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STO is in dire need of a full rebalancing...
telbasta7386
Member Posts: 761 Arc User
Before I get to the point; I've been playing STO off and on since it was subscription only, and I've seen it change drastically over all those years. Some changes were great, others... not so much. I've been away from the game for about a year~ now, and just returned a few days ago when some old fleet members mentioned the current event on discord.
Back when I played a year+ ago, I put a ton of work into my character builds, and at the time they were considered pretty strong (not the best, but as close as I could get being a sporadic player). After returning, and doing red alerts and TFO's and endeavors for a few days, the sheer amount of power creep that has taken hold of this game is blindingly apparent.
Back in the day, you'd be worried about finishing a tholian red alert before the time limit was up. Now you have to wonder if it will even last more than a minute. TFOs are being completed faster than some ability cooldowns. When borg tactical cubes in advanced/elite TFOs are being yeeted into oblivion in mere seconds... yea, something has gone horribly wrong here.
There's no challenge anymore, everyone's got a god-ship that can just will enemies out of existence. How does anyone find this fun? If there's no challenge, there's no satisfaction in accomplishing anything. I get that STO panders to people who want to live out their power fantasies as their favorite captains or in their favorite ships, but do you really feel powerful, or does it just make all of the enemies feel mind numbingly, pathetically weak by comparison?
It used to be that ship combat was slower, and more strategic. You had to work to take down an enemy shield facing, and then try to hit that facing with torpedoes before they could maneuver or get the shield up again. Missions could be intense, trying to whittle down powerful enemies while barely keeping yourself alive as fast as your hull and shield healing abilities could cooldown. Back then, even gravity well on a science build was more for control and support, so that you could group up enemy ships for your escorts to torp spread on, instead of being a 2 second death sentence to all but the toughest ships. Cruisers were actually used for tanking, drawing fire and requiring healing so that your escorts didn't get instagibbed by hostiles. We have none of that anymore, and it feels like the soul of the game is long gone.
On a semi-related note, remember when you could warp to earth spacedock and every ship in orbit was a federation ship? Or to Qo'NoS and at least most of the ships were klingon, with a few rare standouts being nausicaan or orion or gorn? It felt like faction unity, at least to a small degree. Now? Disco balls and weird alien ships everywhere, with actual faction ships few and far between.
Back when I played a year+ ago, I put a ton of work into my character builds, and at the time they were considered pretty strong (not the best, but as close as I could get being a sporadic player). After returning, and doing red alerts and TFO's and endeavors for a few days, the sheer amount of power creep that has taken hold of this game is blindingly apparent.
Back in the day, you'd be worried about finishing a tholian red alert before the time limit was up. Now you have to wonder if it will even last more than a minute. TFOs are being completed faster than some ability cooldowns. When borg tactical cubes in advanced/elite TFOs are being yeeted into oblivion in mere seconds... yea, something has gone horribly wrong here.
There's no challenge anymore, everyone's got a god-ship that can just will enemies out of existence. How does anyone find this fun? If there's no challenge, there's no satisfaction in accomplishing anything. I get that STO panders to people who want to live out their power fantasies as their favorite captains or in their favorite ships, but do you really feel powerful, or does it just make all of the enemies feel mind numbingly, pathetically weak by comparison?
It used to be that ship combat was slower, and more strategic. You had to work to take down an enemy shield facing, and then try to hit that facing with torpedoes before they could maneuver or get the shield up again. Missions could be intense, trying to whittle down powerful enemies while barely keeping yourself alive as fast as your hull and shield healing abilities could cooldown. Back then, even gravity well on a science build was more for control and support, so that you could group up enemy ships for your escorts to torp spread on, instead of being a 2 second death sentence to all but the toughest ships. Cruisers were actually used for tanking, drawing fire and requiring healing so that your escorts didn't get instagibbed by hostiles. We have none of that anymore, and it feels like the soul of the game is long gone.
On a semi-related note, remember when you could warp to earth spacedock and every ship in orbit was a federation ship? Or to Qo'NoS and at least most of the ships were klingon, with a few rare standouts being nausicaan or orion or gorn? It felt like faction unity, at least to a small degree. Now? Disco balls and weird alien ships everywhere, with actual faction ships few and far between.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Thank God I can just slap it into Elite and play episodes though to get that more strategic feeling.
Are there a few highly specialized combinations that perform to ridiculous levels? Yeah. But that's nowhere near everybody.
