We did warn you that Elite is not for everyone. Its pretty extreme. Seriously, most players should not be able to do it.
But please note, that have already had some pretty well organized fleets blazing through Elite with apparent ease. It kinda blows me away honestly. We have a lot of diversity on skill in STO, so finding the right balance point may take time. We want to make a real challenge for our top players, so if players are succeeding easily (and they are), expect it to probably get harder.
Is it just skill, or is it also that you have too many underpowered abilities and ships? Sure, skill helps finding the right tools, but I think it's a problem if there are too many "traps" and too many must-haves.
If you do your levelling missions, you'll likely have a TRIBBLE mixture of gear and BO abilities. And you experienced nothing to teach you that it is bad.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
That cruiser may be just the thing, because you can park it safely, or broadside total beams. A destroyer or escort is only good while keeping the prey in the narrow arc. So the Mat'Ha with both Counter Command space sets, two elite and two advanced fleet DHCs, and a bio molecular torpedo up front. cutting beam and bio disruptor turret in back backed with 5 fleet tac consoles is a rather weak setup. I am thinking a 15 turn rate and fleet RCS are not enough, there is too much time outside of my arc for those 500k hull BoPs. The set up makes for a great evasion tank, but park and fire is what it takes to win this content.
Oh... that torpedo up front. I love a HY3 coup de grace plus the CC set bonus, but I am aware that total cannons are what the really cool kids run.
So onerats, do you run dual beams, or beam arrays on that Assault Cruiser with A2B & FAW? If I am going to make this stupid thread, I might as well try to learn something. Did Cryptic decide not to nerf you when the rest of us got hammered?
If something is not broke, don't try and fix it. Change should enhance the overall gaming experience not frak the whole thing up. Just because someone is not satisified with service that they have paid for does not mean that they are a better or worse player then anyone else. There is not one person who would not return a faulty piece of equipment to the store they bought it from or return a bad meal to the kitchen that served it. My friends we have just been served a mud pie, and when someone has a legit comment what happens? They are accused of not being skillfull enough and that they are whining like a child. A surgeon is skillfull, a military sniper is skillfull ... this my friends is a computer game about a fantasy sci-fi world and yes there should be an "I frakkin Win button".
Some people play this game to escape and unwind from a real world that is scary, and yes there is room at the table for you power players and your egos, so if sci-fi writers can bring Voyager back from the Gamma Quadrant then Cryptic writers and programmers should be able to let us in on that kind of fantasy winning as well. As it is, the game I knew on 10/14 is gone and something vastly different has taken its place. I will continue to play but please do not take my money and whiz down my back and say it's rain.
Generally, yeah, when people complain about the difficulty of a game, it is because they got a slap of reality and learned they are terrible.
And no, the game should not give you an "I frakkin Win" button because then you get accustomed to winning and, as you so eloquently showed us, crumble under the prospect of using actual skill and whine like babies.
No one is whizing on your back. That's the gaping hole where your spine should be collapsing while that whiz from your own bladder spews down your pant leg at the thought that the Kazon might be coming for you.
Delta isn't for the weak. Either adapt and get some skill or stay in the Beta Quadrant with the Tribbles and hide like cowards.
Your choice.
*hops in Oddy and warps out to fight the Vaadwuar*
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
One more thing that I am taking away from this. This is the end of PUGs. I have always done PUGs, and I PUGed the fails. Did a nice normal new Borg STF with fleet mates. It seemed much like an old elite in difficulty, and was pretty easy.
The old content on elite, except ground and The Hive... was easy. Even Cure Found Elite!
Again my point. New purchases were made so I could be weaker.
Ok i knew that a beefing of STFs was coming but this is crazy! ran a 5-man fleet ISA we got to the tac cube with 1:12 left and hadnt even scratched the gateway and the tac cube popped BFAW and wiped our whole team! WTF! i could see this in Elite but Advanced? OMG! I go on to note we had 3 scimitars a Scryer and a Palisade. This may wanna be rethought cryptic.
The type of ships you have don't matter the builds do.
Well therein lies the problem, advanced and elite stfs are not meant for low dps teams, it's fine to have some lower dps team mates if they are providing alternative support, such as soaking up damage and healing, or debuffing and holding in grav wells, but to send an entire team of low dps players into the most challenging event in the game is simply stupid.
