I think advanced should be the old elite not buffed up as it is now. Ive tryed cure on advanced on my rommy that i did cse in before the fleet tac consoles were unlocked (by my fleet) any way Me n one fleet mate did old cse with 3 mins left on the optional clock.
The new advanced i was taking as much time to kill one bop as it used to take me to kill a negh.
Even though i now have upgraded all my fleet consoles to mk xiii, and i have the new 5 tac console rom warbird. RogueTal'shar@wilbor2 or is it RogueTal'Shar@wilbor2 any way use my char n see what im on adout.
as for the dill rewards they jusk suck big time im starting to think you guys just like coming up with new ways tto upset your player base
im staying out of the pve queue till things change advanced needs to be be adle to be done with a free 9 consoles ship with mk xi on it otherwise how can new players/char get mkxii rep stuff?
ill leave on a happy note i love the new story :-)
Personally I don't find the dps race fun. Don't get me wrong, I can do it, but I hate using cookie cutter builds that everyone has to use, to do a particular piece of content.
What I suggest, is you get rid of the 3 tier difficulty and go back to 2.
Normal = The old elite pre DR, with the same optional's and 960 Dilithium
Elite = The current elite post DR and 1440 Dilithium. This is perfect for the masochists that like the dps race.
Personally I don't find the dps race fun. Don't get me wrong, I can do it, but I hate using cookie cutter builds that everyone has to use, to do a particular piece of content.
What I suggest, is you get rid of the 3 tier difficulty and go back to 2.
Normal = The old elite pre DR, with the same optional's and 960 Dilithium
Elite = The current elite post DR and 1440 Dilithium. This is perfect for the masochists that like the dps race.
All should reward VR mats and special rep items.
This, I believe, should keep most people happy...
Not only happy, I think it would have been perfect that way and for Cryptic not at all hard to be implemented.
Awsome post...and I totally agree!
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We have been waiting for years for a challenging content that doesn't take 3 min to do.
I like the new STF advanced difficulty and that gives players something to work on.
Must of us don't have the gear and we are all just started leveling again.
I Think it's great. So why nerfing it? Just because people complain it'is to hard?
Sorry, wasn't Delta Rising on tribble for weeks to test?
This is why we should have some silver members and f2p players to have access to tribble.
More feedback, less changing afterwards when it goes live!
Personally I think story advanced 'difficulty' needs to be stepped up a bit in space in terms of NPC damage, their HP is alright but without any extra damage it's like shooting a damage sponge, the only threat I've seen to my engineer's Aux2Damp Excel is a group of three or more Vaadwaur ships and once I got used to them and adjusted my piloting accordingly that was mitigated.
I wont pass judgement on STFs yet as the first post-DR one I did I was still lvl 50 and had little upgraded gear, the most noticeable thing was their shield resistance/HP (not sure which) which allowed even the BoPs in CSA to take a few minutes of pounding from a ship that could previously rip four of them to shreds at a time on autopilot. If that effect is mitigated when I reach lvl 60 I will be happy but equally I don't want to be shredding four BoPs at a time on advanced difficulty with just EPtW1, TT1, FAW2 and APB2 on 8 RomPla beam arrays.
A lot of people seem to ignroe the fact that if you look up at your XP bar, you'll notice you are scaled to 60. This content is built for 60s, not 50s.
Let people get to their max level with all the new traits and specializations first, then balance if needed.
Welcome to Delta Rising. A lot has changed in the game difficulty, and we are looking for your feedback.
Delta Rising was a massive addition, and we anticipate that we will need to make adjustments. So over the next few weeks expect changes in the baseline difficulty, advanced difficulty, and elite difficulty - and also expect rewards to change as we gather more metrics on play-times and success rates.
Our goal was to make basic difficulty and the story content something everyone can play - even with a standard T5 ship. Levels 1-50 are generally pretty easy at basic difficulty, so we felt 51-60 should step things up a bit. Although we expect 51-60 accessible everyone, those in T5 ships and non-upgraded gear should to start to feel a definite challenge as they approach level 60. We expect Advanced to be for more skilled players and those who have invested in the game (ships and gear). And we expect Elite to be for the best of the best. We don't expect most players to succeed on elite difficulty.
