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Devil's Choice: Defense of New Romulus seems stupidly hard. (spoilers)
peter1z9
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Edit: this is the final wave of the mission with the command ship.
1Is there a certain way to beat it (without bringing other players along), or is something broke that causes the mission to send endless Elachi ships?
When the friendly reinforcements come in, they are just a few named ships that end up stuck endlessly repairing because there are so many darn Elachi. I don't see why the named reinforcements wouldn't have brought at least some generic friends along with them.
1Is there a certain way to beat it (without bringing other players along), or is something broke that causes the mission to send endless Elachi ships?
When the friendly reinforcements come in, they are just a few named ships that end up stuck endlessly repairing because there are so many darn Elachi. I don't see why the named reinforcements wouldn't have brought at least some generic friends along with them.
"Our Bugs are working as intended" - Cryptic
Post edited by peter1z9 on
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i spent a good 15-20 mins on that wave alone just because i couldnt take the combined firepower of all those dreadnoughts -_-...I finally destroyed the command ship through plasma and harpengh DoT
it IS a pain actually...that mission took far longer than i thought it would...but it was awesome none the less...especially considering the nice singularity core reward.
New Romulus should be sending your fighters out first to attack the frigates, Mogai to hit the escorts, then send your fleet ships to help you with the Command ships.
For some reason the devs though it be tactically sound to do the exact opposite, which makes it harder for you, because those fighters don't take any punishment, and with all those cones being tossed out, they all died in about 10 seconds.
not quite the same thing........ when everything including command ships are air power and have massive blanketing AOE weapons, and missiles that seek to anything and main weapons that if it is a "hit" seek until they impact a ship.
in STO it is stupid to send fighters against command ships. hell it is generally stupid in sto to send fighters against anything bigger than other fighters.
that item IMO is utterly useless with the unneeded 15 min CD
it has a 35 second uptime to a 15 min CD.......cryptic needs to lower that CD down tol something like 5 mins. same for the fleet support.....
The mission does seem a bit out of balance and needs to be tweaked before going live. Better allied support would be nice if they are going to keep the number and type of enemy ships for that last mission.
Odd...while leading the ships while cloaked, I went to the border of the map and just sat there. Came here to post, and when I switch back to the game the mission mysteriously completed itself... Well, that's one way to complete a mission. They definitely need to take a look at this.
I already made some proposals for the showdown as part of my testing log for it in the related feedback thread. Long story short:
Wave before last - 2x Dreads, a half dozen escorts and frigates(each).
Final Wave - 1x Command ship, a half dozen battleships and a dozen frigates.
That's Elachi behavior in general. I think they, as an NPC race, just have starship sensors through the wazoo. Also, don't forget cloak strength is (marginally) dependent upon aux power, in which warbirds run chronic deficits, singularity charge hurts cloak strength, and the Elachi missions come at a point in the timeline before most players get points in the stealth skill.
The one thing I found immensely helped during that mission line, especially for the levels at which it occurs coupled with the Elachi's own stats, is to swap out your Mogai for your Temporal Ambassador reward ship. Battle cloak doesn't really help against Elachi anyhow, but the improved resilience of either the Ambassador or Kamarag and improved weapons slotting and power does.
Spock's Brain.
How did you even get through that mission? I got smashed once my very anemic backup was obliterated. The only way I got through the mission was through some strange bug while I was observing the Elachi's tracking behaviour.
It makes me wonder if the intended approach is to just focus down the command ship right off the bat like the Elachi Walkers in Best Defense.
You know, actually exactly like this.
Think of it as circles within circles. Fighter's out front, then escorts, then battleships and carriers. Even on island defense you had the same thing, just with the island, or in this case planet, in the center.
So while I know you were trying to be sarcastic, you actually proved my point. The US Navy, and the Japanese Navy, sent their planes out FIRST, not their battleships.
I tried that. The problem is, once the fighters are down, all those dreadnaughts start using overlapping cone AoEs and if you're in the center of it, you'll never get out of it, but if you concentrate on the outships first, they just wear you down.
I will say this though, I'm pretty sure they expected you to be in a D'Deridex when you fight this battle, armed with cannons. The ships are slow enough that they don't turn much. The problem is of course, that the two battle prior to that, if you
re in a D'Deridex with cannons, you can't turn fast enough to keep up with the swarm of frigates and escorts.
You fight off wave one and retreat? Nothing is there, why would one retreat closer to the planet so that the next wave of enemies can easily bombard it?
I'm not aware of any military organization that fights a battle, wins, and retreats, especially if the the MAIN target of the enemy, and if you lose it, you lose everything.