You are right, they aren't meant for low dps teams, in fact they aren't even meant for teams who already exceeded the old elites by a factor of x2 or, even x3, heck even x4 for that matter.
No they are meant for people who are only focused on the highest possible dps in this game, which is something the vast majority of player's are not really interested in.
PUG groups, are not meant to naturally perform at these levels and, now they cannot even accomplish advanced with any degree of 25% surety.
It completely robs the diversity out of the game and, drives off potential customers, is all it is doing really.
If its too hard switch to normal. There is no reason to complain about something being to hard when you can play on a lower setting. Leave the harder stuff to those who can do. The only reason then for still crying about it would be to get cryptic to increase rewards on normal and advanced.
I'd be curious to see the builds and ships these so called 'top players' were using... I can guess they were all tacs and in escorts and beam boats, this mean I should just throw out all my characters that aren't tacs and mothball all my science ships? What point is there being a healer or a drainboat? The rewards for queues suck now, a lot of things are bugged and laggy, and to be honest I'd rather just be more of a casual player now then really put any more effort into the game. Games need to be fun and have some kind of goal... right now these queues aren't fun, and if the only goal in this game is to do more damage than everyone else and then rub this fact into the faces of the 95% of people that can't make that mark then I guess this really isn't a Star Trek game because that's not what Trek is about...
I am using one of these supposed 25k builds and, granted I do not have everything as far as gear listed but, still it only nets around 13k and, imo is quite literally the most boring build.
Still gets fed its butt in advanced, because it focuses to much on dps, with little survivability in the way of heals.
So, even being slightly behind the average dps required for advanced, it is quite literally imo not fun to play, no challenge other than beating on way overboard bags of hp.
The only thing they did do right, was actually change the strategy involved and, added some changes to the optionals requirements, other than that the TRIBBLE literally sucks.
Erp - I haven't lowered my setting to advanced yet... although, I may leave it on elite for episodes, as I am having success there, but will def NOT join an elite STF quiet yet...
Only did one STF last night which was 'Cure found', did it on advance because I was under the impression the adv was essentially old elite with a few changes + compulsory objectives, 4 eng + sci capt no tac's in the drop which shouldn't off been much of problem just meant it would be a bit slower.
Usually plan that everyone seems to do we split 2/2 with 1 killing borg as they spawn..........this happened for about 30seconds before we were all defending kang against BOP's with stupid amount of HP none of us could kill these things fast enough to focus on the cubes, failed, waste of time. The one cube we did kill died fast but not the BOP only a fraction of the size.
I don't know what gear the rest of the group had but from the affects on the ships all of us had rep gear at least, I don't have access to fleet gear as of this moment but my stuff is all mk12 /rep and sure everyone else did as well.
The whole thing in the end felt pointless, it wasn't hard at all it was frustrating boring and with the reduced rewards it, again, its completely pointless.
I'm sure once I can be bothered to spending silly amounts of time getting gold gear (which tbh i don't plan to do because I have no interest in doing pvp or the super hard stuff which at this stage is adv )
Well therein lies the problem, advanced and elite stfs are not meant for low dps teams, it's fine to have some lower dps team mates if they are providing alternative support, such as soaking up damage and healing, or debuffing and holding in grav wells, but to send an entire team of low dps players into the most challenging event in the game is simply stupid.
It should be equally stupid to send an entire team of ships devoid of any crowd control sci powers, or an entire team of ships with very little tanking and healing capability.
Except it's not, because the devs' idea of increasing difficulty is apparently just to throw in a huge DPS check and forget about every other mechanic.
Also, "soaking up damage", a novel idea if threat generation worked how it should.
If its too hard switch to normal. There is no reason to complain about something being to hard when you can play on a lower setting. Leave the harder stuff to those who can do. The only reason then for still crying about it would be to get cryptic to increase rewards on normal and advanced.
Being at a level equivalent to X2-X4 over the old elites, should be technically on par with something named advanced for, which could be defined as mid-par.
But, instead requires even greater than that, eliminating all but maybe 1-2 possible builds per ship and, this doesn't account for every ship in game rated tier4-5.
