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Tone down the Tholian weapons offline proc...
suaveks
Member Posts: 1,736 Arc User
Tholian space NPCs are the most annoying enemies in the game by far. And by annoying I don't mean difficult - oh no.
To not start with the wrong impression - I like when enemies use their special abilities that require some pre-planning or caution during the fight. Even the whole Web thing with untargettable (from the inside) hardpoints can be avoided when you're close enough to the enemy. The idea is fine, as it varies the otherwise tedious and monotonous STO combat.
Still, there's the issue of the Tholian weapons offline proc. Simply put, it hits way too often and there's no temporary resistance to it once you get rid of it. If you're having a bad luck the Tholians can disable your waeapons the moment you start a fight, you can fix them with EPtW, ET or Weapon Battery only to see them go down AGAIN two seconds later. And this offline status can drag to more than 10 seconds, during which you can do nothing aside from taking damage and waiting. Minor damage, I might add - even during the Azure Nebula Rescue mission when I take on a larger tholian group alone (d'deridex or scimitar) I can "tank" their damage with ease even with an escort. As such, Tholians are more of a annoyance than an actual danger.
I'd really like to see this tweaked or fixed. Make it so that this Weapons Offline proc can occur once every 10-15 seconds. Or at least reduce the % chance of it hitting the player. It's really no fun being in combat with no weapons, even if you're equipped with EPTW, ET and/or batteries which only remove the current offline proc, not protect you from getting hit by another...
This is especially annoying since we've got to grind all those tholian missions to get nukara marks... While at it, can't we get some sort of Epohh tagging equivalent? Grinding thousands of marks on missions that only reward 15-30 per 10minutes on average is no fun, especially if you have more characters.
To not start with the wrong impression - I like when enemies use their special abilities that require some pre-planning or caution during the fight. Even the whole Web thing with untargettable (from the inside) hardpoints can be avoided when you're close enough to the enemy. The idea is fine, as it varies the otherwise tedious and monotonous STO combat.
Still, there's the issue of the Tholian weapons offline proc. Simply put, it hits way too often and there's no temporary resistance to it once you get rid of it. If you're having a bad luck the Tholians can disable your waeapons the moment you start a fight, you can fix them with EPtW, ET or Weapon Battery only to see them go down AGAIN two seconds later. And this offline status can drag to more than 10 seconds, during which you can do nothing aside from taking damage and waiting. Minor damage, I might add - even during the Azure Nebula Rescue mission when I take on a larger tholian group alone (d'deridex or scimitar) I can "tank" their damage with ease even with an escort. As such, Tholians are more of a annoyance than an actual danger.
I'd really like to see this tweaked or fixed. Make it so that this Weapons Offline proc can occur once every 10-15 seconds. Or at least reduce the % chance of it hitting the player. It's really no fun being in combat with no weapons, even if you're equipped with EPTW, ET and/or batteries which only remove the current offline proc, not protect you from getting hit by another...
This is especially annoying since we've got to grind all those tholian missions to get nukara marks... While at it, can't we get some sort of Epohh tagging equivalent? Grinding thousands of marks on missions that only reward 15-30 per 10minutes on average is no fun, especially if you have more characters.
Post edited by suaveks on
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You can target the corners to fight your way out of the webs, actually. I do it all the time (although the Subspace Jump console is a much quicker way out).
It is very annoying, but I haven't had it happen to me quite as much as you seem to. Honestly, I suspect only the Recluse carriers have the ability -- I can't recall it ever happening to me without the Recluse nearby, so I always target them first and hope to knock them out quickly.
But yeah I do agree that the marks need to be revised. Nukara marks are a pain in the rear-admiral to farm right now and the ground missions on Nukara prime gets boring REALLY fast.
How about Tholian STFs? I know it's still of a grind but you'd get more marks and it would make things more fun to play I think.
They should put Nukara marks in the Tholian Red Alerts. I was actually suprised doing my first TRA with my Romulan, there was no marks at all. And add TRA's to Eta Eridani, since that's where Nukara is and there is no RA there. People probably want to do more TRA anyway.
The weapon proc is annoying, and they had patch notes months ago about fixing the offline time, but that never worked at all. You can get hit with weapons offline, have them come on for 2s and get knocked off again. it happens quiet a bit if you have a lot of agro.
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New mission pulls say it rewards a Choice of Marks box. So I'm guessing something got fixed, or there is a really odd bug at play.
