As opposed to the current state of BDA, in which everything is optional and you will get the rewards just by waiting out the timers without doing anything. Great example.
I would much rather have put an unlock condition on it (easy enough to have a solo version of the mission with only one position enabled) so the "crickets" would be stuck in Normal where they belong.
Any content that demands the cooperation of 5 random players to complete a series of "checkpoints", is opening the door to frustration.
If you want some kinda "team only; Elites only" content, maybe you should ask for new content for private ques?
As opposed to the current state of BDA, in which everything is optional and you will get the rewards just by waiting out the timers without doing anything. Great example.
I would much rather have put an unlock condition on it (easy enough to have a solo version of the mission with only one position enabled) so the "crickets" would be stuck in Normal where they belong.
Any content that demands the cooperation of 5 random players to complete a series of "checkpoints", is opening the door to frustration.
If you want some kinda "team only; Elites only" content, maybe you should ask for new content for private ques?
Silly me, thinking Advanced content is supposed to be for Advanced players.
Low is the standard by which waiting out a timer is Advanced.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
And tbh, if someone has taken that much time to bring 30 toons to level 50, I don't think it's our business to tell them how they should use their characters.
After all it is Cryptic that allows for up to 48 toons (i think) per account, with no dil refinement limits.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
I'd leave the advanced ones alone and make elite queues.
Make a CCE queue where the entity can't sustain any damage at all during the massive aoe death charge. In fact all attacks against it at that time should be absorbed and converted into hit points. It should also regenerate hit points during this phase. The aoe blast should insta kill all ships within 10km. It's basic beam attacks should do more damage. The speed of the shards should be increased so that you can't run from them at normal speeds.
Make ISE where you either buff the borg or dump more borg into the map. Change the opening cube into a tactical cube surrounded by regular borg cubes. Once that portion is done have more borg ships spawn from the gateway at several timed intervals growing in number every time rather then when the nodes are destroyed. A buffed Unimatrix ship at the end instead of a tactical cube. Perhaps surrounded by 2 dozen sphere's or some cubes. All you need is more npc damage then can be curb stomped by massive aoe damage.
Problem with this would be that below average players would want in on this and would whine about being unable to complete said missions.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
If Cryptic doesn't seem to have an issue with players having up to 48 characters then I can't see one myself.
And who are we to say how they should play ?
[...]
And tbh, if someone has taken that much time to bring 30 toons to level 50, I don't think it's our business to tell them how they should use their characters.
[...]
I do believe a game where some players don't even spawn before the mission is over is depriving those players with slightly longer loading times of a lot of fun, and that is indeed a lot worse than some people not having their kind of "instant reward and parsing" fun.
If these "1 min ISA's" happened every time then I might agree with you.
But I just described an ISA adv I did the other day, it took 10-15mins and we failed the optional.
And judging from the PUGs I've been doing lately the average player is far from a DPS hero.
People over estimate how many players are actually good in this game and can carry an isa by themselves.
We can talk about difficulty and level restructuring once we have an ISA Elite. Until then I disagree with any changes.
I'd leave the advanced ones alone and make elite queues.
Make a CCE queue where the entity can't sustain any damage at all during the massive aoe death charge. In fact all attacks against it at that time should be absorbed and converted into hit points. It should also regenerate hit points during this phase. The aoe blast should insta kill all ships within 10km. It's basic beam attacks should do more damage. The speed of the shards should be increased so that you can't run from them at normal speeds.
Make ISE where you either buff the borg or dump more borg into the map. Change the opening cube into a tactical cube surrounded by regular borg cubes. Once that portion is done have more borg ships spawn from the gateway at several timed intervals growing in number every time rather then when the nodes are destroyed. A buffed Unimatrix ship at the end instead of a tactical cube. Perhaps surrounded by 2 dozen sphere's or some cubes. All you need is more npc damage then can be curb stomped by massive aoe damage.
