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Sooo Elite Difficulty question
dystopianday
Member Posts: 15 Arc User
Elite isn't all that hard if you play around with all your boff abilities
But trying to kill stuff is like chopping wood with your face
I hit this dude with no shields left with every quantum torpedo in the Alpha Quadrant, and his health doesn't really go down. I'm like
"How strange that my blue doom missiles seem to have been disabled somehow"
Then I hover over the thing's card and am informed it has 400,000 HP
That is dumb, and I'm level 49, I can only assume this is going to get much worse
It's also kind of frustrating from an immersion perspective when a bunch of 2270 D7 cruisers are laughing off my 2410 Prometheus because they have stronger shields than ESD.
So what exactly am I missing out on switching to normal? I haven't seen a single thing drop that isn't garbage compared to faction rewards and stuff I can get on the exchange for chump change. Is Elite really just for endgame content?
But trying to kill stuff is like chopping wood with your face
I hit this dude with no shields left with every quantum torpedo in the Alpha Quadrant, and his health doesn't really go down. I'm like
"How strange that my blue doom missiles seem to have been disabled somehow"
Then I hover over the thing's card and am informed it has 400,000 HP
That is dumb, and I'm level 49, I can only assume this is going to get much worse
It's also kind of frustrating from an immersion perspective when a bunch of 2270 D7 cruisers are laughing off my 2410 Prometheus because they have stronger shields than ESD.
So what exactly am I missing out on switching to normal? I haven't seen a single thing drop that isn't garbage compared to faction rewards and stuff I can get on the exchange for chump change. Is Elite really just for endgame content?
Post edited by dystopianday on
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All this is because the devs couldn't fathom making intelligent AIs that were actually harder to fight so instead they just slapped on a HP modifier and thought that would somehow be fun to play. Welcome to delta rising.
Leading up to DR, I was hoping to see harder content. I was more along the lines of hoping the NPCs would be "smarter" by doing more abilities. How would an NPC ship be if it did Tactical Team, EPTS, Engineering Team, and BFAW on a more regular basis?
I would have loved to see something like that. Then when the Tribble videos people put up of DR before it hit Holodeck came out, specifically the Battle of Korfez (Elite only, of course). I watched it and was dismayed. The only way NPCs lasted long was from sheer hull. Just like Pre and Post-DR, they were lucky to do 1-2 abilities before they died.
None of the NPCs at any difficulty are any "smarter."
They don't do shield rebalancing, focusing, much less Tac Team and EPTS.
They don't turn away from a threat to protect a collapsed shield facing.
Repairs very, very, very rarely happen if at all (vast majority don't).
Almost all don't do any tactical abilities like TS, CSV, CRF, BFAW, etc.
Anyways, the NPCs are nothing more but space zombies. Just keep shooting, it'll eventually go down with no difficulty.
The only difficulty is with some of the poorly thought out victory conditions.
I was worried I was going to miss out on something relevant, like mission rewards or dilithium outside the queues.
I was reading the player input thread from a couple months ago on difficulty and the first few posts were all "it takes me so bloody long to kill these things"
and their final decision was to INCREASE elite HP over what people were already mad about
lolwut
So now in elite there is no such thing as tank, debuffer or healer, all 5 guys are dps, and you need a minimum dps to win no matter how good you and your team are, if you don't kill fast enough you cannot win, borg disconnected is an example, not enough dps--> not enough disconnected ships spawning, cannot kill dreadnoughts, 10 marks.
You want to witness an effective AI in terms of moves? Look at an NPC Mogai. It carries Tactical Team and Attack Petter Alpha. It's a pain. A reminder that AI also don't entirely follow rules regarding move lockouts. You give an AI Beam Fire At Will and Beam Overload, it will prepare both-a player can't do that.
There's also the tales of an NPC ship-the D'Deridex Defender, which had a bunch of healing moves. Players went ballistic because the thing was, according to reports, nigh unkillable.
Actually for Borg disconnected DPS IS THE PROBLEM. The higher your DPS the harder the mission gets. You are best off never even killing the original set of probes. Use science abilities to disable them only and keep saving ships.
If you kill the probes you get spheres if you kill the spheres you get cubes. If you get cubes you are screwed. The voth, undine and borg will attack each other and so long as you have not made the borg too powerful they are fairly balanced and keep each other busy.
The DPS happy approach to borg disconnected is the worst possible way to do that mission. Give me a bunch of tanks and science ships any day for that mission.
Borg disconnected is one of the smartest missions that cryptic has done so far. They actually made a mission where pure dps is a huge problem and people refuse to learn or change. They just try to use even more dps to force it to work the way they want.
We are at the point where cryptic can't really make smarter enemies. People refuse to adapt in any way and just scream and complain when they encounter them and they also scream and complain when they just face dps sponges but less.
