I ran it 3 on Advanced since no one was queued for Normal and I really enjoyed it. I died like 4 or 5 times. One shot would take my shields done and the other would destroy me. What I really found tough were the Borg: Even with their shields down they had an insane amout of health. The bar was barely going down. But it was fun. I can't wait to try it with my Qib battlecruiser
1. Waiting on DoTs to clear so I can save the borg or close the rifts.
2. Was waiting around for disconnected borg/enemies to spawn. //increase disconnected borg spawn rate, enemies spawn rate scales pretty well.
3. Boff pop up filling up the left side of my screen from top to bottom saying I have to ram torps and other lines.
4. Optional timer for the queen and 2 dreads does seem short.
This is going to be a fascinating challenge at higher difficulties. I can already tell some tactics aren't readily apparent to PuGs (no names), so some tooltips may be helpful in that regard - either in the intial briefing or through pop-text:
1) 3/5 players zerged one point during the initial phase. On Elite, that's going to make sense. But players are conditioned to stick together - maybe some indication that they should spread out?
2) For the life of me, I couldn't figure out a way to intercept a Borg Killer Torpedo. Granted, I was kinda swamped soloing a point - but some instruction in that regard might be nice.
3) DoT's interrupting my ability to clear rifts or liberate Cooperative ships seemed inconsistent. Is this by intention? Is one working and not the other?
4) Is it possible to scale spawns at a point for how many players are situated there? I know it's something you've done in the Undine space battlezone.
There are other player tactics that I imagine just need to get worked out by the playerbase.
1) It makes sense to focus fire during the Dreadnought encounter. To maximize rewards, it makes sense to prioritize weakest to strongest? So, by my reckoning: Tethys -> Diamond -> Citadel?
Could you guys look into undine finale ship, she is flying even into the structures , so its kinda VERY HARD to kill her in time . Thanks :P Otherwise i like the mission . VERY MUCH .)
Yes, the Tethys Dreadnaught boss in the last stage likes to fly around and get stuck on structures a lot. The other two bosses, by comparison, don't move around a whole lot and don't have to worry about this.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
I've tried it twice. The first time in a DHC & Turrets Armitage and the second time in a BFAW Galor. I don't know how it is for others, but I found the event a little too busy and required me to juggle way too many things. This was especially true for my DHC Armitage as I had to juggle camming around for targets, turning the ship to the correct attack vector, selecting targets, attacking, rescuing disconnected borg ships and managing my ship's shields and hull. It was especially disorienting after a while.
So the second time I tried it, I decided to just park in the center of the area and try not to move around too much. It was a little more manageable, but I still felt a little too overwhelmed.
I've tried it twice. The first time in a DHC & Turrets Armitage and the second time in a BFAW Galor. I don't know how it is for others, but I found the event a little too busy and required me to juggle way too many things. This was especially true for my DHC Armitage as I had to juggle camming around for targets, turning the ship to the correct attack vector, selecting targets, attacking, rescuing disconnected borg ships and managing my ship's shields and hull. It was especially disorienting after a while.
So the second time I tried it, I decided to just park in the center of the area and try not to move around too much. It was a little more manageable, but I still felt a little too overwhelmed.
I have to agree with you there. It might be because I'm getting old (44) but I'm not even sure I would have been able to keep up with everything 20 years ago
Played it like.. 20 times at least. Maybe add some more time at the end, when you are supposed to destroy the dreadnoughts, but for all what's it worth.. other than that adjustment - don't make it any easier. It's about time we have some challenging missions out there, which promote teamwork, rather than mindless gaming.
The Advanced version may need some tweaks, but given it's supposed to be played with higher lvl/gearing, hard to tell how well that one is balanced.
[10:20] Your Lunge deals 4798 (2580) Physical Damage(Critical) to Tosk of Borg.
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I kept finding my ship unable to move, while still being activating powers, so the UI wasn't jammed. Don't worry! I wasn't silly and missed a debuff or engines offline or anything! It was a genuine problem.
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Admiral Tuwud - High Commissioner, UFP Peace Corps Sigma Red
Borg Disconnected: Normal. 5 man. All T5U ships at level 5.
This was terrible.
1) our pets didn't deploy.