Problem with this would be that below average players would want in on this and would whine about being unable to complete said missions.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
In other words, you don't actually have any "much more profitable methods."
1. Constantly cycling Tactical, Engineering, Science Team.
2. Constantly cycling Emergency Power to __ abilities.
3. Artificially increase Bonus Defense to all NPCs, especially small fighters, escorts, raiders. This necessitates the need for Acc mods for weapons usage. Non [Acc] weapons should be missing the small, fast targets.
4. NPCs using repair abilities here and there. Hazard Emitters on constant rotation clearing Player Hazards. Some of these repair abilities also grant resists, i.e. ASIF and HE.
5. Cycle Polarize Hull for immunity to Tractor Beam, Tractor Beam Repulsors. Polarize Hull also increases resists dramatically.
6. Science Vessel or "Boss" units occasionally using Subnucleonic Beam to strip away player buffs or more usage of Subnucleonic Carrier Wave.
Edit: 7. Have Science Vessel NPC units use player powerful "Mega Gravity Wells" and a few seconds later, fire Scramble Sensors at the mass of players. Most players don't know how to get out of CC these days, nor sensors based attacks like Scramble Sensors. DO IT CRYPTIC. DO IT.
Point 1 alone will severely reign in damage output because Tactical Team clears away Attack Pattern Beta, Delta resist debuffs. This is the reason why Attack Pattern Beta was a joke in PVP while Attack Pattern Omega was held in very high regard. APO doesn't do a debuff on the target that can be cleared. APO simply magnified the damage you did as well as many other useful things. Have Tac Team cycling on NPCs and I promise you, Player Damage Output in PVE will be SEVERELY impaired unless you got buff stripper help.
All this is just tip of the iceberg stuff. You old PVP'ers out there know what the game could really do to players if Cryptic had the balls for it. And I throw that challenge down to Cryptic to do it.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
In other words, you don't actually have any "much more profitable methods."
1. Constantly cycling Tactical, Engineering, Science Team.
2. Constantly cycling Emergency Power to __ abilities.
3. Artificially increase Bonus Defense to all NPCs, especially small fighters, escorts, raiders. This necessitates the need for Acc mods for weapons usage. Non [Acc] weapons should be missing the small, fast targets.
4. NPCs using repair abilities here and there. Hazard Emitters on constant rotation clearing Player Hazards. Some of these repair abilities also grant resists, i.e. ASIF and HE.
5. Cycle Polarize Hull for immunity to Tractor Beam, Tractor Beam Repulsors. Polarize Hull also increases resists dramatically.
6. Science Vessel or "Boss" units occasionally using Subnucleonic Beam to strip away player buffs or more usage of Subnucleonic Carrier Wave.
Point 1 alone will severely reign in damage output because Tactical Team clears away Attack Pattern Beta, Delta resist debuffs. This is the reason why Attack Pattern Beta was a joke in PVP while Attack Pattern Omega was held in very high regard. APO doesn't do a debuff on the target that can be cleared. APO simply magnified the damage you did as well as many other useful things. Have Tac Team cycling on NPCs and I promise you, Player Damage Output in PVE will be SEVERELY impaired unless you got buff stripper help.
All this is just tip of the iceberg stuff. You old PVP'ers out there know what the game could really do to players if Cryptic had the balls for it. And I throw that challenge down to Cryptic to do it.
I like this as well... I always wondered why NPC's didn't have some kind of simple rotation of powers they could use. Is it really that hard to put TT, EPTS, EPTW, ST, ET, A2S, ...etc and then just tell the npc to spam them? I'd also personally prefer fewer enemies, but ones with lots of powers to make ship to ship combat more challenging. Instead we just have two dozen npc meat bags with 1 or 2 abilities that die pretty easily.
So we've gone from ISA being a joke because its to easy, to it rewarding to well for the time it takes.
Sounds like a spite thread to me.
Taylor1701d has mentioned these runs are not the norm and as someone who plays this map daily in pugs runs I totally agree with his assessment the time it takes to complete an ISA depends upon the strength of the team.
