Some cone-based targeting was changed so that it calculates from a center point rather than a specific facing. While this affected nearly every entity in the game, it only significantly impacts very large entities. A side effect of this is that there aren't as many "safe zones" from Borg Cube torpedoes.
Might this have an unintended side effect on how many other weapons they can bring to bear on us at once? I know that I can skim the surface of a Cube to be able to fire both rear beams and fore torpedoes when the ship's flying parallel to the cube face, for example. Having the reverse happen while drawing aggro from a group would be suicidal.
In other words your college lied, things have changed. Our perception does not lie, months and years of a constant changes by a nose hair, we'll notice. Don't take us for idiots. Some of us get paid far more than you I'd bet for more complicated work.
Now go back, examine what you all have actually done and give us a honest complete answer so we can make sense of the 'New Reality' or you can 'Fix It'
No, one said specifically that the Borg mobs in the STFs haven't been changed. The other said that there was a global change for all mobs in the way arc points are calculated.
So the change in the Borg you see are a side effect of a more global change - if you were to look at the code and parameters for the Borg mobs specifically, there should nothing be nothing different there.
In other words your college lied, things have changed. Our perception does not lie, months and years of a constant changes by a nose hair, we'll notice. Don't take us for idiots. Some of us get paid far more than you I'd bet for more complicated work.
Now go back, examine what you all have actually done and give us a honest complete answer so we can make sense of the 'New Reality' or you can 'Fix It'
You know what makes me feel helpful and compliant? Being insulted, patronized, and having somebody's salary waved over me like it's a TRIBBLE-measuring contest.
Something I noticed but am not 100% sure of will have to double check.
But it seems like I am getting more dots applied than I should. In ISE the two guard sphere spawn had me up to 5 stacks of plasma dot within seconds. That hurt.
their energy weapons are not their primary way of dealing damage, the cutting beam and torpedo is by far their primary dealers of damage. that makes it silly to have stf shields guard against plasma weapons, that does almost nothing to protect you from borg, and breaks an entire energy type in pvp
the torpedoes they fire, wile often invisible, deal between 30-60k damage. that is a 1 shot and by far the largest problem in the entirety of the pve in game. it makes hive basically impossible to pug.
the balance solution
npcs clearly have a global modifier to thier weapons that buff their damage. that needs to be reduced dramatically so those 1 shot torpedoes no longer exist. then give borg npcs +50 additional weapons power, so their energy weapons are more powerful, wile their kinetic damage isn't absolutely insane.
this would work with ALL npcs, kinetic damage is the vast majority of the damage all npcs cause, and its because of that npc damage modifier ending up buffing torp damage far more then energy damage. just bypass this with this fix i propose.
You know what makes me feel helpful and compliant? Being insulted, patronized, and having somebody's salary waved over me like it's a TRIBBLE-measuring contest.
I dont expect any of those things from them. The changes are in, they are not going to up and admit fault and beg forgiveness because we asked nicely. There has to be a growing massive negative backlash to send the point home.
It's only been a day now since all these things got in, no need to pre-judge. Already the reason why borg are now shooting almost any angle was explained, now I await to see if they have any intent to do something about it. They gave that courtesy to explain, so return some courtesy in kind and wait and see.
It's only been a day now since all these things got in, no need to pre-judge. Already the reason why borg are now shooting almost any angle was explained, now I await to see if they have any intent to do something about it. They gave that courtesy to explain, so return some courtesy in kind and wait and see.
Given the wide spread TRIBBLE the free player changes that have happened across the game at many points, I have no expectation they will make it 'better', we can only hope for less bad.
I dont expect any of those things from them. The changes are in, they are not going to up and admit fault and beg forgiveness because we asked nicely. There has to be a growing massive negative backlash to send the point home.
But seriously, that first comment was WAY over the line.
Have to disagree with you borticuscryptic, all the STF borg changed. I have nearly full shield, yet my hull is getting chewed down. This did not happen before this update.
That being said, i do like this change for the borg. STF isn't as dull anymore. We have to actually pay attention now *GASP* :eek:
I don't mind CHALLENGE. But enemies with attacks that can basically one-shot you (lances, plasma bolts, heavy plas torps, and now plasma burn of doom) or unresistable debuffs (borg spam Shield Neutralizer every 15 seconds...the only counter has a cooldown of 45 seconds. Good luck with that.) isn't challenge, it's just poorly thought out player-hating nonsense.
