27k DPS? My Grav Well does more DPS than you! Go back to Normal you noob
Kidding! All joking aside, the "Advanced" ques when they first came out, were designed EXCLUSIVELY for people to team up with qualified team mates/fleet mates to handle the difficulty of the content. This was back when even quality players struggled to get 15-20k DPS, and even the best teams struggled to complete Khitomer Advanced.
With your "average" player able to do better than that, Advanced ques are extremely easy these days. 100k+ players can single handed beat almost any advanced que and carry teams full of 5-10k players. IMO the Advanced content is fine....
What the game REALLY needs is a tier ABOVE Elite! Hardcore or something, where if you die you cant respawn, and everything is super difficult. Right now this game offers little challenge to "Good" and "Expert" players.
I'm not sure what Advanced que the OP is talking about. If you need Iconian marks, Gateway to Grethor is easily doable with 27k. I have gotten frustrated with Battle of Procyon V, but that has more to do with B:FAW spam from NPCs right when I am about to close a rift, not because I lack DPS.
Yeah Battle of Procyon can be a bear if the pug players have no clue and just go after the spawns and ignore closing the gates as a priority. I was in one last week and the other four were fighting the spawns at one gate not one of them was smart enough to go around tot he back while the NPC's were distracted and close the gate. I took my old t-5u Torkhat and shut 5 gates by not enganing the spawns. The others were still messing around chasing spawns. Procyon isn't that hard if you read the hints at the start. It couldn't be more plain.
I wasn't there of course (avoiding the new queues like the plague) but even if you're trying to close them... it's near impossible to do it.
There just too much spam on that map, too many spawns and unless you have someone aggro'ing the enemies AND debuffing / removing their FAW spam, it's just not possible to close anything without trying to fight through waves of ships that seem to spawn endlessly.
It sounds like you got simply lucky and someone else was taking the hits for you. Doesn't necessarily mean they were messing around though, you probably wouldn't have been able to shut the portals if they hadn't kept the enemies busy... just saying.
The mission is poorly designed. Yes, it may be possible with a PUG at times, but the ridiculous spawn rates combined with DOT effects and FAW spamming means you either need two very dedicated aggro-tanks and debuffers or someone with tractor beam repulsors or you have to be very lucky.
I'm sure the OP meant to say Advanced is made hard by the weak sauce/under geared/unskilled players entering Advanced via the public queues, who aren't really ready for that difficulty level and therefore place more pressure on his build to carry them through as he has to score the majority of the kills due to being the only one capable of making a dent in the NPC's hull. Therefore giving the illusion that advanced is difficult when it really is the weakness of the other team members making it seem that way as he has carry them.
27k DPS?
With your "average" player able to do better than that, Advanced ques are extremely easy these days. 100k+ players can single handed beat almost any advanced que and carry teams full of 5-10k players. IMO the Advanced content is fine....
What the game REALLY needs is a tier ABOVE Elite! Hardcore or something, where if you die you cant respawn, and everything is super difficult. Right now this game offers little challenge to "Good" and "Expert" players.
No. What the game needs is not another difficulty level. This game needs some rebalancing to make advanced content truly for the advanced players again. Not something anyone can complete within a few days of creating his or her account (see one of my earlier posts for explanation on that).
It's kind of pointless to keep adding difficulty levels, then add more power creep and end up with a game where everyone's an elite player who has completed über-elite-awesomeness level content.
The core of the problem is power creep. Then the solution is to remove the sources of that power creep: endless stacking of abilities and systems (weapons that have increased cycling haste while benefitting from reduced weapon cost and increased power levels + bonuses for each additional target that you hit for example) , it's been named often enough.
One might therefore even wonder if they consider it a problem though. At this point I'm starting to wonder if they even care about playability of the game or just want to keep adding and selling stuff. Making kits upgradable is just another example of that: there's already enough power creep, also on the ground. We certainly don't need more of it.
Anyway, suggesting that they add more difficulty levels is not solving the problem, it's ignoring (indeed, worsening) the problem that they keep creating so that they can keep selling stuff.
I'm not sure what Advanced que the OP is talking about. If you need Iconian marks, Gateway to Grethor is easily doable with 27k. I have gotten frustrated with Battle of Procyon V, but that has more to do with B:FAW spam from NPCs right when I am about to close a rift, not because I lack DPS.