ISA and CCA are casual friendly stfs. STO has many casual players that pop in only have time for some quick play before popping back out.
Again ask for Elite maps or go play one of the other STF's STO offers leave ISA and CCA be
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
1. Constantly cycling Tactical, Engineering, Science Team.
2. Constantly cycling Emergency Power to __ abilities.
3. Artificially increase Bonus Defense to all NPCs, especially small fighters, escorts, raiders. This necessitates the need for Acc mods for weapons usage. Non [Acc] weapons should be missing the small, fast targets.
4. NPCs using repair abilities here and there. Hazard Emitters on constant rotation clearing Player Hazards. Some of these repair abilities also grant resists, i.e. ASIF and HE.
5. Cycle Polarize Hull for immunity to Tractor Beam, Tractor Beam Repulsors. Polarize Hull also increases resists dramatically.
6. Science Vessel or "Boss" units occasionally using Subnucleonic Beam to strip away player buffs or more usage of Subnucleonic Carrier Wave.
Point 1 alone will severely reign in damage output because Tactical Team clears away Attack Pattern Beta, Delta resist debuffs. This is the reason why Attack Pattern Beta was a joke in PVP while Attack Pattern Omega was held in very high regard. APO doesn't do a debuff on the target that can be cleared. APO simply magnified the damage you did as well as many other useful things. Have Tac Team cycling on NPCs and I promise you, Player Damage Output in PVE will be SEVERELY impaired unless you got buff stripper help.
All this is just tip of the iceberg stuff. You old PVP'ers out there know what the game could really do to players if Cryptic had the balls for it. And I throw that challenge down to Cryptic to do it.
Quoted for truth.
"So my fun is wrong?"
No. Your fun makes everyone else's fun wrong by default.
So we've gone from ISA being a joke because its to easy, to it rewarding to well for the time it takes.
Sounds like a spite thread to me.
Taylor1701d has mentioned these runs are not the norm and as someone who plays this map daily in pugs runs I totally agree with his assessment the time it takes to complete an ISA depends upon the strength of the team.
ISA and CCA are casual friendly stfs. STO has many casual players that pop in only have time for some quick play before popping back out.
Again ask for Elite maps or go play one of the other STF's STO offers leave ISA and CCA be
I also agree that Elites are wanted/needed/would be nice.
"So my fun is wrong?"
No. Your fun makes everyone else's fun wrong by default.
Interesting proposals, but with a balance patch on the horizon it may be a bit premature.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
If you are going to revamp Queues, get rid of stupid, illogical, non-'real world' objectives. And by 'stupid...' objectives, I mean objectives you'd NEVER get from your superiors in a 'real life' (if fictional) encounter.
Examples, if the Transformer is healed at all you blew the objective. That is a gimicky objective. Same with, you need to take the three Dreadnoughts down within a minute of each other. Gimicky and not logical from a military perspective. Think harder for objectives that really mean something militarily.
Dopey mechanics are just that - dopey.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
If you are going to revamp Queues, get rid of stupid, illogical, non-'real world' objectives. And by 'stupid...' objectives, I mean objectives you'd NEVER get from your superiors in a 'real life' (if fictional) encounter.
Examples, if the Transformer is healed at all you blew the objective. That is a gimicky objective. Same with, you need to take the three Dreadnoughts down within a minute of each other. Gimicky and not logical from a military perspective. Think harder for objectives that really mean something militarily.
Dopey mechanics are just that - dopey.
As mandatory mission objectives i would agree with you on that, but those are not mandatory objectives, but instead are optionals that give additional rewards (whether the bonus is worth it or not is another fact to talk about). So in a way they do make sense as things the group would strive for, and if succeeded would be beneficial to the the mission, but not actually part of the mission completion.
Interesting proposals, but with a balance patch on the horizon it may be a bit premature.