One thing I enjoy about STO is the difficulty settings. I think an adjustment to some enemies and certain difficulty levels, with rewards to match, could work, but on a very directed scale. I say this because I still meet quite a few people in game who don't know how to fight Tzenkethi, or avoid Mo'Kai because they don't understand Viral Impulse Burst and how to avoid or cleanse it. For many of those people, they're still a challenge. I think it's good though that this game can keep people interested and still allow for the Elite crowd to get their kicks in. Overbalance too much and you lose the more casual player base, especially the people joining the game due to rising interest in new Star Trek content.
For an example of what I'm warning about, you need only look up and click over to the Neverwinter forums. That game has been in Limbo for almost 2 months now waiting on a massive Nerf bat to its entire combat system that will almost assuredly drive most of its players away, yet again, for the 2nd time in 2 years. Why? Their devs want to enforce a new scaling system since the content there has 1 difficulty setting, but what they're getting is locking most casual players out of content, royally messing the in-game economy from price gouging items that people speculate they'll need to change to, and also postponing any equipment rework from the early game that might allow new players to adjust along the way.
So for my 2 EC, let's not do that, and instead be extremely careful about it.
"Quality Passes" don't usually go over well around here.
I generally just run in and do what I can whenever I do TFOs and not worry if there's god ships around. They took the time to tweak their builds, I don't think we need to nerf them just because we don't have what they have.
But even on a new character I'm leveling right now, at lieutenant commander rank doing patrols that, before the level-scaling was implemented were restricted to commander/captain/admiral, I'm still killing enemy ships in a few seconds each, and I don't even have a good build. It feels like all around the pve difficulty in this game has just been massively reduced to the point where everyone, regardless of how good or bad their build is, can steamroll everything they encounter; but then you get those 'god builds' on top of it and you're left with half the players in the TFO not even being able to get to the enemy before it implodes on itself.
What do people even play for, if there's no challenge? Does anyone really find it genuinely fun to grind your way through hundreds of patrols or TFO's that present no challenge at all, just to get items that will make them present even less than no challenge? Not to mention that, as an MMORPG, you typically think the game would encourage reliance on other players and group mechanics (especially in multiplayer instances like TFO's) - but at this point any decent build could practically solo the entire thing, with no need for tanking, healing, or anything but facerolling on your ability tray until everything blips out of existence.
As mentioned, not everyone. Sure, all the 'regular'/top players can do ludicrous things. I still can't solo a lot of things that many here take the soloing of for granted. Perhaps most of the mediocre players have moved on, leaving mostly old veterans. Maybe not. /shrug
(and maybe a lot of us iffy players don't run TFOs, so we don't show up in the pugs.)
Well, I mean - not everyone is a "challenge" gamer, throwing themselves at the brick wall of difficulty in order to come out the other side with a victory rush. I know that I don't turn up the difficulty on games, generally finding the default difficulty hard enough for me. I don't play "Boss Fight" games (*Souls, Monster Hunter, etc) for instance - I find Big Boss Fights to be awful & tedious, with a feeling of "thank god that's over, and I can get back to the game" rather than "woohoo! I'm awesome! What a rush!" when they're done.
(I've only ever done Advanced content in STO when that one task - Dominion recruit? - required it. And I did it via CCA, which doesn't seem to really require much of it's Advanced version. STO I mostly play to see stories, collect & visually-customize ships, and make cool costumes for my characters. And yeah, there's a bit of skinner box / OCD to some of the stuff I do, just like in other MMOs.)
This game is ultra casual and super easy for anyone who's played any MMO previously -- very true.
That's why they added the difficulty slider. (I play on 'Advanced' and it's still very easy. That said, 'Elite' is too much of a slog as the Devs just made EVERTHING a sack of HP and a LARGE sack.
But yeah, believe it or not, I STILL see some new players post that the game is too hard even at base difficulty; so no I don't think the Devs are going to do a rebalance that makes all the levels 'more challenging' because it will drive some real ultra casuals (who might spend so money) off.
IMO - STO's been super easy since day one. The Devs (for whatever reason) don't want that changed.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I did think it was super ridiculous doing the "rescue and search" patrol mission the other day, my tiny little lukari UFO had to basically solo what felt like 80-100 klingon ships (and did so with relative ease, at that). Ships in star trek were always supposed to be tougher to destroy, and now it's like we're going all JJ Abrams "MOAR EXPLOSHUNS!" style, which really doesn't feel right as a longtime trek fan.
Competitive engines for one. I dont mind the speed boost. But the fact it doesnt have a lockout and if you have your boosts cycled enough you can keep going for a very good period of time.