It eliminates diversity of builds, it promotes frustration to the majority of player's and, quite honestly does little to improve the quality of game experience for, the people who are new or, really don't want to have to play such a narrow minded dps arms race.
Many of us have paid over $100 for the Delta Pack, and as you can see on the forums, our first experiences with our new tier 6 ships, and tier 5 upgrades is failure after failure. Even in regular fleet alerts! Please do go ahead and make elite truly elite, but let those of us who were happy playing STO up to now have a decent shot at advanced content just like we did until yesterday with elite content.
I hope PvE is adjusted with an emergency patch very soon. No one wants to pay to lose. Nobody!
bought the pack, driving the guardian, sci. character, 10k dps, no problems whit the missions or stf. dont know what are you talking about.
That cruiser may be just the thing, because you can park it safely, or broadside total beams. A destroyer or escort is only good while keeping the prey in the narrow arc. So the Mat'Ha with both Counter Command space sets, two elite and two advanced fleet DHCs, and a bio molecular torpedo up front. cutting beam and bio disruptor turret in back backed with 5 fleet tac consoles is a rather weak setup. I am thinking a 15 turn rate and fleet RCS are not enough, there is too much time outside of my arc for those 500k hull BoPs. The set up makes for a great evasion tank, but park and fire is what it takes to win this content.
Oh... that torpedo up front. I love a HY3 coup de grace plus the CC set bonus, but I am aware that total cannons are what the really cool kids run.
So onerats, do you run dual beams, or beam arrays on that Assault Cruiser with A2B & FAW? If I am going to make this stupid thread, I might as well try to learn something. Did Cryptic decide not to nerf you when the rest of us got hammered?
TBH, an FACR-U isn't worth it. As a Tac Cruiser it is beaten by Avenger and Oddy, and matched by the Excelsior and Guardian. (especially Fleet Guardian when it arrives)
Assuming you have it as you talk about buying the pack, for a Guardian DR throws a curve ball here, but look up a decent A2B FACR build and copy it, the two ships are close enough to make it work. (the higher DPS but fragile non-A2B builds cant be done on a Guardian, not enough Tac Boff slots, but you do gain a Lt. Cm. Sci, so slot a Grav Well there for crowd control)
Have a think about what you wrote and then wonder if you could do it another way, here's a hint, the Kang now has 3.5 million hit points
I did notice that as well which is why I broke off from the group and went to kill a whole side by myself.
Still for the optional it means Kang can't go below 2.6 million. It seems the only builds that matter now are massive DPS builds. My Oddy won't and didn't die but with 8,000 DPS (that was my old DPS, I don't know exact numbers on what it is now with Mk XIV gear) it was slow in killing things in Advanced.
I'm not level 60 yet but do have T5U Oddy with full Mk XIV fleet gear...could reaching level 60 be that much more of a game changer?
Fleet Admiral Thomas Winston James a.k.a. The Grayfox Fleet Leader of:
Liberty Task Force/Liberty Honor Guard
Pride of the Federation/Pride of the Empire
Liberty Guardians U.S.S. Liberty, NX-42813-L, T-6 Legendary Odyssey Class
I am not blowing smoke on anything. My point still stands. The Content can still be played using existing T5 ships - you simply cannot do it on Advanced unless you are marginally skilled. On Elite you need to have the best gear and ships available to you - which was made clear even in the Podcasts. But that is not stopping anyone from doing it even on Regular difficulty while they get better.
You need to play on advanced or better to get a lot of that best gear. No purple mats, damn near no neural processors, and much more limited avenues for the neural processor equivalents.
What's funny to me, as that the episode content actually did start to provide some real gameplay difficulty. I've gotten up to the vaadwaur, and they actually start to act like they have strategies. The episode stuff is actually much more fun than the new queue and the revamped "slightly harder" old queues.
The Guardian is set up, and looks great. I was just all excited about the stupid Mat'Ha. Could the day of Escorts Online be over? I have yet to see a happy post by an escort/raider/destroyer captain... T5U or T6. I better look some more.
The Guardian is set up, and looks great. I was just all excited about the stupid Mat'Ha. Could the day of Escorts Online be over? I have yet to see a happy post by an escort/raider/destroyer captain... T5U or T6. I better look some more.
