This mission is simply way too hard and needs to be toned down. There is a difference between a fun challenge and being tedious. I got to the point to where all of the ships were one me and dying in 3 seconds.
I wonder about the difficulty levels different people posting here were playing on. The default difficulty is of course "Normal", and I suspect those saying it was easy, or who completed it quickly, were on Normal. Especially those saying "let your allies do it all and they'll win it for you".
On advanced (which is all I play on, generally), as others have said, the non-named allies are dead within seconds of the command wave jumping in, and the named allies spend *all* of their time in "repairing". At most they get one or two shots off before going back to "repairing". So effectively, it is you, soloing everything.
I won the fight. It took around an hour. My allies barely helped, if at all, because they were always down. The problem as I saw it was the extra dreadnoughts, not the command ship or anything else. The command ship was a good opponent, but it was difficult to do anything to it before the other dreads came zooming in and tag-teamed me, despite pulling the command ship away as much as I could. And it was the same story when I initially tried to kill the other dreads first, which is why I decided to ignore them and focus on the command ship.
My suggestions for a fix to the mission would be either to remove a dread or two, or give the player more "repairable" allies, or probably more useful, alter the allies so they can actually do something before being busted back into "repairing". Ie/ when they finish "repairing", have them be at full health and shields, because they seem to jump back into the fight with almost no health after repairing, as if all they did was fix a "system offline" status.
That said, I liked the fact that it was difficult, hence why I play on advanced (I'm not a TRIBBLE, hence not on elite, but normal is just too boringly simple), but this mission doesn't feel hard so much as it feels frustrating, mostly because it just takes so darned long to finish. Up until the command ship fight it did feel pretty epic, and still did until I saw just how bad the command ship fight was.
I don't like tuning down missions - as that seems 'we fail to comply to normal game play'.:(
But this mission has some issues - i also pressed 'yellow' here and will skip it.:mad:
I found one counterpart to pickon - as it charged its frontal big shot and took 99%
of my HP - ok, thats no fun.. but worse is unable to target, unable to fire, unable to
counter at some points like you're frozen or 'not getting your process time'.
A little Escort took me out - so, that defines the battleships strength..
and this is on level 33 - so, on what level are you guys/girls/aliens playing this?
the unable to target is really frustrating - i used TAB to switch through the cloud
well, that makes sense..
I came here because i noticed that this mission must have stirred some cloudy waters
also the radar shows 3 - closing in your confronted with the whole family.
Upgrade my RADARRRR
p.s. worse is the combination of "cry havoc and this mission"
i had to cancel then skip - thus, if i ever want the goodies
i need to REDO the complete mission.
I checked the next missions and they seem alike the FED
string - so.. now i finally can go back to bed..
I don't like tuning down missions - as that seems 'we fail to comply to normal game play'.:(
But this mission has some issues - i also pressed 'yellow' here and will skip it.:mad:
I found one counterpart to pickon - as it charged its frontal big shot and took 99%
of my HP - ok, thats no fun.. but worse is unable to target, unable to fire, unable to
counter at some points like you're frozen or 'not getting your process time'.
A little Escort took me out - so, that defines the battleships strength..
and this is on level 33 - so, on what level are you guys/girls/aliens playing this?
the unable to target is really frustrating - i used TAB to switch through the cloud
well, that makes sense..
I came here because i noticed that this mission must have stirred some cloudy waters
also the radar shows 3 - closing in your confronted with the whole family.
Upgrade my RADARRRR
p.s. worse is the combination of "cry havoc and this mission"
i had to cancel then skip - thus, if i ever want the goodies
i need to REDO the complete mission.
I checked the next missions and they seem alike the FED
string - so.. now i finally can go back to bed..
zzz people are beating it on elite - stop being a little girl
I beat it on Normal, somewhere in my early 30s, with a D'Deridex. I died a few times, but as I said, there's no penalty for dying other than respawning well outside the field of battle (so I'd cloak up, head in at full impulse, then pick a target, uncloak, and cut loose with my weapon boosts). I even had a few allies left at the end!
I'm currently flying a D'Deridex, wearing mission rewards and a few bought consoles I could afford.
I've been playing this game for a bit, but I suppose I'm a casual player? I always play on Normal setting.
First two waves were no problem at all. Then in come the last wave of battleships, and the fun was over.
