Just thought I get a kick in doing Episode 4 on Elite as a Klingon, and those Federation Patrols acted like they were from the 30th Century and not the 23rd. My Klingon and Medic companion literaly got vaporized in under 2 seconds (buffed) while my Borg BO lasting 2 seconds longer due to shield recharge.
You think Technology improved in a 150 years, but seems the opposite is true. :rolleyes:
Come on, Cryptic. What is with Elite Difficulty being so insanely easy in the original Episodic Content and Exploration zones (with the exception of rapid fire, dual pistoled Mobs and Klingon Swordmasters), but these new Episodic Content missions having mobs on Elite Difficulty acting like they are 20-30 levels above us when on Elite.
Elite supposed to be a challenge, but there is no challenge when you get killed before you can even get a second shot off!
I really hope the changes to Ground Combat in Season 3 is going to fix this, because I'm at the point I'm just not going to bother with Elite mode anymore, unless its a space-only mission.
OH FYI, Advanced mode with Episode 4 was perfect, it was a challenge without being over or underpowered.
Comments
I'm curious what you thought of only having 2 boffs with you...
Thats really cool
I think there shoulda been a slightly longer delay between when you lock the door after the turbolift and when they blow it to pieces. I couldn't turn around fast enough and cross the hall before i got attacked.
Otherwise really cool mission.
It's kind of nice, seems like less clutter. The fact that only one of my boffs ever talked the entire time kind of killed the atmosphere for me though. A very simple change to add to the atmosphere would be to mix up which boff gets the dialog somewhat. Or better yet, have conversations between the boffs themselves, whether just in random pop up text, or with with different boffs giving the player alternative advice.
And speaking of boff dialog, there *really* should be two sets of dialog for kdf boffs depending on whether they are klingon or not. Most of those lines sound very wrong coming from non-klingon bridge officers. It would almost be funny if it weren't so immersion breaking.
I really had to think tactically, depending on what kind of powers I thought I'd need. It really added something nice to the overall feel of this episode.
And I really noticed that those 23rd century phasers ate away at my personal shields like crazy. I mean, almost instantly! On Normal!
i agree.. especially since the pop ups don't take up the whole screen now (really like those by the way)
One thing I have noticed is as I am aquiring all these new devices and weapons, ground combat is becoming much more fun. I really think one issue is that assigning a bof as a tank is kind of useless, I want to play as a medic/sciency guy, but everything aggros on me and I spend most missions spamming heals on myself and the NPC's ignore my boffs.
I'd rather be able to tactically assign a tanking boff, dps boff, and support boffs and actually have those mechanics work, instead of the whole luck of the draw aggro system
oh to add to the above poster...since you gave us the breen boff, why not impose your own dialogue to the boff and add flavor to the missions, maybe some breen centric quips, some little things.
I agree to the above poster in having the boffs talk to each other in the mini dialogues, its a neat way to tell story.
If there is issues with players not liking words put in their mouths, create a small tab in the personnel window that lets us assign a personality type to the boff, like brainy, logical, hot tempered etc, and link banter to those traits, keeping it generic enough.
It was great, except for the part where I took the time to kit out four of my BOffs with TOS uniforms to go to the past, and only two of them got to actually use them.
I don't follow. Neither PvP nor STFs run off of the difficulty slider. For me, Advanced (not Elite) ground combat in exploration/story missions helps me optimize my character for STFs by learning different powers and weapons. And PvP is completely different. You can't even use PvE and PvP in the same sentence except for pointing out the difference between them, even on elite.
As for the 2 BOs, I was kinda surprised. Fortunately, those were my best BOs, so it worked out in the end. Not a bad idea. I was very pleased with the episode as a whole. I'm happy to see some variation from the linear content we had at early levels. This was apparent last week, but this week really mixed things up! Also, the problem-solving is shaping up very nicely. You could see some in the STFs, but here it is really apparent that you guys are considering more things than just combat all of the time. Thumbs up!