If I were to guess, I would expect basic to get some minor tuning, Advanced to get a little easier and Elite to get a lot harder - and rewards, like dilithium rewards, could potentially go up across queues once we are sure we are hitting the right mark. But this is just my guess at this time.
Until then, let us know your thoughts here, and we will take your feedback into consideration.
Thanks, and we hope you enjoy Delta Rising.
LLAP
well i would make the normal just as the old elite was. period nothing different at all from it. same rewards and all.
if they fail the ops on it the reward should be the same as normal anyways so not loss of anything only a net gain. turn back the clock 2 days and just try to que up a normal stf. LOL you will be sitting along time guaranteed.
advanced should be like the old elite but optional a requirement, not optional and same dil reward but an extra BNP
Elite i cant comment on as i havent gotten there. but if you want it a kick TRIBBLE nightmare mode fine giv it the same dil reward as the other two but one extra BNP totalling 3. enough for the dil convet project or make buying gear a bit faster . itsa good bonus for those looking for the challenge and does not punish everbody else. and you been running the game all this time with most doing the elites that should not have been there forcing others to carry them through the mission. only way that will stop is if rewards are more equal. one BNP and slighty eaiser content that can be finished faster and with casual player enjoyment. isnt going to break you . it will give you happy customers looking to throw more money at you.
now if you really want to control a real problem go after the companies that are farming and then spamming and selling in game items that a army of alts farmed not the actual player base. hell hire me ill weed out those farmers for you . even run sting operations to catch them red handed . or you could actually listen to bug reports i have sent for past year and half about them exploiting mark tribbles with that army of alts getting one mark per tribble every 60 seconds. then trading them for dil then buying zen then selling items for real money all without ever leaving the Klingon homeworld.
so please go after the bad guys and stop picking on the players. and that would include showing us Klingon players a little love. instead of slapping us in the face all the time.
Trophies for killing FEDS ahh those were the days.
This is pretty lazy game design.
Making enemies just have boatloads of hp is lazy lazy. How boring is it to shoot at things that don't hurt you for 10x longer to achieve the same result? People really need to lose their jobs
There's a very vocal minority out there that like the new difficulty, but this difficulty just isn't fun for everyone else. It's way to hard. Instead of fealing like my characters are getting better it just feels like they've been made much worse and now I have to invest significant time and money to get them back to where they were. I'm not sure I want to do that and it's definitely not something I'm happy about.
Yeah, I'm gonna agree with a lot of people - don't dump the difficulty curve, but dump the HP. Slash the HP by, like, 35-40%.
I mean, when you're sitting there trying to shoot the Crystalline Entity and it takes forever to even get it past 60%, you're probably doing something wrong.
I hope the difficulty will be tweaked in the coming weeks. I'm an older player and while I'm "F2P" I've bought plenty of Zen over the past few years. My T5 ships were not maxed out but I had plenty of VR XII weapons/gear and space sets. While I certainly expected a challenge and for STFs to be tougher, I felt like I was suddenly using water pistols and spitballs against the Borg. And after getting smacked around where once I could hold my own, the slashed rewards was just adding insult to injury.
I don't want nerf...but I do want balance. Reward should justify effort. Also, don't force me to become a member of the Church of DPS. I have really enjoyed this game for the past few years but I stayed out of PvP because I just did not want to be another DPS munchkin. I hope these new difficulty settings will not force players to focus on DPS just to be viable.
Adding more hull and resists was silly. Still same old dumb NPCs. Add more dill rewards if you're going to submit players to agony of this. Borg stfs and kerrat are the only things thats keeping a lot of players here.
So far not impressed with this release. Worse than LoR
Quote about STO on consoles: "Not quite as bad as No man's sky, but a close second."
A lot of people seem to ignroe the fact that if you look up at your XP bar, you'll notice you are scaled to 60. This content is built for 60s, not 50s.
Let people get to their max level with all the new traits and specializations first, then balance if needed.
"In the new Advanced versions of the queues you will see a similar level of challenge in the enemies that you are used to when the queues were labeled Elite. In addition, players with Captains under max level will find themselves bolstered up to level 60, the same level as their opponents. You wont gain seats or powers you didnt have, but your damage and other numerical values for your Captain and ship will be scaled up to match what you would do at this higher level"
People here have already pointed out what needs to be done but i'll still add my 2 roubles:
First,
HP of NPCs in advanced queues should be cut by at least 20-30% or even more if you plan to allow lvl 50 characters to do advanced queues. ATM it simply takes too much time to kill something.