Yeah Battle of Procyon can be a bear if the pug players have no clue and just go after the spawns and ignore closing the gates as a priority. I was in one last week and the other four were fighting the spawns at one gate not one of them was smart enough to go around tot he back while the NPC's were distracted and close the gate. I took my old t-5u Torkhat and shut 5 gates by not enganing the spawns. The others were still messing around chasing spawns. Procyon isn't that hard if you read the hints at the start. It couldn't be more plain.
I was in a pug for the nakul red alert one guy warped out when we lost the first transport. after 30 minutes I had to give up. 4 ships unable to take down the dreads.. I don't claim to be a 100K DPSer, TBH I have no idea what my dps is all i know is 4 cruisers could not do it after 30 minutes. and this was NORMAL
The core of the problem is power creep. Then the solution is to remove the sources of that power creep: endless stacking of abilities and systems (weapons that have increased cycling haste while benefitting from reduced weapon cost and increased power levels + bonuses for each additional target that you hit for example) , it's been named often enough.
One might therefore even wonder if they consider it a problem though. At this point I'm starting to wonder if they even care about playability of the game or just want to keep adding and selling stuff. Making kits upgradable is just another example of that: there's already enough power creep, also on the ground. We certainly don't need more of it.
Anyway, suggesting that they add more difficulty levels is not solving the problem, it's ignoring (indeed, worsening) the problem that they keep creating so that they can keep selling stuff.
The problem with removing things is that at this point in the game that will NEVER happen. There haven't been major "nerfs" for years. The only thing we can hope for is something that can actually adequately match a high level players abilities.
I don't even know what people are talking about with "elite marks".
I play advanced or elite stf when available, and barely set ship in a bz (only handful of times), and I have 2 characters with full ground gear (different reps), etc.
Buying elite marks is a waste of your hard work. So this is the way I view it. I know none of my ships are up to par with AVD stfs, so for the rep I am working on, I find the most easy staf, and that is the one I will do on Adv. The other half is your team mates should not care, because if they are decked out, then they should be doing elite. If they are not decked out, then they are in the same boat as you, and have no reason to complain. This is the best option given the current set up. Find a adv space stf, you find easy, do it once a day. You will have both the marks and the elite marks you need.
Good enough is common gear...the reason your ships aren't good enough is due to pilot error and not the gear you have access to.
Well Ill give you points for being the most obvious troll on the forums, I have seen in a long time. My suggestion was to help out the op and accurate. It does not matter what can or can not be done, what matters is your not so sub par with your numbers, that you drag the entire team down. I might suggest you get a life instead of going around and turning a simple suggestion made by another player into a insult that you can wield at said player.
Well Ill give you points for being the most obvious troll on the forums, I have seen in a long time. My suggestion was to help out the op and accurate. It does not matter what can or can not be done, what matters is your not so sub par with your numbers, that you drag the entire team down. I might suggest you get a life instead of going around and turning a simple suggestion made by another player into a insult that you can wield at said player.
He's not wrong, you just don't like the way he's saying it.
He doesn't wear 'kid gloves' with people, but what he's saying is accurate.
"Elite Marks" are the items needed to acquire Reputation gear. Things like Voth Cybernetic Implants, Terran Gravimetric Inducers, Borg Neural Processors, Isomorphic Injections, Ancient Power Cells, & Iconian Probe Datacores.
oh...well...since they aren't called "marks", I don't call the marks.
What the game REALLY needs is a tier ABOVE Elite! Hardcore or something, where if you die you cant respawn, and everything is super difficult. Right now this game offers little challenge to "Good" and "Expert" players.
Why? A lot of the queues aren't even available in Elite yet, some of them not even in Advanced.
Three levels would be quite enough, if they were distributed properly. But instead, Cryptic turned Advanced into Normal+ because some players whined it was too hard, and some players are still whining it's too hard. Until Cryptic is willing to tell the whiners "if its too hard, play an easier difficulty level," no amount of additional levels are going to help.
What the game REALLY needs is a tier ABOVE Elite! Hardcore or something, where if you die you cant respawn, and everything is super difficult. Right now this game offers little challenge to "Good" and "Expert" players.
Why? A lot of the queues aren't even available in Elite yet, some of them not even in Advanced.
Three levels would be quite enough, if they were distributed properly. But instead, Cryptic turned Advanced into Normal+ because some players whined it was too hard, and some players are still whining it's too hard. Until Cryptic is willing to tell the whiners "if its too hard, play an easier difficulty level," no amount of additional levels are going to help.
