Do enemies play by the same rules?

miirik · February 2014

For example:

Do enemies have power levels to drain?

If some enemies have subsystem disable immunity, that would make phaser procs useless, correct?

markhawkman · February 2014

You can. Enemies DO play by different rules, but they're not completely different. However some do have resists to that.

miirik · February 2014

Well I been thinking about running polarons and then I thought... I seen lots of enemies running with "WEAPONS OFFLINE IMMUNITY" and such. So I been sort of hesitant. At least I know disruptor procs work on basically everything.

hereticknight085 · February 2014

The weapons offline immunity is due to you already having knocked their weapons offline and they are now immune to that for 12 seconds. It was done to balance phasers.

And to answer your question, yes, enemies do follow the same rules as players (more or less). The only enemies that don't are boss class enemies and dreadnought class enemies.

lucho80 · February 2014

miirik wrote: »

Do enemies have power levels to drain?

Yup, and it's way easier to drain them than human players.

Donatra doesn't follow the rules (and frankly Scimitars in general sometimes), I use my anti proton beam from the Dominion set, and they still can cloak.

ghyudt · February 2014

Most enemies are vulnerable to things like shield disable and engines offline. Idk about weapons and auxiliary. As stated, certain enemies (bosses, crystalline entity, etc) are immune to everything. Pretty sure the entity is also immune to radiation and damage over time effects as well. Phasers do knock enemy shields and engines offline though in most cases (I only ever use phasers).

amosov78 · February 2014

It's funny that NPC ships can load up abilities at the same time that for us are either locked out, or share a cooldown. Earlier I saw a Cardassian Keldon-class load up both High Yield 3 and Torpedo Spread 2 together right before engaging my ship.

lilchibiclari · February 2014

NPCs don't actually have BOFFs and Captains slotted--instead all of the appropriate BOFF or Captain powers are treated as inherent powers of the ship variant, so you might see a D'Deridex with Torpedo High YieldII, Beam Fire At Will I, etc. etc., but they are treated as ship abilities.

timezarg · February 2014

And if you're interested in what exactly enemy NPC ships will be using against you, here is a wiki page with a collection of links at the bottom that lead to the information about each different NPC ship in-game.

How much actual damage these ships do and can absorb depends on your level, the difficulty setting, and what setting the developers put a scenario (such as STFs) on. The info on those pages should be accurate, the developers don't change NPC skill settings very often.

jockey1979 · February 2014

Up until the power drain nerf a while back, I used to completely shut down the Borg ships in my Vo'quv.

Nothing quite as funny as turning the big cucumber in the Red Alerts completely offline and seeing it just sit there, as you pound the living daylights out of it.

Also worked in PvP. A properly specc'd Vo'quv was a sight to behold in PvP. As long as you tanked an escorts first alpha, it never got a second as all its level hit 0 and just drifted until your 4 polaron turrets and 2 beams (depending on angle etc..) slowly carved it up.

You can still drain, but now it has major negative returns and is not constant (the drain cycles from drones), though again, if done right can still be really powerful, nothing like an Elite cube shooting you for 1 damage per weapon per pulse then hitting it with subsystems to offline them

ultijuice · February 2014

jockey1979 wrote: »

Up until the power drain nerf a while back, I used to completely shut down the Borg ships in my Vo'quv.

Nothing quite as funny as turning the big cucumber in the Red Alerts completely offline and seeing it just sit there, as you pound the living daylights out of it.

Oh you can totally still shut down the unimatrix vessels, it just needs a bit more drain than before. I can still do that in my vesta, though I can no longer shutdown tactical cubes (atleast not unless I use the romulan rep space power and get lucky with polaron proc) and other high tiered ships, but you can still drain the unimatrix vessels dry.

shadowwraith77 · February 2014

ultijuice wrote: »

Oh you can totally still shut down the unimatrix vessels, it just needs a bit more drain than before. I can still do that in my vesta, though I can no longer shutdown tactical cubes (atleast not unless I use the romulan rep space power and get lucky with polaron proc) and other high tiered ships, but you can still drain the unimatrix vessels dry.

You can still do it to Cubes, but they are more apt to use Sci team, HE or Eng team to clear the issue, well at least something to the equivalent of those anyways.

burstorion · February 2014

I'm considering collecting protonic polarons for a drain/transphasic scimtar (the sci varient) build (faw) for my fedrom (a full bore fawtar seems wrong for a fed)

5 flow cap consoles (bonus plasma proc sci consoles) , one dyson tac console and two fleet polaron console

high crit, high proton/plasma damage on the hull and a lot of drainage

oldkhemaraa · February 2014

If by enemies you are referring to NPC ships, and in ground NPC characters, yes, they do not play by the same rules when dealing with "Boss" mobs.

As a gamer I'd prefer they did myself, but quite simply the cannot code any real flexibility into NPC actions and reactions. There is no AI.. there is only a script that NPC's follow. As with many other MMO's NPC's are given much greater health and defenses then any player character avatar, or ship could possibly have because quite simply, we can out think them, because we CAN think.

All MMO's have to "cheat" this way. Someday this may change, but for now it's beyond the available technology.

Do enemies play by the same rules?

Comments