You know as well as I do that after a brief "feeling things out" period with the changes, we will be back to 110% levels of OPness. This isn't the first time the game drastically changed as it's happened multiple times already.
Things won't change much. We will will get back to ISA in 3 minutes, CCA in 30 seconds, etc. The NPCs have always been dumb and worthless. Nothing more than damage sponges made tougher by timed objectives. Even that isn't enough against players.
===
Anyways, I am completely down for Cryptic to make NPCs do far more actions that make them dangerous. I want them to do things that, "Hey, maybe going completely all in for offense won't be good for me with all these debuffs / sensor attacks / CC / Hazards coming my way."
Or maybe all those enemy actions give value to buff stripping and "healboats."
I don't think that will happen though, we'll just keep walking over stuff with no effort.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
In other words, you don't actually have any "much more profitable methods."
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
In other words, you don't actually have any "much more profitable methods."
You've hit cap - Hooray !
Its even easier for KDF.
My statement stands.
Your statement trips and falls on it's face on the lockbox dil claims which can hardly be called profitable.
Also, you didn't count the travel time between all those locations.
5000 dil for 1 min of work (and 1 min of travel time) is not profitable ?
Weird statement.
And yeah, its so hard to transwarp to DS9 right ?
Anyway, fair enough, add 1min travel time (there and back) if it makes you feel better. I'd be still way ahead of this hair brained idea that ISA is somehow farmable and at risk of being exploited by nefarious players with 30+ alts.
But okay, if you really think grinding 30 toons to level 50 just so you can play ISA back to back- 7 to 8 times per toon per day is a more efficient method and good return on time invested, so be it.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
In other words, you don't actually have any "much more profitable methods."
Some random thoughts:
1. Stuff being locked to newbie toons is not the same as stuff being locked to newbie players. As such, the level limit for queues matters little beyond a very arbitrary, non-factual lower limit on theoretical ship power.
2. Either this game has an utterly amazing new player rate (you know, one that should have the entire industry talking on a level it actually gets mainstream news coverage), or, presumably what is actually the case (because nobody talks about it), it has a downright shocking rate of players with no intent to ever make it past newbie skill. Kind of TRIBBLE design to not gate these from A/E queues at all. (And then design many A, bot for some inexplicable reason not all, queues down to never fail despite of it.)
3. What pseudo-gating there is is fairly stupid. Take BDA's optional goals. Failing them doesn't actually punish players to bloody stupid and/or lazy to figure out what they're supposed to do, it punishes people who do try despite a TRIBBLE team. A far more elegant solution would be to give a bonus for each ship disconnected to every player fighting near that node; this'd reward intelligent tank/disconnector teamplay while not rewarding stupid all barrels blazing play. (At least that's what I guess lets 3 people covering one node fail to score disconnects. All it'd take is for any one of them to occasionally help a blue ship before aggroing another red one. Apparently figuring that out is tantamount to rocket science?) Of course, elegant would be harder to implement than stupid...
4. CCA is a bloody joke. You know a piece of content is total epic fail when somebody who's barely more than a newbie tells a budding fleet to run it daily for the 'free' fleet marks. Seriously. It's possible to carry a team to still complete the under 5 mins optional goal if the second best build (by dps, according to the in-game info) is a pretty pointless rainbow disruptor beam boat. That's not 'advanced' by any sane standard, and no, 'we wantz free marks' is not a valid argument for sticking by it. Seriously. If you want to give people 135 free marks a day, just bloody give everyone 135 free marks on login. Problem solved. Then go make CCA 'advanced' in some way. Or at least pretend you give a damn by making the optional goal 'under 90 seconds'...
5. No, the overall space revamp is not going to fix CCA unless it completely breaks everything else. That's simply not possible. In order to nerf damage hard enough on high-end dps builds for CCA to run any risk of going past 5 minutes, they'd have to nerf things so hard regular space missions become unplayable for most everyone else.