I've been reporting massive shield penetration (direct to hull damage) for months with no response. Suddenly S7 launches and folks pay attention? Gasp! Shock!
This is the same old ****ed up borg code as before.
What is NEW is the fact that ground borg got seriously screwed up. I tried to run assimilated and the undine borg missions on my lowest fed toon, and it was .... what's the word?
So many expletives I cannot type them here.
The borg were nearly impossible to kill. Even with mk XI blue and purple gear my entire away team died so many times I stopped counting after 50, IN ONE ROOM. The room where you plant the fractal virus to blow up the borg cube is literally impossible to complete without a billion deaths. The borg were regitering damage in the 1-7 range any time you shot them. Their shields were absorbing 99% of all incoming damage for no reason.
Get the shields down and their bare skin took more damage, but the shields wouldn't go down. Further targetting just 1 aggros 10 nearby and they ALL swarm you. Even with cover shields, turrets, quantum mortars, med gens, shield gens, and defense bubbles, it's impossible to kill 1 of the 10 before you are swarmed and they 2-shot kill you. OR 1-shot you with the "plasma sweep" firing animation.
Then forget the elite tactical drones! I tried the next mission where you beam to the Romulan ship to clear the borg, and the first room was just as bad as the previous mission's room. They are literally impossible to kill in under 10 minutes of sustained fire. They send out knockback blasts every second for a minute at a time and anybody inside 20 meters is instantly knocked down. You get up and INSTANTLY are knocked down again. Repeat 50x. All the while the other borg drones are shooting you and you die. There's no hope of ressurecction because the away team is being knocked down repeatedly also. Or wiped out. The very first room you spawn in my entire away team died many times, myself even more.
The borg shields were 99% effective against all incoming damage, and if you found a simple drone without shields you couldn't kill it before you had to remodulate again. They were significantly tougher than elites STF drones I've run into in the past.
It's utter BS. Whatever cryptic did to the borg it's totally fubar.
What I think they did was to allow the plasma fire to stack. I did notice this also. My odyssey used to never worry about plasma fire but yesterday and today it takes 3-5K each tick from my hull. During that time I did notice being hit by the beams does set you on fire about every other hit. Those fires are stacking.
Rodentmaster: use melee on them borg missions. you and your boffs, you will do that room in under 3 minutes no deaths...
No. I've been reporting massive BS damage direct to hull (through full shields) backed up with stats direct from combatlog. It's not the plasma doing the damage. In almost every case it's a plasma torp (sometimes under donatra it's called a photon torp, but same BS). It's a 1-time impact damage and not an over-time burn, though for the record the plasma damage has become more intense lately. Especially with the rapid fire plasma torps. HE cooldown is so long you can get hit 10x with a plasma torp before it comes back. I HAVE in the past, also.
The problem is the stupid TRIBBLE coding for these torps. They crit at a rate normal torps fire. That is almost every shot. And those crits bypass all shields apparently.
I have to agree something has changed ... I ran into a cube and sphere yesterday in the new Romulan zone as one part of a exploration mission ... usually they will be some work, but yesterday they ripped through my shields and tore up my tac escort refit like I was running around in a tier 2. I like a good challenge, but this was silly ... I died 4 times before I finished the mission. I'm running with Aegis set and Borg universal console along with VR MX XI weapons that seemed like peashooters. I won't say I'm an expert, but I'm no noob either.
Ok just did another and here are some details from combat log.
All are from Tac Borg Cube
TSS, Epower to Shield 1, 100+ Shield Power, and Maco Shield being used just to give idea of current resistance rating. In addition have 24.6 energy/40.3 kinetic hull resists.
Ok so no idea what that info even represents or how those first numbers were calculated from the first. Perhaps shield resistance math got messed up somewhere because just the maco shield and my shield power alone are more resist than what was applied. Next up the Torp.
Ok first off I thought shields had an innate 75% kinetic resist or am I wrong on that because the log is implying around 65%. And how on earth did I gain kinetic hull resistance from no where for the hull hit?
Somewhere in your damage vs resistance formula someone made a boo boo. That is the only logical conclusion I can draw.
That said, it's possible that Borg encountered in Into The Hive are set to a higher level than they are in other STFs. I haven't checked to be certain. But if they are, that means they are rolling on different (higher) damage tables.
this one...