And all of this prompts you to be inventive, and counter them. Off the top of my hat,
- The obvious: spend some points in Starship Subsystem Repair.
- Get (human) boffs with 'Leadership' trait, for a 20% faster damage and subsystem repair (after LoR, they don't seem to stack any more, though).
- Get purple warp core that comes with [REP] too (subsystem repair).
- Pay em back in kind, and slap em with Viral Matrix yourself, every once in a while.
They got me literally only 1 time, when they managed to shut down ALL my systems at once, and kept pounding me. With literally *everything* disabled, you're simply hosed. No biggie. "Sometimes you get the bear; and sometimes the bear gets you." Remember? And I thought it was actually kinda amusing, in a 'wut?!' kinda way (after which I started to fit against it, of course: it's only fun the first time).
Even so, human BOFFs are not the answer because there are plenty of KDF and KDF-Roms who won't be able to field a bridge worth of Humans in the first place. YES, you can get one from Marauding, but getting a full team is extremely annoying and/or expensive because you have to either farm up several toon's worth of Marauding XP (which you can only ever do once per toon), or buy them.
Wish my procs worked that good. A few times I've had my entire ship covered with multiple OFFLINE graphics. Wish there was something obvious to see when my proc do work. Most times you never can tell when your procs work!
Pretty much. I can tank the entire capital group including the named ship, I've got 6 points into subsystem repair and power insulators, I have a Human boff on active, and my weapons still get chain disabled.
I suspect the reason is it may not actually be "beam target weapons" they're using as I never see the icon for it show up, it seems to be more an effect of the weapons themselves, like an OP version of the Phaser subsystem offline proc or some special skill that Tholians have.
However, I do like the idea behind an enemy that's not simply "grab an escort and spam CRF/CSV to win" (which even these still are if you can kill them before it procs), it's just this seems rather broken.
Any player with increased threat control suffers greatly because of this proc. Even a smaller tholian group have a decent chance of hitting you with their w-offline proc. Any repair ability such as ET, EPTW or W-Battery only fixes the current offline status, but does not protect you from getting hit yet again, which happens often.
Seriously, Cryptic, either decrease the percentage chance of this proc or do something to reduce its duration, as it can last for as long as 10 seconds. Phaser proc is nothing compared to this...
As it stands, Tholians aren't difficult enemy to fight - they're just irritating...
Full human crew, with 9/9 in subsystem repair; I still can be locked down for 4+ seconds at a time.
I'm not echoing the OP's complaints, but I don't think these are the kinds of interesting enemy abilities I'm looking for. Really, the only case of such I can think of which was interesting are the Breen cruisers with sub-nuke, but any pack with more than one sub-nuke capable ship is just aggravating.
On a related note, could they reduce the time it takes the Tholian webs to collapse? Either I easily target the web nodes and escape quickly, or I can't target them reliably at all and sit there being beaten on until it finally collapses. A faster collapse would make it harder to escape before taking damage, without leaving it so long that I twiddle my thumbs for several seconds waiting for it to collapse.
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They do?
I can sit point blank in front of them, engines off, and just blast them all to hell with ease. No challenge at all. They manage to prolong the issue if they get a weapon proc, but that doesn't make it challenging.
I find a single KDF-borg cruiser a lot more dangerous than even a whole group of Tholians.
They don't pose a threat on any of my characters. I can solo any pack of tholians in any stf, with any ship. If they don't have a tarentula, they can't even scratch my shield.
They are annoying. That's all. No challenge at all.
Even normal borg STF are more challenging.
It's not a challenge, it's annoying. It probably is working as intended, though, given that preventing you from killing Tholians is a hurdle to completing Azure Nebula Rescue.
A fleet mate has the fleet nebula, got caught in one of those and on a whim, used Tractor beam repulsers...LoL! I've never seen a web dismantled so quickly
Fortunately a weapons battery or engineering team restores it, and I go about my business. :P
You have to click on them manually. Easiest place to find them is at the bottom corner of one of the triangles. Just click, you will target, and they are REALLY easy to take down.
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I have never had them proc anything but Weapons and Engines. Even then they only seem to offline Weapons and it is unavoidable and lasts a ridiculous amount of time. It also prevents you from firing torps which makes no sense.
I would say if their offline proc worked like OURS does (That means not at all LOL) then it would be fine but having it be Uber is just insulting.