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Tougher PvE
adamkafei
Member Posts: 6,539 Arc User
I've been playing now since F2P and know my way around the games systems, I've also played all the current content to death and am at a loss as to why I am still playing this game BUT that is not the point of this thread, the point of this thread is to see about getting some harder content.
Something like what Hive onslaught was during the Tribble test weekend where the AI had a better damage output (slightly lower than now) but a FAR better AI (tac cubes using Viral matrix and stuff), it made you work for a living (unless you had the right team composition). Could we please have something like this that we can throw our elite build ships at and still get a challenge from?
I for one am not finding the content fun anymore and ALL of it (EVEN NWS) is done best by a team of 5 tac/scorts and it is time to break that mold and have something that REQUIREs the skills the other captain/ship classes bring, preferably something that doesn't involve the borg as most of us long term players are sick of the sight of them but please devs ANYTHING that isn't DPS based!
On a side note: can we see some more balance changes in the game please?
For the community: please discuss! What do you guys want to see in PvE?
Something like what Hive onslaught was during the Tribble test weekend where the AI had a better damage output (slightly lower than now) but a FAR better AI (tac cubes using Viral matrix and stuff), it made you work for a living (unless you had the right team composition). Could we please have something like this that we can throw our elite build ships at and still get a challenge from?
I for one am not finding the content fun anymore and ALL of it (EVEN NWS) is done best by a team of 5 tac/scorts and it is time to break that mold and have something that REQUIREs the skills the other captain/ship classes bring, preferably something that doesn't involve the borg as most of us long term players are sick of the sight of them but please devs ANYTHING that isn't DPS based!
On a side note: can we see some more balance changes in the game please?
For the community: please discuss! What do you guys want to see in PvE?
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Comments
1) Missions are too short and require too many repeats.
2) Enemy design is too simplistic.
1) With the fleet advancement and rep system that's in the game currently, it is necessary to have short, quickly repeatable missions so people who can only play here and there, and maybe not always be able to get 4 bros to play with them, can still play. So some short missions that can be near-PuGged and don't require a specific team build (ie. 5 players with a decent grasp of the mission can do it without needing to really talk to each other, so you can get groups easily) should remain in the game.
But it isn't necessary to have nearly all of them like that. In fact, it contributes to the boredom & ease of end-level PvE for long-term players, and ultimately to the impression that the game is one big, unfun, grind-sandwich, which is the reason why a lot of people have stopped playing.
Let's say for simple example that you need to do 300 minutes of playtime in a certain mission to reach a certain goal. Which do you think you'll get bored of first, a ten minute mission, with only ten minutes of tactics that need to be learned and mastered, which needs to be done 30 times? Or a thirty minute mission with thirty minutes of tactics and learning that needs to be done 10 times?
It's obviously going to be the former, isn't it? Now imagine you have to do 30,000 minutes of playtime to get what you want (as is the case in the game). It's going to get even more mind-numbing.
Missions don't have to be marathons, and shorter missions need to exist to be fair to everyone. But a bit more length and complexity than exists now would go some way to delaying the point when you start to play missions on auto-pilot. And there are only two alternatives to short zerg-fest group PvE missions - Terradome & NWS. That's not enough.
I also appreciate that no one's obliging me to grind, but if I want any worthwhile loot reward anymore, I have to.
2) They're mostly just mountains of health with few useful abilities. This makes destroying them a matter of wearing them down. Cut their health and give them the ability to heal themselves. Give them powers that make mindlessly burning through damage buffs as quickly as possible a bad idea once in a while.
These two problems together create a predictable PvE environment that can get really stale sometimes, as well as a DPS-dominant meta, since you just want to relieve your enemies of a large amount of HP in the shortest time possible, and you don't really need any tanking or debuffs, or disables/stuns, or crowd control to defeat them.
This isn't all Cryptic or PWE's fault, btw.
Because do you know what this forum would be flooded with if Cryptic introduced a new STF that was 3x as long as the existing ones, with complex objectives, enemy AIs that required thinking, tactics and co-ordination, and was pretty much entirely un-PuGgable?
A lot of crying about how it can't be PuGged, is too hard and how people who either lack the desire or ability to get an organised group together are being locked out of content.
Anyhow, tl;dr version:
What I'd like to see from PvE in this game is longer missions and enemies with more useful abilities.
But that only goes so far before you have to return to the PvE grind to get the next piece of gear and then we end up back where we started with a desire for PvE to be harder
If you want more of a challenge play with random people no private matches and use weaker gear/equipment no duty officers on active duty and even a weaker ship. When something is to easy for someone that person need to create a challenge for themselves.
its the best mission in the game. you have a goal and you are on a shared map with other players trying to reach that goal.
it is the only mission that makes it really feel like there is a war going on.
They tired to recreate that experience with nukura, but it fell flat, as it is too easy
ideally you would have a map with a stages that are increasingly hard to even reach, where you have to stay as a large group and cooperate
like a harder version of Breaking the Planet (by far the best ground PvE imo) except that map instance doesn't end and the goals are individual or team (like Defera and to a lesser degree, Nukura)
basically to cultivate raids and cooperation
I'll toss out a couple ideas, just to spur some creative juices.