Given that they are so few at the moment, I would say patience. It is still Escorts Online, just need to re-figure out those builds once again.
I assume people are forgetting that fleet red alert was made to be inclusive of lower ranked players.
The one I did last night was way beyond sensible.
A full fleet team of non noobs (2 being PvPers in well spec' ships) yet even the smallest, weakest of the enemy was hitting 350k-400k hulls.
Each and every ship required focus fire, thus slowing the run and running out of time.
1. I have yet to hit 51 on any captain before I think about doing PvE. To do PvE, and especially Advanced now is like doing a former elite on a level 40.
2. Pick Up Groups are completely out for Advanced and Elite content. It's either fleet mates, via social/STF channel, or forget it.
3. Sustained DPS is better than burst DPS. If you fly and escort the way you should, it will take you forever to kill anything, such as 600k hull birds of prey! If you use DHCs, park or forget about it.
4. Use Doffs and new episodic content now, and try PvE queues after level 60, and not before. Especially if you're not hardcore. If you are hardcore, play 3 hours to level 60, then play PvE queues and advanced STFs.
How stupid are some of you?! I mean really? Defending Cryptic over what is clearly a bunch of TRIBBLE? First off they said we could easily do all existing content WITHOUT a tier 6 ship. Then the launch happens and you not only cant do advanced ques with a Tier 5 or Tier 5u but you also cant do them in a tier 6.
And the Cryptic defenders arguement is that we havent hit lvl 60 yet so its ok that missions we have been hundreds of times are now out of our league? That logic is seriously flawed.
This isnt about making the game easier overall. The lvl 60 elite ques should be extremely hard. But to make the tier UNDER THAT totally ridiculous is just a bad bad decision. There goes grinding R&D mats...
We did warn you that Elite is not for everyone. Its pretty extreme. Seriously, most players should not be able to do it.
But please note, that have already had some pretty well organized fleets blazing through Elite with apparent ease. It kinda blows me away honestly. We have a lot of diversity on skill in STO, so finding the right balance point may take time. We want to make a real challenge for our top players, so if players are succeeding easily (and they are), expect it to probably get harder.
Um, actually... no. This is not a new difficulty. It's a new level of annoying.
You took slow, boring bags of health and added more health to them. That is not difficult. It just means in order to beat them, you have to spec out your super leet dps ships with the new gear and spacebar your way to victory. Last I checked, gear =/= skill.
Making the same mission take longer with a higher gear requirement =/= difficulty.
How stupid are some of you?! I mean really? Defending Cryptic over what is clearly a bunch of TRIBBLE? First off they said we could easily do all existing content WITHOUT a tier 6 ship. Then the launch happens and you not only cant do advanced ques with a Tier 5 or Tier 5u but you also cant do them in a tier 6.
And the Cryptic defenders arguement is that we havent hit lvl 60 yet so its ok that missions we have been hundreds of times are now out of our league? That logic is seriously flawed.
This isnt about making the game easier overall. The lvl 60 elite ques should be extremely hard. But to make the tier UNDER THAT totally ridiculous is just a bad bad decision. There goes grinding R&D mats...
Dude, I'm using a T5 Operations Oddy with only the Separation module. Only my fore weapons are purple and all of them are from LoR and lower. I only have one DR item and that's a shield emitter. My mortality rate? Surprisingly low. Half the time I just pick off stragglers and let the big boys do the heavy hitting.
Either learn to pick your battles better and synergize with your clearly superior teammates or go sit in the kid's corner playing Kadis-Kot. The Delta Alliance has no place for whiners and cowards.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
They also said that with the new difficulty, people in lower Tier ships with lower Tier gear would have problems. It's not their fault people can't read or didn't listen.
So far, I haven't come across any episodic content I can't complete in my existing Fleet ship with MK XII Rep/Fleet gear. Normal queues are not difficult. Advanced is a bit more of a challenge and I have not tried the new Elite yet, nor do I intend to as the nerfed rewards are the real problem IMO.
It's fine to want to adjust the difficulty, but the rewards should match that increased difficulty. It's like us being asked to work harder and more hours, but get paid less.
I laugh at the Connies floating around in the Delta Quadrant.