6. ISA isn't quite as bad as CCA. If the designers actually figured out how to make CCA legitimately A, odds are they'll manage for ISA - and any other queue- too.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
If Cryptic doesn't seem to have an issue with players having up to 48 characters then I can't see one myself.
And who are we to say how they should play ?
Doesn't take long on an xp weekend, though I personally wouldn't do it, I'm fine with my 7, only 3 of them really get play time anyway.
If you have 30 toons (as I've seen some claim to have) and a 30 minute cooldown, a 60 second match (including load times) would work out rather nicely.
I'll also add that ISA has a 30 min cooldown, so you can't even farm it in a conventional way.
With a 30 min cooldown and 1 minute completion time, what are players doing for half an hour? Do people just log out for 29 min? Or is the issue people only play for 1 or 2 minutes a day? Is that something you can fix by forcing players to play "the correct way" by extending the duration to 15 minutes, or nerfing the rewards?
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
According to the wiki ISA gives 1,803 dil ore per run (if all the marks and BNP are converted, no daily bonus). If it takes less than 2 min that's over 900 dil/minute. Other than CCA, I'd like to know what the "much more profitable methods" are.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
If Cryptic doesn't seem to have an issue with players having up to 48 characters then I can't see one myself.
And who are we to say how they should play ?
Doesn't take long on an xp weekend, though I personally wouldn't do it, I'm fine with my 7, only 3 of them really get play time anyway.
Eh, I dunno Mark, last XP weekend I brought 6 of my KDF and KDF/Rom captains to level 20 so I could claim all the AoY/Delta rewards.
It was a pretty nasty grind imho, reminded me of grinding Delta or AoY. And I only brought them to level 20. No where near 50.
So, I doubt anyone is out there exploiting XP weekend, making an army of ISA alts...
I would hope not at least, because that would be going fullblown potato.
Fair enough, take out VIP claims.
We can even take out Admiralty since that is also level 50 restricted.
We're left with contraband, and general doffing (@level 10). That'll net you anywhere between 3500-6000 dil per day if done properly.
Which is still a lot more time efficient then running 4-5 ISA's on 15+ toons.
3. What pseudo-gating there is is fairly stupid. Take BDA's optional goals. Failing them doesn't actually punish players to bloody stupid and/or lazy to figure out what they're supposed to do, it punishes people who do try despite a **** team. A far more elegant solution would be to give a bonus for each ship disconnected to every player fighting near that node; this'd reward intelligent tank/disconnector teamplay while not rewarding stupid all barrels blazing play. (At least that's what I guess lets 3 people covering one node fail to score disconnects. All it'd take is for any one of them to occasionally help a blue ship before aggroing another red one. Apparently figuring that out is tantamount to rocket science?) Of course, elegant would be harder to implement than stupid...
That's what you get when the only required objective in the entire mission is waiting out the timers.
If anything, BDA is the biggest joke in the queue lineup. Speeding through through ISA or CCA may be easy but at least you need to do something. In BDA a team could basically zone in, mass suicide themselves at the borg to avoid the AFK penalty then spend the rest of the mission looking at the respawn prompt...and win. This they call Advanced.
Scaling handicaps per character for exceeding expected performance with the idea to push people to content more their level. I suspect such an idea would be too labor intensive to go back and add to the content we already have, but I think it would be an interesting fix.
As a half-baked example, a % damage reflection.
Do expected or less dps in a Normal whatever? no change.
Do 20% more dps then expected in a Normal? Get an achievement and now whenever you do that particular Normal queue the boss reflects 20% of your damage back to you.
Do 100% more dps then expected in a Normal? Get another achievement and now you get 100% damage back at you.
Do 1000% more dps then expected in a Normal? have another achievement and now you get back 1000% of the damage you do!
With another set of separate achievements for Advanced and yet another for Elite. A character may be seeing a 100% reflect in this particular normal, but only have unlocked the 20% in the Advanced version and having not played an Elite yet would see no reflection in his or her first Elite.
Something like this would hopefully push players to play content they have not already mastered.