The old sft are still the same, but in Into The Hive, borg are too strong... My shield are totally useless... No matter if I use maco shield have the max into shield skill and use both TSS and EPtS.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
What I think they did was to allow the plasma fire to stack. I did notice this also. My odyssey used to never worry about plasma fire but yesterday and today it takes 3-5K each tick from my hull. During that time I did notice being hit by the beams does set you on fire about every other hit. Those fires are stacking.
I think you may be on to something here. A change to the way plasma fire works, especially combined with the torpedo arc change could definitely be causing this. I was skeptical of the issue being plasma dot, since there were times that the dot didn't seem to be doing much, but if it does stack, especially if you get a bunch of procs back-to-back, it could certainly be the cause.
Another possibility: From what I remember, plasma torpedo fires were considered completely separate from plasma energy fires. I'm imagining a scenario where plasma energy weapons are refreshing or stacking plasma torpedo fires. I can easily see that as a bug introduced while modifying something else.
I have played over a thousand elite STFs; I have likely been teamed with most of you at some point. Today I played my last. Less than 30 seconds in all five of us had been killed and I know there was at least one other highly experienced player in the group.
This new set-up is obvious BS. Personally, I suspect it was done to cut down on successful optionals since they don't give you anything at all for achieving them anymore. That's like fixing a toothache with a ball peen hammer to the knee.
Did my first ISE after the latest patch and I was burned to death twice. At one point I had 80% hull with emergency power to shields 1, tac team 1 and reverse shield polarity 1 all going at the same time and I was simply fried in less than five seconds, shields never dropping once. The borg may not have been modified at all but it is ridiculously obvious that plasma weapons have been changed, notably the energy type's secondary DoT effect... Hey, at least this makes plasma weapons useful again... But without Dilithium for STFs, why bother... Of course, if this situation keeps up with THE major Dil Grinds no longer paying out I expect Zen will be going for 50 Dilithium on the exchange by month's end.
STO Forum member since 2008, player since 2012 - funny story that
Some cone-based targeting was changed so that it calculates from a center point rather than a specific facing. While this affected nearly every entity in the game, it only significantly impacts very large entities. A side effect of this is that there aren't as many "safe zones" from Borg Cube torpedoes.
Something more then that has changed ior at least feels to have changed. I never used safe zones and armour tank and used to have no problem in STF's. Now even with close to 70% hull resistance and more heals then before I can barely stay alive. Even as an armor tank with shields up my hull is around 20% before I know what is going off and I used to be able to armor tank without shields. (I fly a crusier which high hull hitpoints and all armor skills maxed out). 53k+ hull at well over 60% resistance should not be going down as fast as it is even with shields up. Could it be that hull resistance is not working?
Some cone-based targeting was changed so that it calculates from a center point rather than a specific facing. While this affected nearly every entity in the game, it only significantly impacts very large entities. A side effect of this is that there aren't as many "safe zones" from Borg Cube torpedoes.
Oh, thank you for that :-) Finally Khitomer will be more challenging :-) And CSE will be a hell again :-)
The higher bleedthrough was something which I noticed on Tribble, but couldn't test it with ACL.
What I think they did was to allow the plasma fire to stack. I did notice this also. My odyssey used to never worry about plasma fire but yesterday and today it takes 3-5K each tick from my hull. During that time I did notice being hit by the beams does set you on fire about every other hit. Those fires are stacking.
Rodentmaster: use melee on them borg missions. you and your boffs, you will do that room in under 3 minutes no deaths...
I think it's the combination of it stacking along with the fact that your going to get hit by more weapons fire due to the new arcs (thus more stacks, more direct damage, etc).
Regardless, I like it. I have to actually pay attention now. I'd also like to say there is a whole lot of nonsensical BS being splayed out in this thread by some posters claiming doom and gloom. Especially regarding one hit kill nonsense.
Get some hull heals, make sure you have at least one copy of Hazard emitters to cleanse the dot, and play a little more defensively.
I'm pretty sure, as previously stated here, that Borg Plasma Dots are stacking. I saw my Odyessey hull doing some crazy dips while fully shielded tanking infected elite yesterday. FaW + a lot of spheres is much more dangerous now.
I did a Borg sector invasion and actually thought it was worse than stf on elite difficulty. Shield neutralization was on me non-stop, combine that with stacking plasma dot you better have some friends willing to help with healing.
I don't mind the increase difficulty in STF's but not having a reason to run more than one a day is a no win situation for everyone.