Kirk wouldn't have lasted five minutes against the Vaadies. :rolleyes:
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
My mortality rate? Surprisingly low. Half the time I just pick off stragglers and let the big boys do the heavy hitting.
Honestly, none of this content has killed my ships. I had zero dying last night. None! The problem is the incredible hit points on enemy ships in non ranked PvE, and more so in advanced STFs.
see, you just undermined any point you might have wanted to make.
functionally, you just admitted the game was dps centric to the exclusion of anything else from the start.
arguing against something being so while stating it as being true, is your own cognitive dissonance showing through.
Actually I admitted no such thing .
In the old STF's -- let's say the part where we needed to fly behind the Transwarp gate , and have tons of probes & cubes fly through / get stuck on the gate -- there you needed he cruisers to heal the escorts , while the escorts did most (but not all) the damage -- and ALL ships needed Neutronium Eng consoles .
That WAS team play ... -- supporting one another .
The same as needing a Sci on ground to finish Armek .
Right now , the Advanced just needs DPS .
No Neutronium is needed , and you can fly perfectly well with tons of Lobi consoles .
No healing for the weak by the strong is needed either .
Just Eng console slots stuffed with money and Doff slots stuffed with money , and all sorts of upgrades for ... money .
On one hand this is what makes F2P successful .
On the other ... -- well consider the rarity of some of the Doff that make the high DPS game go .
Do you know why they are so expensive (apart from player greed) ?
Rarity .
And that means that even if most of the player base wanted to get onto the DPS bandwagon --- they actually can't ... due to that very rarity .
Honestly, none of this content has killed my ships. I had zero dying last night. None! The problem is the incredible hit points on enemy ships in non ranked PvE, and more so in advanced STFs.
That's why I get the other guys to do it. They kill the dreadships and bionoughts and blah blah, I'm over here, completeing the optional objective of beaming people off the exploding ship! I'm contributing!
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
Comments
Is it just skill, or is it also that you have too many underpowered abilities and ships? Sure, skill helps finding the right tools, but I think it's a problem if there are too many "traps" and too many must-haves.
If you do your levelling missions, you'll likely have a TRIBBLE mixture of gear and BO abilities. And you experienced nothing to teach you that it is bad.
That cruiser may be just the thing, because you can park it safely, or broadside total beams. A destroyer or escort is only good while keeping the prey in the narrow arc. So the Mat'Ha with both Counter Command space sets, two elite and two advanced fleet DHCs, and a bio molecular torpedo up front. cutting beam and bio disruptor turret in back backed with 5 fleet tac consoles is a rather weak setup. I am thinking a 15 turn rate and fleet RCS are not enough, there is too much time outside of my arc for those 500k hull BoPs. The set up makes for a great evasion tank, but park and fire is what it takes to win this content.
Oh... that torpedo up front. I love a HY3 coup de grace plus the CC set bonus, but I am aware that total cannons are what the really cool kids run.
So onerats, do you run dual beams, or beam arrays on that Assault Cruiser with A2B & FAW? If I am going to make this stupid thread, I might as well try to learn something. Did Cryptic decide not to nerf you when the rest of us got hammered?
Member since December 2009
Generally, yeah, when people complain about the difficulty of a game, it is because they got a slap of reality and learned they are terrible.
And no, the game should not give you an "I frakkin Win" button because then you get accustomed to winning and, as you so eloquently showed us, crumble under the prospect of using actual skill and whine like babies.
No one is whizing on your back. That's the gaping hole where your spine should be collapsing while that whiz from your own bladder spews down your pant leg at the thought that the Kazon might be coming for you.
Delta isn't for the weak. Either adapt and get some skill or stay in the Beta Quadrant with the Tribbles and hide like cowards.
Your choice.
*hops in Oddy and warps out to fight the Vaadwuar*
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
The old content on elite, except ground and The Hive... was easy. Even Cure Found Elite!
Again my point. New purchases were made so I could be weaker.
Member since December 2009
The type of ships you have don't matter the builds do.
You are right, they aren't meant for low dps teams, in fact they aren't even meant for teams who already exceeded the old elites by a factor of x2 or, even x3, heck even x4 for that matter.
No they are meant for people who are only focused on the highest possible dps in this game, which is something the vast majority of player's are not really interested in.
