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What happened to the STF's
doctorstegi
Member Posts: 1,221 Arc User
I took a rather long break from STO and i do have to every other year but what the hell happened to the STF's ?
Elite Mode or now Advanced Mode nerfed to oblivion in rewards ?
720 dillithium
1 neural processor ? Always only 1 ?
Some stuipid crafting material instead of items so no more purple mk xii goodies ?
Not sure i like the fact i have to work more now cause of the increased amount of enemies for less rewards...
Elite Mode or now Advanced Mode nerfed to oblivion in rewards ?
720 dillithium
1 neural processor ? Always only 1 ?
Some stuipid crafting material instead of items so no more purple mk xii goodies ?
Not sure i like the fact i have to work more now cause of the increased amount of enemies for less rewards...
C-Store Inc. is still looking for active members on the fed side. If you don't have a fleet feel free to contact me in game @stegi.
Post edited by doctorstegi on
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normal gives 720 dil and R&D materials that have a "good chance" at being worth more EC than a purple item. If you really get a good box you can buy a whole ship's worth of vendor trash purples from one box. ....
advanced gives 1 rep token (processor, etc), 1 box of better crafting materials, and 1400 dil. (I thought?? Maybe its 300/700/1400 for normal, adv, elite now? I dont pay attention to the dil payout)
elite gives 2 rep tokens, better crafting stuff (more purple mats, I think?) and ??? dil (not sure, most don't HAVE an elite so comparison here is odd).
basically advanced is the old elite and the rewards are the same except for the more valuable crafting materials instead of junk.
CC-advanced gives you junk items if you place in the top 6 or so (seems to be 3 third place winners, 2 second, and 1 first?? or something weird like that).
Purple mk xii are pretty rubbish and useless these days. Crafting material are great in fact crafting material is worth more to sell then most Purple mk xii.
Wrong. They are not similar.
They got nerfed, big time. Especially considering time required has jumped significantly. Instead of running 3 back-to-back STFs for an avg of 8 mins each, you're spending 20-50 mins per SFT, depending on which you run. The dil is still less than what elites used to be, assuming you're playing advanceds now. "Elite" now does indeed offer a slightly better reward as a final payment, but most of them are broken or missing or just impossible to complete anymore. Not to mention they can take over an hour. You have battleships with 4 million hullpoints. You have boss ships with far more. It takes 5 minutes of dedicated pounding from all 5 players in the STF to take down a single mid-level ship sometimes. The reward-per-time-played is decimated to a sliver of a fraction of what it used to be.
And the circular logic behind it all? You can't play elites until you're maxed out in gear and upgrades, but you can't GET gear or the materials to upgrade until you're already playing elites. You can't even play elites until level60, which is gated behind massive grinds, and you can't get to lvl15 to upgrade your gear until you grind out OVER a month solid of R&D, then pay ****-tons of dilithium to upgrade everything you have.
To the OP: If you haven't played in a while, cryptic is decapitating this game, and fast. Delta Rising has destroyed the game, driven most of the playerbase off, and ruined the entire logic of the gameplay flow from the ground up.
Best to not get back into the game right now. They show no signs of reversing their poor choices, and are only making it worse and worse. There have been 3 major gameplay nerfs in the past month, NOT including the DR release itself. It just keeps getting worse and worse.
But that is not what is happening.
What is happening to both advanced and elite is people who are not ready for it are going in and doing 5k dps when 3 times that is the new "normal" then wondering why stuff is dying slowly. You got people in 2-3 tac console ships shooting beam arrays at stuff and going derp. You got people in sci ships without exotic damage. You got people with XII gear, or worse.
Your 8 min stf was not supposed to BE like that. Elite sts being rickrolled by scims in 3 min by scimitars was game breaking, really, efficient but not intended. They are supposed to take longer and be at least moderately challenging.
PPL are not upgraded enough and ready for elite yet, and it shows. Talk to me in 6 months... we will be face rolling them again.