Interesting proposals, but with a balance patch on the horizon it may be a bit premature.
You know as well as I do that after a brief "feeling things out" period with the changes, we will be back to 110% levels of OPness. This isn't the first time the game drastically changed as it's happened multiple times already.
True, but the effectiveness of any proposed change depends on how the balance patch influences individual powers and thus any proposal at this time is premature.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Comments
If you want some kinda "team only; Elites only" content, maybe you should ask for new content for private ques?
Low is the standard by which waiting out a timer is Advanced.
Ah, but ISA is locked to newb toons. You can only play it at level 50 and above.
You also can't go in expecting every run to take less then 2mins (unless you're doing 75k+ DPS and can carry a bad group of pugs) on all 30 toons !
For those 2 reasons alone, it is a very poor farming choice. And they have much more profitable methods at their disposal.
And tbh, if someone has taken that much time to bring 30 toons to level 50, I don't think it's our business to tell them how they should use their characters.
After all it is Cryptic that allows for up to 48 toons (i think) per account, with no dil refinement limits.
Make a CCE queue where the entity can't sustain any damage at all during the massive aoe death charge. In fact all attacks against it at that time should be absorbed and converted into hit points. It should also regenerate hit points during this phase. The aoe blast should insta kill all ships within 10km. It's basic beam attacks should do more damage. The speed of the shards should be increased so that you can't run from them at normal speeds.
Make ISE where you either buff the borg or dump more borg into the map. Change the opening cube into a tactical cube surrounded by regular borg cubes. Once that portion is done have more borg ships spawn from the gateway at several timed intervals growing in number every time rather then when the nodes are destroyed. A buffed Unimatrix ship at the end instead of a tactical cube. Perhaps surrounded by 2 dozen sphere's or some cubes. All you need is more npc damage then can be curb stomped by massive aoe damage.
Problem with this would be that below average players would want in on this and would whine about being unable to complete said missions.
Ah but you seem to leave out the part where you have to grind 30 toons to level 50 in order to even begin doing as you say.
So my statement stands, grinding ISA is an inefficient method to farm Dil.
If Cryptic doesn't seem to have an issue with players having up to 48 characters then I can't see one myself.
And who are we to say how they should play ?
If these "1 min ISA's" happened every time then I might agree with you.
But I just described an ISA adv I did the other day, it took 10-15mins and we failed the optional.
And judging from the PUGs I've been doing lately the average player is far from a DPS hero.
People over estimate how many players are actually good in this game and can carry an isa by themselves.
We can talk about difficulty and level restructuring once we have an ISA Elite. Until then I disagree with any changes.
+1
1. Constantly cycling Tactical, Engineering, Science Team.
2. Constantly cycling Emergency Power to __ abilities.
3. Artificially increase Bonus Defense to all NPCs, especially small fighters, escorts, raiders. This necessitates the need for Acc mods for weapons usage. Non [Acc] weapons should be missing the small, fast targets.
4. NPCs using repair abilities here and there. Hazard Emitters on constant rotation clearing Player Hazards. Some of these repair abilities also grant resists, i.e. ASIF and HE.
5. Cycle Polarize Hull for immunity to Tractor Beam, Tractor Beam Repulsors. Polarize Hull also increases resists dramatically.
6. Science Vessel or "Boss" units occasionally using Subnucleonic Beam to strip away player buffs or more usage of Subnucleonic Carrier Wave.
Edit: 7. Have Science Vessel NPC units use player powerful "Mega Gravity Wells" and a few seconds later, fire Scramble Sensors at the mass of players. Most players don't know how to get out of CC these days, nor sensors based attacks like Scramble Sensors. DO IT CRYPTIC. DO IT.
Point 1 alone will severely reign in damage output because Tactical Team clears away Attack Pattern Beta, Delta resist debuffs. This is the reason why Attack Pattern Beta was a joke in PVP while Attack Pattern Omega was held in very high regard. APO doesn't do a debuff on the target that can be cleared. APO simply magnified the damage you did as well as many other useful things. Have Tac Team cycling on NPCs and I promise you, Player Damage Output in PVE will be SEVERELY impaired unless you got buff stripper help.
