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Please stop buffing the freakin' borg every update -- this is ridiculous
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE stop buffing the borg in crazy ways every freaking update!
It's bad enough that no matter what shields you have (I have a capacity over 5600 on mine) that any single glancing hit drains them with "magic" inside 5 seconds. It's bad enough the big plasma torpedoes are almost awlays 1-shot kills....
It's just bad enough they're as tough as they are and as hard to kill as they are, and as lethal as they are. I can deal with a bit of challenge, and it really rocks when you get a team that can take out a pair of cubes without anybody dying...
However, it seems EVERY update the borg are getting buffed. I don't mean the glitch where all lethality on AI is ramped up by a factor of 10. I mean normal stuff. The sector defense against borg. The kessat mission, etc. It's gotten to the point that probes are actually a threat now. I passed within 9.9km of one and it instantly hit me. One single hit and that side's sheild was down 50%, and the rest draining like mad from the "magic borg shield sucker" (TM, patent pending).
On top of that, there's other craziness! Spheres now chase you down! FAST!!!! I could NOT get away from a sphere. It chased me like crystalline entity shards! It was fast, too! I used evasive manuevers, I diverted all power to engines, and in the end it still caught up with me, shieldless and damaged, and killed me. This would be about 20km from the fight where I died, no less! -- They don't even return to their previous flight plans anymore. They single mindedly hunt you down. And they are FAST!
Further, tactical cubes are wicked fast as well for some reason. You can see the AI is applying BOFF skills but I don't recall the symbol of what it was. It almost looked like attack pattern alpha (if I recall) but the end result was a VERY fast cube. Fast enough that you find yourself within 3km of it very quickly and cannot get away without evasives when you get in trouble.
Then.... there's the unimatrix. This thing is hard enough sometimes. With uncoordinated teams it's almost impossible. With coordinated teams it's very possible. However it keeps getting tougher every update! Now it has Galor-class guns mounted on each end, and they are using RAPID FIRE III or some TRIBBLE!! You get hit with a solid stream of about 20 bursts at once. THEN it's got 2 types of torpedoes, now! It's firing salvoes of 12 or so. I know because I use salvo myself and it looks like the same thing (only with a mere fraction of the torpedoes). That's a LOT of freaking torpedoes all detonating at once! And they recharge rather quickly! I got hit by 3 bursts of these salvoes in 1 attack/retreat just recently. It was so bad I didn't make it out past 10k to the safe zone. Wanna know what's worse? Sometimes -- 50/50 chance -- they're INVISIBLE and you see the pattern blowing up on your shields/hull but you had no warning and no chance to evade/brace/whatever.
This is in ADDITION to the plasma ball that seems to un-killable no matter how many buffs, targetting modes, or skills you use on them. I've had a plasma ball chase me 12km (me in full retreat, it following) from the originating source and me firing away the entire time with aft weapons. It was about a million little yellow "miss, miss, miss" notices and it was unkillable -- but guess what? I wasn't. It got me. Seems I can target and kill them if they are following other people, but if it's after you you'd better pray.
So PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop buffing the borg EVERY UPDATE! It's too much! It really is! You can't learn 1 tactic before it doesn't work anymore, and it REALLY ****es me off to see there's no standards. The damage/lethality/1-shotness/"difficulty" change at a whim like the devs are bipolar!
STOP!!!
It's bad enough that no matter what shields you have (I have a capacity over 5600 on mine) that any single glancing hit drains them with "magic" inside 5 seconds. It's bad enough the big plasma torpedoes are almost awlays 1-shot kills....
It's just bad enough they're as tough as they are and as hard to kill as they are, and as lethal as they are. I can deal with a bit of challenge, and it really rocks when you get a team that can take out a pair of cubes without anybody dying...
However, it seems EVERY update the borg are getting buffed. I don't mean the glitch where all lethality on AI is ramped up by a factor of 10. I mean normal stuff. The sector defense against borg. The kessat mission, etc. It's gotten to the point that probes are actually a threat now. I passed within 9.9km of one and it instantly hit me. One single hit and that side's sheild was down 50%, and the rest draining like mad from the "magic borg shield sucker" (TM, patent pending).
On top of that, there's other craziness! Spheres now chase you down! FAST!!!! I could NOT get away from a sphere. It chased me like crystalline entity shards! It was fast, too! I used evasive manuevers, I diverted all power to engines, and in the end it still caught up with me, shieldless and damaged, and killed me. This would be about 20km from the fight where I died, no less! -- They don't even return to their previous flight plans anymore. They single mindedly hunt you down. And they are FAST!
Further, tactical cubes are wicked fast as well for some reason. You can see the AI is applying BOFF skills but I don't recall the symbol of what it was. It almost looked like attack pattern alpha (if I recall) but the end result was a VERY fast cube. Fast enough that you find yourself within 3km of it very quickly and cannot get away without evasives when you get in trouble.