I experienced the Advanced queues right after Delta Rising and my option is that although the overall difficulty hadn't actually increased as the AI was still as dumb as a lobotomised Pakled plus the NPC's weren't hitting any harder than pre-Delta, what had gone up was the hit points to monstrous levels which made the missions tediously boring as you just spent x time firing at a sponge with little gain.
The optional autofail did also pull me out the public queues until it was removed as it was near impossible to complete a pug run
I made several runs in the DPS channels and although we won it was a hard slog because of those hit points.
I kinda would not have minded them keeping the optional auto-failure, if they adjusted how the optionals were done reward wise. I could have seen it that the auto-fail was tied to both the fact of if it were a premade or public que, and the difficulty level of the stf you were in, to determine how many of the optionals you could fail before the stf would fail fully.
Also though I would have rather see the optionals determine not the bonus marks you get, but how many elite marks you get. So like in normal you could get 1 elite mark for completing all of the optionals, advanced could be one elite mark per optionals, and then elite I am not sure on how many as not sure if you would want it to pay out the same number of elite marks as the Bzs.
What the game REALLY needs is a tier ABOVE Elite! Hardcore or something, where if you die you cant respawn, and everything is super difficult. Right now this game offers little challenge to "Good" and "Expert" players.
Why? A lot of the queues aren't even available in Elite yet, some of them not even in Advanced.
Three levels would be quite enough, if they were distributed properly. But instead, Cryptic turned Advanced into Normal+ because some players whined it was too hard, and some players are still whining it's too hard. Until Cryptic is willing to tell the whiners "if its too hard, play an easier difficulty level," no amount of additional levels are going to help.
I experienced the Advanced queues right after Delta Rising and my option is that although the overall difficulty hadn't actually increased as the AI was still as dumb as a lobotomised Pakled plus the NPC's weren't hitting any harder than pre-Delta, what had gone up was the hit points to monstrous levels which made the missions tediously boring as you just spent x time firing at a sponge with little gain.
The optional autofail did also pull me out the public queues until it was removed as it was near impossible to complete a pug run
I made several runs in the DPS channels and although we won it was a hard slog because of those hit points.
In my opinion, the increased enemy stats made Advanced PUGs just about challenging enough to be interesting again for a while. Not hard, but not entirely easy either, a good medium as is fitting for the middle level. And the fail conditions were unquestionably the smartest thing they ever did for the queues. Advanced should NOT be auto-win and anyone who can't handle challenge should play Normal.
Since then, they've backtracked all the progress they made and turned Advanced from a solid middle ground into yet another Normal. Useless.
Okay, I lied, I can say a lot more. I have been playing this game for a few years now and I have been in numerous advanced STFs with nothing more than thee last free ship I received, equipped with the best of the gear received from missions and drops, parsing anywhere from 7k to 15K DPS and I have never found them to be impossible or even inordinately difficult. I have had a number of PUGs where I ended up as the top DPS dog in the fight and pulling all the aggro when you aren't set up for tanking can be quite.........fun. The point being that although optionals didn't get done most of the time, the STF did get done.
Now that I am parsing the the low to mid 20k range and have gotten a little better at survival even though not set up for tanking, PUGs where I end up as top dog, while not easy, are definitely not extremely difficult.
So, while I won't use the exact same wording as someone else, I have to agree that if the ship is capable of parsing 27K DPS, the shipis more than capable of tackling advanced STFs and the problem is not the ship, or how hard the STF is.....
As for the power creep. It is definitely a problem, however finding a solution to it is also a definite problem. This is not my first F2P MMO, it is also not the first with a power creep problem. I have now seen at least two other MMOs try to solve power creep by "nerfing", and I have seen both of those games lose a good percentage of their biggest "whales" because of that nerfing, me being one of them.
As I could afford it at the time, I spent over $4,000.00 in less than a year on one of them. The Alliance I was in was all players who spent real money on the game and I was at the lower end of amount spent. Long story short, we spend real money to get the current really good stuff, it gets nerfed, we spend more real money to get the next current really good stuff, it gets nerfed, after a certain number of times of having the stuff we spent large amounts of real money on getting nerfed, we finally followed the example of our sister alliance of big spenders, we quit spending any money at all and then quit playing at all. Although some of them probably exaggerated how much they were spending on the game, even allowing for that, nerfing cost that game 400 players (that I know of), each of which were spending anywhere from $1,000.00 to $10,000.00 a year on the game.
I'm not saying it will happen, but if Cryptic tries to solve power creep by nerfing stuff, it likely would result in a huge loss of income, and I would like to see this game stay around for a long, long time.