At first I took the advice of the game and went for the lead ship, only to get a face full of DoomBlast from every ship in the fleet. This went on for a bit, and then I started trying to nibble of the escorts one ship at a time... but as soon as I even decloak within weapons range of anything, even a shuttle, I get every enemy ship up my six at the same time. When you get the Cone of Death from seven directions at once, there is no dodging it.
Eventually I decided to check if I could just sit back and let my allies do the job (as somebody suggested), so I respawned and parked some distance away (cloaked) to watch the show. It would seem that my cloak isn't as good as the flotilla engineers wold have me believe... because after only about a minute the entire Elachi fleet had converged on my position, spotted me right through my cloak and DoomBlasted me again.
That's when I came here to see if I could get some advice on what I was doing wrong. Apparently the answer to that is "I decided to play this mission".
Seriously though, this mission needs a lot of balance work. It's nice to see that some people have completed it, but I'm not willing to spend over an hour of constant death and respawn to finish off one ship. Especially not when I have the Heroes of Starfleet and the Klingon Defence Force at my side, to no avail.
Judging by some of the descriptions here I'd say the mission is even bugged, not just unbalanced. Some say the Big Bad won't die unless you take out all the escorts first, others say the escorts respawn until you take out the Big Bad. It can't be both, surely?
By the way, I thought you were only supposed to get injuries to your ship from certain elite missions, like STF:s? Why, then, did I come out of this with "hull stress"?
My first run, level 32 with the DD (with HORRIBLE equipment) loaded with 2 forward plasma torps and 2 plasma arrays, 2 more plasma arrays aft with plasma mines. Resulted in 4 deaths, about 30 minutes to complete.
What I did was punched deep, going for the command ship. Once I had everyone's attention, drop eject warp plasma and evasive, mines as soon as they were ready, and torpedo spreads for everyone. Once evasive was off I'd be trading fire with the command ship, then I hit DeM, Reverse Shield Polarity, and Feedback Pulse (Forget what ranks they were, sorry). Once those were down, hit Warp Shadows or Singularity Jump and ran off to cool down and heal up. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. All other available Boff abilities were focused on shield and hull heals/resistances to keep me in the fight.
I did this on a Sci. Captain, so ymmv, but Sensor Scan + 30% exotic damage (Sci. Exclusive) + RSP + Feedback is hilariously effective against the Elachi.
My first run, level 32 with the DD (with HORRIBLE equipment) loaded with 2 forward plasma torps and 2 plasma arrays, 2 more plasma arrays aft with plasma mines. Resulted in 4 deaths, about 30 minutes to complete.
What I did was punched deep, going for the command ship. Once I had everyone's attention, drop eject warp plasma and evasive, mines as soon as they were ready, and torpedo spreads for everyone. Once evasive was off I'd be trading fire with the command ship, then I hit DeM, Reverse Shield Polarity, and Feedback Pulse (Forget what ranks they were, sorry). Once those were down, hit Warp Shadows or Singularity Jump and ran off to cool down and heal up. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. All other available Boff abilities were focused on shield and hull heals/resistances to keep me in the fight.
I did this on a Sci. Captain, so ymmv, but Sensor Scan + 30% exotic damage (Sci. Exclusive) + RSP + Feedback is hilariously effective against the Elachi.
In that case you should hold master classes or something.
Level 33 Sci, with a D'Deridex Dual Beam bank, Caustic Plasma Beam array, two regular beam arrays, two plasma torps fore and aft.
Maybe it's your feedback pulse or something, I don't know. I got merced. I had to have died 15 times easy, took well over an hour. And the damnable misery of it is, I stopped on my 60 km journey back to the fight to pick off an escort that had left the group, and got the message that the command ship was gone, and then got the message that the dreadnaughts had died and I won.
Which in addition to the mission being excessively long, frustrating, and ultimately boring, the win was completely unsatisfying. I didn't even see the end. Heck that battle deserved a cinematic finish at least.
Looking back at it, the only thing I didn't try was picking off the small boys, though I could barely see them anyway. The allies were a curious combination of completely useless and the guys that actually somehow won the fight.