Then.... there's the unimatrix. This thing is hard enough sometimes. With uncoordinated teams it's almost impossible. With coordinated teams it's very possible. However it keeps getting tougher every update! Now it has Galor-class guns mounted on each end, and they are using RAPID FIRE III or some TRIBBLE!! You get hit with a solid stream of about 20 bursts at once. THEN it's got 2 types of torpedoes, now! It's firing salvoes of 12 or so. I know because I use salvo myself and it looks like the same thing (only with a mere fraction of the torpedoes). That's a LOT of freaking torpedoes all detonating at once! And they recharge rather quickly! I got hit by 3 bursts of these salvoes in 1 attack/retreat just recently. It was so bad I didn't make it out past 10k to the safe zone. Wanna know what's worse? Sometimes -- 50/50 chance -- they're INVISIBLE and you see the pattern blowing up on your shields/hull but you had no warning and no chance to evade/brace/whatever.
This is in ADDITION to the plasma ball that seems to un-killable no matter how many buffs, targetting modes, or skills you use on them. I've had a plasma ball chase me 12km (me in full retreat, it following) from the originating source and me firing away the entire time with aft weapons. It was about a million little yellow "miss, miss, miss" notices and it was unkillable -- but guess what? I wasn't. It got me. Seems I can target and kill them if they are following other people, but if it's after you you'd better pray.
So PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop buffing the borg EVERY UPDATE! It's too much! It really is! You can't learn 1 tactic before it doesn't work anymore, and it REALLY ****es me off to see there's no standards. The damage/lethality/1-shotness/"difficulty" change at a whim like the devs are bipolar!
STOP!!!
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Run proper skills and gear and this won't be a problem. MACO Shield + Borg set, that field gen console that gives +35% to shields, at least one tactical team, csv if you're a cannon escort or bfaw if you're a beam boat (either of these will pretty much insta-kill the heavy plasma torps), heck, if you're an escort, you should be following kostamojen's STF escort build guide anyways.
Wait... opposite of that.
The problem is it's not a beam... It's any weapon hit you get begins this drain... [EDIT: Or it's an invisible beam that recharges instantly and fires with the weapons.] So you get hit once, hit hazard emitters, and then get hit again and it drains more! Then you're only able to hope you can run fast enough before the NEW hits drain you dry. Some ships have a shortage of decent BOFF layouts, and devoting time to hull plating or hazard emitters often means you lose such functions as science team, etc.
Power insullation appears to do diddley squat to lessen the drain. EPS is a bandaid on a sucking chest wound (and wasted as the new shields drain just as quickly).
It really is overpowered in some areas, IMO.
I know a lot of folks still bang their head against that wall, especially in the STFs. I feel sympathy for you all, since you're really just the victims of poor development there. But I have no creative or even useful ideas on how to fix the problem without getting rid of some development and starting over with the borg as enemies.
HE will continue to remove any newly applied shield neutralizers for its duration. If you pack 2 copies you can be immune to it 50% of the time (15 sec duration, 30 sec shared cooldown). Yes it means that you have to give up some other abilities. But hey, when in the collective, adapt
Really, apart from the one-shot invisitorps, I don't have a problem with the Borg being tough. They're the Borg! They're meant to be a threat.
It's like they're not even trying.... "OOh! That new ship we just made with the new guns? Let's put THOSE on i! No, don't replace anything else, just stick more guns on. It has infinite power anyways!"
It's foolish on their part and wholly misguided.
Now, I understand the Borg are the Borg. They should be terrifying to come up against. However it is plain idiotic to give ungodly damage bonuses to their ships and think that 'makes it harder'.
It doesn't make it harder. It merely makes it continously more frustrating to the point where people just stop bothering with it.
I dare cryptic to run a comparison of how many players run elite STF's now compared to how many ran elite STF's a month ago. Not the number of STF's ran but the PEOPLE running them. It has dropped significantly as the borg have been given significant more firepower.
So devs, instead of increasing the borg's ability to frustrate players to death how about making them CHALLENGING instead?
Give the borg the ability to self heal. They currently do not do this.
Remove the uber damage ability from borg and replace it with more borg-like attacks... aka more boarding parties, more tractor holds, more debuffs. The borg after all want to CAPTURE ships not just blow them up.
The thing is, the Borg only have to buy a single key. They then assimilate that key and then adapt it to their new lockboxes and no longer have to keep buying new keys.
(BTW: Borg Shield Neutralizer is started by a small green torpedo-like projectile. And the Borg torpedoes are not invisible on my screen, so I guess it is a matter of graphics settings.)
Untrue. I have found myself often hit with shield drains, I hit hazard emitters, the drain stops, and one second later I get hit with another shield draining weapon and lo & behold; hazard emitters do nothing to help against the second drain. Please wait while power cools down, hope you don't die from DOT attack. Ditto for plasma burns and every other DOT effect that it is supposed to protect you from. Yes, it sweeps you clean from whatever is on you right now, but it offers not protection against any further attacks at all.
Bug or design, I don't know.
ofc with bigger ships it wouldnt be that much prbolem, but the BoP dies from the single torpedo, and has no chance against the high yield plasma one
No, HE will continue to remove Borg Shield Neutralizers for its duration. It gets perhaps a brief second to drain the shields one tick but the HE than removes it. Don't confuse Borg Shield Neutralizers to their massively overpowered Tachyon Beams which I still don't think Power Insulator skills are countering.