2) "Ramming the torpedoes" wasn't possible
3) The 3 end ships where impossible to defeat (this may be because we didn't have any ship traits or was a high enough level with high enough gear).
But even if all that worked, It wasn't a very fun mission. the mission goals were confusing.
Imo this was one really impressive mission and for the most part intuitive even though I skipped the intro. The only part I had trouble with was taking the voth borg killing torpedoes out in time because everyone was using romulan hyperplasmas so there were destructible torpedoes flying everywhere and I couldn't tell which were the voth's. But whoever designed this did a fantastic job.
I too enjoyed this mission, a nice balance and really encourages teamwork and knowing where you need to be and when to get the best score.
The borg killing torpedoes are a nice touch, needing to ram them in order to destroy them is very interesting, the more you ram, the more your bonus points go up which can net you a nice small reward.
also watching three NPC dreadnoughts fight it out is also awersome too
I cannot wait for the voiceover work and the cutscenes to be cleaned up
This will definitely be a challenge on the harder difficulty. It's good on the premise and seems to encourage more teamwork than the other pve stuff. Terrible fps again with a lot happening on screen.
It still does seem as though as with everything, it'll be a DPS issue more than anything.
If you've come to the forums to complain about the AFK system, it's known to be bugged at the moment.
Played it on normal difficulty all 5 T5-U level 5 was fun sometimes a chaos much to manage at the same time but thats the challenge, and bad fps at times when a lot is happening.
It is clear that the enemy's are built to fight with new gear especially the dreadnoughts at the end! This new pve encourage more teamwork as others stated witch is way better than the old pve stuff.
Agreed wit all above this PVE will definitely be a hard nut to crack on the harder difficulty. but i think with the new and higher gear it will be easier to do. now we al run rep fleet ect XII gear.
The dreadnoughts at the and needs more time added to it than the 4 minutes given to destroy all three. decrease time on the harder levels like advanced and elite but make normal longer than those 4 minutes we only got the voth destroyed in that time. for example 8 min on normal 6 min on advanced and 4 minutes on elite.
The only problems I've found so far was that allied borg ships weren't spawning over by my nexus point in my second playthrough (but there were still enough showing up elsewhere to meet the optional objective.) Otherwise this STF has been outrageously fun on normal with a rep and fleet gear equipped T5-U ship though I can see more frustration building at the higher difficulty levels (which is nice, something to work towards.) I particularly like the combination of different enemy types once things heat up between the factions. It adds a lot of variation and it forces more direct strategic thinking besides "shoot the big one" (since you have to prioritize between the voth/undine/borg of the same class starship attacking you at any one moment depending on what each is most likely to hurt you with next.) Great use of visuals, great setup. Even with the Delta Quadrant and cast voice overs this might end up being the most memorable part of the DR expansion. Besides a bit of tweaking with the NPC spawns I can't see a whole lot [in the gameplay department] that needs work.
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Definitely seems like the difficulty has gone up exponentially with tonight's Tribble patch. I have not played the regular version again today, but the Advanced version is much, much, much harder than it previously was. Borg Probes and Spheres are now harder to kill than Borg Cubes in the current Elite STFs. Also at the end all five of us teamed up on just the Borg Queen and at the end of the countdown we only had her down to 79% hull and her shields were still almost full.
Definitely seems like the difficulty has gone up exponentially with tonight's Tribble patch. I have not played the regular version again today, but the Advanced version is much, much, much harder than it previously was. Borg Probes and Spheres are now harder to kill than Borg Cubes in the current Elite STFs. Also at the end all five of us teamed up on just the Borg Queen and at the end of the countdown we only had her down to 79% hull and her shields were still almost full.
my guess is they switched advance with elite, the last ships have 2,8 million hp, even even probes have 280k. :eek:
If you play the advance one you also get uplevled to 60.
If this is really the elite version I even see trouble at lvl 60 there, it will be an insane dps race, more then any other stfs so far we have seen.
Im enjoying the new mission and love the direction Delta rising is going.... that being said...
I am not a fan of making Enemies harder to kill by giving them the ability to crit one shot for 250k
This has been a reccurring pattern lately especially with the borg... in Most Elite STFs a borg can smack you for 100k with what we like to call the "invisible" torpedo... no way to defend against it or even see it coming... just BOOM dead..
