A Step Between Stars currently has a few issues that are making it a shadow of the great mission it used to be:
* Almost none of the slide-in dialogues are playing their VOs.
This is an issue in other missions, too, but it's particularly noticeable in this one since there are so many conversations between Tuvok and Cooper during this mission. It's really jarring being so quiet.
* The space combat is completely imbalanced at level 60
This has been reported plenty of times now. So many players want to blame it on the weapon/ability configuration of the DSD, but that's not the main problem. This mission used to be very playable on Elite at level 50 when it first came out. Changes to the game since then have completely wrecked it...
The imbalance is at level 60. The ship's build just can't handle how the Undine (and Voth, to a lesser extent) scale up. The mission should probably just be capped at level 50. I know some have managed to complete this on Elite, but even Normal can be tough for me, and I'm not a bad player.
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I'm no game developer, but I can see that allowing the use of our own ships in that mission would be contradictory to it's original purpose of showcasing the abilities that are used by the DSD..I think it might have also been the first instance of a 2ndary deflector.
I ran this on my Tac Alt not too long ago at 60, and was not "tremendously" put off by the difficulty... Few things to consider:
1. I'm a fan of science, so instead of building my tac to be a crit-monster / weapons only Captain, I had 3 pips in the old partigen skill and a few in gravitons IIRC. That helped with the provided Sci abilities quite a bit...
2. The "heavy dying" didn't start till I was getting into the 3rd "heavy cruiser populated" wave - but this was also partly due to my stubbornness at flying her in destroyer mode for my tac. When I said "TRIBBLE it, let me fly this as a Sci would" (park some, feedback pulses all over the place, tractor beam into a GW to maximize damage), wave 3 went down...
3. "Contrary" to popular player belief, the consoles of the DSD set are not a complete waste, they just don't contribute to a hyper min-max. I've flown my KDF in a fully kitted out DSD, so when I "suddenly remembered" that I had all them consoles, off to town I went. Lightning-arc power into a GW (love it when they're trapped in arc range), shield drain beam fired in-between cycles of the hyper-BOffs heal (spammed nigh constantly), the metaphasic or whatever hyper-shield the Dyson set gives pulled out as an "oh crud" button... Topped off with the infamous "GW, "science" alpha, transform, tack on Cmdr Tac ability" maneuver to vape one of the dreadnoughts in their opening salvo...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
No real surprise that people have problems with it now, hell last time I played it (lvl 50) the "flagships" spent most of the fight "repairing".
As for the voice over, when I last tried it, only Cooper's was missing.
I do hope it gets balanced -- I have several characters who are ready to take this mission. It's a really good one, a momentous turn in the story and very immersive.
Could it be capped at a lower level, maybe? Like the zones where you're fighting at lvl X? If that can be a temporary fix until the scaling up is fixed to 60, it would at least make it possible to complete the mission. The space part, after exiting the station, is where it goes south, for me. I don't know for others but the gripe I've heard was about the space fight against the Undine.
Do you mean the sun room and the shadow hugger accolade? No it still works. The path that opens is random. Or so i thought, I just did it three times last night. I couldn't get the other path to open for me. The defend the doctor while he works the console one.
The issue with the slide-in dialogs is still very much relevant.