Second,
rewards should be changed: 480 dil for normal, 960 dil some VR mats and BNP (injector, implant etc), 1440 or even 1920 dil plus more VR mats and BNP for elite.
Make elite really challenging, that'd be great to have a challenge actually, but don't forget that we still need something framable and that something shouldnt take forever to complete. Advanced queues that can be done in 10 minutes would fit this role perfectly. Not 2 minutes like it used to be but 20-25 minutes for 480 dil is also not an option.
I m shocked that bigger hp sponges don't satisfy the masses, what an unexpected turn of events, geko. It was such a stunning success the last times, and the feedback you so desperately miss on those forums, has been anything but clear on what is fun when increasing difficulties, and what isn't.
Yeah, I'm gonna agree with a lot of people - don't dump the difficulty curve, but dump the HP. Slash the HP by, like, 35-40%.
I mean, when you're sitting there trying to shoot the Crystalline Entity and it takes forever to even get it past 60%, you're probably doing something wrong.
This sounds about right. Enemies aren't too 'difficult' (dangerous?) per se but their HP scaling is pants-on-head insane. Why on earth does a Kazon carrier have over a million HP? It took me nearly an hour of nonstop slogging to do a regular story patrol (the one with the 2 Benthan guard ships that Deputize you). A patrol. This was as a level-60 captain with 10 specialization points spent exclusively in the space skills, owning most of the lockbox traits, flying a T5U Mobius with maxed-out ship Mastery, with Mk XII fleet/reputation gear (no I haven't upgraded anything, because the upgrade system is buggered). In other words what I'm saying is this character is no spring chicken. Over the length of the patrol (54 minutes from start to finish, 44 minutes engaged in combat) I parsed an average of 9,500 DPS. When it was all said and done I had to chew through 25,530,616 combined enemy hull and shield HP. This is ludicrous.
This content isn't more difficult, it's more tedious, and I'm not even talking about the queues here. Turning enemies into mountains of HP is neither creative nor imaginative. It's.. a drag. You've made the DPS race in STO even worse. Sci skills and tanks are nearly useless, subsystem targeting is a pathetic joke because the NPCs aren't intelligent enough for it to matter, they'll behave the same way regardless of your actions, and subsystems don't stay offline for more than a moment (really STO needs hard points and permanent subsystem destruction to cripple your adversaries in a fight).
I will inevitably adapt and get better, but hammering on one ship for several minutes* is not my idea of fun. When I had defeated a couple carriers only to be presented with another group of them back to back my immediate thought was 'oh TRIBBLE you Cryptic for putting several of these enemies back to back' and that should never be the response that content elicits from a player because it means the content is failing to deliver the fun factor (failing quite hard I might add) and is only frustrating.
*one ship that is not a boss ship, that is just one in several waves of ships I might add. If it were a boss ship that would be more acceptable, but for the common thug to take longer than a boss ship used to take is ridiculous.
Now, make no mistake, I was one of the players asking for a Nightmare mode, but I wanted it to be just that, a mode (as in optional), for players to strive towards in queued content, not something that is thrust upon everyone for all content everywhere, including Joe Everyman that can't even pull 3k DPS vs an unshielded target. At this point I have no intentions of ever playing in the PvE queue again unless several balance passes are made (which is the purpose of this thread, so hopefully the collective advice is heeded). Otherwise PUGs won't be able to handle this. Only premades will be worth my time, and even then the time/reward ratio has just become highly skewed, and my alts can forget about getting any rep gear now since the Normals don't award the needed materials.
I'm assuming that the Fleet alert isn't the only queued event to have this, and I personally think that the level cap for Normal should be set back to 50 like they said it would. I also think they should make Advanced and Elite versions of the Fleet Queues maybe for the truly daring.
From playing Fleet Alert, I learned that it only takes 1 wave for most of a team to quit out because more difficult than it says it should be.
It's not the only one. The 'brackets' for any PVE queue that isn't split into the Normal/Advanced/Elite trifecta are all messed up and inconsistent. Also I would just like to point and laugh at how a level 5 character can now be drawn into a level 60 fleet alert and do jack diddly squat to help the team.
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 posted in the other topic before I noticed this one.
Normal is fine, Elite is fine, but please address Advanced mode. It needs to be toned down by a lot, not "slightly". The difference between Advanced and Elite is very little in regards of enemy buffs. Advanced should be more in the middle between Normal and Elite, not very close to Elite. It is fine if Advanced is harder than previous Elite mode, but not ten times harder.
We have been waiting for years for a challenging content that doesn't take 3 min to do.
I like the new STF advanced difficulty and that gives players something to work on.
Must of us don't have the gear and we are all just started leveling again.
I Think it's great. So why nerfing it? Just because people complain it'is to hard?
Sorry, wasn't Delta Rising on tribble for weeks to test?
This is why we should have some silver members and f2p players to have access to tribble.
More feedback, less changing afterwards when it goes live!
Are you blaming the tribble testers? . . . Nice. There was plenty of feedback, apparently it was just ignored . . . Again..
As far as the storyline goes, I like the new Delta Quadrant mobs. The aesthetics of ground Vaadwuar are above reproach. The Kazon were fun; it's nice to see an actual enemy carrier.
Advanced PVE queues are perhaps a bit excessively ramped up, though. These are presented after the first mission as a means to help you grind to 60 between missions but every one I've tried has been 5x harder than the old Elite. That seems, perhaps, a bit much.
The artist formerly known as PlanetofHats.
Actual join date: Open beta, 2009ish.
"Similar" doesn't mean "easier" or "exactly what it was before". The current Advanced is similar to the old Elite difficulty IMO.
no it's not. 1 million hp vs 21 million isn't remotely similar, unless you failed grade school math.
hp needs to be cut by at least 50-60% to return it to around what it used to be. keep the absurd hp values for elite queues where minmaxing pvpers can get destroyed over and over, but don't force everyone with less than 30k dps into normal queues which have no rewards worth considering.
Now clowns, that's another story. They scare the crap out of me.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
No, just NO. This new difficulty setting is ridiculous, and I'm a decent player. For a PUG team of lvl 50 players to fail a basic Fleet Alert is absurd. For a similar PUG team to fail the option in ISA *by several minutes* is likewise insane.
Prior to DR PvE content, even on "Elite" was too easy... PUG teams finishing STFs with 5+minutes to go on the optional and etc. But now to not even be able to consider completing the option... too much too soon.
You don't have to put things back as they were, but dial it back quite a bit.
If you're having difficulty blowing up NPCs on Advanced now, you're built/geared/specced wrong or are using sub-par ships/gear.
Geko spelled it out for you ... "We expect Advanced to be for more skilled players and those who have invested in the game (ships and gear)."
It will be a real shame if Advanced gets nerfed to what Elite was before. It was already boringly easy. What needs to happen now IMO is an adjustment to the rewards for completing, not changing the difficulty level.
If you can't complete Advanced now, improve your build and gear.
Obviously, getting a whole new elite setting for yourselves, wasn't enough.
I played for about an hour this morning. Most was sending out Doff missions and tweaking my UI. Not wanting to get too sucked in until after work I did Tau Dewa dailies. I did the 5 and got the 138 marks. Overall very nice. I did it on elite. While I wasn't overwhelmed I did actually have to heal a fair amount. Mind you my ship is about all MK XIII UR. Once I finished that, the Tholian Red Alert Popped. There were 3 of us in there and it was ROFL Stomped in about 5 minutes. I know there were T6 ships in there at least one and myine is a T5U Fleet Avenger.
If anything, the daily and the Tholian RA difficulties should be swapped. I haven't done any of the new STFs, I'm not going to bother smashing my forehead against my keyboard until they get tuned appropriately.
Normal is fine, Elite is fine, but please address AdvancIed mode. It needs to be toned down by a lot, not "slightly". The difference between Advanced and Elite is very little in regards of enemy buffs. Advanced should be more in the middle between Normal and Elite, not very close to Elite. It is fine if Advanced is harder than previous Elite mode, but not ten times harder.
Agreed. I get that some players are looking for supremely challenging content, and there should be a place for them in Elite. At the moment, though, such players have Elite and Advanced, and the rest of us have some of the baseline queues. We don't even have Fleet Alert anymore.
With the way the last mirror event went and the way undine assault elite was set up it's no surprise that the "New Difficulty" took the worst road possible. Crypic has obviously allowed themselves to be lead around by the vocal minority trolls that complain about "more difficulty" but who are likley not even playing the content they are complaining about. The numbers do not lie. Nobody played the "elite" mirror event because it wasn't worth the hassle. Nobody played Undine Assault elite because it wasn't worth the waste of time getting spawn camped by a dozen neverending mobs, any two of which could easily take out even the best equipped ships. Nobody wanted to sit and get spawn camped, nobody wants to sit and have the advanced CE wipe out both teams over and over again until everyone just leaves without ever even getting through the first stage.
I'm in a fairly sizable fleet and it's unanimous: advanced queue events are not worth the hassle, regular queues don't award enough to play more than once per day (for the daily bonus marks) and nobody is looking to even try the elite queues. Cryptics "New Difficulty" game design is SO bad that people don't event want to try it. That should tell you something.
The timers and fail conditions are a step in the right direction. The HP and damage buffs are the worst things Cryptic could have done along with the neverending mobs track taken with the undine events. The mobs for the difficulties should scale along the level arc. If the queue opens for play at 50 then the mobs should be level 50 appropriate, then scale up to elite being 60 with the timers and conditions.
I'd like to see the play/win/loss stats for the queued events published in real time, or daily, to the web site. Let everyone see if completions are even possible. Right now it's new and people are trying different things, but I bet the advanced and elite queues become very rarely run queues that people just don't bother with.
For the past year I've played STO almost exclusivly. After day 1 of Cryptics "New Difficulty" I'm already considering what game I'm going to move to (I've decided ArcheAge). After discussions in fleet and a cursory look through this thread I'm confident I'm not the only one that's looking to move on.
Comments
The new advanced i was taking as much time to kill one bop as it used to take me to kill a negh.
Even though i now have upgraded all my fleet consoles to mk xiii, and i have the new 5 tac console rom warbird. RogueTal'shar@wilbor2 or is it RogueTal'Shar@wilbor2 any way use my char n see what im on adout.
as for the dill rewards they jusk suck big time im starting to think you guys just like coming up with new ways tto upset your player base
im staying out of the pve queue till things change advanced needs to be be adle to be done with a free 9 consoles ship with mk xi on it otherwise how can new players/char get mkxii rep stuff?
ill leave on a happy note i love the new story :-)
What I suggest, is you get rid of the 3 tier difficulty and go back to 2.
Normal = The old elite pre DR, with the same optional's and 960 Dilithium
Elite = The current elite post DR and 1440 Dilithium. This is perfect for the masochists that like the dps race.
All should reward VR mats and special rep items.
This, I believe, should keep most people happy...
Not only happy, I think it would have been perfect that way and for Cryptic not at all hard to be implemented.
Awsome post...and I totally agree!
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I like the new STF advanced difficulty and that gives players something to work on.
Must of us don't have the gear and we are all just started leveling again.
I Think it's great. So why nerfing it? Just because people complain it'is to hard?
Sorry, wasn't Delta Rising on tribble for weeks to test?
This is why we should have some silver members and f2p players to have access to tribble.
More feedback, less changing afterwards when it goes live!
I wont pass judgement on STFs yet as the first post-DR one I did I was still lvl 50 and had little upgraded gear, the most noticeable thing was their shield resistance/HP (not sure which) which allowed even the BoPs in CSA to take a few minutes of pounding from a ship that could previously rip four of them to shreds at a time on autopilot. If that effect is mitigated when I reach lvl 60 I will be happy but equally I don't want to be shredding four BoPs at a time on advanced difficulty with just EPtW1, TT1, FAW2 and APB2 on 8 RomPla beam arrays.
Let people get to their max level with all the new traits and specializations first, then balance if needed.
well i would make the normal just as the old elite was. period nothing different at all from it. same rewards and all.
if they fail the ops on it the reward should be the same as normal anyways so not loss of anything only a net gain. turn back the clock 2 days and just try to que up a normal stf. LOL you will be sitting along time guaranteed.
advanced should be like the old elite but optional a requirement, not optional and same dil reward but an extra BNP
Elite i cant comment on as i havent gotten there. but if you want it a kick TRIBBLE nightmare mode fine giv it the same dil reward as the other two but one extra BNP totalling 3. enough for the dil convet project or make buying gear a bit faster . itsa good bonus for those looking for the challenge and does not punish everbody else. and you been running the game all this time with most doing the elites that should not have been there forcing others to carry them through the mission. only way that will stop is if rewards are more equal. one BNP and slighty eaiser content that can be finished faster and with casual player enjoyment. isnt going to break you . it will give you happy customers looking to throw more money at you.
now if you really want to control a real problem go after the companies that are farming and then spamming and selling in game items that a army of alts farmed not the actual player base. hell hire me ill weed out those farmers for you . even run sting operations to catch them red handed . or you could actually listen to bug reports i have sent for past year and half about them exploiting mark tribbles with that army of alts getting one mark per tribble every 60 seconds. then trading them for dil then buying zen then selling items for real money all without ever leaving the Klingon homeworld.
so please go after the bad guys and stop picking on the players. and that would include showing us Klingon players a little love. instead of slapping us in the face all the time.
Making enemies just have boatloads of hp is lazy lazy. How boring is it to shoot at things that don't hurt you for 10x longer to achieve the same result? People really need to lose their jobs
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I mean, when you're sitting there trying to shoot the Crystalline Entity and it takes forever to even get it past 60%, you're probably doing something wrong.
I don't want nerf...but I do want balance. Reward should justify effort. Also, don't force me to become a member of the Church of DPS. I have really enjoyed this game for the past few years but I stayed out of PvP because I just did not want to be another DPS munchkin. I hope these new difficulty settings will not force players to focus on DPS just to be viable.
So far not impressed with this release. Worse than LoR
"In the new Advanced versions of the queues you will see a similar level of challenge in the enemies that you are used to when the queues were labeled Elite. In addition, players with Captains under max level will find themselves bolstered up to level 60, the same level as their opponents. You wont gain seats or powers you didnt have, but your damage and other numerical values for your Captain and ship will be scaled up to match what you would do at this higher level"
First,
HP of NPCs in advanced queues should be cut by at least 20-30% or even more if you plan to allow lvl 50 characters to do advanced queues. ATM it simply takes too much time to kill something.
Second,
rewards should be changed: 480 dil for normal, 960 dil some VR mats and BNP (injector, implant etc), 1440 or even 1920 dil plus more VR mats and BNP for elite.
Make elite really challenging, that'd be great to have a challenge actually, but don't forget that we still need something framable and that something shouldnt take forever to complete. Advanced queues that can be done in 10 minutes would fit this role perfectly. Not 2 minutes like it used to be but 20-25 minutes for 480 dil is also not an option.
Ahem: lol
This sounds about right. Enemies aren't too 'difficult' (dangerous?) per se but their HP scaling is pants-on-head insane. Why on earth does a Kazon carrier have over a million HP? It took me nearly an hour of nonstop slogging to do a regular story patrol (the one with the 2 Benthan guard ships that Deputize you). A patrol. This was as a level-60 captain with 10 specialization points spent exclusively in the space skills, owning most of the lockbox traits, flying a T5U Mobius with maxed-out ship Mastery, with Mk XII fleet/reputation gear (no I haven't upgraded anything, because the upgrade system is buggered). In other words what I'm saying is this character is no spring chicken. Over the length of the patrol (54 minutes from start to finish, 44 minutes engaged in combat) I parsed an average of 9,500 DPS. When it was all said and done I had to chew through 25,530,616 combined enemy hull and shield HP. This is ludicrous.
This content isn't more difficult, it's more tedious, and I'm not even talking about the queues here. Turning enemies into mountains of HP is neither creative nor imaginative. It's.. a drag. You've made the DPS race in STO even worse. Sci skills and tanks are nearly useless, subsystem targeting is a pathetic joke because the NPCs aren't intelligent enough for it to matter, they'll behave the same way regardless of your actions, and subsystems don't stay offline for more than a moment (really STO needs hard points and permanent subsystem destruction to cripple your adversaries in a fight).
I will inevitably adapt and get better, but hammering on one ship for several minutes* is not my idea of fun. When I had defeated a couple carriers only to be presented with another group of them back to back my immediate thought was 'oh TRIBBLE you Cryptic for putting several of these enemies back to back' and that should never be the response that content elicits from a player because it means the content is failing to deliver the fun factor (failing quite hard I might add) and is only frustrating.
*one ship that is not a boss ship, that is just one in several waves of ships I might add. If it were a boss ship that would be more acceptable, but for the common thug to take longer than a boss ship used to take is ridiculous.