Hive Elite is even worse... but thats another story...
All in all the mission is fantastic... but I dont see it being much fun if you die 20 times to one shot kills...
Its probably one of the biggest reasons most players steer clear of the Hive Elite
Played this last night on Advanced via a pug queue. Pretty fun mission.
A few nits:
1. Are we supposed to use ramming speed on the Voth Borg Torps? If so, doesn't ramming speed only work when we're at 25% health? Or am I missing something?
2. Those three dreadnoughts at the end are HARD, man. I'm going to want some of those Thoron-Infused weapons to try and DOT them and placate them.
3. The rewards we got at the end of an advanced queue were the exact same as the ones from normal - no Ancient Computer Cores, no Advanced R&D Package (just normal), and only about 30 marks. I think that's a bug.
So I finally gave this a go, on normal. Here are my first impressions.
- You're doing this odd-numbered splitting of the party again? 5 players with 3 positions to cover? I'm not really a fan of this.
- It was pretty boring. Shoot enemy Borg, mash F to free Borg, rinse and repeat. I saw what appeared to be a pattern in which the waves would spawn at certain points, but I wasn't sure.
- Borg Cubes have shield neutralizer again! Thank you! Quite possibly the only good highlight from this instance.
- The Voth are using special warheads that can only be destroyed by ramming. Do you need to use ramming speed or do you just need to hit it with your ship?
- I wouldn't say this mission is difficult because you're facing tough enemies, but rather you're facing a large number of familiar enemy types by the third phase. Quantity over quality.
- It was quite impressive fitting that huge fortress ship in the instance, though I assume it's some sort of limited background object.
- The fight with the dreadnoughts at the end was relatively boring.
Overall, this really presented nothing new in terms of gameplay. It's just a time consuming shooting gallery where everything is thrown at you but the kitchen sink. And from this, higher difficulties don't seem worthwhile.
It's a neat idea, a fun mission, but there are a few flaws with it. For one thing, even on normal I don't think I've ever gotten every optional in the same run. Between that and the comments in this thread I don't even want to think about what advanced is like. Then there's how the forces are split. The five-three split works on The Cure, where it just takes one to defend and two or three guys can gang up on a cube to press the offensive. Here though, it definitely seems to take a bit of teamwork to deal with the enemies AND free the Borg ships. A two-ship team with a cruiser pulling aggro using commands and a second ship concentrated on freeing the Borg ships seems to work well, but you can only do that on two points, leaving point number three in the lurch unless that person has some serious DPS. One solution I might have would be to increase the difficulty a bit and make it a ten-ship action, but I don't know how effective that would be at solving the problem, or if it's even feasible at this stage.
Admiral Katrina Tokareva - U.S.S. Cosmos, Yorktown-class Star Cruiser Admiral Dananra Lekall - R.R.W. Teverresh, Deihu-class Warbird General J'Kar son of K'tsulan - I.K.S. Dlahath, Vo'devwl-class Carrier
well even current normal difficulty will be to difficult for the majority of people, i where i games where I killed the undine dreadnought myself and 4 other ships haven't managed to even put one of the other dreadnoughts below 75%.
Not to mention with the uneven split this will one guy defending on spot on his own. I can do this on normal myself up the the third stage without a problem.
Form my observation most people struggle already when they have 2 ships there.
2 ships per spawn-point is completelly feasible and doable... as long as both know what to do. I kinda don't understand why there would be 3rd spawn point, as I honestly don't see how one person can do it on their own, both fight the enemies & rescue the disco-Borg. But, that's as far as 'complaints' go, in terms of this queue... it's nice to see a new challenge ahead of us.
[10:20] Your Lunge deals 4798 (2580) Physical Damage(Critical) to Tosk of Borg.
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Played this last night on Advanced via a pug queue. Pretty fun mission.
A few nits:
1. Are we supposed to use ramming speed on the Voth Borg Torps? If so, doesn't ramming speed only work when we're at 25% health? Or am I missing something?
2. Those three dreadnoughts at the end are HARD, man. I'm going to want some of those Thoron-Infused weapons to try and DOT them and placate them.
