range, my positioning - those were just examples above; and I know that it adversely affects what I'm doing to fly like I do...but at the same time, they've added so much powercreep - well, it's allowed me to fly worse and worse while still performing better.
And I'm rambling away here...gee, that VD guy likes talking about himself...but I'm really just trying to get it across that I just fly for fun. Sure, maybe I've forgotten more about some of the mechanics than some folks will ever know; but I'm not really hung up on that knowledge unless I come across a bug, I'm testing something, or somebody asks a question and I'm bored enough to go look.
I'm just that goofball that's flying around having fun...being all non-optimal, inefficient, and generally looking bad. But my ships tend to have all sorts of cool glowy FX, make the trippiest sounds, and well...yeah...like VM, I used to use VM all the time - didn't care that in many cases it wasn't doing anything, I'd even VM torps. Cause it just sounds so freaking cool!
I've been and will continue to be an advocate of trying to meet content requirements and then just having a blast doing whatever from that point. There are plenty of advocates out there for high DPS and fast runs. I'm not one of them. Everybody shows up for an ISA doing 4-6k DPS? Awesome, let's see what we can do with that! 3-4 folks show up doing 1-2k DPS...and well...it's irritating. And to be honest, I've said it before and I'll say it again - and - I guess it could have been a 4th thing up there, but just having some fundamental knowledge of the instance, eh? Cause almost all of the ISA fails I've seen were not from a lack of DPS by any means...it was folks off chasing butterflies. You're there at the Trans, somebody drops a Gen too early for the group? No worries, right? If we just pop the other Gens and take out the Trans...we're good! Where is everybody? Everybody grabbed their own Sphere and decided to chase them all over the map. I'm...I'm...I'm not a DPS guy - I can't carry a group doing that! So yeah...it fails. No reason it should have though, cause the group had more than enough combined DPS for it not to be an issue.
And yeah, I think that's enough babbling from me for a bit...
edit: I remembered a 5th thing...which is kind of more important right now with all the lag going on and UI delays. If you've been playing for hours because it's the weekend, bouncing around between different toons and stuff, it can help to restart the client before tackling any runs or the like. Cause, imho, STO definitely has a memory leak issue over a period of time like that - not releasing resources and the rest - where it can get brutal.
Heh, no doubt my Breen set 'n regular T5 APU would have sucked in that ISA regardless for DPS, but there's no way it should have died like it did...sitting there for a day trying to get heals to go off. :P
The APU looks pretty cool with the Breen set, btw.
I don't want to be mean or something but dps channels used to beat cca in less than a minute.. Guess that made them mad to increase difficulty from advanced to elite and keep old rewards..
At least change the naming of [Advanced] to [Elite]...
For an actual casual, with no knowledge no gaming experience just a love of some cheesy old TV shows, STO as it is today is not particularly welcoming to them; they're expected to either become Gamers or to get lost, and personally I'm sorry to see that change.
An actual casual player should never even entertain the thought of entering an Elite queue. Everything except Battle of Korfez has a Normal mode.
I don't want to be mean or something but dps channels used to beat cca in less than a minute.. Guess that made them mad to increase difficulty from advanced to elite and keep old rewards..
At least change the naming of [Advanced] to [Elite]...
I've been in PUGs that did it in under a minute... Most are around two minutes, and almost never over 3 so IDK what the OP is talking about.
I still remember during launch, people just mined the spawn point ofthe Entity and it would insta-die LOL! THAT was broken!
Just wait 'til they make the 5 minutes not 'optional.'
Give it 2 weeks.
They are taking aim at each mission that can be pugged over 50% of the time and therefore get the most successes and materials.
They will pick them off one by one, maybe leaving ISA for some reason - for old time's sake.
Maybe it will then be a single player game (fine with me). Or a premade friends only game.
Will that make enough money to survive? We'll see.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Comments
I still don't change power settings. I still take way too wide arcs on things. I still have torps on all my builds outside of specific all energy test builds looking at something particular.
It's a trip if I do a search for my posts, sorting by ascending on the date and searching for "fore" to find the way I used to list builds...and well, it's along the same lines as what I run.
It's part of the reason that I didn't break 10k in ISE before DR. It kind of irritates me that I got 22k in ISA off a build I was testing some tanking stuff on...meh, it was a WTF kind of thing. Hell, it was like when I first hit up an ISA on Dec 30th, cause I hadn't wanted to run it because I didn't think my build was ready for it - but enough folks had said it had been nerfed into the ground that I went ahead and did...and got irked by doing 17k. Cause I'm still doing the same kinds of builds that I was running back in 2012...what's changed is having VR14 instead of VR12, broken things like Enhanced Armor Penetration, etc, etc, etc.
Yes, there is definite min/maxing of a sort going on with my builds, I like to play a certain way - I'm not a DPS guy, I like stuff shooting at me instead of other players, I like having to charge in there to do some suicidal crowd control, and well - that stuff, so I tend to build for survival first. There's also going to be the PvP background bit going on, where it was that survival stuff and playing more of a support role there - so that's what I've done in PvE. I didn't switch builds from one to the other. Most of my builds (outside of testing specific things) are still running [Acc]x2 or [Acc]x3 weapons.
I try not to let what I know get in the way of having fun most of the time. Yesterday I hit up an ISA in a Fleet Nebula with both 3pc Borg sets...cause it looked cool. When I hop from the Benthan to the Apex, I don't change how I fly...and the Apex turns like it's waiting for the Universe to move around it. I'll get back to the fighting eventually...er...eventually, just how wide is this turning radius? Wheeeee! And that's what I mean by wheeee...I'm just doing my thing.