The post DR STFs were not hard. But they did require teamwork. My objections to them were these:
- If it is an OPTIONAL Objective, how can I fail the mission by not completing it? Does not the word "optional" imply the objective is an addition to the primary mission? Maybe someone needs to simply relabel everything.
- The Dilthium rewards being reduced to the point of laughability.
The BattleZones are fun but they pay out too much I think.
I would not mind them bringing back for a limited time those Post-DR STF conditions. Just relabel the Optionals as Mandatory. And they should have a larger payout. I'm not looking for a ridiculous amount of Dilthium for successfully completing one. But a performance based payout, such as with the Dilthium Mining on Vlugta, would be nice. Say cap it at 1,500 or so. With players getting a variable amount based upon how well the team did. With AFK guaranteeing a zero payout. So that player's reward being distributed equally among the others.
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
- If it is an OPTIONAL Objective, how can I fail the mission by not completing it? Does not the word "optional" imply the objective is an addition to the primary mission? Maybe someone needs to simply relabel everything.
They corrected all of them, didn't they? It seems like I get an "elite mark" every time now, "optionals" successfully completed or not.
The hardest part of advanced is when you land in a "bad" pug, and it takes 5 times longer to finish. I'm no DPS powerhouse, but I am rather middling at around 40k. I love it when I fall in with the folks doing 90k or more, and it takes 45 seconds to complete. I also don't mind it when it's sort of a challenge because the teams dps is on the lower end, but I do NOT care for having to struggle because folks don't know the content at all, or are blatantly trolling puggers.
I kinda would not have minded them keeping the optional auto-failure, if they adjusted how the optionals were done reward wise. I could have seen it that the auto-fail was tied to both the fact of if it were a premade or public que, and the difficulty level of the stf you were in, to determine how many of the optionals you could fail before the stf would fail fully.
Also though I would have rather see the optionals determine not the bonus marks you get, but how many elite marks you get. So like in normal you could get 1 elite mark for completing all of the optionals, advanced could be one elite mark per optionals, and then elite I am not sure on how many as not sure if you would want it to pay out the same number of elite marks as the Bzs.
1, If everyone contributes to the common effort and knows what you need to do in order to finish the mission, they're not hard at all.
2. PUGS are hard because people just can't play. And aren't willing to improve. Just "Hey, let's join in Advanced Queue and ruin everyone else's experience and results or get carried because I like playing a rainbow ship". This game needs to have a easier connection between casual elitism (50k dps or more) and the guys we usually carry in pugs (barely 10k tactical with random boff skills or engineer/sci that plays its role minimally poor).
3. A team that can throw in HEALS and BUFFS can easily win over ANY CONTENT. I even see now in ISA pugs that people CAN'T HEAL others. They're saving it for... the day of tommorow. Nobody realises that if that stupid-guy-that-carries-us dies (the top dps grabs the top threat when surrounded by under-performers), they won't do any worth-mentioning dps and will also die - and fail opts, fail the mission. Learn to SUPPORT and HEAL. STF's are TEAM QUEUES.
4. The worst pugs: Procyon/Days of Doom/ISA. And mentionable others: Undine Infiltration (People can't even read the clues - minimal effort, minimal results)/Counterpoint (Some people can't really understand that people need to close portals and transport attack teams besides being DPS-trigger-happy./Assault on Terok Nor (Some people can't quite get the fact that if you're a sloppy non-coordinated teammate, you're doing it wrong. This is a TEAM QUEUE.)
Last i checked, all you needed for most advanced queues was 10k dps.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Comments
Kidding! All joking aside, the "Advanced" ques when they first came out, were designed EXCLUSIVELY for people to team up with qualified team mates/fleet mates to handle the difficulty of the content. This was back when even quality players struggled to get 15-20k DPS, and even the best teams struggled to complete Khitomer Advanced.
With your "average" player able to do better than that, Advanced ques are extremely easy these days. 100k+ players can single handed beat almost any advanced que and carry teams full of 5-10k players. IMO the Advanced content is fine....
What the game REALLY needs is a tier ABOVE Elite! Hardcore or something, where if you die you cant respawn, and everything is super difficult. Right now this game offers little challenge to "Good" and "Expert" players.
I wasn't there of course (avoiding the new queues like the plague) but even if you're trying to close them... it's near impossible to do it.
