Vault shuttle event still sucks and more

monkeybone13 · November 2012

Tried the vault shuttle event once since it was the extra-romulan-marks-for-an-hour event.

Well....Failed in the second room, as usual, where you have to remodulate the 4 cores. Always fail in the second room. If we can get to the third final room we can win. The problem I believe has been way way too many enemy ships flying around. If you start remodulating a core and get attacked you are interrupted and have to start the process over and over again. This causes time to run out, thus mission failure. The team I ended up with did great in the first room with plenty of time to spare. And I'm talking a 5 person team against a dozen ships or so all at once in this stinking room. At least it seems that way.

The larger warbird ships are tougher and take too long to destroy especially when your team is all over the place trying to remodulate the cores and you go 1 on 1 with it.

It specifically is called Vault Shuttle Event for the hour long event to get extra Romulan marks, and says you need a small craft or fighter. There is only one Vault Shuttle event that requires a small craft/fighter. The other is the new Vault Event: Snared which allows you to use a regular large ship.

What ticked me off was thinking "oh well I still have plenty of time to try it again" and boy was I wrong. 30 minute cooldown on Vault Shuttle event. It took me 15 minutes (possibly longer) after queuing to get in and I queued 2 minutes after it started. After failing there was 35 minutes left for the hour long event for extra marks. This means after the cooldown I would have 5 minutes to complete it successfully to get extra Romulan marks which is impossible because of the long wait time and the fact it takes -as stated in the PVE queue- about 15 minutes to complete.

Either the Vault Shuttle event hour long extra mark event should be changed to include the new Vault Event: Snared, or remove the cooldown timer completely since there is no alternative event at all to do while you wait to be able to do the one you just completed, or horribly failed. The reason why there are cooldown timers on pretty much every PVE queue, or at least a lot of them, is because during the special hour (2 hour for fleet actions) event to earn extra rewards, there are other PVE queues that qualify, offering the same types of rewards (fleet marks, omega marks, romulan marks, etc.) and they want people to actually play the different types of content instead of all flocking to their favorite one, and I'm cool with that. It gets boring doing the same mission over and over and having to switch between them makes it less monotonous.

Weeks ago I gave up on this event for the Reman Datalogs. I thought maybe it would be different now. The problem is I really have liked this event and enjoy doing it (when not failing every single time). But now I'll just skip the stupid thing and get Romulan marks elsewhere if I need them. No matter how great the players and their ships/abilities are it just isn't enough. Get a lot of teams before that look like we're gonna make it only to get screwed up in the second room.

duaths1 · November 2012

what? they did put a cooldown in the primtime? lol

the event is fine, i grinded it for MK XII set in the old times with datalogs..

the only problem right now is that people queue it, read no guides, do not read the mission briefing and then it is no surprise that it fails..

try running it with an dedicated grp, although, youll get more marks just by playing new romulus content..

somewhere in the academy there is a guide written by myself - The Vault- a small how to

naharikajal · November 2012

Well the idea with the cooldown timer doesn't sound good to me. Especially for a mission which can fail so easily.

I went through a lot of runs to get enough datalogs for the MK XII set. I have to admit from time to time it was very painful (failing because of 2 seconds for example). I failed far more runs than I passed. But with a good group it was fun and sometimes made my heart beat faster

Anyway, now that I have my set I am not planning to play it constantly (like I did before) because it's still difficult and I can earn my romulan marks somewhere else.
But from time to time for a real challenge... why not ^^

jmanwin · November 2012

The difficulty of the event would be fine if the rewards matched the difficulty. I completed the mission during a non-event hour, hit every single trigger personally while wrangling a group of semi-noobs through it, and was awarded a grand total of 15 Romulan Marks for my trouble.

Then I did the Vault: Ensnared mission mistakenly thinking it was also a shuttle event, ended up in my escort with half the good gear stripped, slept-walked through the mission clicking the shield heal button twice the entire time, never came anywhere close to being in danger, failed the optional because I never found the ship I was supposed to attack, and was awarded 17 Romulan Marks in less time than it took to do the Shuttle mission.

Did anybody up there bother to check the failure rate on the Shuttle event before rating it as "Easy"? (Anyone who took the time to master this event already knows you didn't.)

I still don't know how many Marks it awards while the special Event is on, because you only get one shot at completing it during that hour thanks to the cooldown timer. If it gave double the normal marks during the special event plus dilithium, then I might still play it given my own high success rate, but as it stands nobody who hasn't already mastered it has any reason to ever attempt this mission again. There are dozens of ways to get more romulan marks faster without the high rate of failure that learning this mission entails.

monkeybone13 · November 2012

Another thing I forgot to mention. The door to the next area will NOT open until you have destroyed every ship, tractor beam, and whatever else can be targeted in the room. We could have all cores remodulated with 2 minutes to spare and run out of time because of the amount of TRIBBLE we have left to shoot. I have failed due to not killing everything more than nobody remodulating the cores, on time.