No, it's a beam... I saw it once. Looked like the blue tachyon beam. Maybe it has the invisibility bug like the odd torpedo too.
Or I could keep reading and discover that they have both?
Yep, Cubes can have both whle spheres will only come with Tachyon beams. Tractor Probes also tend to have the shield neutralizer as well.
Nope, it's a game-breaking bug. How do I know? Because I see about 1-in-3 of the attacks. A dozen or more torpedoes flying at you too fast to evade, blowing up in bright patterns all over your shields..... Then some seconds later you see ANOTHER flurry of shield explosions just like it, only no torpedoes ever came from the borg ship firing them. You know because you were attacking it the entire time and would have seen.
So before you fight the Borg in Borg STFs, you need to get the Borg weapons and Borg gear, which you can only get by doing Borg STFs?
Did I miss something there?
Nope thats entirely correct from a certain persepective. See most people currently believe if your not god than you shouldn't queue up while others keep asking...what does god need with a starship?
But in all seriousness In order to get the borg equipment you do need to do the stfs...minus the console wich is a normal "episode" misson, believe its the first one for the undine series.
This is wrong (except for maybe elite missions). All you need is good XI stuff, and there are tons of different ways to get it.
You can Craft XI purple gear, buy it with dilithium, or from the auction with ECs, or just get blue XI gear from quests. Aegis gear works fine for starting STFs, or the Breen gear will work too if needed.
Slotting the right kind of armor helps also, like plasma resists.
The typical MMO mentality is that an encounter is easy as soon as you've gotten the loot from that encounter previously. Therefore, in order to do that encounter, you need to have "Appropriate loot," with that appropriate loot being said reward for completing the encounter. It's circular logic that, while making perfect sense, makes no sense at all.
In the real world, when you challenge an encounter for the first time you bring the best gear available prior to your first time experiencing it. When that is done, the content can be challenged at the level of balance it was intended for, and challenging it repeatedly will (obviously) be easier as your equipment will be better, as will your knowledge/experience.
Since a certain style of MMO has TRIBBLE and crippled the concept of caution and logical puzzle solving and replaced it with "how fast can you go," the average player now only cares about how "efficient and expedient" the team is.
In short, yes. In order to "not burden the team" and in order for content to be challenging/not "easy," you need to have defeated it many times in the past and it needs to be balanced with the assumption that everyone has conquered it multiple times already.
Well, I removed all of that, it is very easy to see you are upset neighbor, in spades. Yet, I highlite something I want to elaborate on. "Standard".
It would be tough to have a set standard when the system as a whole, meaning all the things added to STO, does not really have a standard per say. Sure they do add things in, both good, bad, and some "omg" what were they thinking.
Still, to my knowledge how you descibe the borg .. well it is how the Borg are. Now, as far as game mechanics? Well that is a whole different story.
Cryptic base engine has some old bugs and issues, that Dan states himself he is going to hold department heads to get thes e cleaned up. However, I do not trust him in that regard, here is why, he was in the position to affect that change last year.
Little FYI, Dan was the Exec Producer for STO for the year of 2011. We call it the year of Drought, meaning no content added for over 8+ months. All the recent content came because of F2P, not because of any planned additions. The current Weekly series is the first true planned addition added to the game. All the STF were in game already, they simply got refabed into what you all see now. In truth we lost one instance which has not come back yet.
It was a big year in change, that is for sure, still, we who supported the game through that period are now a sleptic bunch. I enjoy Star trek and I am a die hard trekkie. I am old enough where I watch the original episodes when they aired. It is Cryptic, who many of us have an issue with, and how they do things.
Still, times change and sometimes people. So we will see. Made myself a promise, if the promises made for season 3, 4 and 5 are not added before season 6.. then yeah ... fool me once....
Other Ra's area joke.
In STF's they very rarely drain your shields.
Last night I was tanking with my BOP and doing quite well.
Definition of tanking I went in cloaked for a dps burst and stayed in the fight for about 10 seconds. The I rush off and have the tac cube follow me. While It is targetting me I fly out of range letting the other team mates pound away. If i loose aggro I cloak and swoop in and repeat....
I still do random pugs and see the cruiser captains sitting in one place and complain when they pop and took 150k damage. Even in my BOP I can handle mitigate the one shot through defenses and fast movement to the poinit that I rarely die.
Invest in armor plating used in the Eng slots. Increase your shield powers to over 80 (arbitrary and is what I use) as this increases resistances.
FOR THE LOVE OF (generic deity) do not pop your green shield regen and hope this is a cureall. This does not save your behind....I see cruiser captains so often pop this needlessly while sitting on one place and they cry man this six i was hit for 200k.....even through my shields and the regen.
BORG Primary attacks Plasma 2ndary kinetic and tertiary Anti proton
Buff these and your shield power rating and you will do far better.
Also learn to use your abilities in a timely manner when they cooldown and what shares the cooldowns...build your rig around a good set of BO abilities and you will be fine.
The borg aint so tuff.