There just too much spam on that map, too many spawns and unless you have someone aggro'ing the enemies AND debuffing / removing their FAW spam, it's just not possible to close anything without trying to fight through waves of ships that seem to spawn endlessly.
It sounds like you got simply lucky and someone else was taking the hits for you. Doesn't necessarily mean they were messing around though, you probably wouldn't have been able to shut the portals if they hadn't kept the enemies busy... just saying.
The mission is poorly designed. Yes, it may be possible with a PUG at times, but the ridiculous spawn rates combined with DOT effects and FAW spamming means you either need two very dedicated aggro-tanks and debuffers or someone with tractor beam repulsors or you have to be very lucky.
No. What the game needs is not another difficulty level. This game needs some rebalancing to make advanced content truly for the advanced players again. Not something anyone can complete within a few days of creating his or her account (see one of my earlier posts for explanation on that).
It's kind of pointless to keep adding difficulty levels, then add more power creep and end up with a game where everyone's an elite player who has completed über-elite-awesomeness level content.
The core of the problem is power creep. Then the solution is to remove the sources of that power creep: endless stacking of abilities and systems (weapons that have increased cycling haste while benefitting from reduced weapon cost and increased power levels + bonuses for each additional target that you hit for example) , it's been named often enough.
One might therefore even wonder if they consider it a problem though. At this point I'm starting to wonder if they even care about playability of the game or just want to keep adding and selling stuff. Making kits upgradable is just another example of that: there's already enough power creep, also on the ground. We certainly don't need more of it.
Anyway, suggesting that they add more difficulty levels is not solving the problem, it's ignoring (indeed, worsening) the problem that they keep creating so that they can keep selling stuff.
I was in a pug for the nakul red alert one guy warped out when we lost the first transport. after 30 minutes I had to give up. 4 ships unable to take down the dreads.. I don't claim to be a 100K DPSer, TBH I have no idea what my dps is all i know is 4 cruisers could not do it after 30 minutes. and this was NORMAL
I play advanced or elite stf when available, and barely set ship in a bz (only handful of times), and I have 2 characters with full ground gear (different reps), etc.
I get marks, I apply them.
Well Ill give you points for being the most obvious troll on the forums, I have seen in a long time. My suggestion was to help out the op and accurate. It does not matter what can or can not be done, what matters is your not so sub par with your numbers, that you drag the entire team down. I might suggest you get a life instead of going around and turning a simple suggestion made by another player into a insult that you can wield at said player.
He's not wrong, you just don't like the way he's saying it.
He doesn't wear 'kid gloves' with people, but what he's saying is accurate.
Playing on 'Normal' also has the enjoyable effect of NOT putting semi/permanent damage on to your "CharToons", neither Ground nor Space.
oh...well...since they aren't called "marks", I don't call the marks.
Why? A lot of the queues aren't even available in Elite yet, some of them not even in Advanced.
Three levels would be quite enough, if they were distributed properly. But instead, Cryptic turned Advanced into Normal+ because some players whined it was too hard, and some players are still whining it's too hard. Until Cryptic is willing to tell the whiners "if its too hard, play an easier difficulty level," no amount of additional levels are going to help.
I experienced the Advanced queues right after Delta Rising and my option is that although the overall difficulty hadn't actually increased as the AI was still as dumb as a lobotomised Pakled plus the NPC's weren't hitting any harder than pre-Delta, what had gone up was the hit points to monstrous levels which made the missions tediously boring as you just spent x time firing at a sponge with little gain.
The optional autofail did also pull me out the public queues until it was removed as it was near impossible to complete a pug run
I made several runs in the DPS channels and although we won it was a hard slog because of those hit points.
Also though I would have rather see the optionals determine not the bonus marks you get, but how many elite marks you get. So like in normal you could get 1 elite mark for completing all of the optionals, advanced could be one elite mark per optionals, and then elite I am not sure on how many as not sure if you would want it to pay out the same number of elite marks as the Bzs.
In my opinion, the increased enemy stats made Advanced PUGs just about challenging enough to be interesting again for a while. Not hard, but not entirely easy either, a good medium as is fitting for the middle level. And the fail conditions were unquestionably the smartest thing they ever did for the queues. Advanced should NOT be auto-win and anyone who can't handle challenge should play Normal.
Since then, they've backtracked all the progress they made and turned Advanced from a solid middle ground into yet another Normal. Useless.