Edit: Also, we're not being killed ourselves left and right. It's a matter of the larger ships, such as Birds of Prey, take a while to kill. I hardly see any other players getting killed because we can usually take care of ourselves. But taking on a BoP yourself when your entire team is spread out due to so many enemies on top of is, it can take me a whole minute or two just to destroy 1 BoP.

fiberteksyfir · November 2012

jmanwin wrote: »

The difficulty of the event would be fine if the rewards matched the difficulty. I completed the mission during a non-event hour, hit every single trigger personally while wrangling a group of semi-noobs through it, and was awarded a grand total of 15 Romulan Marks for my trouble.

Then I did the Vault: Ensnared mission mistakenly thinking it was also a shuttle event, ended up in my escort with half the good gear stripped, slept-walked through the mission clicking the shield heal button twice the entire time, never came anywhere close to being in danger, failed the optional because I never found the ship I was supposed to attack, and was awarded 17 Romulan Marks in less time than it took to do the Shuttle mission.

Did anybody up there bother to check the failure rate on the Shuttle event before rating it as "Easy"? (Anyone who took the time to master this event already knows you didn't.)

I still don't know how many Marks it awards while the special Event is on, because you only get one shot at completing it during that hour thanks to the cooldown timer. If it gave double the normal marks during the special event plus dilithium, then I might still play it given my own high success rate, but as it stands nobody who hasn't already mastered it has any reason to ever attempt this mission again. There are dozens of ways to get more romulan marks faster without the high rate of failure that learning this mission entails.

Funny you should mention that. No Win Scenario is also rated "easy".

monkeybone13 · November 2012

fiberteksyfir wrote: »

Funny you should mention that. No Win Scenario is also rated "easy".

Good point. I've done the No-Win Scenario a few times and can never get past stage 5.

Would winning a no-win scenario be an oxymoron? Makes me wonder.

captainrevo1 · November 2012

I dont think i have ever failed this mission. some were very, very close to failing and perhaps i was just lucking out with great pugs but its not that difficult if people know what they are doing.

its by no means an easy mission, and its pretty much the stf's of shuttles

if people go in half hearted, with a bad set up or dont know what they are doing, then sure it will go bad real fast. while im not a fan of time limits that cause a fail, i dont mind some tricky content. not every mission is made for every player.

best bet is to go through a chat channel (when the queues are fixed), and get an experienced team together or now that the reman equipment is through the rep system, just leave it.

nicha0 · November 2012

Nothing wrong with the shuttle vault mission, it is easy, if you are failing it then you are just bad at it. Even if I pug it, I typically hit all the objectives myself without a problem. The biggest challenge is getting all the other people to defend, because somehow they think by sitting in the front killing enemy shuttles they are being productive.

The cooldown seems like a mistake though, the whole shuttle event should be scrapped.

nynik · November 2012

My main problem with running the vault shuttle event is in how the mechanics for advancing rely on each team member being out of red alert status. Sometimes red alert status seems to last for more than 10 seconds (and at times it has felt longer) after you last took (or received) and offensive action. I've been with teams that have cleared the entire room, including any cloaked units, only for us to fail because all five team members had not cleared red alert status before the time ran out - even though all the hostile NPCs were DEAD up to 45 seconds before the timer was due to run out.

I raised this when the event was first introduced, and it was lucky enough to be asked of the event designer on priority one - unfortunately, he put it down to cloaked units (le sigh) and not the fact that red alert status can negatively impact on this mission's success.

But I would suggest avoiding PUGs when your aim is to capitalize on bonus hour(s) events for content. You need people who understand or are willing to apply strategy. For example, one person rushes the npcs at a power core allowing you to reconfigure it without aggression.

jmanwin · November 2012

I got 20 marks for completing this mission while the special Vault Shuttle event is on. As usually happens, there was little chance my pug team would have completed the mission if I hadn't been there to complete the side tasks.

Meanwhile, I got 60 marks for a badly noobed-up Infected Space Elite mission that possibly set the speed record for failing the optional, plus a Borg Neural Processor.

There is no way that doing Infected Space without the optional is as hard as Vault Shuttle, forget 3 to 4 times as hard as the rewards would indicate. This is the hardest mission of the Romulan branch and ought to be rewarded as such, especially if you want to sell $5 shuttles.

(It doesn't need to be easier. We have plenty of quick, brainless Romulan mark missions. I'd rather it got harder in the first and third rooms and provided STF level rewards.)

darthstormstrike · November 2012

I did the event one time and that was enough to know I will never waste my time on that crapola of an event. And TRIBBLE the Romulan marks it gives.

Vault shuttle event still sucks and more

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