I don't care what justifications you all can invent to be ok with it all. They opened their commentary to this discussion with a LIE ' We didn't change anything '. Then another one contradicted that LIE with ' We only changed this one thing in this one place '. Another LIE. We players are compiling mountains of data now to prove to them that they LIE. But if you think they don't already know that they are LIEING to us, you are fools.
How about Cryptic goes with TRUTH for a change and lay out everything they tweaked or changed and haven't told us, along with their long term plans for development in real terms not fantasy maybe terms/
I like the changes, Thank You -- elite STF's are more challenging, and more interesting.
Pior to season seven I was running a few STF's a day. Granted, I would only pug Infected elite-but I loved running Cure Elite and KA Elite with my fleet. Some evenings we would literally have all stf's on cooldown and hop onto alts to keep rolling them. That ain't the case anymore. Nobody needs anything out of Cure or KA. Nobody needs more than an Infected or 2 for Omega Marks.
Comments
Might this have an unintended side effect on how many other weapons they can bring to bear on us at once? I know that I can skim the surface of a Cube to be able to fire both rear beams and fore torpedoes when the ship's flying parallel to the cube face, for example. Having the reverse happen while drawing aggro from a group would be suicidal.
No, one said specifically that the Borg mobs in the STFs haven't been changed. The other said that there was a global change for all mobs in the way arc points are calculated.
So the change in the Borg you see are a side effect of a more global change - if you were to look at the code and parameters for the Borg mobs specifically, there should nothing be nothing different there.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
You know what makes me feel helpful and compliant? Being insulted, patronized, and having somebody's salary waved over me like it's a TRIBBLE-measuring contest.
But it seems like I am getting more dots applied than I should. In ISE the two guard sphere spawn had me up to 5 stacks of plasma dot within seconds. That hurt.
their energy weapons are not their primary way of dealing damage, the cutting beam and torpedo is by far their primary dealers of damage. that makes it silly to have stf shields guard against plasma weapons, that does almost nothing to protect you from borg, and breaks an entire energy type in pvp
the torpedoes they fire, wile often invisible, deal between 30-60k damage. that is a 1 shot and by far the largest problem in the entirety of the pve in game. it makes hive basically impossible to pug.
the balance solution
npcs clearly have a global modifier to thier weapons that buff their damage. that needs to be reduced dramatically so those 1 shot torpedoes no longer exist. then give borg npcs +50 additional weapons power, so their energy weapons are more powerful, wile their kinetic damage isn't absolutely insane.
this would work with ALL npcs, kinetic damage is the vast majority of the damage all npcs cause, and its because of that npc damage modifier ending up buffing torp damage far more then energy damage. just bypass this with this fix i propose.
I dont expect any of those things from them. The changes are in, they are not going to up and admit fault and beg forgiveness because we asked nicely. There has to be a growing massive negative backlash to send the point home.
Given the wide spread TRIBBLE the free player changes that have happened across the game at many points, I have no expectation they will make it 'better', we can only hope for less bad.
Wow! What an amazingly scumbag remark. Score yourself 10 elitist jerk points!
BTW: I am in no way on Cryptic's side in this, but... wow...
I agreed with this statement of yours:
But seriously, that first comment was WAY over the line.
That being said, i do like this change for the borg. STF isn't as dull anymore. We have to actually pay attention now *GASP* :eek:
This is the same old ****ed up borg code as before.
What is NEW is the fact that ground borg got seriously screwed up. I tried to run assimilated and the undine borg missions on my lowest fed toon, and it was .... what's the word?
So many expletives I cannot type them here.
The borg were nearly impossible to kill. Even with mk XI blue and purple gear my entire away team died so many times I stopped counting after 50, IN ONE ROOM. The room where you plant the fractal virus to blow up the borg cube is literally impossible to complete without a billion deaths. The borg were regitering damage in the 1-7 range any time you shot them. Their shields were absorbing 99% of all incoming damage for no reason.
Get the shields down and their bare skin took more damage, but the shields wouldn't go down. Further targetting just 1 aggros 10 nearby and they ALL swarm you. Even with cover shields, turrets, quantum mortars, med gens, shield gens, and defense bubbles, it's impossible to kill 1 of the 10 before you are swarmed and they 2-shot kill you. OR 1-shot you with the "plasma sweep" firing animation.
Then forget the elite tactical drones! I tried the next mission where you beam to the Romulan ship to clear the borg, and the first room was just as bad as the previous mission's room. They are literally impossible to kill in under 10 minutes of sustained fire. They send out knockback blasts every second for a minute at a time and anybody inside 20 meters is instantly knocked down. You get up and INSTANTLY are knocked down again. Repeat 50x. All the while the other borg drones are shooting you and you die. There's no hope of ressurecction because the away team is being knocked down repeatedly also. Or wiped out. The very first room you spawn in my entire away team died many times, myself even more.
