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Feedback on Mirror Invasion
majortiraomega
Member Posts: 2,214 Arc User
The new Mirror Invasion has great potential, but there are a few things that make the mission less than enjoyable.
Firstly, the mission is a flat 15 minutes long and cannot be completed more quickly with better teams. This unnecessarily drags out the mission and makes completing the mission tedious. Secondly, the Rift Closing mechanic is extremely frustrating to players. The rift spawns ships every 15 seconds and any enemy fire will cancel the Rift closure process regardless of the player's progress.
This closure cancel mechanic makes it evident that the goal was to have a tank aggro the enemies, but even that does not work for two reasons. All NPCs in this mission have Beam Fire at Will and Torpedo Spread. Some of the NPCs also have Point Defense System. As a result, NPC AoE hits every player within 10km. To make matters worse, it is highly likely to have 2-6 rifts spawn right on top of each other, potentially dropping out 18 ships every 20 seconds. On Elite, the battle is lost once enough rifts spawn on top of each other and the rifts begin to pump out an unlimited number of Typoon battleships.
The map's only difficulty is the NPC's ability to overwhelm by sheer numbers, but the ability to counter said numbers is impossible to due to do the never ending AoE spam. In the end, this makes for a mission that is not mentally stimulating, fun, or enjoyable.
Firstly, the mission is a flat 15 minutes long and cannot be completed more quickly with better teams. This unnecessarily drags out the mission and makes completing the mission tedious. Secondly, the Rift Closing mechanic is extremely frustrating to players. The rift spawns ships every 15 seconds and any enemy fire will cancel the Rift closure process regardless of the player's progress.
This closure cancel mechanic makes it evident that the goal was to have a tank aggro the enemies, but even that does not work for two reasons. All NPCs in this mission have Beam Fire at Will and Torpedo Spread. Some of the NPCs also have Point Defense System. As a result, NPC AoE hits every player within 10km. To make matters worse, it is highly likely to have 2-6 rifts spawn right on top of each other, potentially dropping out 18 ships every 20 seconds. On Elite, the battle is lost once enough rifts spawn on top of each other and the rifts begin to pump out an unlimited number of Typoon battleships.
The map's only difficulty is the NPC's ability to overwhelm by sheer numbers, but the ability to counter said numbers is impossible to due to do the never ending AoE spam. In the end, this makes for a mission that is not mentally stimulating, fun, or enjoyable.
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Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
Post edited by majortiraomega on
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Comments
Elite is still elite, except it's easier than normal, and with greater rewards.
Member since December 2009
I think a weakness is that there is really not much point to saving the base - closing rifts can grant more rewards. I think there should be at least an extra bonus for having the base never being destroyed (say, 5 marks). But maybe that's the wrong direction. I dislike that the moment the station is destroyed, there is no tension whatsoever to stop enemy ships - you know they get wiped anyway, and you have already lost anything you could have gained from saving the station.
It only drops once every 20 hours. If you replay it sooner than the cool down, then you do not get the multi-dimensional transporter.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
I like this one because to get the best results you need to work as a team. Try and go alone on rifts and you get smacked. No team work bad rewards. I think it is excellent for those reasons.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
This is beyond a ******* joke now.
Edit
Yay, another round with afkers.
The problem is, this is STO. In 15+ hours' worth of runs, you can count on your hands the number of people who have the slightest idea what teamwork is. You WILL be abandoned, you WILL have at least one person afking, you WILL see rifts on at least one side ignored until they snowball into an unbreachable fortress, and you WILL tear your hair out as the station gets disabled over and over because you're the only one on the team making an honest effort.
Honestly, I'm tempted to just cloak and read a newspaper while the first phase is in progress, because it's more fun than being the one guy with half a clue breaking his back so the slackers and headless chickens can get a couple extra marks for doing diddlysquat.
We did make it to the next stage with the base completely intact, though.
Rifts closed: 3.
Armada upon armada of ships coming through the wormholes that are spawning, in a run I had today there were three portals on top of each other.