What I experienced that was supremely frustrating was a certain impotence of firepower. It seems that the Elachi are all using Team Fortress constantly, because I'm fairly certain they had perfect shields. I would unload with beam arrays and Fire at will with EptW and would leave not a scratch on their shields and no visible bleedthrough damage. If I had been shooting blanks perhaps I would've startled the lumpy headed TRIBBLE. There's a hole in their shield facing in the direction that they launch the cone of death, but if you can reach it to fire through it then it's highly likely you were in the cone of death have no shield and your ship's hp has been halved.
Sensor scan nothing seemed to work, but more than no attack seeming to hit home, the fact that it seemed that if they looked at me too hard my shields evaporated and my hull melted. I mean they're ugly, but not THAT ugly. Cone of death aside, I felt like I had stepped into an Elite STF....which for the record doesn't take NEARLY as long to complete. Even into the hive isn't so brutally overwhelming. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say it seems more fair. I'd feel different if I had felt that there was a way to tweak my ship so it would be more survivable, or if it was a lack of equipment. If I was dealing at least consistent damage and slowly whittling them down steadily I'd be fine. But I feel like I won solely through a combination of rock stubbornness and luck. Once those dreadnaughts came in I felt superfluous as I barely did anything to win the battle. Any damage I incurred was healed by the time I got back from respawn. And one thing that really got my goat, my ship would detonate right on one of the dreadnaughts or the command ship, and never ONCE did it do any damage. Not any appreciable damage, any damage at all. No shield hit, no hull, nada, zero, zip, zilch.
So, uhh, yeah, needs work boys and girls.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
Comments
Please fix this.
Its not really a challange, more like a chore, like unblocking a toilet filled with TRIBBLE and tampons.
On advanced (which is all I play on, generally), as others have said, the non-named allies are dead within seconds of the command wave jumping in, and the named allies spend *all* of their time in "repairing". At most they get one or two shots off before going back to "repairing". So effectively, it is you, soloing everything.
I won the fight. It took around an hour. My allies barely helped, if at all, because they were always down. The problem as I saw it was the extra dreadnoughts, not the command ship or anything else. The command ship was a good opponent, but it was difficult to do anything to it before the other dreads came zooming in and tag-teamed me, despite pulling the command ship away as much as I could. And it was the same story when I initially tried to kill the other dreads first, which is why I decided to ignore them and focus on the command ship.
My suggestions for a fix to the mission would be either to remove a dread or two, or give the player more "repairable" allies, or probably more useful, alter the allies so they can actually do something before being busted back into "repairing". Ie/ when they finish "repairing", have them be at full health and shields, because they seem to jump back into the fight with almost no health after repairing, as if all they did was fix a "system offline" status.
That said, I liked the fact that it was difficult, hence why I play on advanced (I'm not a TRIBBLE, hence not on elite, but normal is just too boringly simple), but this mission doesn't feel hard so much as it feels frustrating, mostly because it just takes so darned long to finish. Up until the command ship fight it did feel pretty epic, and still did until I saw just how bad the command ship fight was.
But this mission has some issues - i also pressed 'yellow' here and will skip it.:mad:
I found one counterpart to pickon - as it charged its frontal big shot and took 99%
of my HP - ok, thats no fun.. but worse is unable to target, unable to fire, unable to
counter at some points like you're frozen or 'not getting your process time'.
A little Escort took me out - so, that defines the battleships strength..
and this is on level 33 - so, on what level are you guys/girls/aliens playing this?
the unable to target is really frustrating - i used TAB to switch through the cloud
well, that makes sense..
I came here because i noticed that this mission must have stirred some cloudy waters
also the radar shows 3 - closing in your confronted with the whole family.
Upgrade my RADARRRR
p.s. worse is the combination of "cry havoc and this mission"
i had to cancel then skip - thus, if i ever want the goodies
i need to REDO the complete mission.
I checked the next missions and they seem alike the FED
string - so.. now i finally can go back to bed..
zzz people are beating it on elite - stop being a little girl
Take you all day to come up with that one? :rolleyes:
I'm currently flying a D'Deridex, wearing mission rewards and a few bought consoles I could afford.
I've been playing this game for a bit, but I suppose I'm a casual player? I always play on Normal setting.
First two waves were no problem at all. Then in come the last wave of battleships, and the fun was over.
At first I took the advice of the game and went for the lead ship, only to get a face full of DoomBlast from every ship in the fleet. This went on for a bit, and then I started trying to nibble of the escorts one ship at a time... but as soon as I even decloak within weapons range of anything, even a shuttle, I get every enemy ship up my six at the same time. When you get the Cone of Death from seven directions at once, there is no dodging it.