All this is just tip of the iceberg stuff. You old PVP'ers out there know what the game could really do to players if Cryptic had the balls for it. And I throw that challenge down to Cryptic to do it.
-Contraband turn in - 5 secs
-Colonization doffing - 10 secs
-Dil mining VIP claim - 1 min
-Admiralty Projects - 2mins
You've hit cap - Hooray !
Its even easier for KDF.
My statement stands.
I like this as well... I always wondered why NPC's didn't have some kind of simple rotation of powers they could use. Is it really that hard to put TT, EPTS, EPTW, ST, ET, A2S, ...etc and then just tell the npc to spam them? I'd also personally prefer fewer enemies, but ones with lots of powers to make ship to ship combat more challenging. Instead we just have two dozen npc meat bags with 1 or 2 abilities that die pretty easily.
Sounds like a spite thread to me.
Taylor1701d has mentioned these runs are not the norm and as someone who plays this map daily in pugs runs I totally agree with his assessment the time it takes to complete an ISA depends upon the strength of the team.
ISA and CCA are casual friendly stfs. STO has many casual players that pop in only have time for some quick play before popping back out.
Again ask for Elite maps or go play one of the other STF's STO offers leave ISA and CCA be
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Quoted for truth.
No. Your fun makes everyone else's fun wrong by default.
I also agree that Elites are wanted/needed/would be nice.
No. Your fun makes everyone else's fun wrong by default.
Examples, if the Transformer is healed at all you blew the objective. That is a gimicky objective. Same with, you need to take the three Dreadnoughts down within a minute of each other. Gimicky and not logical from a military perspective. Think harder for objectives that really mean something militarily.
Dopey mechanics are just that - dopey.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
As mandatory mission objectives i would agree with you on that, but those are not mandatory objectives, but instead are optionals that give additional rewards (whether the bonus is worth it or not is another fact to talk about). So in a way they do make sense as things the group would strive for, and if succeeded would be beneficial to the the mission, but not actually part of the mission completion.
You know as well as I do that after a brief "feeling things out" period with the changes, we will be back to 110% levels of OPness. This isn't the first time the game drastically changed as it's happened multiple times already.
Things won't change much. We will will get back to ISA in 3 minutes, CCA in 30 seconds, etc. The NPCs have always been dumb and worthless. Nothing more than damage sponges made tougher by timed objectives. Even that isn't enough against players.
===
Anyways, I am completely down for Cryptic to make NPCs do far more actions that make them dangerous. I want them to do things that, "Hey, maybe going completely all in for offense won't be good for me with all these debuffs / sensor attacks / CC / Hazards coming my way."
Or maybe all those enemy actions give value to buff stripping and "healboats."
I don't think that will happen though, we'll just keep walking over stuff with no effort.
Also, you didn't count the travel time between all those locations.
5000 dil for 1 min of work (and 1 min of travel time) is not profitable ?
Weird statement.
And yeah, its so hard to transwarp to DS9 right ?
Anyway, fair enough, add 1min travel time (there and back) if it makes you feel better. I'd be still way ahead of this hair brained idea that ISA is somehow farmable and at risk of being exploited by nefarious players with 30+ alts.
But okay, if you really think grinding 30 toons to level 50 just so you can play ISA back to back- 7 to 8 times per toon per day is a more efficient method and good return on time invested, so be it.
1. Stuff being locked to newbie toons is not the same as stuff being locked to newbie players. As such, the level limit for queues matters little beyond a very arbitrary, non-factual lower limit on theoretical ship power.
2. Either this game has an utterly amazing new player rate (you know, one that should have the entire industry talking on a level it actually gets mainstream news coverage), or, presumably what is actually the case (because nobody talks about it), it has a downright shocking rate of players with no intent to ever make it past newbie skill. Kind of TRIBBLE design to not gate these from A/E queues at all. (And then design many A, bot for some inexplicable reason not all, queues down to never fail despite of it.)