I try to make sure I'm meeting the content's requirements, and then it's whatever goofy thing comes to mind. I spend most of my time off in non-group content doing things that aren't optimal in the least. Cause it's just a game. And imho, there's just so much powercreep that it's allowing for even goofier things to do while still meeting the content's requirements.
When it comes to "knowledge", I think part of what you mentioned there with the Subsystem Power (not the switching, but just setting them in the first place) as well as the combination of positioning and range penalty would take a lot of folks from where they are to places they couldn't imagine without making any other changes.
1) Each point of Weapon Subsystem Power is 2% pre-damage resistance final damage. Somebody firing at an average of 50 Weapon Power is doing 100% of their damage, somebody firing at an average of 100 Weapon Power is doing 200% of their damage.
2) Somebody sitting just inside 5km with beams is doing ~84% of their damage. Somebody sitting just inside 10km with beams is doing ~64% of their damage. For Cannons that's ~72.5% and ~40% of their damage.
3) If you're sitting in the middle of nowhere and not shooting at anything with a bit of a distance to fly before you've got something to shoot at...you're not doing any damage. So watching videos for how the flow of a run might go or watching what folks are doing around you so you can try to better position yourself or follow that invisible path (variable) through the instance, is going to affect damage.
Cause regardless of what they're running (as long as they're running Energy, mind you); those three things can make a major difference.
Say we go with a completely random number of 10,000 (not completely random, but random easy).
50 Weapon Power, just inside 10km, with half the time spent doing nothing:
10,000 * 1 * 0.64 * 0.5 = 3,200
100 Weapon Power, just inside 5km, with about 10% time spent doing nothing:
10,000 * 2 * 0.84 * 0.9 = 15,120
3,200 vs. 15,120...because of setting Weapon Power and doing some stuff to keep it within a certain range, trying to stay within 5km of targets more than staying within 9km, and having a path of some sort planned out (while also adjusting based on what others are doing)...
Say it was 5,000? 1,600 vs. 7,560
Say it was 20,000? 6,400 vs. 30,240
Those simple, imho, things can just kill what folks otherwise might be doing.
Then yeah, beyond that, you get into doing all the other stuff - paying better attention to activations, what durations will mean in the run, when to trigger stuff - getting into potential better gearing selections...and all the rest. It's an ongoing learning process, no doubt. But it's why I say you could drop me in one of those DPS League guy's builds and have me run with them...and it would be pretty lol just how poorly I did. Cause I'm just kind of going wheeee...
I'm not perfect by any means on my Weapon Power, my range, my positioning - those were just examples above; and I know that it adversely affects what I'm doing to fly like I do...but at the same time, they've added so much powercreep - well, it's allowed me to fly worse and worse while still performing better.
And I'm rambling away here...gee, that VD guy likes talking about himself...but I'm really just trying to get it across that I just fly for fun. Sure, maybe I've forgotten more about some of the mechanics than some folks will ever know; but I'm not really hung up on that knowledge unless I come across a bug, I'm testing something, or somebody asks a question and I'm bored enough to go look.
I'm just that goofball that's flying around having fun...being all non-optimal, inefficient, and generally looking bad. But my ships tend to have all sorts of cool glowy FX, make the trippiest sounds, and well...yeah...like VM, I used to use VM all the time - didn't care that in many cases it wasn't doing anything, I'd even VM torps. Cause it just sounds so freaking cool!
I've been and will continue to be an advocate of trying to meet content requirements and then just having a blast doing whatever from that point. There are plenty of advocates out there for high DPS and fast runs. I'm not one of them. Everybody shows up for an ISA doing 4-6k DPS? Awesome, let's see what we can do with that! 3-4 folks show up doing 1-2k DPS...and well...it's irritating. And to be honest, I've said it before and I'll say it again - and - I guess it could have been a 4th thing up there, but just having some fundamental knowledge of the instance, eh? Cause almost all of the ISA fails I've seen were not from a lack of DPS by any means...it was folks off chasing butterflies. You're there at the Trans, somebody drops a Gen too early for the group? No worries, right? If we just pop the other Gens and take out the Trans...we're good! Where is everybody? Everybody grabbed their own Sphere and decided to chase them all over the map. I'm...I'm...I'm not a DPS guy - I can't carry a group doing that! So yeah...it fails. No reason it should have though, cause the group had more than enough combined DPS for it not to be an issue.
And yeah, I think that's enough babbling from me for a bit...
edit: I remembered a 5th thing...which is kind of more important right now with all the lag going on and UI delays. If you've been playing for hours because it's the weekend, bouncing around between different toons and stuff, it can help to restart the client before tackling any runs or the like. Cause, imho, STO definitely has a memory leak issue over a period of time like that - not releasing resources and the rest - where it can get brutal.
Heh, no doubt my Breen set 'n regular T5 APU would have sucked in that ISA regardless for DPS, but there's no way it should have died like it did...sitting there for a day trying to get heals to go off. :P
The APU looks pretty cool with the Breen set, btw.
Just open up your wallet please !
At least change the naming of [Advanced] to [Elite]...
Normal rewards neither special rep currencies nor very rare crafting mats.
I still remember during launch, people just mined the spawn point ofthe Entity and it would insta-die LOL! THAT was broken!
Unless you've played through Delta rep with the (false) idea you could actually make use of the reputation.
Give it 2 weeks.
They are taking aim at each mission that can be pugged over 50% of the time and therefore get the most successes and materials.
They will pick them off one by one, maybe leaving ISA for some reason - for old time's sake.
Maybe it will then be a single player game (fine with me). Or a premade friends only game.
Will that make enough money to survive? We'll see.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."