In short, there is nowhere to retreat to. Hold the line, at all costs.
The other ships, including the 'hero' ships from the KDF and Starfleet, if you watch them fight, they are literally getting destroyed in about 3 salvos or less by the enemy fleet, and are almost constantly in 'repairing' mode. There is absolutely NO realism in this fight.
Your allies from the Flotilla? If they aren't long gone by wave 3, they will be soon, and they don't respawn. So at the end of the battle, I would have expected there to be no more Flotilla location on the sector map afterwards, but there is. Therefore, one would expect a fair number of them to have survived. Or some testament to the loss and rebuilding of the Republic fleet. At least they tried to add this in at the end of the mission. But it's more like it wasn't real afterwards.
This battle is basically the Romulan equivalent of Wolf 359, with similar consequences for failure
Now, if you got beat back toward New Romulus by wave 1. Then Wave 2 would be incoming, and Wave 3 was the Command Ship in the back, with a small support, for instance. Then we linked up with the hero ships, flanked them to get to the Command ship and destroy it for the win, that would work much better. But I have no clue whether the game engine would support that kind of fight.
At least this would feel more epic to play, rather than a hopeless zerg fest. While I'm sure its possible to play as is with less to no zerg, why would we want to? It's just too unrealistic in its current form
Unlike the majority of the rest of the Romulan story line, I've no desire to replay this. It could award a Mk XV Legendary Singularity Core, or Warp Core (gold color) from the 29th Century, and I wouldn't enjoy playing it as it currently is.
For realism's sake, The Flotilla ships would have to respawn. They need to be able to keep the Elachi busy, and the Elachi need to make at least a token attack on the planet if they get in range.
I'm really hoping this mission is a chain of gigantic bugs and issues, and will be closer to entirely retooled before it hits Holodeck, because it's an immense letdown.
Aside from the Vengance Arc, the Romulan story line is a real thrill to play, and they could save this arc if they just explained, fixed, or preferably both, Elachi SPACE technology, their ground setup is just fine.
1. Elachi Battleships get those 2 cruiser support ships those things are stupidly crazy strong (string more expletives if you want) for saying the battleship crapped them out. Where can we get those, and unless you tone them down the devs will have all players asking for something as totally dumb. (See fed carrier arguments for details) See loss of perspective on item 2.
2. The last time I saw more than one capital ship it was in a STF NOT a mission that a level 30+ need do. Its been mentioned that Subcommanders get this one. Seriously? Which dev is responsible for the total loss of perspective? (At least when Gozer made the STFs to torture players it was an endgame thing.)
3. The friendly AI is utterly useless. This isn't just a problem with this mission. In most missions its not an issue, its usually something that could be handled by most players anyways, its always when the blob is introduced. Which the STFs do, but by then the player has the skill, gear and experience and they have other players to depend on. Even those take time to get good at.
Whoever made this mission this hard I have a couple of requests. PLEASE make us some new STFs. The current ones are boring and you have a talent for endgame content. Running STFs 75+ times you hunger for something new. Also if you could come up with new fleet actions. The dev that buggered this one might work better doing end game and group content.
your front weapons may as well not be there ( i did this mission in a Big D with aft mounted torpedo spreads doing 90% of the work)
And the indestructible High Yield Torpedoes
Their cloak detection abilities could easily be spelled out due to their association with the Tal Shir.
The disables are terribly redundant, but that isn't as bad.
I'm sure there are additional bugs and/or broken mechanics at work here.
Actually I found this to almost be a blessing. Normally they'd teleport behind you, then wind up one of those long recharge arc things. This would give me a chance to battle cloak, power to engines, and evasive manuevers. If I battle cloaked at any other time, I'd have my hull handed to me to a brown paper bag.
Course the problem is when one does it, then 5 seconds later another does it. Then it sucks. But if they do it all pretty much at the same time, it gave me a chance to at least turn.
But that's about the only use the cloak had in this one... turning.
I didn't get to the mission until I was already in my D'Deridex, for one thing. Considering that, lots of cloaking, alpha striking, mines, and ramming. Even if they detect you, you don't get on their hate list until you open fire so you have ample time to get at least one alpha strike in before you die. If you managed to get quantum asborption in, you might survive long enough for a second pass. After that, go to ramming speed and just before you ram, drop mines. Between the initial ram, mines, and the singularity core overload, that's a crapload of damage.
Also, making the Elachi escorts your highest priority really helps. Those things do a lot of damage, especially overlapping their arc weapons' area-effects. They're way more dangerous than the battleships and dreadnoughts.