I can't wait until next week! I hope it is all space, since ground seems to be getting all of the love lately. With the Breen missions, I was happy that there was a balance of all components of the game: space, ground, combat, diplomacy/problem-solving, classic Star Trek, new and original ideas.
By the way, I'm betting on the Guardian of Forever getting us to the 23rd century next week. It did it before, and it will do it again!
My thinking is that the STF's are, in general, more difficult than normal difficulty. If you played the game entirely alone, on normal, you'd pretty much feel like a sledge hammer got dropped on you when doing an STF.
PvE can be used to try PvP tactics on something that acts with a certain consistency. Then you go do the PvP after testing your strategy on NPC's.
Sounds like there is some potential for future accolades with such a system. This is especially so if the number of BO can be selected or simply based of difficulty level.
That part kind of irked me as well but we - err.. I should say at I, did it for immersion purposes also harboring a very minor expectation of it having some mission affect and/or accolade reward potential.
It works, but only for missions of this type where evasion and movement are as good or better options than shooting. For the most part, I'd rather stick with the normal 5-person team setup.
Part of the reason for that is that 5 people gives you more versatility available; but just as significantly, I built my ground crews explicitly on the lines of a 5-person standard team. My 'cast' essentially, is built around having all of these characters present most of the time. So while on special missions where you need to keep out of trouble where it makes sense in-story as to why you'd have fewer BOs, sure... but for most things I'd rather stick to 5.
Haven't played the mission yet, but I don't think that every episode NEEDS a team of 5. While a lot of the real episodes had away teams, they weren't always teams of 5, and sometimes there were episodes with 3 people, two people, one person, etc.
Just two problems that I had with this mission though:
1) I could not keep by BOs from drawing aggro. Seriously. I put them in passive, got them to put their weapons away, finally I even right clicked on each of their powers to turn them off. They STILL kept drawing aggro. *sigh* I really wanted to get that diplomatic accolade too.
2) The security guys were too tough. First they have no personal shields, yet they kept ignoring shot after shot after shot that I fired at them. And their 2 hundred year old phasers ripped the heck out of my purple [cap] x2 personal shields. This was on the NORMAL difficulty setting.
Other than that it was an excellent mission and I look forward to playing more of these weekly episodes!
Just wanted to point out that that's a pretty damn big exception that tends to make Elite mode on ground pretty useless IMO. I would really like to see the dual-pistol bosses toned down. Right now they flatten my entire ground team in about 3-5 seconds.
I prefer it and find ground play far more engaging with less support.
My one tweak:
I think the default for most missions should be two named BOs and one random security guy, once we get the ability to customize what our shipboard NPCs look like with a crew uniform.
And you should have themed accolades for both redshirt deaths and keeping redshirts alive. And maybe some means of upgrading/progressing our random redshirts.
It was fun being honest, made me think about whether I wanted to start a fight or not...
Well there is quite a learning curve when it comes to the STFs, people always had problems with it, even after doing it a few times. Like going for the nodes or playing "Mario" in Rebecca's lair, or getting the right people in defending the Generators in the Cure.
Though when it comes to difficulty settings, there really isn't much you can do. This isn't an old style MMO where you could pull mobs individually out of a group safely. Here it's "Aggro and hope for the best".
In all honesty, I liked having a varied team. Though I noticed the Selection at the start, you had a chance to have a Red Shirt with you, which I don't know was a bug or not.
But when it comes to Elite difficulty, I honestly don't think 2 more BO's would've made a difference, given how powerful those Phasers were. No matter the difficulity, they were set to vaporize.
Well if it was bosses in the traditional sense of MMOs (being alone after fighting through their minions), I honestly wouldn't mind. But since bosses in STO are within groups, they are very troublesome.
The one boss I hate the most in all of STO is the Reman Captains, that Mind Attack is quite severe, and on higher difficulty, its nearly an instant kill.
I noticed that your BO's dont get transported to your new location when you take the Jefferies Tube, instead they take the long way around, and end up aggroing that way. I just had to abort the mission because of that.