Give us a temporal incursion ESTF. Throw in the sphere builders, I don't know. Three bosses:
1. A temporal science vessel. This little sucker would have a turn rate of around 30, and flight speed around 100. Give it AI to constantly get abaft of the ship with aggro, and constantly drop mines and/or turrets. That forces players to reposition and plan movement like a TRIBBLE, while managing area-denial attacks. Make it weak against slows and holds, and even chroniton weapons, so CC is the best/only way to deal with it.
2. A temporal support vessel. This bad boy emits anti-matter spread in constant pulses, and throws out a special version of viral matrix that spreads when player ships are within 5Km of one another. Have it target randomly, and switch targets between salvos, so aggro is completely unpredictable. That plays hell with targeting, positioning, and healing and forces players to very carefully maneuver and plan their strikes so as to not damage others.
3. A sphere. Its cloaking barrier prevents targeting outside 3Km, and it constantly emits a gravity well with a radius of 3Km that does some serious damage. If more than three targets are within 3Km, it photonic shockwaves. Players would have to coordinate attack runs, get in and alpha strike, and get out before the grav well tears them apart. Outside 3Km, adds spawn that have to be controlled by players not doing attack runs.
Hmm, other ideas...
- A boss that has low hull, but high shields and extremely high hull repair. It alternates between two phases: reverse shield polarity, and feedback pulse. The high hull repair trait means it can't merely be pummeled with torpedoes and bleedthrough damage, and has to be burst down through its "feedback pulse" phase. Just gotta survive the feedback pulse to burst it down, which means doing too much damage could bite an unwary player in the butt, and hard.
- A boss with a variant of the subspace jumper, except it jumps in front of a player, drops tractor mines, and vents a theta radiation variant that does a crapload of kinetic damage (like 10K/sec) and kills accuracy (so the player can't take its subspace jump as an opportunity to alpha strike it). The player that got jumped has to polarize hull or APO, and power their way out of the radiation cloud before it kills them.
- A carrier boss with a single-facing shield neutralizer. It punishes tactical team use, hard, by zapping away all shields if TT is active, leaving the player(s) vulnerable to its attack craft. Or better, a single-facing shield drain, which heals the carrier for whatever shields are drained away from the player.
- A temporal science vessel boss with a Manheim device. The "present" ship constantly heals the "past" ship, the "future" ship placates and jams players that target the "present" ship, and the "past" ship bursts the TRIBBLE out of whatever player targets it.
Spock's Brain.
Yay!
Another fetish abuse thread!
:rolleyes:
So, like...what makes you think 1-shot-insta-kill WTFtorps makes for more of a challenge?
Trying to finish the mission in this lifetime?
Imagine all the times you were shot ONCE and now think of those single shots meaning instant death...
Now, for a more serious suggestion:
Cryptic can add more optional objectives and increase the rewards for completing them AND only for pugs.
Now THAT'S a challenge.
RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
This is the better suggestion.
RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
I don't recall him saying anything about 1 shot weapons.
It's possible to make a harder ai without giving it 1 shot abilities.
Take a look at all the powers we as the player have access to, now look at the npc. It doesn't even have emergency power to shields or tactical team! Just those 2 powers alone would make fighting the ai a little more fun.
Do you even Science Bro?
That's what it'll turn into, just like the other fetish abuse threads.
1 Shot Instakill Weapons = MOAR Challenge
Making them like Fed Cruisers won't solve the "problem" either.
Don't encourage Cryptic to change the STF's any more than they have already.
UNLESS the actual STF grinders (like me) are behind the change.
Until then, just leave it alone.
The intent is good but what Cryptic will give us will be bad.
RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
No, that's what you think would happen, because you lack imagination to envision scenarios that are challenging without one-hit killers. In fact, the OP here calls out improving NPC AI while reducing their damage output, which entirely precludes the notion of "one-hit kill" weapons altogether.
Spock's Brain.
This is true but then again Cryptic want ESTFs to to be group content and as it stands STO is an MSORPG, if they built missions that required teamwork and chat to complete I think it would be a good thing in the long run. I remember when the Hive STFs were in testing and the group I did them with actually had to chat and co-ordinate to complete it, it made the game fun
So you make a mix of missions, for every 2 missions that can be done with mk 6 gear on a T3 ship with no chat (AKA what we have now) you make 1 that requires mk 11/12/endgame gear and good team composition along with chat to complete because the AI makes better use of more skills with a little lower damage output which in turn would increase the number of people playing STFs, I have turned to pvp because PvE just isn't fun after the 1000th time of doing the missions.
One would thing that the TT distribution effect should be perma online on all borg ships.
thats just my idea for something that should be done easily. ofc i take everything else that gives me a reason to continue powering up my ships and stuff.
If you hadn't noticed, player ideas, thoughts and opinions, and what Cryptic end up implementing are usually polar opposites.
Devs:
1) Created 3 Careers with roles that mimic typical trinity.
2) Created 3 primary ship types, that also have roles and are effectively your class in space (Ref: Captain Gecko, recent podcast)
3) Combining 1 & 2 allows for a unique version of "hybrid" classes or "mutli-classing" to various degrees.