The space station can't be saved so that bonus is out. It's now just a race to get the station up to level five and wait for the beat down of the station to happen then at the end you can actually accomplish something because worm holes won't open on top of each other.
The way I understood this event is it was to be a foothold attempt not an all out invasion from the entire universe.
Please find a happy medium, maybe a max number of portals that need to be closed or have the event "end" after all the portals were closed before the patch (similar to Fleet Alert). It skips to the next stage upon completing a wave.
I think the mission is good enough to stay on the PVE lists once the event is finished as it is at the end of the day adding some variety to the availible missions. But it needs some tweaking i think.
Maybe remove the timed aspect and make it so that failure is possible if the station gets killed. Or possibly make the station an optional that will heavily reduce the payout and tone down the rift/ship spawns so you don't get swamped (which is clearly now a major annoyance).
Also I think if the spawn rate of the rifts is kept high as it currently is, make it so that they can be closed whilst under fire but its just a lot slower. That way you'd really need to be tanking it to try that tactic making teamwork the easier or quicker option.
I was also thinking could they make it so that a rift cannot spawn ships whilst it is being closed? I can take getting mobbed by npcs or being hit by random FAW or torps but having ships appear on top of you and instantly open up is just daft. I think is terms of trek science the act of closing the rift would make it unstable so that it can't be used to pass ships through.
But i do have one thing that really hacks me off about this event - AFK players.
God dammed people going AFK really ruins the match because if you're trying real hard to get the marks the loss of one person out of a five man team is a big hit to your effectivness.
Plus the afk'ers still get the same reward as everyone else (the mirror rep thing) but actually damage the team!
Surely cryptic can do something about this?!?!?!?!
I meam today there was a guy in a warbird who just sat cloaked the whole match beside a power station and did nothing the whole match. The res of us got totally mobbed by npcs and just could not save the station, it died like 3 times. Plus i think we got less than 10 rifts closed so the place was swimming with mirror ships.
Can cryptic not do something so that if a ship is inactive for more than a couple of mins that person looses the mission reward (be it marks, dil etc)?
I really don't know how to fix that, but it bothers me. The mission feels wrong this way.
Other than that, it seems tomorrow I'll finish the event on all characters that I choose to do it at all (I believe that's 6 characters).
short written: this mission su ck s ... end!
If they do that in its current state nobody will play it.
-Normal Mirror: Portals are releasing Mirror Ships way too fast, we went from having to wait a few minutes to being over loaded, can't even make an optional on Normal events any more. (at least in PUG's). Most of the time players do not want to close Portals but instead Initiate Power Transfer while the Base gets swarmed and our optional points go down the friggin tubes.
-This event was made for all players, but mostly for those who have Avatars to level up, it was once a level boosting event, now nobody seems to care about the new players or those who want to make new Avatars.
-Another event I see many players just sitting it out, or not respawning until the end of the event. Isn't this suppose to be a team effort?
The event does have it's fun points and an interesting idea, but over all it's an Epic Fail!
Atrox, survival and pretty explosions around me.
Oddy. Was I in an Oddy? I couldn't tell because all the phaser fire and shield glow hid the ship till the tachyon wave.
Dread: Did not survive as well as an Oddy, did not kill much either.
Mirror Luna. Exploding in new balls of fire!
Vesta. For the love of all you hold holy keep these guys off me so I can close rifts! Seriously I think they made rift closing draw agro and the more you do the more agro you get from everyone. I swear a typhoon left the station just to keep chasing me.
And anyone griping that the AI needs a tweak. Fly an Vesta here! I try an evasive away from a fight to reach another rift and anything with a tractor beam grabs me. I try and polarize the hull and get hit with debuffs and gravity wells and yes more tractor beams. Help I am squishy!
We need more like this. Where every ship has a good use.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Plus i don't think my shields barely dropped at all and my hull certainly never went below 90%. This was despite basically flying into the middle of massive swarms of ships and using BFAW & TS3 on them.
Even the typhoons were getting wiped out in less than half a minute.