(BTW, wish Drake was a Contact. Having to from the Episode > Drozana > Drozana Outside > Eta Sector and back is troublesome).
I do like the idea of having differnt size away teams for different missions. It would be even better if we could sometimes have a required profession for a BOF. In any case, I hope we see more away missions with anywhere between 1 and 4 BOFs needed (maybe also in the Exploration space missions).
It was a good change of pace having to be strategic to get by without fighting. However, I'm not sure if it was a bug or not, but I had to restart the mission after climbing the Jeffries Tube for the first time. A couple of the Starfleet patrols stayed in the narrow corridor after the first room, making it impossible to sneak by. If I attempted the run, they would slaughter my team then beam out. But as soon as I respawned, they would run from the second big room and wait in the corridor, again making it impossible to stealthily avoid them.
Oh and as soon as I'd gotten to the start of that section and got the pop up about changing the BOffs to Passive mode, the BOffs would run right in, fight and die before I could click anything. I had to do the entire section alone. Which turned out to be quite cool actually, but still it was a bug/bad AI.
It was a nice change of pace and fun because it fit the style of the mission which was primarily one of non-violence. I certaintly wouldn't have want to face the avergage mission mobs with just two BO's.
Also I think it would have been wonderful to have been given a 23rd century hand phaser if you got the accolade, as indeed they were nasty on 24th century shielding.
I loved it personally, had a great time of it. The trouble was I did it today with an Alt and my wife (so in theory us and a Bridge officer?) and got an away team of five. Made things much more challenging on the sneaky sneaky parts.
this is what bothers me most about this episode and sto in general. if you keep adding in 23 or 22 nd cent. they will be oped. such as this mission was. the 23rd cent weponds riped through my 25th cent shilds and armor like it wasnt even there.
i understand people want to play as thier favorate ships and have things from the 22, 23 cent. but cant we please have some kind of resembalence of realisim. i am in no way of a canon freak. i just belive that if they add a 22,23rd cent ships or weponds they should only be used at lt1-6. imo
the ep i thought it was cool to have only 3 officers. it made me think on what kind of bos i want to bring to the mission.
Hi, Honestly, I didnt like having only two bridge officers with me. I had actually thought about creating a post about this. The way I see it, the bridge officers are extensions of our characters. I have setup my away teams to function in a particular way with the current settings and have invested quite a bit into the various bridge officers I have in order to do that. There should be a minimum of 4 members on an away team including myself. I have an officer dedicated specifically to medicine, one to science ground control, etc... I was not able to bring any tactical officers on this last mission or an engineer. So, yeah, I didnt care for this limited approach. I didnt find it made things more fun.
To echo onto the original posters issue, I also accidentally played it on Elite. It was very overpowered. Even if I had put together a team of real players, I think it would have been too difficult. They were able to literally vaporize me in one shot multiple times. Something was clearly wrong on the scaling issue with this mission. Other than that and the problem above about the limited away team size, I thought it was pretty good.
But "normal" difficulty wasn't added with the introduction of the difficulty slider, advanced and elite modes were. Normal difficulty has always been the default, and had the difficulty slider not been introduced we would all still be snoozing through what is now the lowest difficulty setting. If anything, the difficulty slider helped players (who took advantage of the harder settings) to become better prepared for STFs (and PvP - if you're struggling to survive on elite mode you're probably not going to fare very well in PvP).
I like the 2 BO thing.. but I do NOT like fights that take a crazy long time to finish. Not just this mission, but also some others, such as Romulans, take way too long. The biggest problem is when there is an NPC healer and a NPC that does shield heals in the same fight. The 2 can keep eachother alive for a crazy long time.
I loved it.
I would totally enjoy having the ability on EVERY mission to take only the amount of bridge officers "I" think I will need. That puts a decision in the hands of each player that let's them make the same decision a true Captain would make.
In so many episodes, the Captain would say "You, you and you...join the away team" So sometimes it was just 3 people, or maybe 4. Other times it was 5.
Giving people a chance to increase their own difficulty and play around with different away teams, would go a long way to making ground mission be more fun.