3. The rewards we got at the end of an advanced queue were the exact same as the ones from normal - no Ancient Computer Cores, no Advanced R&D Package (just normal), and only about 30 marks. I think that's a bug.
1) just flying through them is all that is meant
2) yeah
3)bug or part of the whole "this mission is a WIP" thing yeah
2 ships per spawn-point is completelly feasible and doable... as long as both know what to do. I kinda don't understand why there would be 3rd spawn point, as I honestly don't see how one person can do it on their own, both fight the enemies & rescue the disco-Borg. But, that's as far as 'complaints' go, in terms of this queue... it's nice to see a new challenge ahead of us.
simple, once more than one species has showed up, get out of range and stop firing for a few seconds, they start going at each other, and you can slip in, not firing and typically liberate the disconnected borg without firing a shot (fighters on intercept helps here)(warning: bring hazard emitters, with the borg proc rate a stray shot hitting you can apply the DoT and mess this up)
well even current normal difficulty will be to difficult for the majority of people, i where i games where I killed the undine dreadnought myself and 4 other ships haven't managed to even put one of the other dreadnoughts below 75%.
Not to mention with the uneven split this will one guy defending on spot on his own. I can do this on normal myself up the the third stage without a problem.
Form my observation most people struggle already when they have 2 ships there.
IMO they should make normal a little easier (further seperating the reward gap to compensate) and leave the others as is.
Comments
I would not mind those if they ignored the torpedoes. Best would be to make all torpedoes untargetable for PVE.
Main points for me are:
1. Waiting on DoTs to clear so I can save the borg or close the rifts.
2. Was waiting around for disconnected borg/enemies to spawn. //increase disconnected borg spawn rate, enemies spawn rate scales pretty well.
3. Boff pop up filling up the left side of my screen from top to bottom saying I have to ram torps and other lines.
4. Optional timer for the queen and 2 dreads does seem short.
Will test more later.
Yeah, just use FAW for everything, but than what's the point of having other weapons in the game in the first place?
And than why is the Dyson set torpedo destructible, if its useless against VOTH? I mean.... Undine Bio torp is extra good against Undine.
1) 3/5 players zerged one point during the initial phase. On Elite, that's going to make sense. But players are conditioned to stick together - maybe some indication that they should spread out?
2) For the life of me, I couldn't figure out a way to intercept a Borg Killer Torpedo. Granted, I was kinda swamped soloing a point - but some instruction in that regard might be nice.
3) DoT's interrupting my ability to clear rifts or liberate Cooperative ships seemed inconsistent. Is this by intention? Is one working and not the other?
4) Is it possible to scale spawns at a point for how many players are situated there? I know it's something you've done in the Undine space battlezone.
There are other player tactics that I imagine just need to get worked out by the playerbase.
1) It makes sense to focus fire during the Dreadnought encounter. To maximize rewards, it makes sense to prioritize weakest to strongest? So, by my reckoning: Tethys -> Diamond -> Citadel?
Other thoughts?
Yes, the Tethys Dreadnaught boss in the last stage likes to fly around and get stuck on structures a lot. The other two bosses, by comparison, don't move around a whole lot and don't have to worry about this.
Joined January 2009
So the second time I tried it, I decided to just park in the center of the area and try not to move around too much. It was a little more manageable, but I still felt a little too overwhelmed.
I have to agree with you there. It might be because I'm getting old (44) but I'm not even sure I would have been able to keep up with everything 20 years ago
Very challenging. And fun.
The Advanced version may need some tweaks, but given it's supposed to be played with higher lvl/gearing, hard to tell how well that one is balanced.
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I kept finding my ship unable to move, while still being activating powers, so the UI wasn't jammed. Don't worry! I wasn't silly and missed a debuff or engines offline or anything! It was a genuine problem.
Internet connection is fiber, excellent ping.
Twin dual core Xenon 3.2Ghz, 8GB RAM. ATI 5880 card.
This was terrible.
1) our pets didn't deploy.
2) "Ramming the torpedoes" wasn't possible
3) The 3 end ships where impossible to defeat (this may be because we didn't have any ship traits or was a high enough level with high enough gear).
But even if all that worked, It wasn't a very fun mission. the mission goals were confusing.