Keep the speed boost. But have a lockout or "can only proc 2 or 3 times every 30 seconds" Wouldnt be too bad of a change at all.
What I would like to see as an alternative, sort of goes back to the Breen story arc. There was a Capital Ship that sometimes appeared. During the time of that content being new, it seemed like going up against the Capital Ship was an optional challenge on top of the regular ease of the mission. It was a big ship that took about 5-10 minutes or so minutes to kill, depending on whether or not you were teaming the mission. Again, this is based on my average builds of the time. For me, it was the right balance between fun and challenging.
Because cookie cutter builds and pay to win flavors of the month are all too common in this game now. I hate to say it, but I think a DPS cap is ultimately the way to go. That way, people can still have their unique and diverse builds using different weapons types, consoles, and so on. That way, the DPS cap could help keep the best of players more in line with the difficulty scaling of the content PWE is putting out.
Not bad idea though I'd expand it to show that certain consoles aren't OP on their own but had interactions with other things that might have to be reconsidered.
So because there may always be extreme exceptions of the playerbase will always be min-maxing, or who will never be especially competent, the game's possible balance issues should always be ignored?
That's quite a design philosophy you have there.
Perhaps in other games it would but it’s not as if we would not know already that balance checks around here only mean loose 100k from what you got in favor of 500k you get from the releases next week.
Oh come on... who cares, Neela will chill through an pug ISA with a mil DPS then so by all means go for it cryptic. I have full confidence in you.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Yeah, big shock.. but I agree.
The cycle of 'rebalancing' needs to stop for good with this game. Cryptic can only make things one of two ways.. overpowered or useless. Every time they do a 'balance pass' they just go through and nerf everything good into uselessness and say that they did it because those items were 'over performing.'
They then spend the next 6 months making new super expensive items that are more powerful then the ones they just nerfed for being too strong. Then, once they have all the money from those purchases, they do another round of super nerfs.
A full rebalancing is the last thing we need and every time they do one the games population takes a hit. Yes, new people eventually come in to replace those that left, but eventually, they get caught in this cycle too and that's something that definitely needs to stop. Thankfully, they haven't done one in quite a while.. I hope that trend continues because I know they would just TRIBBLE it up.
Realize only about 1-5% of the player base play in the TOP +150k DPS Category, and often it requires well coordinated effort of a TEAM of 2 or 3 to hit those milestones; maybe 10-15% get close to approaching 60-100k.
Realize Cryptic often includes several NERFs, countless times months in advance of game enhancements such as introducing Endeavor's, or did prior to introducing MW Ships, or the Experimental upgrade.
Realize Red Alerts are also NORMAL difficulty, so do some END quickly yes, do I think some should be revised slightly, I do think 2 of the 5 run a fair bit longer, while 1-2 often end far faster. The Borg is one that often (not always) ends faster, it might require a few more groups of enemy be defeated for sure. The problem is you make more TAC CUBE's, or expand their HP or damage further, and new or normal players QUEUE, they will feel cheated by how difficult it is.
I'm just happy to finally seeing a few returning after having been away for 1-3 years.
― ♥ ―
So I agree with seaofsorrows & peterconnorfirst, in saying 'Considering how many left during the last balance check this is not a bright idea.' and where seaofsorrows agreed. I also think coldnapalm made a good point in saying, "Every single time they do a rebalance of the game, it is the casuals who gets shafted. Why? Because the people who can make ships that are doing the deeps now will just figure out the new borked combination and use that or change their piloting for the new META. The top end players are top end players for a reason...and you can give a casual an exact copy of a ship that does 200k DPS and they won't even do 10% of that. In extreme cases not even 1% of that."
― ♥ ―
That was similar to my above comment, that Cryptic has nerfed a few times over the year's prior to introducing new enhancements, or as last player above noted TOP END players quickly find a new Meta to capitalize upon. Realize many over the years have remained relatively FLAT with DPS, despite all the expanded options or now hoops one should jump; yet there are nice rewards for those who choose to jump! Be it the expanded Endeavor's, MW Ships extra console (most but not all, are slower to turn), to the greatly expanded option giving all ships the Experimental upgrades with yet another console, trait, and even device slot.
I'll loop in the Ambassador, but I think Cryptic tries very hard, to find a FAIR balance for all!
@ambassadorkael#6946
Saying it wouldn't be hard to revise the Borg I'll also quite another, I do think they could require 2-4 (random) more cube groupings be defeated. True Treker's often far more enjoy the story in game, exploration, expanded options for diplomacy, or Tactics which includes knowing when 'not' to fight. It's what made TNG the pivotal series, which yes even Kirk often knew when not to fight. But that's not quite reality in a game, if only it could be through some other aspect of game play, as the planet evolves or story continues...