PUG groups, are not meant to naturally perform at these levels and, now they cannot even accomplish advanced with any degree of 25% surety.
It completely robs the diversity out of the game and, drives off potential customers, is all it is doing really.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Tell that to the failaxy or, any other number of crutch requiring ships!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
but no there is no reason to play advance
i do not care how hard they make elite they can make it so you die 1 second after warp in but at least make advance on par to how the old elite was
I am using one of these supposed 25k builds and, granted I do not have everything as far as gear listed but, still it only nets around 13k and, imo is quite literally the most boring build.
Still gets fed its butt in advanced, because it focuses to much on dps, with little survivability in the way of heals.
So, even being slightly behind the average dps required for advanced, it is quite literally imo not fun to play, no challenge other than beating on way overboard bags of hp.
The only thing they did do right, was actually change the strategy involved and, added some changes to the optionals requirements, other than that the TRIBBLE literally sucks.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
Usually plan that everyone seems to do we split 2/2 with 1 killing borg as they spawn..........this happened for about 30seconds before we were all defending kang against BOP's with stupid amount of HP none of us could kill these things fast enough to focus on the cubes, failed, waste of time. The one cube we did kill died fast
I don't know what gear the rest of the group had but from the affects on the ships all of us had rep gear at least, I don't have access to fleet gear as of this moment but my stuff is all mk12 /rep and sure everyone else did as well.
The whole thing in the end felt pointless, it wasn't hard at all it was frustrating boring and with the reduced rewards it, again, its completely pointless.
I'm sure once I can be bothered to spending silly amounts of time getting gold gear (which tbh i don't plan to do because I have no interest in doing pvp or the super hard stuff which at this stage is adv
Rant over bla bla bla.
It should be equally stupid to send an entire team of ships devoid of any crowd control sci powers, or an entire team of ships with very little tanking and healing capability.
Except it's not, because the devs' idea of increasing difficulty is apparently just to throw in a huge DPS check and forget about every other mechanic.
Also, "soaking up damage", a novel idea if threat generation worked how it should.
if I stop posting it doesn't make you right it. just means I don't have enough rum to continue interacting with you.
Being at a level equivalent to X2-X4 over the old elites, should be technically on par with something named advanced for, which could be defined as mid-par.
But, instead requires even greater than that, eliminating all but maybe 1-2 possible builds per ship and, this doesn't account for every ship in game rated tier4-5.
It eliminates diversity of builds, it promotes frustration to the majority of player's and, quite honestly does little to improve the quality of game experience for, the people who are new or, really don't want to have to play such a narrow minded dps arms race.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
bought the pack, driving the guardian, sci. character, 10k dps, no problems whit the missions or stf. dont know what are you talking about.
TBH, an FACR-U isn't worth it. As a Tac Cruiser it is beaten by Avenger and Oddy, and matched by the Excelsior and Guardian. (especially Fleet Guardian when it arrives)
Assuming you have it as you talk about buying the pack, for a Guardian DR throws a curve ball here, but look up a decent A2B FACR build and copy it, the two ships are close enough to make it work. (the higher DPS but fragile non-A2B builds cant be done on a Guardian, not enough Tac Boff slots, but you do gain a Lt. Cm. Sci, so slot a Grav Well there for crowd control)
I did notice that as well which is why I broke off from the group and went to kill a whole side by myself.
Still for the optional it means Kang can't go below 2.6 million. It seems the only builds that matter now are massive DPS builds. My Oddy won't and didn't die but with 8,000 DPS (that was my old DPS, I don't know exact numbers on what it is now with Mk XIV gear) it was slow in killing things in Advanced.
I'm not level 60 yet but do have T5U Oddy with full Mk XIV fleet gear...could reaching level 60 be that much more of a game changer?
Fleet Leader of:
Liberty Task Force/Liberty Honor Guard
Pride of the Federation/Pride of the Empire
Liberty Guardians
U.S.S. Liberty, NX-42813-L, T-6 Legendary Odyssey Class
Game Handle: Grayfox@GrayfoxJames
Website: https://www.libertytaskforce.com
Armada (STOFA Member Fleet): https://www.libertytaskforce.com/stofa
Discord: https://discord.gg/bGp9N7z
Twitter: STOFA@LTFGrayfox
Email: CSDynamix@Hotmail.com
You need to play on advanced or better to get a lot of that best gear. No purple mats, damn near no neural processors, and much more limited avenues for the neural processor equivalents.