They are either too easy (Normal) or too drawn out (Advanced) to play now. The Normal maps are the same, just ridiculously easy. They changed the Advanced maps so it's almost impossible to play unless you have a premade team since the NPCs have crazy-high hull and shield specs.
Rewards are always changing, spin the wheel.
SCE ADVISORY NOTICE: Improper Impulse Engine maintenance can result in REAR THRUSTER LEAKAGE. ALWAYS have your work inspected by another qualified officer.
- 'adjusted' dilithium (first removed, then restored slightly by spreading it around everywhere)
- 'adjusted' rewards (removed item drops, added R&D materials, lowered speciality rewards)
- 'adjusted' difficulty (increase npc hitpoints, hard failure optionals, timers)
- 'adjusted' XP (in general, across the game in terms of amounts earned and goalposts moved)
Add to this the new costs associated with upgrading and the impression (however right or wrong) that formerly elite gear now does'nt allow you to play competitively, and that you need to buy a new ship;
And finally, make the difficulty curve on the new "advanced" so steep that many players fail over and over, making upgrading and a new ship looking like your only option.
----
Which of course officially are not the reasons why the queues are empty. It's a reporting error.
Merry CrypticMess
Admiral Thrax
So, get your Tactical character into their escort or Scimi with all Mk XIV Epic cannons and stuffs and you'll start having fun.
SCE ADVISORY NOTICE: Improper Impulse Engine maintenance can result in REAR THRUSTER LEAKAGE. ALWAYS have your work inspected by another qualified officer.
There's a reason why after the double whammy of Enhancement Dysfunction and the Global Defense Nerf utterly destroying my main MA/SR Hero in City of Heroes that I was very happy to play WoW for 2 years ... even though City of Heroes was my first MMORPG and I'd been playing it for less than a year.
Guess Cryptic just loves making the same mistakes over and over and over again ...
Protonic Kool-Aid Down The Drain Cruiser
Immortal BOff Skills combo for Ground
to play advanced stf you do not need a premade team, you just need players who know what to do. I pug a lot since I hate to play with faw builds (so common on dps-xxxxx channels) and always when the run fails mainly is because someone does not know what to do or because is totally useless (ex. < 6000 dps and/or no support to the team).
you do not need a tactical character on a escort or scimi with epic equipment... you need a decent and usefull build: ex my sci toon into sci vessel use 2xGW and TBR for crowd control and maximize the overral dps of the team, moreover using TS and a full torpedo build I can deal 14-15k dps...
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
No thanks to the TRIBBLE balancing paradigm the devs delude themselves under.
As you`ve no doubt noticed, STFs are no where near as popular nowadays as they were before delta. The reasons are for what you`ve already said but also because of the fact that advanced is so much harder than elite was, given the fact that you instantly lose if you fail the "bonus" now, leaving with nothing. It makes pugging pretty much pointless since there is no coordination or regulation between the team. I gave up trying to pug on advanced as people still, for example, nuke down the nanite generators in infected space before the cube is down or have atrocious dps due to entering advanced with mark X green gear.
The borg ones are still popular due to the borg gear being sought after, but you still have to wait a while. Forget even trying to get into Vault Ensnared or Azure nebula unless you have a few hours of waiting time to kill.
I might have something to do with people leaving the game too, perhaps, as even stfs like Gorn/Fed minefield have absolutely no one in them ever.
&
I'm sorry you don't know anything.
1) Maxed out gear? Hardly! No circularity. Join a fleet and buy stuff, you anti-social basement dweller.
1.5) In point of fact, if you learn why things work on a starship, you can more than carry your own weight in Advanced with XII blues from Exchange.
2) Advanced (not Elite anymore) doesn't require lvl 60 to participate.
3) Actually playing an RPG is not "grinding", nor is not instantly making you da bestest a "gate".