― ♥ ― ♫♪♪ : Something I wish could get attention, even if Ship interior customization, thru expanded trophy mechanic isn't.
Exploration aspect to revisit (some) planets previously conflicted over, as the story evolves or changes, with new aspects to pursue! With those opportunities, perhaps different new crafting Material to find, depending on the mission, planet or area. As they think about revisiting/expanding crafting later this year? Picard tried to revisit with the Romulan's in that new series, when he went back trying to right the wrongs of the Federation; despite the challenges he was aware of, also be an opportunity for endless evolving story elements for earlier planets. Revisiting Iconian, showing the evolution before and after the peace accord; each with different maps, showing the evolving story.
― ♥ ― ♫♪♪ : Be nice if Walker, Aquarius, or Scimitar Bridge also allowed you to lower faction decks too.
The problem is now there are far more hoops to jump thru, all while many have remained relatively FLAT in DPS! Most new players start doing 5k shortly after level up; as they expand specializations and start increasing gear from Mk XII Rare/Very Rare to now Mk XV EPIC, they work thru 10k, 25k, then 35k. That is where the many struggle to break thru however; or remain most flat years later.
It's been done a few times over the last 2-5 years even prior to Season 13 as I noted above. Change the Meta, DPSers will quickly find a new one, all while the casual or non DPSers often pay most of the price as another eluded.
I'm just happy to see several old players returning! No answers, just more questions or things to think about... ...and someone please give the cute kitty (above) her T6 Nova in the New Year.
I've often debated if they should add 1-2 more tactical cube's to the Borg Red Alert however.
Though again, I'll state the Red Alert EVENTS like all events, are done at NORMAL. I'd be open if they allowed Events to be completed at either Normal, or Advanced based on people's preference; but it's also why they likely didn't. If 75-90% then queue for Advanced, people who are limited to Normal, wouldn't be able to run them in a reasonable time. They don't want new players to be punished, as someone else eluded to earlier. Fleet's and Players both want new Players and friends to join, as well a being included in the adventure! It's why they realized to set the bar lower, so all could participate, so I'm fine if a few runs go faster.
The DPSer still have little problems surviving, regardless the DPS they put out. Most boss, and even several enemy in TFO's / Patrol's, heavily rely on AoE attacks, not single player attacks though some do exist. So if one hits far harder with far greater threat, all equally share the pain inflicted, it just hurts far more for some than others.
Is that fair, not exactly, and it's why the DPSer barely notice. Just saying, everyone everyone contributes. I just try to treat everyone with respect, and mostly welcome and love seeing new people joining the adventure.
But I'm not going to comment any further on this thread, I enjoy the story far more, as my updates above denote.
@dragon#2626
I'm somewhat interested in your build for a Vengeance. While it is not completely impossible to be killed by the bleedthrough from a Trico or plasma-blast mine, considering the small amount of bleed through it is more likely that there is something amiss with your build.
Can you provide you build in skillplanner?
While I do think the game needs a rebalance I don't think the devs can do it. The problem is the devs have a history of only doing half the job. They will do the first stage of the rebalance, abandon the project and move onto something else just like all the other times they have started something new left it half finished and moved on. There are so many examples of this in game like all the colony shop items I want to use but are still broken years later.
I also agree its the casuals that often get shafted as they often don't really understand the core mechanics behind the game. The top end players tend to adapt pretty fast while the casuals are left doing little DPS, struggling to know how to fix the build and will have no guides to read as they take time to update.
My other concern is all the builds and weapons that got ruined in other balance pass's and never get fixed. Tricobalt themed builds are pretty much impossible to use today and are none viable even for normal content as the balance pass broke them. Transphasic are only just usable but are terrible as the balance pass messed up the damage scaling on them. Just to give 2 of many examples.
So yes a balance pass is good if done correctly but it needs to be finished off not 1 pass then abandoned. Two last examples the mine balance pass was really good but again it was abandoned in the first pass leaving major bugs, useless items, broken stuff. Same for the carrier hangar balance pass the changes are good but again they seem to be abandoned and incomplete. Its the lack of a follow up that is causing the problems.
It seems pretty balanced to me, I still keep getting my TRIBBLE handed to me on a silver platter, maybe I built my ship wrong, might just be me but having my ship constantly blow up is the reason why I prefer ground combat over space any day.