4) No content actually requires any specific combination of roles to be effective. Some (all DPS) team comps are more optimal, but all content is designed to allow, theoretically, any mix of career/ships to complete anything.
5) #4 allows PUG queue teaming to function with minimum of requirements to be met.
General Playerbase:
1) Seem to hate the idea of roles, and role type gaming. Go bonkers at the mention of trinity gameplay - even Trinity lite.
2) Hate the idea that one ship is optimal at content. Which is odd, since they intrinsically prefer this type of content (easy to complete) due to #1.
3) Create endless amounts of threads trying to push the other Careers/Ship classes to fill the same role as the one that is "optimal".
Ultimately harder content will to at least some extent require players to play specific roles, with boff layouts that adhere to that. (We have this in PvP)
Unfortunately this game's playerbase seems completely adverse to it (State of PvP? Possibly part of it), and even after all this time many still struggle with something so rote as STFs.
So the content we get is Tau Dewa sorties and Azure Nebula Rescue, or Starbase Fleet Defense.
It's easy, quick and all you need is a spacebar and a pulse.
But this is Star Trek, people watched the shows, the movies and expect that their "ships" perform in certain way.
However saying this, it does not excuse the trivial "elite" content. Elite should be elite, it should be very hard and it should require proper team coordination and at least assigned roles. Ie. some eng in steamrunner will probably make better tank than a tac with A2B Excelsior.
It's an MMO, with MMO conventions.
The funny part is that you are describing archtypes, and not actual roles.
In some games Fighter could be tank, or DPS. In some games Rogue is an ambush hitter, in others its a ranged character. In some games the Mage is control, others debuffs and yet others still a ranged striker.
The roles, are Tank, DPS, Heal. There are other roles like control, ranged striking, ambush striking, etc. These can apply to any game, not just "fantasy".
That's not enough for some people so they will spend countless years complaining on the forums that their sack of apples is not a bowl of oranges.
Those people must love disappointment.
That would be an issue with implementation of content, not suggestions and feedback for content. The person to whom I responded was criticizing the OP for their feedback, on the basis of Cryptic/PWE's implementation of content. That person cannot be held responsible for what content, or how that content is implemented, by Cryptic/PWE.
If you have an issue with how Cryptic/PWE implements content, take it up with them, but don't lash out at fellow players providing feedback in good faith.
Spock's Brain.
tac / escort = assassin
tac / cruiser = paladin with big two handed hammer
tac / sci ship = battle mage
eng / escort = duelist
eng / cruiser = paladin with shields and sword
eng / sci = priest
sci / escort = rogue
sci /cruiser = ugh ugh got me there
sci / sci = wizard
And I personally feel that is more than enough to satistfy majority of players and their playstyle. Some people would like to turn their ships in something their aren't, while other players would like to chain people and enslave them in the name of holy trinity.
We probably won't agree about this, but we share the common ground when it comes to triviality of PVE and the need to improve the difficulty, especially in regards to teamplay. That does not require everyone to be pidgeon-holed to certain role, just because they happen to fly certain ship class.
Shadowknight!
Tanky, workable damage when played right, lots of drains and debuffs.
Spock's Brain.
The issue is that we need to open up Mk XII drops threw harder missions, or just open up Tier 6 already (Will this ever happen)?
The game is not hard enough at the moment, and Is a Tac-fest. (With a little Sci). As a long played Eng, I can tank everything without issues and dish out damage but I still don't dish out nearly as much damage as Scis or Tacs with the same exact build due to their superior abilities.
tl;dr: I would be all for playing harder missions, if there were actual rewards that were not just Marks that can be gotten a dozen or so other places.
My suggestion is that if you're good enough join a Fleet, or a channel that you can trust to always be consistent.
Optional objectives, and that's the problem. The morons and slackers know there's no way to actually fail out an ESTF, approximately 80 are guaranteed by merit of having joined the ESTF, and all else is a matter of time not effort. In fact, I'd lay cash money the only reason you see optional objectives being completed at all, let alone by the "hardcore" grinders who actually understand the economy of time, is the optional objective completion happens to align with the most expedient method of completing the given ESTF. ESTF's, first and foremost, need actual failure conditions to increase the risk and cost of participating in one.
Make the objectives that are optional in STF's, mandatory in ESTF's. You get the full reward, or you get nothing. In exchange, make the Mark X ground sets cost 100 Omega marks and the Mark XI space sets cost 250 (retain other costs) so they're accessible in a reasonable amount of time with normal STF's; and increase the ESTF rewards (increase the BNP yield 6-11 BNP's, or have them give 2880 Dilithium ore instead of 960).
Spock's Brain.
Great way to kill public Elite STF matches especially ground ones that already take a wile to get started.
If public ESTF matches are only "alive" on the back of leeches and idiots who have learned nothing but to game the system, GOOD. Cryptic's free to ratchet up the rewards to incentivize ESTF play for those who have the know-how, normalize STF rewards to be an actual step into ESTF play, and leave normal STF's for the majority who just seek to maximize individual reward for minimal effort and risk.
Spock's Brain.