3. What pseudo-gating there is is fairly stupid. Take BDA's optional goals. Failing them doesn't actually punish players to bloody stupid and/or lazy to figure out what they're supposed to do, it punishes people who do try despite a TRIBBLE team. A far more elegant solution would be to give a bonus for each ship disconnected to every player fighting near that node; this'd reward intelligent tank/disconnector teamplay while not rewarding stupid all barrels blazing play. (At least that's what I guess lets 3 people covering one node fail to score disconnects. All it'd take is for any one of them to occasionally help a blue ship before aggroing another red one. Apparently figuring that out is tantamount to rocket science?) Of course, elegant would be harder to implement than stupid...
4. CCA is a bloody joke. You know a piece of content is total epic fail when somebody who's barely more than a newbie tells a budding fleet to run it daily for the 'free' fleet marks. Seriously. It's possible to carry a team to still complete the under 5 mins optional goal if the second best build (by dps, according to the in-game info) is a pretty pointless rainbow disruptor beam boat. That's not 'advanced' by any sane standard, and no, 'we wantz free marks' is not a valid argument for sticking by it. Seriously. If you want to give people 135 free marks a day, just bloody give everyone 135 free marks on login. Problem solved. Then go make CCA 'advanced' in some way. Or at least pretend you give a damn by making the optional goal 'under 90 seconds'...
5. No, the overall space revamp is not going to fix CCA unless it completely breaks everything else. That's simply not possible. In order to nerf damage hard enough on high-end dps builds for CCA to run any risk of going past 5 minutes, they'd have to nerf things so hard regular space missions become unplayable for most everyone else.
6. ISA isn't quite as bad as CCA. If the designers actually figured out how to make CCA legitimately A, odds are they'll manage for ISA - and any other queue- too.
Doesn't take long on an xp weekend, though I personally wouldn't do it, I'm fine with my 7, only 3 of them really get play time anyway.
Eh, I dunno Mark, last XP weekend I brought 6 of my KDF and KDF/Rom captains to level 20 so I could claim all the AoY/Delta rewards.
It was a pretty nasty grind imho, reminded me of grinding Delta or AoY. And I only brought them to level 20. No where near 50.
So, I doubt anyone is out there exploiting XP weekend, making an army of ISA alts...
I would hope not at least, because that would be going fullblown potato.
@warpangel
Fair enough, take out VIP claims.
We can even take out Admiralty since that is also level 50 restricted.
We're left with contraband, and general doffing (@level 10). That'll net you anywhere between 3500-6000 dil per day if done properly.
Which is still a lot more time efficient then running 4-5 ISA's on 15+ toons.
If anything, BDA is the biggest joke in the queue lineup. Speeding through through ISA or CCA may be easy but at least you need to do something. In BDA a team could basically zone in, mass suicide themselves at the borg to avoid the AFK penalty then spend the rest of the mission looking at the respawn prompt...and win. This they call Advanced.
As a half-baked example, a % damage reflection.
Do expected or less dps in a Normal whatever? no change.
Do 20% more dps then expected in a Normal? Get an achievement and now whenever you do that particular Normal queue the boss reflects 20% of your damage back to you.
Do 100% more dps then expected in a Normal? Get another achievement and now you get 100% damage back at you.
Do 1000% more dps then expected in a Normal? have another achievement and now you get back 1000% of the damage you do!
With another set of separate achievements for Advanced and yet another for Elite. A character may be seeing a 100% reflect in this particular normal, but only have unlocked the 20% in the Advanced version and having not played an Elite yet would see no reflection in his or her first Elite.
Something like this would hopefully push players to play content they have not already mastered.
True, but the effectiveness of any proposed change depends on how the balance patch influences individual powers and thus any proposal at this time is premature.