Spock's Brain.
1. Way too many capital ships in the last wave. I blew up eight times trying to take out even one dread, and couldn't even scratch it. It, however, had no problems eating my shields for breakfast, and then shoving one of those torpedoes down my throat for good measure.
2. Support is completely useless, I lost every Romulan ship within the first 30 seconds of the last battle. The four Federation ships were about as useful as a Swiss cheese umbrella in a rainstorm.
3. Viral Matrix is the biggest pain in the neck they throw at you. It always drops two systems, and it's almost always engines and weapons, which means I can't shoot or turn, al lthe while getting hammered by said dreads.
So, the suggestions? Either tone down the strength of those ships by at least half, cut the number of ships in half, or scrap the entire mission and redo it, because you obviously blew it with this one. Up until now, the Romulan story line was great. This ruins it completely.
Here's a map to show how much they've screwed up the game map.
The balance of every previous wave is actually very good. I was on the edge of my seat until the last wave, where it quickly started feeling like an exercise in futility. I forged on and eventually managed to whittle down the enemies until my repairing Federation and Klingon allies could shoulder the hurt a little better... but it soured the fun/epicness of the whole scenario.
My feelings on the matter is that there's a need to maintain this feeling of pitched battle all around you, and that's best achieved with granting allied ships more staying power. I feel that to accomplish that, a couple more 'unkillable' vessels should be brought into the fray by the Romulan Republic - for example, ships previously seen in the storyline like the Ha'apax-class R.R.W. Deihu. It would both enhance the continuity and relieve the fun-killing pressure presently plaguing the last leg of this mission.
Give it some Vo better diolog, actual things to defend like a port or something just make it simi realistic. not CHAOS CHAOS CHAOS and then you solo the last ten ships cause the npc's all die.
The Viral Matrix spam got old fast but wasn't enough to be a serious problem.... Invasive scan was a PITA simply because it temporarily turned of my Boff powers. I could clear it with sci team though.
My character Tsin'xing
The Dreadnaughts would eat my D'D alive in >10s even after burning every CD. How any folks managed to survive long enough to actually see the Command Ship defeated is a mystery to me.
In the end after ~7 deaths (would have been more but I sat "dead" for a few minutes trying to think of a better strategy) and not being able to scratch the Command Ship I ended up in a struggle against a handful of Frigates somewhere near the spawn point because I had no idea where the Command Ship even was. In the middle of my battle I get a message the Command Ship was defeated.
Yay team?
I've had a pretty fun experience with LoR thus far but this mission really turned me off. You've got less than a week Cryptic and you need to do some serious retuning of this mission.
Edit: Given some of the wildly varying comments is it at all possible this mission is randomly switching to Elite?
My character Tsin'xing
But, I shouldn't have to feel like i need to swap out for a federation ship. I'm romulan. My mogai should have very similar capabilities to a Sovereign ( as evidenced in "Nemesis" ), although agreeably, it has nowhere near the power of the D'Dex which i'm sure is the ship Cryptic expected people to be using for this mission.. Still.. I found the mission to be ridiculously difficult..
Elachi have exceptionally strong shields, especially their bigger ships. My D'Deridex build therefore focused on circumventing this one advantage of theirs: Dual heavy cannons + Directed Energy Modulation III with almost 100% uptime thanks to 2x Aux2Bat and Technician DOffs. Also Reverse Shield Polarity II helped me staying alive. The +10 turnrate of the Romulan battlecloak also came in handy to help me move the Romulan Space Whale into position. The Elachi Command ship wasn't able to withstand this firepower for more than half a minute. The rest of the fight was fairly easy due to the fact that the Elachi ships started warping out.
It's important to remember that the moment the 3rd wave starts, the Subcommander directs you to focus all fire on the Command ship. I don't think you are really meant to fight the other ships, unless you are hunting for xp/sp I suppose.
That's really what made the difference for me in this fight between the first and second time I did it. The first time I tried to kill everything within sight, and that was a long and ugly affair. There's just too much firepower concentrated in a very small area. As for survival/defense, mobility is essential, even in the D'D. I made full use of Evasives, Engine Batteries, and Singularity Jump was almost used on cool down. The singularity powers in general are what makes the largest difference for me.
Most importantly however was separating their forces. I pulled the command ship away and we had a sort of brutal standoff, while the allied ships mopped up the main forces. Yes, the escorts and such will keep warping in, but once the two dreadnoughts are taken out, the Elaichi have lost a tremendous amount of firepower.
The command ship doesn't last long without the two dreadnoughts to assist it.