4) ~20 mil EC & $5 USD is more than enough to upgrade to XIII, which, given #1.5, is all any casual non-maxer needs. You want more than that? Give up another day's lunch, or don't buy new toothpaste this week. Learn to squeeze and roll right up to the top of the tube if you have to. Geebus!
5) The game is just as populous as ever. A lot of clueless new players too, as usual at the start new seasons/holiday events. The usual bitchers take their ball and go home whenever they get spooked. They always come back when they realize the devs won't just make them Super Saiyans because they know how to pout and stage tantrums. The rest of the community (the adults) sail smoothly along, appreciatively pretending to be starship captains after work, with perspective. Go make yourself a coffee and laugh at some comedy.
You can do fine dps as any class and in a variety of ships. I have done fine on all 3 classes in advanced. And most of my ships are not escorts, though all can produce reasonable dps its not even up with a pre-DR scim. You don't need that much, but you need more than level 40 dps... which is what people are bringing. If 2/5 in a PUG are pulling 2k dps, its over on advanced or elite. As it should be.
Sorry kids but your mirror star cruiser geared with exchange bought purple consoles and mission reward weapons is no longer suited for endgame. Stop dragging things like that into the advanced qs.
You want proof of what ppl are dragging into STFS??
I did crystal on my brand new char, yes, its a rom tac in an escort (using a t5 not upgraded kazon). Level 50. Not one piece of rep yet, he hit tier 1 this morning thanks to speedup tokens. Not one piece of fleet gear, because no one will do the fleet alert and our only project does not take the few fleet marks I have. I took one of the third place rewards... that should not even be remotely possible.
That may be true. But the folks dragging in the heaps are not built well enough to handle it. ICA ... people cant blow the transformer before the spheres get out of their GW and fly over to heal it. Which is 100% pure dps race, and 1 group in 3 for PUGS can't handle THAT. YET. I think, in a few months, they WILL manage it, but the bulk of the players need a lot of time to get their gear to xiv, their specialization trees unlocked, their builds improved towards handling the new difficulty... it will happen. Remember how early on several STFS were very hard, then not so hard, then a faceroll? It will happen.
And while an expert player CAN make a ship like that do well, most players cannot. And either player, from expert to novice, would do better still with better gear in a better ship. The novice will double his dps in a better ship, and go from useless to functional. The expert will get 10x his dps.
Keep the AI as they are, keep the Varduaar hitting harder than anything, but remove the stupid ****ing timer bonuses that fail.
REMOVE those.. that is IT, and we can have more fun immediately, the uber elite builds can nail them in minutes with their gold shiny we spent our wage on Zen builds, and the rest of us who play a few hours in the evening can chug along and enjoy some fun.
Remove the fun aspect and well, I'm waiting for Star Citizen.
Sorry, forgot to include sarcasm tags.
SCE ADVISORY NOTICE: Improper Impulse Engine maintenance can result in REAR THRUSTER LEAKAGE. ALWAYS have your work inspected by another qualified officer.
I agree. The more they lock things down in timers, the less fun it becomes.
The big picture is that they need to make things more difficult to force the players to progress and therefore spend more in and out of the game. It keeps players from getting bored with vaping NPC with too much ease.
It will get easier again as we progress and adapt strategies. Then they will come out with Tier 7 ships, then it all starts over again.
It hopefully keeps enough players active and keeps the money coming in.
SCE ADVISORY NOTICE: Improper Impulse Engine maintenance can result in REAR THRUSTER LEAKAGE. ALWAYS have your work inspected by another qualified officer.
You dont need to expert level to function in game. Players just need to drop their expectations. You have normal difficulty and queues for those who cannot build the right way.
If players want to finish Advanced, they must build the right way since you got a timed mission with higher HP.
You also dont need uber elite builds unless you are aiming for 100k dps. Epic/Gold items are not a necessity to function. Since the most cost effective weapon in game is available to everyone, Romulan Plasma, in MK XII Very Rare, and the best universal consoles/sets are also available for all players in reputation, there is no excuse for these players if wanting to finish Advanced.