But in spite of all the agro i was generating the poor old sci ships we had (i think a vesta and a DSV) were getting seriously pounded by npcs.
There was no way the rest of us could really save them so i don't know if rift closing agro's the npcs or something.
Whatever the deal is closing rifts is now quite difficult without some basic teamwork, which i'm in favour of to be honest. Less people going Rambo all over the place with scimitars, in fact some of these players are less help in some instances.
I've had great success in my Fleet Assault Cruiser, good survivability, decent firepower, Grav torp gives me a pseudo-grav well for keeping them bunched up
BUT theres just so many of them, maybe the spawn rate could be toned down just a little?
I think at the root of it, i'm just glad to have a new event. Old mirror had become a bit stale after so may runs of the mission, and this new one had a little bit more to do, with the power transfers and the rifts, I'll be sad to see it go away, but i'm hoping that this might be the start of some new content trends
Personally, I'd prefer to see more events that are run for a limited time on a cycle, It seems more interesting when the event isn't running all the time, makes it a little more special
More challenging PvE content is certainly great to see... but the vast majority of players need to seriously up their game.
I will add these:
-the station, once powered up, repeatedly shoves the ships back into the rifts that are being closed, where they do their aoe spam again and disrupt the rift closing again.
- the ships continue to fire after dead, not just the stray slow moving torp but beam fire as well. It takes a while to be able to close a rift even after splatting the group.
- it is extremely difficult, even on normal, for weak players. I have watched countless players actually die, in normal mode, from a "small" (relatively) number of ships, for example 2 escorts and 4 trash from 2 rifts will kill many "casual" players. Once someone dies, the map gains 3-4 rifts worth of trash and it will soon be hopeless.
- it is exceedingly frustrating that only select ships can do the tasks faster. My sci carrier cannot close rifts faster. My rom tank cannot power the stations faster.
- the boss is coming cutscene is broken and cannot be exited.
IMHO the event needs the following tweaks:
1) station shove removed OR improved to push them past the power up stations
2) # of rifts needs to max out at a lower number, say 2 rifts per player (10 total) at any one time
3) ability to close portals should be captain class based, not ship based.
4) cutscene needs to go away
5) it needs to become a STF after the event. I like doing this mission, in spite of the rough edges.
6) in general dead ships need to be cleaned up faster and better. They continue to shoot here which is annoying and in general they remain a target for pets after dying causing damage from warp cores to be excessive for pets.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
I think it would be improved if it either pushed the npcs past the rifts/power stations, or if it just did damage with no push (like the crystaline entity does, although maybe not so lethal).
Or perhaps if it was only in one direction?
Also I was thinking today and really the mission is backwards in terms of difficulty. The first half is easily the toughest part as you are literally fighting non-stop for 10 mins or whatever against fleets of ships.
Then the dread comes in and you've got barely any fighting to do, just a few rifts to close and the a 5 on 1 fight with the dread that lasts a couple of minutes at most.
The mission should get harder in the second part, not the other way round.
Perhaps make it so the first half is the same but with less rifts and ships so it's not quite so manic.
Then the dread comes in and more rifts start to open (like we currently have the first half) so the pressure is up. Once the dread is killed, no more rifts spawn and its just a case of mopping up the last few npcs to finish the match.
Two optionals for keeping the station alive in both halfs of the mission as well as marks for closing rifts and powering up the station as it currently is.
I think you have a point there. If there were only one or two rifts for the first 'half' but we have to power up the targeted relays. Then when the second half hits you have to take down the dread as it is creating the rifts on this side there would be more consternation. I mean Obisek says it creates rifts. So how does closing the others trap it?
It should be drop the dread as fast as possible or it will make the fleet impossible we see now in the early half.
On a side note I have a prediction for a third version of this event. First version was a Federation shipyard was taken over and we had to sabotage mirror ships and drive them off. Second iteration we are defending a romulan shipyard from being taken. For the third iteration we launch from a Klingon shipyard to attack the Mirror staging area.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
I think your onto something with that idea, I agree that the Dreadnought part of the mission seems strangely easy compared to the first part