What's funny to me, as that the episode content actually did start to provide some real gameplay difficulty. I've gotten up to the vaadwaur, and they actually start to act like they have strategies. The episode stuff is actually much more fun than the new queue and the revamped "slightly harder" old queues.
Member since December 2009
Given that they are so few at the moment, I would say patience. It is still Escorts Online, just need to re-figure out those builds once again.
The one I did last night was way beyond sensible.
A full fleet team of non noobs (2 being PvPers in well spec' ships) yet even the smallest, weakest of the enemy was hitting 350k-400k hulls.
Each and every ship required focus fire, thus slowing the run and running out of time.
1. I have yet to hit 51 on any captain before I think about doing PvE. To do PvE, and especially Advanced now is like doing a former elite on a level 40.
2. Pick Up Groups are completely out for Advanced and Elite content. It's either fleet mates, via social/STF channel, or forget it.
3. Sustained DPS is better than burst DPS. If you fly and escort the way you should, it will take you forever to kill anything, such as 600k hull birds of prey! If you use DHCs, park or forget about it.
4. Use Doffs and new episodic content now, and try PvE queues after level 60, and not before. Especially if you're not hardcore. If you are hardcore, play 3 hours to level 60, then play PvE queues and advanced STFs.
Member since December 2009
And the Cryptic defenders arguement is that we havent hit lvl 60 yet so its ok that missions we have been hundreds of times are now out of our league? That logic is seriously flawed.
This isnt about making the game easier overall. The lvl 60 elite ques should be extremely hard. But to make the tier UNDER THAT totally ridiculous is just a bad bad decision. There goes grinding R&D mats...
Um, actually... no. This is not a new difficulty. It's a new level of annoying.
You took slow, boring bags of health and added more health to them. That is not difficult. It just means in order to beat them, you have to spec out your super leet dps ships with the new gear and spacebar your way to victory. Last I checked, gear =/= skill.
Making the same mission take longer with a higher gear requirement =/= difficulty.
Dude, I'm using a T5 Operations Oddy with only the Separation module. Only my fore weapons are purple and all of them are from LoR and lower. I only have one DR item and that's a shield emitter. My mortality rate? Surprisingly low. Half the time I just pick off stragglers and let the big boys do the heavy hitting.
Either learn to pick your battles better and synergize with your clearly superior teammates or go sit in the kid's corner playing Kadis-Kot. The Delta Alliance has no place for whiners and cowards.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
I laugh at the Connies floating around in the Delta Quadrant.
Kirk wouldn't have lasted five minutes against the Vaadies. :rolleyes:
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
Honestly, none of this content has killed my ships. I had zero dying last night. None! The problem is the incredible hit points on enemy ships in non ranked PvE, and more so in advanced STFs.
Member since December 2009
Actually I admitted no such thing .
In the old STF's -- let's say the part where we needed to fly behind the Transwarp gate , and have tons of probes & cubes fly through / get stuck on the gate -- there you needed he cruisers to heal the escorts , while the escorts did most (but not all) the damage -- and ALL ships needed Neutronium Eng consoles .
That WAS team play ... -- supporting one another .
The same as needing a Sci on ground to finish Armek .
Right now , the Advanced just needs DPS .
No Neutronium is needed , and you can fly perfectly well with tons of Lobi consoles .
No healing for the weak by the strong is needed either .
Just Eng console slots stuffed with money and Doff slots stuffed with money , and all sorts of upgrades for ... money .
On one hand this is what makes F2P successful .
On the other ... -- well consider the rarity of some of the Doff that make the high DPS game go .
Do you know why they are so expensive (apart from player greed) ?
Rarity .
And that means that even if most of the player base wanted to get onto the DPS bandwagon --- they actually can't ... due to that very rarity .
That's why I get the other guys to do it. They kill the dreadships and bionoughts and blah blah, I'm over here, completeing the optional objective of beaming people off the exploding ship! I'm contributing!
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP