Just did a pug fleet alert with 5 other level 50 captains. One was in the new intel escort and we failed, big time. Don't think we even completed wave 3.
Is this for real? Is this what was intended? If so they can kiss the casual player goodbye....
Yeah, I was shocked by this change too. I did Fleet Alert twice yesterday (everybody involved had a powerful ship) and both times ended in failure when the timer ran out around wave seven or eight. When unloading a full torpedo spread on a frigate and it doesn't show any sign of damage, you know something is very wrong. This isn't fun and it isn't challenging, it's cheap.
ran CC advanced with a couple fleeties. one of our fleetmembers were complaining about how tough it was, and we descided to see what the fuss was about.
sure, it was annoying becasue of the super high hp on everything, but it wasnt that bad. I think the key to it is the new intel exposes.... i was constantly going between exposing its weapons and it's defenses, took about 15 minutes, but we killed it.
Just ran with a group that failed on Wave 2, against freaking Orion. I didn't blow up, we just ran out of time because everything took forever to kill. I managed to take a look at the info window on an Orion Interceptor --that's right, a fightercraft-- and saw that it had 17,000 hull points! My starship has 31,000.
A fighter with 17k hull! On a normal queue! It's insane. Anyone who says that's even remotely ok is off their rocker.
I experienced in only as "slightly harder" (see my post above). Noticeable, sure, but you ppl are really grossly exaggerating. And no, I'm wasn't running with a premade team, or from an DPS channel: just a regular PUG.
I *can* see how someone al lv 5 (also, see above) might not be able to make it, though. But accommodating to people at lv 5 is going to be problematic, regardless of DR.
Try the same again, this time with two newbies, flying Mirandas, on the team. Doubt the outcome will be quite the same.
It won't be, no. But maybe we need to look thru the 'You can still do everything like before' farce. You need to be at (or near) lv 60, and be in a very good ship. Honestly, none of this was my idea. It was all Cryptic.
But yeah, like I said, the Doubt Rises whether these things can still be done in Mirandas (by ordinary players). Cryptic simply wanted us to get the 'best-of-the-best', else face no longer being able to compete. 'The weak will perish.' Not necessarily a good business decision, btw.
I don't think it CAN be done either by new players in Mirandas. In which case, there are only really two 'options':
1: Increase the level cap so only level 40 and above can access FA
2: Roll FA back to how it was pre-expansion
And, with all due respect to new players - as it is NOT their fault - they've gone from being, what some considered, an inconvienience in FA, to making any instance they're in an almost guaranteed fail.
Agreed. And whilst I don't normally like Cryptic giving in to the whiners too much, in all fairness, I think there should be at least 1 mission where new(er) plays can get Fleet Marks from.
I think Cryptic's thinking has been too much 'If only they pay is thru the nose, and are fully leveled and geared up, all of this will be doable by them.' Which is true, but new players exist too, and always will (y'all really *do* want a steady influx of new players, right, Crptic?!). Seems, at this point, new players no longer have access to a good Fleet Mark mission, at all.
MK XII is Level 50 equipment. Not level 60. And you also have to account for your other team members (if you use the public queue, chances are, you'll be matched with some level 30 in a connie).
Except that is the very issue. Fleet Alert is supposed to be something you can enter at what? Level 10 with Mk III gear and have a chance of success. Now five level 50+ with new gear are struggling and failing. Fleet alert was a way to burn off some aggression and teach lower level people how to play in a STF. Now it is tougher than the old elite stfs but still accessible at level 10. Go figure.
I have to assume it is temporarily broken.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
That's what I'm hoping too. This could have all been avoided had the difficulties remained the same and they just added a fourth, harder tier above elite.
Another thing I don't understand is why these supposedly good players who brag about how easy everything is and can complete elite events with their eyes closed are so concerned with what's happening in the normal difficulty queues.
I think Cryptic's thinking has been too much 'If only they pay is thru the nose, and are fully leveled and geared up, all of this will be doable by them.' Which is true, but new players exist too, and always will (y'all really *do* want a steady influx of new players, right, Crptic?!). Seems, at this point, new players no longer have access to a good Fleet Mark mission, at all.
Well except for CCN and colony invasion. And the easy fix for the fleet alert is just to scale players to 50 rather than 60 (this mission was designed to be played at that level anyway.)
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Well except for CCN and colony invasion. And the easy fix for the fleet alert is just to scale players to 50 rather than 60 (this mission was designed to be played at that level anyway.)
I don't think it CAN be done either by new players in Mirandas. In which case, there are only really two 'options':
1: Increase the level cap so only level 40 and above can access FA
2: Roll FA back to how it was pre-expansion
And, with all due respect to new players - as it is NOT their fault - they've gone from being, what some considered, an inconvienience in FA, to making any instance they're in an almost guaranteed fail.
I agree with this. You used to be able to run these with even two lower level players and now you can't even finish it with one. Rolling it back or level banding are the only reasonable options in my opinion.
After 3 failed pugs, I finally had a successful pug run this morning. I actively targeted what other players were targeting. A chat with another team member after the battle revealed I was not alone in doing this. With quite the hodge-podge of ships (including me in a Gal-X and even a Starcruiser), we made pretty good time through it.
Maybe we got lucky? Don't know. But I plan on trying the tactic again after the maintenance.
So we are at a point were we need to pile over guides and builds and simply do one "Ultra-DPS"-Build to even complete Low-Level PvE Queues?
Great...
looks that way. I hadn't been able to play until this morning. for some reason it would download the same 3514Mb over and over and wouldn't complete. When my dad couldn't figure it out we just decided to delete it and re-install the game! hehe.
The first thing I ran was a fleet alert, I hopped on my new tactical captain and upgraded my Narcine carrier to T5U and then queued. It took longer than I thought it might to join a team, but the fleet alert was a success!
However I could tell they were a lot harder.
My favorite toon is a science captain in a fleet nebula. I spent a lot of time making it the best it can be for me. Its very tough and does about 10k damage. But after seeing how many hit points things have now, I don't feel like that ship can compete anymore. Even at T5U it still only gets the 2 tactical consoles. I cannot push its damage up enough to compensate for the spike of damage now needed >.<
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.
Nope, not with the fleet alert (NPC health scaling at 60 is why there's a noticable difference now in the mission.)
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Yeh Fleet action is not what it was. What I have noticed is the level setting when I played it was bumped up to 60. Now iirc wasn't that advanced settings? So has the NORMAL fleet action been accidentally set to advanced, or did they intend to have a normal AND advanced queue and forgot to do it right.
Since STO has become a min/maxer's paradise, perhaps Cryptic can throw the other 95% of the player base a bone and have STOs with the fun mechanics that existed before the update. Casuals and small fleets have gotten the shaft with the update. Hope you got your reputation tracks done before the update because you don't get jack unless you are a boring mindless DPS build. I am curious if pissing on 95% of the player base was Cryptic's game plan. I enjoy the heck out of STO, but my fun meter is not moving at all. Dull, boring and tedious are the watch word of the day with the changes. Side note: With the majority of new characters being leveled up through the DOF missions. What is the point of level 50, 2500zen opps 3200zen ships? For me STO went from 10/10 of fun to 2/10 for fun. Would have been better to have left the STO's alone and added two tiers above elite for level 60 captains with dil and mark rewards scaled. I do hope Cryptic will surprise me and reexamine the direction they decided to take my favorite MMO.
So, found my skills were invalid and had to respec, thought maybe that was the problem.... Nope.
Klingons... wave 2.... fail.
At the end all that was left was me and the smoking hulk of a tier 5 starbase, couldn't even heal it which I think is odd. Also Kinks were using bio-neural warheads. Is that normal? Or the new normal?
I just played Fleet Alert and I can say it will discourage newbies and casual players. We only made it to round 2 and ran out of time. This is way harder for normal and for the fact that it is for level 5 to level 60.
AKA Primus01, Lifetime member since January 16, 2010
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i realize they want to make some of the content harder , but this is taken a drastic turn , they might as well have done a complete character wipe and gotten the same amount of discontent .
the balance is all out of wack , the whole point of the expansion was to rase the cap , for new harder content for Elite level of play , what they forgot was the lower levels . hell i can barely finish a pug in a ISA let alone a NORMAL FLEET ALERT . both things my lvl 50 could easly do before .
the levels are supposed to be Normal Advanced and Elite . 3 tiers of difficulty for the the differnt levels of play 1-40 45- 50 51-60 . the old way was 1-40 and 45-50 , that is why those missions unlock at those levels . thats whats broken and this should have been discovered , this is what happens when testing is blocked but a small percentage LTS and gold subs . more looking at kobali prime not enough into the older content to see these issues . maybe they should have used REDSHIRT for LTS gold testing and put the old content upgrades only on TRIBBLE for the masses to test ? maybe then maybe all of this would have been addressed before Launch .
just saying .
Frankly, if it's supposed to be "endgame content" now then it should have already been restricted to endgame-level characters. Fleet Alert in particular is available to people well below that level. If you can get into the match and it's not a bug then you ought to be able to contribute something.
Even if it's just throwing your Miranda on an energy bolt so somebody else doesn't take the hit in Borg alerts.
USS Aratama: Draw The Blade!
USS Shigure: Washed Clean
USS Akizuki: A Light In The Dark
should but if you fail fleet alert... by wave 3... there's a problem
I have yet to complete wave 2, since the release of DR. In normal mode, for a FA, everything had their HP's tripled... except the starbase that is. It's a joke. I am running a complete kitted out T5 ship, something that took me months to build and God only knows how much FC, Dil, and EC.
We were told that scaling up in ships and gear would be optional, as long as you wanted to play normal content and whatnot, that there would be really no reason to upgrade, and that generic PvE stuff (and normal queueables) would not require a T6 ship.
This game is holding on only because it has "Star Trek" in the title. If this was a generic space MMO... yeah, it'd be long gone by this point. There is no way in Hades that I am going to throw money at Cryptic, just to get a T6 ship and then spend a million (or more) dil just to kit the damn thing out. Again.
No.
We were told that normal PvE content would be playable with the old, max level gear. It currently is not.
This is exactly what Cryptic wanted. Now go open your wallet for the shiny new T6 ships and have at it! :P
Holy HANNA. The game even before I've started playing Delta Rising despite being a LEVEL 52 engineering Captain has gotten CRAZY STUPID. My Tactical Captain is farther along in the episodes and having played him earlier and then decided to try engineering.
Yet it seems all the WARBIRDS of moderate to HIGH level's are practically impossible to beat unless your EXTREMELY PATIENT using a torpedo spread and then retreat strategy because the WARBIRDS are dealing like 35,000 Kinetic damage in a single attack if you look at damage history during the respawn dialog. Your whole ship only has 42000 armor and it's practically wiped out in one heavy plasma torpedo or volley from a single warbird while meanwhile your barely scratching the enemy you may as well be breathing on them.
???????
Say the game really didn't have much strategy before as it was just click, click, click but at least it was FUN to play and go through the episodes and experiences. But now it's just so impractical, meaningless, etc... I really don't care about level 6 ships or forking over money to Cryptic just so you have a small HOPE of fighting.
The way the game play has changed it's like you need 10 human players to beat a single warbird it which case the game has just gotten stupid. Say it's bad enough the Big Personal Tray / Power Tray's in SPACE is no longer saving any of your skills. They keep resetting every time you go to ground and given the only way to win almost every battle is to call fleet support when your playing by yourself it constantly requires you keep setting that option.
'
Given other comments I'm seeing from many other players over the last little while I can quickly see the popularity of this game eroding very FAST!!!
Holy HANNA. The game even before I've started playing Delta Rising despite being a LEVEL 52 engineering Captain has gotten CRAZY STUPID. My Tactical Captain is farther along in the episodes and having played him earlier and then decided to try engineering.
Yet it seems all the WARBIRDS of moderate to HIGH level's are practically impossible to beat unless your EXTREMELY PATIENT using a torpedo spread and then retreat strategy because the WARBIRDS are dealing like 35,000 Kinetic damage in a single attack if you look at damage history during the respawn dialog. Your whole ship only has 42000 armor and it's practically wiped out in one heavy plasma torpedo or volley from a single warbird while meanwhile your barely scratching the enemy you may as well be breathing on them.
???????
Say the game really didn't have much strategy before as it was just click, click, click but at least it was FUN to play and go through the episodes and experiences. But now it's just so impractical, meaningless, etc... I really don't care about level 6 ships or forking over money to Cryptic just so you have a small HOPE of fighting.
The way the game play has changed it's like you need 10 human players to beat a single warbird it which case the game has just gotten stupid. Say it's bad enough the Big Personal Tray / Power Tray's in SPACE is no longer saving any of your skills. They keep resetting every time you go to ground and given the only way to win almost every battle is to call fleet support when your playing by yourself it constantly requires you keep setting that option.
'
Given other comments I'm seeing from many other players over the last little while I can quickly see the popularity of this game eroding very FAST!!!
The NPC D'Deridex has always been like that long before DR, even long before LOR.
Tractor Beam
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This was even on normal difficulty content before DR. What you saw is nothing special, nothing new, nothing due to DR. It's simply you making the mistake of sitting in front of a NPC D'Deridex, nothing more.
Try moving around. Survivability works better that way.
sometimes i wonder why there is even a "test" server around if no actual testing takes place on the dam thing rather than "play new content early" and why the hell am i carrying a luitenant who keeps dieing every 20 seconds >_>
I see a sign that this isn't what was intended. First: I suck, my ship is only drops and sucks. But I had no problems before. After three fleet alerts - the first two failed at wave 2 and 3, the third was won against Tholians, when we blew the last ship of wave four with 0:00 to go - only four players though, the fifth disappeared early), I have one major observations though:
Fighters are somehow overpowered, I noticed the 17000 on them, too. The frigates are also ridiculous. The tarantula however was a blast. I wasn't even able to look at its stats, it went too fast. Battleships were taken out like you normally kill fighters. This cannot be what was intended.
Also, even if intended as is, this would not be a "challenge" anymore than writing your name 5000 times in a day. Which means: technically it is, but there's no skill involved other than building a high DPS ship. I could dive in the midst of the enemy lines, and if I am not mistaken, after three and a half minutes my health may even have dropped to 90%. No, the enemies do not do more damage nor are they smarter.
And to those high end players thinking this would somehow "teach others proper builds": not in the least, you're completely out of touch with "normal players". You teach by going just beyond the limit, not by showing what comes way later. You do not teach chess to new players using endgame studies which rely on weakening the pawn structure. You do not teach maths to first graders with Markov chains in discrete time. You do not teach ship building with enemies far out of my league. If I achieve 95% within time, I may be inclined to look for that extra edge. If I achieve 50% it really takes determination, not many will do that. If I don't even get this far - no use. So there must be options for players to scale their skills (also to scale their ships.- If I need fleet gear to get fleet marks - how should I ever get to the fleet gear). A game can not live off the top 1%, it needs the others as well.
As stated, I am certain Cryptic knows this, and FA is just bugged for now. See the normal fleet queues which do not seem much more difficult than they were. The featured Delta Rising Queue is no real problem, the Viscous Cycle does not seem to have changed much, if at all.
So let's wait for a week and see whether this gets fixed.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Fleet Alerts are difficult? Hell Yeah!!! I'm loving seeing all these fail posts. No offense. It just means we are actually getting a real challenge.
Edit: I will put this caveat in, I haven't played it yet, so there could be an issue but I will reserve my right to recant all over the place when the time comes.
LOL a challenge. This is not a challenge. This is saying "I will scale up the hull and shields of the enemy and make them harder to kill so players will just have to spend money to get better gear hehehehehe"
How is this in any way a challenge? Its plain and simple pew pew until dead. The only thing you need to win fleet alert is higher DPS now, the only challenge here is getting the better gear to beat it. There is no strategy either. Just pew pew. This isn't a real challenge. beating the alert is plain and simple if you have a high amount of DPS apparently now....
And no im not gonna pour in buckets of dilithium and other things to get new gear. The upgrade system is such a huge resource sink. but i could be wrong, this may not have been what cryptic was aiming for. We will see in time though.
I ran a couple of these last night. failed against gorn on wave three while i was using my T5-U Jem'nought complete with MK13 fleet and rep gear. (I put out over 20k dps before the upgrades), but I can't speak for the rest of the team.
won a couple more, one with my voth bastion and another with my tac ody (4 tactical consoles, it SO TOTALLY needed that!)
Something isn't right, as others have stated, it was not uncommon to see a miranda or some other low level ship in these before.
Heaven help the poor newbie who decides to try one of these in his lvl 20 ship or something, only to be blamed by the rest of the team for their failure on the second wave. Even I have done it in lower ships before (though I do make sure I am equipped) they are a nice break from the story, or if you need a little xp before the next mission opens up.
I can only hope someone has messed up here. Myself, personally, I can slog through anything. Although i am casual (sometimes not logging in for days, and even then only playing an hour or so) I do like to grind out powerful ships in the end, so i'm sure if things stay this way, I will be fine, but for the new person, starting out in STO, this could be a horror.
Comments
Yeah, I was shocked by this change too. I did Fleet Alert twice yesterday (everybody involved had a powerful ship) and both times ended in failure when the timer ran out around wave seven or eight. When unloading a full torpedo spread on a frigate and it doesn't show any sign of damage, you know something is very wrong. This isn't fun and it isn't challenging, it's cheap.
sure, it was annoying becasue of the super high hp on everything, but it wasnt that bad. I think the key to it is the new intel exposes.... i was constantly going between exposing its weapons and it's defenses, took about 15 minutes, but we killed it.
I experienced in only as "slightly harder" (see my post above). Noticeable, sure, but you ppl are really grossly exaggerating. And no, I'm wasn't running with a premade team, or from an DPS channel: just a regular PUG.
I *can* see how someone al lv 5 (also, see above) might not be able to make it, though. But accommodating to people at lv 5 is going to be problematic, regardless of DR.
It won't be, no. But maybe we need to look thru the 'You can still do everything like before' farce. You need to be at (or near) lv 60, and be in a very good ship. Honestly, none of this was my idea.
But yeah, like I said, the Doubt Rises whether these things can still be done in Mirandas (by ordinary players). Cryptic simply wanted us to get the 'best-of-the-best', else face no longer being able to compete. 'The weak will perish.' Not necessarily a good business decision, btw.
Agreed. And whilst I don't normally like Cryptic giving in to the whiners too much, in all fairness, I think there should be at least 1 mission where new(er) plays can get Fleet Marks from.
I think Cryptic's thinking has been too much 'If only they pay is thru the nose, and are fully leveled and geared up, all of this will be doable by them.' Which is true, but new players exist too, and always will (y'all really *do* want a steady influx of new players, right, Crptic?!). Seems, at this point, new players no longer have access to a good Fleet Mark mission, at all.
Except that is the very issue. Fleet Alert is supposed to be something you can enter at what? Level 10 with Mk III gear and have a chance of success. Now five level 50+ with new gear are struggling and failing. Fleet alert was a way to burn off some aggression and teach lower level people how to play in a STF. Now it is tougher than the old elite stfs but still accessible at level 10. Go figure.
I have to assume it is temporarily broken.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
That's what I'm hoping too. This could have all been avoided had the difficulties remained the same and they just added a fourth, harder tier above elite.
Another thing I don't understand is why these supposedly good players who brag about how easy everything is and can complete elite events with their eyes closed are so concerned with what's happening in the normal difficulty queues.
Well except for CCN and colony invasion. And the easy fix for the fleet alert is just to scale players to 50 rather than 60 (this mission was designed to be played at that level anyway.)
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Normal is level 50.
I agree with this. You used to be able to run these with even two lower level players and now you can't even finish it with one. Rolling it back or level banding are the only reasonable options in my opinion.
Maybe we got lucky? Don't know. But I plan on trying the tactic again after the maintenance.
This would probably be best. Same with SBD. Have it level locked too, to avoid... a bad experience.
looks that way. I hadn't been able to play until this morning. for some reason it would download the same 3514Mb over and over and wouldn't complete. When my dad couldn't figure it out we just decided to delete it and re-install the game! hehe.
The first thing I ran was a fleet alert, I hopped on my new tactical captain and upgraded my Narcine carrier to T5U and then queued. It took longer than I thought it might to join a team, but the fleet alert was a success!
However I could tell they were a lot harder.
My favorite toon is a science captain in a fleet nebula. I spent a lot of time making it the best it can be for me. Its very tough and does about 10k damage. But after seeing how many hit points things have now, I don't feel like that ship can compete anymore. Even at T5U it still only gets the 2 tactical consoles. I cannot push its damage up enough to compensate for the spike of damage now needed >.<
Joined January 2009
Tholians.... fail wave 2.
FM reward.... 14
Time would be better spent doing the officer of the watch dailies and doffing.
FA is dead to most people now. Way to go Devs! :mad:
Nope, not with the fleet alert (NPC health scaling at 60 is why there's a noticable difference now in the mission.)
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Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Cirran
Severly disappointed customer
Klingons... wave 2.... fail.
At the end all that was left was me and the smoking hulk of a tier 5 starbase, couldn't even heal it which I think is odd. Also Kinks were using bio-neural warheads. Is that normal? Or the new normal?
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the balance is all out of wack , the whole point of the expansion was to rase the cap , for new harder content for Elite level of play , what they forgot was the lower levels . hell i can barely finish a pug in a ISA let alone a NORMAL FLEET ALERT . both things my lvl 50 could easly do before .
the levels are supposed to be Normal Advanced and Elite . 3 tiers of difficulty for the the differnt levels of play 1-40 45- 50 51-60 . the old way was 1-40 and 45-50 , that is why those missions unlock at those levels . thats whats broken and this should have been discovered , this is what happens when testing is blocked but a small percentage LTS and gold subs . more looking at kobali prime not enough into the older content to see these issues . maybe they should have used REDSHIRT for LTS gold testing and put the old content upgrades only on TRIBBLE for the masses to test ? maybe then maybe all of this would have been addressed before Launch .
just saying .
Frankly, if it's supposed to be "endgame content" now then it should have already been restricted to endgame-level characters. Fleet Alert in particular is available to people well below that level. If you can get into the match and it's not a bug then you ought to be able to contribute something.
Even if it's just throwing your Miranda on an energy bolt so somebody else doesn't take the hit in Borg alerts.
USS Shigure: Washed Clean
USS Akizuki: A Light In The Dark
I have yet to complete wave 2, since the release of DR. In normal mode, for a FA, everything had their HP's tripled... except the starbase that is. It's a joke. I am running a complete kitted out T5 ship, something that took me months to build and God only knows how much FC, Dil, and EC.
We were told that scaling up in ships and gear would be optional, as long as you wanted to play normal content and whatnot, that there would be really no reason to upgrade, and that generic PvE stuff (and normal queueables) would not require a T6 ship.
This game is holding on only because it has "Star Trek" in the title. If this was a generic space MMO... yeah, it'd be long gone by this point. There is no way in Hades that I am going to throw money at Cryptic, just to get a T6 ship and then spend a million (or more) dil just to kit the damn thing out. Again.
No.
We were told that normal PvE content would be playable with the old, max level gear. It currently is not.
Yet it seems all the WARBIRDS of moderate to HIGH level's are practically impossible to beat unless your EXTREMELY PATIENT using a torpedo spread and then retreat strategy because the WARBIRDS are dealing like 35,000 Kinetic damage in a single attack if you look at damage history during the respawn dialog. Your whole ship only has 42000 armor and it's practically wiped out in one heavy plasma torpedo or volley from a single warbird while meanwhile your barely scratching the enemy you may as well be breathing on them.
???????
Say the game really didn't have much strategy before as it was just click, click, click but at least it was FUN to play and go through the episodes and experiences. But now it's just so impractical, meaningless, etc... I really don't care about level 6 ships or forking over money to Cryptic just so you have a small HOPE of fighting.
The way the game play has changed it's like you need 10 human players to beat a single warbird it which case the game has just gotten stupid. Say it's bad enough the Big Personal Tray / Power Tray's in SPACE is no longer saving any of your skills. They keep resetting every time you go to ground and given the only way to win almost every battle is to call fleet support when your playing by yourself it constantly requires you keep setting that option.
'
Given other comments I'm seeing from many other players over the last little while I can quickly see the popularity of this game eroding very FAST!!!
The NPC D'Deridex has always been like that long before DR, even long before LOR.
Tractor Beam
VM
HYT Plasma
Good night
This was even on normal difficulty content before DR. What you saw is nothing special, nothing new, nothing due to DR. It's simply you making the mistake of sitting in front of a NPC D'Deridex, nothing more.
Try moving around. Survivability works better that way.
This new HP scaling is terrible.
Extra challenge is fine for the new "Elite", but put everything back the way it was for normal and advanced.
Fighters are somehow overpowered, I noticed the 17000 on them, too. The frigates are also ridiculous. The tarantula however was a blast. I wasn't even able to look at its stats, it went too fast. Battleships were taken out like you normally kill fighters. This cannot be what was intended.
Also, even if intended as is, this would not be a "challenge" anymore than writing your name 5000 times in a day. Which means: technically it is, but there's no skill involved other than building a high DPS ship. I could dive in the midst of the enemy lines, and if I am not mistaken, after three and a half minutes my health may even have dropped to 90%. No, the enemies do not do more damage nor are they smarter.
And to those high end players thinking this would somehow "teach others proper builds": not in the least, you're completely out of touch with "normal players". You teach by going just beyond the limit, not by showing what comes way later. You do not teach chess to new players using endgame studies which rely on weakening the pawn structure. You do not teach maths to first graders with Markov chains in discrete time. You do not teach ship building with enemies far out of my league. If I achieve 95% within time, I may be inclined to look for that extra edge. If I achieve 50% it really takes determination, not many will do that. If I don't even get this far - no use. So there must be options for players to scale their skills (also to scale their ships.- If I need fleet gear to get fleet marks - how should I ever get to the fleet gear). A game can not live off the top 1%, it needs the others as well.
As stated, I am certain Cryptic knows this, and FA is just bugged for now. See the normal fleet queues which do not seem much more difficult than they were. The featured Delta Rising Queue is no real problem, the Viscous Cycle does not seem to have changed much, if at all.
So let's wait for a week and see whether this gets fixed.
LOL a challenge. This is not a challenge. This is saying "I will scale up the hull and shields of the enemy and make them harder to kill so players will just have to spend money to get better gear hehehehehe"
How is this in any way a challenge? Its plain and simple pew pew until dead. The only thing you need to win fleet alert is higher DPS now, the only challenge here is getting the better gear to beat it. There is no strategy either. Just pew pew. This isn't a real challenge. beating the alert is plain and simple if you have a high amount of DPS apparently now....
And no im not gonna pour in buckets of dilithium and other things to get new gear. The upgrade system is such a huge resource sink. but i could be wrong, this may not have been what cryptic was aiming for. We will see in time though.
I ran a couple of these last night. failed against gorn on wave three while i was using my T5-U Jem'nought complete with MK13 fleet and rep gear. (I put out over 20k dps before the upgrades), but I can't speak for the rest of the team.
won a couple more, one with my voth bastion and another with my tac ody (4 tactical consoles, it SO TOTALLY needed that!)
Something isn't right, as others have stated, it was not uncommon to see a miranda or some other low level ship in these before.
Heaven help the poor newbie who decides to try one of these in his lvl 20 ship or something, only to be blamed by the rest of the team for their failure on the second wave. Even I have done it in lower ships before (though I do make sure I am equipped) they are a nice break from the story, or if you need a little xp before the next mission opens up.
I can only hope someone has messed up here. Myself, personally, I can slog through anything. Although i am casual (sometimes not logging in for days, and even then only playing an hour or so) I do like to grind out powerful ships in the end, so i'm sure if things stay this way, I will be fine, but for the new person, starting out in STO, this could be a horror.