Please restore elite Donatra to her former bad self

boootz · October 2013

I was playing KASE today with some fleeties and tanked Donatra. . . In my Chel Gret. She never fired her torpedo spread of doom, and I never feared I would blow up.

Elite Donatra was more fun when she was challenging in my opinion.

a3001 · October 2013

boootz wrote: »

I was playing KASE today with some fleeties and tanked Donatra. . . In my Chel Gret. She never fired her torpedo spread of doom, and I never feared I would blow up.

Elite Donatra was more fun when she was challenging in my opinion.

yeah but see...here's the problem: if the devs buff her torp spread of utter doom, atleast 50 other guys will be whining and another 100 will be posting on the forums how utterly stupid it was to rebuff her. either way, thus shows the futility of human endeavor.

angrytarg · October 2013

The problem is that in order to have NPCs that are actually challenging there had to be another method instead of buffing their HP to 50 million and give them frequent insta-kills. Because that's not challenging. If the NPC just bombs a random player with a 999,999 damage attack every minute, where's the challenge? It's not that you could EVADE such an attack because the game operates in a turn based combat model, there are no actual torpedoes flying. If that would be changed and manual avasive manneuvres were a thing THAN it'd be challenging.

jetwtf · October 2013

Donatra fired a torp spread? Never saw or was a victim of that one. I know she used the thalaron weapon cone of doom all scimitars have and it is quite lethal but very very easy to avoid.

The past week before thursdays patch my fleet in premades with 1 pug managed to keep her from cloaking by heavy use of power drain, without a cloak she doesnt use the thalaron weapon and ofcourse we made short work of her. Also i believe drain weekens the thalaron weapons damge as well, so maybe the OP wasnt seeing a nerf to Donatra but what happens when she is being heavily drained. were there multiple aux2bat cruisers hitting her with plasmonic leech and someone with energy siphon and maybe a tykens rift? Or a single drain sci with energy siphon and a tykens on her?

captainkeatz · October 2013

angrytarg wrote: »

The problem is that in order to have NPCs that are actually challenging there had to be another method instead of buffing their HP to 50 million and give them frequent insta-kills. Because that's not challenging. If the NPC just bombs a random player with a 999,999 damage attack every minute, where's the challenge? It's not that you could EVADE such an attack because the game operates in a turn based combat model, there are no actual torpedoes flying. If that would be changed and manual avasive manneuvres were a thing THAN it'd be challenging.

Exactly. Games like WoW give you buttons to push, void zones to leave and other tools to avoid instagib damage. That's why Don's Thalaron weapon is fair game. A 500k torp spread is not interesting gameplay.

Want to rebuff her? Have her use Thalaron more often, maybe give her a tractor beam or tractor beam mines to make avoiding it more difficult. Don't mindlessly buff unavoidable attacks.

sonnikku · October 2013

captainkeatz wrote: »

Exactly. Games like WoW give you buttons to push, void zones to leave and other tools to avoid instagib damage. That's why Don's Thalaron weapon is fair game. A 500k torp spread is not interesting gameplay.

Want to rebuff her? Have her use Thalaron more often

If that's to be the case then the simple act of her coming out of cloak to "charge" it can't be allowed to put me in combat and prevent me from going to full impulse because evasive maneuvers can be used ONCE. Then you're just screwed. Such as it is she sometimes put's me in combat and I use EM for those times. Other times she does that two times in a row in less than a minute and EM is on cooldown. What do you do then?

asraschaal · October 2013

Use an engine battery or increase power to engines manually.

lucho80 · October 2013

Getting Donatra to fire her torp spread again would make things challenging, haven seen her fire it lately. As for difficulty, CSE's carrier is a joke compared to Donatra.

starswordc · October 2013

The real trick with Donatra is that she has claustrophobia.

No seriously, she cloaks more often the closer people get to her, and therefore uses her thalaron generator more often. I was only told this recently by a fleetmate when we were doing our weekly game night, so I started paying closer attention to my positioning (I have a habit of closing to point-blank range, though using VATA is helping that since it has a minimum range) and noticed she cloaked less often. That means you're less likely to get turned into this poor TRIBBLE because you'll have more time for EM to cycle.

lomax6996 · October 2013

sophlogimo wrote: »

All the NPC's should be more dangerous. In a perfect world, NPC*s would be a schallenging as an avergae PvPer of the same level and in the same type of vessel.