Okay, I lied, I can say a lot more. I have been playing this game for a few years now and I have been in numerous advanced STFs with nothing more than thee last free ship I received, equipped with the best of the gear received from missions and drops, parsing anywhere from 7k to 15K DPS and I have never found them to be impossible or even inordinately difficult. I have had a number of PUGs where I ended up as the top DPS dog in the fight and pulling all the aggro when you aren't set up for tanking can be quite.........fun. The point being that although optionals didn't get done most of the time, the STF did get done.
Now that I am parsing the the low to mid 20k range and have gotten a little better at survival even though not set up for tanking, PUGs where I end up as top dog, while not easy, are definitely not extremely difficult.
So, while I won't use the exact same wording as someone else, I have to agree that if the ship is capable of parsing 27K DPS, the ship is more than capable of tackling advanced STFs and the problem is not the ship, or how hard the STF is.....
As for the power creep. It is definitely a problem, however finding a solution to it is also a definite problem. This is not my first F2P MMO, it is also not the first with a power creep problem. I have now seen at least two other MMOs try to solve power creep by "nerfing", and I have seen both of those games lose a good percentage of their biggest "whales" because of that nerfing, me being one of them.
As I could afford it at the time, I spent over $4,000.00 in less than a year on one of them. The Alliance I was in was all players who spent real money on the game and I was at the lower end of amount spent. Long story short, we spend real money to get the current really good stuff, it gets nerfed, we spend more real money to get the next current really good stuff, it gets nerfed, after a certain number of times of having the stuff we spent large amounts of real money on getting nerfed, we finally followed the example of our sister alliance of big spenders, we quit spending any money at all and then quit playing at all. Although some of them probably exaggerated how much they were spending on the game, even allowing for that, nerfing cost that game 400 players (that I know of), each of which were spending anywhere from $1,000.00 to $10,000.00 a year on the game.
I'm not saying it will happen, but if Cryptic tries to solve power creep by nerfing stuff, it likely would result in a huge loss of income, and I would like to see this game stay around for a long, long time.
- If it is an OPTIONAL Objective, how can I fail the mission by not completing it? Does not the word "optional" imply the objective is an addition to the primary mission? Maybe someone needs to simply relabel everything.
- The Dilthium rewards being reduced to the point of laughability.
The BattleZones are fun but they pay out too much I think.
I would not mind them bringing back for a limited time those Post-DR STF conditions. Just relabel the Optionals as Mandatory. And they should have a larger payout. I'm not looking for a ridiculous amount of Dilthium for successfully completing one. But a performance based payout, such as with the Dilthium Mining on Vlugta, would be nice. Say cap it at 1,500 or so. With players getting a variable amount based upon how well the team did. With AFK guaranteeing a zero payout. So that player's reward being distributed equally among the others.
They were NOT labeled optional.
They corrected this with the Terran Badlands BZ.
The hardest part of advanced is when you land in a "bad" pug, and it takes 5 times longer to finish. I'm no DPS powerhouse, but I am rather middling at around 40k. I love it when I fall in with the folks doing 90k or more, and it takes 45 seconds to complete. I also don't mind it when it's sort of a challenge because the teams dps is on the lower end, but I do NOT care for having to struggle because folks don't know the content at all, or are blatantly trolling puggers.
Forget DPS, that's when it sucks to me.
My character Tsin'xing
2. PUGS are hard because people just can't play. And aren't willing to improve. Just "Hey, let's join in Advanced Queue and ruin everyone else's experience and results or get carried because I like playing a rainbow ship". This game needs to have a easier connection between casual elitism (50k dps or more) and the guys we usually carry in pugs (barely 10k tactical with random boff skills or engineer/sci that plays its role minimally poor).
3. A team that can throw in HEALS and BUFFS can easily win over ANY CONTENT. I even see now in ISA pugs that people CAN'T HEAL others. They're saving it for... the day of tommorow. Nobody realises that if that stupid-guy-that-carries-us dies (the top dps grabs the top threat when surrounded by under-performers), they won't do any worth-mentioning dps and will also die - and fail opts, fail the mission. Learn to SUPPORT and HEAL. STF's are TEAM QUEUES.
4. The worst pugs: Procyon/Days of Doom/ISA. And mentionable others: Undine Infiltration (People can't even read the clues - minimal effort, minimal results)/Counterpoint (Some people can't really understand that people need to close portals and transport attack teams besides being DPS-trigger-happy./Assault on Terok Nor (Some people can't quite get the fact that if you're a sloppy non-coordinated teammate, you're doing it wrong. This is a TEAM QUEUE.)
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."