Eventually I decided to check if I could just sit back and let my allies do the job (as somebody suggested), so I respawned and parked some distance away (cloaked) to watch the show. It would seem that my cloak isn't as good as the flotilla engineers wold have me believe... because after only about a minute the entire Elachi fleet had converged on my position, spotted me right through my cloak and DoomBlasted me again.
That's when I came here to see if I could get some advice on what I was doing wrong. Apparently the answer to that is "I decided to play this mission".
Seriously though, this mission needs a lot of balance work. It's nice to see that some people have completed it, but I'm not willing to spend over an hour of constant death and respawn to finish off one ship. Especially not when I have the Heroes of Starfleet and the Klingon Defence Force at my side, to no avail.
Judging by some of the descriptions here I'd say the mission is even bugged, not just unbalanced. Some say the Big Bad won't die unless you take out all the escorts first, others say the escorts respawn until you take out the Big Bad. It can't be both, surely?
By the way, I thought you were only supposed to get injuries to your ship from certain elite missions, like STF:s? Why, then, did I come out of this with "hull stress"?
Furthermore: TVtropes link. You were warned.
What I did was punched deep, going for the command ship. Once I had everyone's attention, drop eject warp plasma and evasive, mines as soon as they were ready, and torpedo spreads for everyone. Once evasive was off I'd be trading fire with the command ship, then I hit DeM, Reverse Shield Polarity, and Feedback Pulse (Forget what ranks they were, sorry). Once those were down, hit Warp Shadows or Singularity Jump and ran off to cool down and heal up. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. All other available Boff abilities were focused on shield and hull heals/resistances to keep me in the fight.
I did this on a Sci. Captain, so ymmv, but Sensor Scan + 30% exotic damage (Sci. Exclusive) + RSP + Feedback is hilariously effective against the Elachi.
In that case you should hold master classes or something.
Level 33 Sci, with a D'Deridex Dual Beam bank, Caustic Plasma Beam array, two regular beam arrays, two plasma torps fore and aft.
Maybe it's your feedback pulse or something, I don't know. I got merced. I had to have died 15 times easy, took well over an hour. And the damnable misery of it is, I stopped on my 60 km journey back to the fight to pick off an escort that had left the group, and got the message that the command ship was gone, and then got the message that the dreadnaughts had died and I won.
Which in addition to the mission being excessively long, frustrating, and ultimately boring, the win was completely unsatisfying. I didn't even see the end. Heck that battle deserved a cinematic finish at least.
Looking back at it, the only thing I didn't try was picking off the small boys, though I could barely see them anyway. The allies were a curious combination of completely useless and the guys that actually somehow won the fight.
What I experienced that was supremely frustrating was a certain impotence of firepower. It seems that the Elachi are all using Team Fortress constantly, because I'm fairly certain they had perfect shields. I would unload with beam arrays and Fire at will with EptW and would leave not a scratch on their shields and no visible bleedthrough damage. If I had been shooting blanks perhaps I would've startled the lumpy headed TRIBBLE. There's a hole in their shield facing in the direction that they launch the cone of death, but if you can reach it to fire through it then it's highly likely you were in the cone of death have no shield and your ship's hp has been halved.
Sensor scan nothing seemed to work, but more than no attack seeming to hit home, the fact that it seemed that if they looked at me too hard my shields evaporated and my hull melted. I mean they're ugly, but not THAT ugly. Cone of death aside, I felt like I had stepped into an Elite STF....which for the record doesn't take NEARLY as long to complete. Even into the hive isn't so brutally overwhelming. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say it seems more fair. I'd feel different if I had felt that there was a way to tweak my ship so it would be more survivable, or if it was a lack of equipment. If I was dealing at least consistent damage and slowly whittling them down steadily I'd be fine. But I feel like I won solely through a combination of rock stubbornness and luck. Once those dreadnaughts came in I felt superfluous as I barely did anything to win the battle. Any damage I incurred was healed by the time I got back from respawn. And one thing that really got my goat, my ship would detonate right on one of the dreadnaughts or the command ship, and never ONCE did it do any damage. Not any appreciable damage, any damage at all. No shield hit, no hull, nada, zero, zip, zilch.
So, uhh, yeah, needs work boys and girls.