No... in a perfect world you would have an Elite setting that would offer you a "challenge" <snicker><snicker> and a normal setting that would give the rest of us the easy, entertaining escapist enjoyment we seek. Oh wait! We already have that!

Seriously... challenge?? What are you challenging? Your ability to manipulate a keyboard and mouse? Oooohhhh... (shiver, shiver)... MAD skills. You can conquer the world with such skills. :P

Not everyone is seeking a "challenge" here. My life already has all the challenges I need or want... what I game for is to ESCAPE from challenges... get it? You want a challenge play on Elite level. Leave the normal level just as it is (or even nerf it some more!);)

boootz · October 2013

Some people seem to be conflating Donatra's torpedo spread with the insta kill super heavy plasma torpedoes. I tanked Donatra both when she was challenging and in her current state, and I could survive her torpedo spread, hell even her tholaron blast, in my fleet dssv. . . Not my chel grett however.

I have noticed that all npc's are much less challenging. There is power creep for sure, but also elite content has definitely been nerfed.

shadowwraith77 · October 2013

So you want to give Donatra back even more cheap tricks than what is current? Great, I for sure don't want them because cheapness is not challenging, it is simply stupid annoying.

List of cheap tricks by Donatra
Torpedo spreads that cause massive shield+hull damage (seems 75% kinetic resistance on shields not working against borg anything)
Tractor mines to go with those stupid tractor probes
healing capability while cloaked
thalaron pulse that activates at any given moment w/o the need to fully charge for 12secs.
on the fly torpedo weapon changes from plasma-photon (I guess that's why she cloaks so much to change out weapons)

that's all I can come up with so far and have seen used in the past and currently.

boootz · October 2013

No, I just want her to be challenging again.

There should be a normal difficulty and then there should be elite.

My concern is that she is not using her torpedo spread.

lordfuzun · October 2013

I'm not her target and yet a (full) shield facing and 50% of my (full) hull goes *POOF* in an instant. I'm pretty sure she's using her Torpedo Spread.

dracounguis · October 2013

Essentially NPCs have to cheat to be challenging. The AI can only do so much to be a challenge. Personally, I would hate to give NPCs some uber-weapon that lets them kill you at will. That's not a challenge it's a cheat due to programming limitations and/or dev laziness.

ferdzso0 · October 2013

what are you talking about? they made donatra challenging. they made her use the cloak randomly, instead of the 5km rule, so it is more challenging!111!!!

why do you want more challenge?

marshalericdavid · October 2013

Make the fight be more like Nemesis with Scimitar picking a target attacking it with its arsenal and chasing target around. The target needs to try to survive wile the other players pound away at the Scimitar. Teamwork would be good to help keep the targeted player alive because if targeted player dies YOU COULD BE NEXT.

Scimitar would cloak much less only doing so to escape from Tractor Beams,Warp Plasma,Gravity Well and any other attempts at crowd control. After cloaking picks a new target trying to kill it with Thalaron Blast and then chases new target it is not destroyed.

shadowwraith77 · October 2013

Biggest thing making her unchallenging! She sits like a duck waiting to be picked off, no real strategy needed when your target just sits there like a big old bullseye. :rolleyes:

nagrom7 · October 2013

I would love for donatra to cloak more often, or even firing while cloaked occasionally. However if this happened, we should be able to use the science skills that decloak players to decloak her too. It would make more teamwork and tactics viable than just pew pew till she dies.

adverbero · October 2013

I've noticed there are very few challenging Single Enemies in the PvE environments and missions

Generally those that ar a challenge have unusually large Hull Strength that are far beyond the possible players Hull
(Or in certain Missions they have a coding set up that they will warp out when damaged to a certain percentage so they survive as the story demmands)

Other than that the enemies seem to be placed in such a way to outnumber us to give a challenge, Sure this gives the Player an escapist Epic feeling of being amazing, But it also feels painfully false when dropping the enemy in droves without effort ( i'm sure that most players are easily capable of taking on two groups of Frigates, thats 6 vs 1, does that seem right?)

Personally I'd like the Elite Mode and PvEs with the elite tag, to scale a little higher, or enable enemies to use more advanced abilities, maybe improved AI that redistributes shields more effectively
since the Power creep has been going on a while now the only way i get a challenge anymore is to remove my High end Weapons and gear and use common Items to level the playing field between me and the NPC

Please restore elite Donatra to her former bad self

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