I would love to see enemy drain boats, enemies that used special abilities on us, enemies that would work together to drop shields and them beam overload or enemies that would drop cloak and alpha strike like players do.
Douglas MacArthur - Quote on the dedication plaque of the U.S.S. Ranger NCC-97332-A Armitage class Fleet Heavy Strike Wing Escort.
Waiut, aren't disconnected ships supposed to spawn every time you finish a wave? because yesterday we had terrible dps and 1 AFK and only 2 disconnected ships spawned in the 3rd stage.
I noticed that the faster you kill the more disconnected ships spawn, or maybe I'm crazy, but once, we had massive dps and we saved up to 56 ships.
Also, how do you expect to kill all 3 bosses in one minute with low dps?
If you do have a ship converted to borg you have to destroy it before more ships will spawn to save.
You do need fairly decent dps for the bosses, just don't use that dps during the waves.
ah, I had been hoping this was a bug that might be fixed (as soon as viscous cylce gets fixed). Thanks for clarifying.
I realized recently this whole fail system is an argonite shell game.
argonite is used for both space and ground shields and projectiles. Maybe not so many people have projectiles, but still many do and all have many shields to upgrade.
Which missions are difficult or impossible to pug: borg disconnected, azure, viscous cycle (broken). All pay argonite. Must buy packs to get argonite. Oops argonite drop rate in packs is much lower than other materials. Buy moar packs!
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Azure is the same kind of mission. On elite you don't want to destroy the ships. What you want is a tank to draw them away or a sci to shut them down quickly. Then you rescue the ship and they despawn. Doing Azure as a dps fast makes it VERY difficult and you need a lot more DPS.
Many of these missions that people think of as pure DPS fights are not DPS fights. They can be done FAR easier using other methods but that does not change that so many view the game purely through DPS glasses.
Yes. I know. But knowing and making 4 random people do is a different matter. And one side making all 3 sides of disconnected fail pretty much guarantees pug failure.
If we were able to see the fail rates of missions I would guarantee that Borg disconnected, azure and rhiho station are right at the top - probably at around 75% - including premades. Perhaps azure and rhiho station are a little lower due to a larger number of premades.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Rhiho station? why? it seems pretty easy.
Well I haven't tried it in a month or so. Prior to that my pug success rate was 0.0%
I've premade it on elite a few times with mixed results. Perhaps I'll give it another look, but it was way too frustrating back in November. I know that many Rhiho pro groups can free the scientists in 1.25 seconds but 6 minutes would be a challenge for most pugs.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
I'm glad to hear they are splitting up now. I'll get back in there as I enjoy the mission quite a bit. I can free 3 solo but the team would usually only free 1 additional or sometimes zero.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
tried a couple days ago in elite pug, pretty easy, destroy 6 devices, find 6 engineers, kill the leader, took us less than 5 minutes.
Elachi are pretty weak, low hp (1k or less) but heavy shields (5-6k), it helped having 3 guys with the AR-116B and lots of mortars, some of us were one shooting Elachi with the expose+flank.
We didn't split the group, and it was the first time I tried that queue.
Azure rescue is a different song, people is just too stupid to understand cooperation, first thing I say, split 2/2/1, 1 guy aggro the other frees ships, then we go to the guy that was solo, I'll take aggro, what happened? 3 ships following me and drawing aggro instead of freeing ships, ships freed? 1.
This is still the game it is...they can't really make things harder, but they did need to make things take longer. So it's pretty easy to see why they did what they did. Imagine what the frustration level would have been for folks if they'd made it harder instead?
Why would they think that, though?
Because normal mode teaches you to kill the ships! Both borg DC and azure are trivial on normal and you can faceroll the mobs. Ive done a side of borg DC by myself, rescued all the ships and killed all the npcs while taking only minor damage. Ive cleared a scim in azure solo with just one FAW cycle. These are not impressive feats --- I am not really that good, in the grand scheme of things --- which is what makes the point: they teach you do dps thru these missions on normal by making the difference between normal and advanced too wide a gap.
The biggest thing about normal/advanced/elite solo setting is just torp damage random death risk and huge shields and hull. The NPC's favorite tactic is a torp spread crit --- easily doing 1/2 a million damage to the player when all 5 torps crit (and they all do, pretty much 1 roll for crit affects all the bombs). It will kill most players, and its not fun or interesting, just an NPC I win button. When they don't have TS, its tree-chopping fun for all -- if you are not in the top 1% of dps players, you are in for long drawn out fights. You *do* get more blue and purple vendor trash on elite. Its just not worth it --- the price increase is small compared to killing a lot more stuff in the same amount of time for white vendor loot, you make more money off normal, the missions are faster on normal, and in just about every other regard, normal is just better. You should get like a full bar of xp on elite for a replay mission, but you don't ... so do them on normal in 2 min a pop for better efficient xp farming.