Now, make no mistake, I was one of the players asking for a Nightmare mode, but I wanted it to be just that, a mode (as in optional), for players to strive towards in queued content, not something that is thrust upon everyone for all content everywhere, including Joe Everyman that can't even pull 3k DPS vs an unshielded target. At this point I have no intentions of ever playing in the PvE queue again unless several balance passes are made (which is the purpose of this thread, so hopefully the collective advice is heeded). Otherwise PUGs won't be able to handle this. Only premades will be worth my time, and even then the time/reward ratio has just become highly skewed, and my alts can forget about getting any rep gear now since the Normals don't award the needed materials.
Do whatever you want with Elite difficulty, that's supposed to be the nightmare mode we asked for, but everything else needs some balance passes.
It's not the only one. The 'brackets' for any PVE queue that isn't split into the Normal/Advanced/Elite trifecta are all messed up and inconsistent. Also I would just like to point and laugh at how a level 5 character can now be drawn into a level 60 fleet alert and do jack diddly squat to help the team.
Joined January 2009
Normal is fine, Elite is fine, but please address Advanced mode. It needs to be toned down by a lot, not "slightly". The difference between Advanced and Elite is very little in regards of enemy buffs. Advanced should be more in the middle between Normal and Elite, not very close to Elite. It is fine if Advanced is harder than previous Elite mode, but not ten times harder.
STO Screenshot Archive
Not even close in difficulty
Are you blaming the tribble testers? . . . Nice. There was plenty of feedback, apparently it was just ignored . . . Again..
Advanced PVE queues are perhaps a bit excessively ramped up, though. These are presented after the first mission as a means to help you grind to 60 between missions but every one I've tried has been 5x harder than the old Elite. That seems, perhaps, a bit much.
Actual join date: Open beta, 2009ish.
hp needs to be cut by at least 50-60% to return it to around what it used to be. keep the absurd hp values for elite queues where minmaxing pvpers can get destroyed over and over, but don't force everyone with less than 30k dps into normal queues which have no rewards worth considering.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
No, just NO. This new difficulty setting is ridiculous, and I'm a decent player. For a PUG team of lvl 50 players to fail a basic Fleet Alert is absurd. For a similar PUG team to fail the option in ISA *by several minutes* is likewise insane.
Prior to DR PvE content, even on "Elite" was too easy... PUG teams finishing STFs with 5+minutes to go on the optional and etc. But now to not even be able to consider completing the option... too much too soon.
You don't have to put things back as they were, but dial it back quite a bit.
Obviously, getting a whole new elite setting for yourselves, wasn't enough.
Sarah Knightly - Co-leader; Frontier Explorers - U.S.S. Witchblade
Rias Gremory - Leader; Frontier Marauders - I.K.S. B'ullwinkle
If anything, the daily and the Tholian RA difficulties should be swapped. I haven't done any of the new STFs, I'm not going to bother smashing my forehead against my keyboard until they get tuned appropriately.
Agreed. I get that some players are looking for supremely challenging content, and there should be a place for them in Elite. At the moment, though, such players have Elite and Advanced, and the rest of us have some of the baseline queues. We don't even have Fleet Alert anymore.
I'm in a fairly sizable fleet and it's unanimous: advanced queue events are not worth the hassle, regular queues don't award enough to play more than once per day (for the daily bonus marks) and nobody is looking to even try the elite queues. Cryptics "New Difficulty" game design is SO bad that people don't event want to try it. That should tell you something.
The timers and fail conditions are a step in the right direction. The HP and damage buffs are the worst things Cryptic could have done along with the neverending mobs track taken with the undine events. The mobs for the difficulties should scale along the level arc. If the queue opens for play at 50 then the mobs should be level 50 appropriate, then scale up to elite being 60 with the timers and conditions.
I'd like to see the play/win/loss stats for the queued events published in real time, or daily, to the web site. Let everyone see if completions are even possible. Right now it's new and people are trying different things, but I bet the advanced and elite queues become very rarely run queues that people just don't bother with.
For the past year I've played STO almost exclusivly. After day 1 of Cryptics "New Difficulty" I'm already considering what game I'm going to move to (I've decided ArcheAge). After discussions in fleet and a cursory look through this thread I'm confident I'm not the only one that's looking to move on.