The borg shields were 99% effective against all incoming damage, and if you found a simple drone without shields you couldn't kill it before you had to remodulate again. They were significantly tougher than elites STF drones I've run into in the past.
It's utter BS. Whatever cryptic did to the borg it's totally fubar.
Rodentmaster: use melee on them borg missions. you and your boffs, you will do that room in under 3 minutes no deaths...
The problem is the stupid TRIBBLE coding for these torps. They crit at a rate normal torps fire. That is almost every shot. And those crits bypass all shields apparently.
All are from Tac Borg Cube
TSS, Epower to Shield 1, 100+ Shield Power, and Maco Shield being used just to give idea of current resistance rating. In addition have 24.6 energy/40.3 kinetic hull resists.
1946(2148) Plasma Cannon Shield Damage
239(3673) Plasma Cannon Damage
Ok so no idea what that info even represents or how those first numbers were calculated from the first. Perhaps shield resistance math got messed up somewhere because just the maco shield and my shield power alone are more resist than what was applied. Next up the Torp.
3591(10460) Plasma Torpedo Shield Damage, Kinetic
19248(55429) Plasma Torpedo Damage, Kinetic
850(1309) Plasma Damage, the dot.
Ok first off I thought shields had an innate 75% kinetic resist or am I wrong on that because the log is implying around 65%. And how on earth did I gain kinetic hull resistance from no where for the hull hit?
Somewhere in your damage vs resistance formula someone made a boo boo. That is the only logical conclusion I can draw.
this one...
The old sft are still the same, but in Into The Hive, borg are too strong... My shield are totally useless... No matter if I use maco shield have the max into shield skill and use both TSS and EPtS.
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
Another possibility: From what I remember, plasma torpedo fires were considered completely separate from plasma energy fires. I'm imagining a scenario where plasma energy weapons are refreshing or stacking plasma torpedo fires. I can easily see that as a bug introduced while modifying something else.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
This new set-up is obvious BS. Personally, I suspect it was done to cut down on successful optionals since they don't give you anything at all for achieving them anymore. That's like fixing a toothache with a ball peen hammer to the knee.
kills shields in seconds then boom
STO Forum member since 2008, player since 2012 - funny story that
Something more then that has changed ior at least feels to have changed. I never used safe zones and armour tank and used to have no problem in STF's. Now even with close to 70% hull resistance and more heals then before I can barely stay alive. Even as an armor tank with shields up my hull is around 20% before I know what is going off and I used to be able to armor tank without shields. (I fly a crusier which high hull hitpoints and all armor skills maxed out). 53k+ hull at well over 60% resistance should not be going down as fast as it is even with shields up. Could it be that hull resistance is not working?
Oh, thank you for that :-) Finally Khitomer will be more challenging :-) And CSE will be a hell again :-)
The higher bleedthrough was something which I noticed on Tribble, but couldn't test it with ACL.
I think it's the combination of it stacking along with the fact that your going to get hit by more weapons fire due to the new arcs (thus more stacks, more direct damage, etc).
Regardless, I like it. I have to actually pay attention now. I'd also like to say there is a whole lot of nonsensical BS being splayed out in this thread by some posters claiming doom and gloom. Especially regarding one hit kill nonsense.
Get some hull heals, make sure you have at least one copy of Hazard emitters to cleanse the dot, and play a little more defensively.
I did a Borg sector invasion and actually thought it was worse than stf on elite difficulty. Shield neutralization was on me non-stop, combine that with stacking plasma dot you better have some friends willing to help with healing.
I don't mind the increase difficulty in STF's but not having a reason to run more than one a day is a no win situation for everyone.
How about Cryptic goes with TRUTH for a change and lay out everything they tweaked or changed and haven't told us, along with their long term plans for development in real terms not fantasy maybe terms/
Pior to season seven I was running a few STF's a day. Granted, I would only pug Infected elite-but I loved running Cure Elite and KA Elite with my fleet. Some evenings we would literally have all stf's on cooldown and hop onto alts to keep rolling them. That ain't the case anymore. Nobody needs anything out of Cure or KA. Nobody needs more than an Infected or 2 for Omega Marks.
What is so interesting about that?