The borg killing torpedoes are a nice touch, needing to ram them in order to destroy them is very interesting, the more you ram, the more your bonus points go up which can net you a nice small reward.
also watching three NPC dreadnoughts fight it out is also awersome too
I cannot wait for the voiceover work and the cutscenes to be cleaned up
It still does seem as though as with everything, it'll be a DPS issue more than anything.
It is clear that the enemy's are built to fight with new gear especially the dreadnoughts at the end! This new pve encourage more teamwork as others stated witch is way better than the old pve stuff.
Agreed wit all above this PVE will definitely be a hard nut to crack on the harder difficulty. but i think with the new and higher gear it will be easier to do. now we al run rep fleet ect XII gear.
The dreadnoughts at the and needs more time added to it than the 4 minutes given to destroy all three. decrease time on the harder levels like advanced and elite but make normal longer than those 4 minutes we only got the voth destroyed in that time. for example 8 min on normal 6 min on advanced and 4 minutes on elite.
All thing considered i liked it!
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my guess is they switched advance with elite, the last ships have 2,8 million hp, even even probes have 280k. :eek:
If you play the advance one you also get uplevled to 60.
If this is really the elite version I even see trouble at lvl 60 there, it will be an insane dps race, more then any other stfs so far we have seen.
I am not a fan of making Enemies harder to kill by giving them the ability to crit one shot for 250k
This has been a reccurring pattern lately especially with the borg... in Most Elite STFs a borg can smack you for 100k with what we like to call the "invisible" torpedo... no way to defend against it or even see it coming... just BOOM dead..
Hive Elite is even worse... but thats another story...
All in all the mission is fantastic... but I dont see it being much fun if you die 20 times to one shot kills...
Its probably one of the biggest reasons most players steer clear of the Hive Elite
A few nits:
1. Are we supposed to use ramming speed on the Voth Borg Torps? If so, doesn't ramming speed only work when we're at 25% health? Or am I missing something?
2. Those three dreadnoughts at the end are HARD, man. I'm going to want some of those Thoron-Infused weapons to try and DOT them and placate them.
3. The rewards we got at the end of an advanced queue were the exact same as the ones from normal - no Ancient Computer Cores, no Advanced R&D Package (just normal), and only about 30 marks. I think that's a bug.
- You're doing this odd-numbered splitting of the party again? 5 players with 3 positions to cover? I'm not really a fan of this.
- It was pretty boring. Shoot enemy Borg, mash F to free Borg, rinse and repeat. I saw what appeared to be a pattern in which the waves would spawn at certain points, but I wasn't sure.
- Borg Cubes have shield neutralizer again! Thank you! Quite possibly the only good highlight from this instance.
- The Voth are using special warheads that can only be destroyed by ramming. Do you need to use ramming speed or do you just need to hit it with your ship?
- I wouldn't say this mission is difficult because you're facing tough enemies, but rather you're facing a large number of familiar enemy types by the third phase. Quantity over quality.
- It was quite impressive fitting that huge fortress ship in the instance, though I assume it's some sort of limited background object.
- The fight with the dreadnoughts at the end was relatively boring.
Overall, this really presented nothing new in terms of gameplay. It's just a time consuming shooting gallery where everything is thrown at you but the kitchen sink. And from this, higher difficulties don't seem worthwhile.
Admiral Dananra Lekall - R.R.W. Teverresh, Deihu-class Warbird
General J'Kar son of K'tsulan - I.K.S. Dlahath, Vo'devwl-class Carrier
Not to mention with the uneven split this will one guy defending on spot on his own. I can do this on normal myself up the the third stage without a problem.
Form my observation most people struggle already when they have 2 ships there.
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1) just flying through them is all that is meant
2) yeah
3)bug or part of the whole "this mission is a WIP" thing yeah
simple, once more than one species has showed up, get out of range and stop firing for a few seconds, they start going at each other, and you can slip in, not firing and typically liberate the disconnected borg without firing a shot (fighters on intercept helps here)(warning: bring hazard emitters, with the borg proc rate a stray shot hitting you can apply the DoT and mess this up)
IMO they should make normal a little easier (further seperating the reward gap to compensate) and leave the others as is.
As far as 2+ ships, see my above post