As far as the grindfest we have now. Ehh.. I did space ones to kill time for the CD's to reset. I always got most of my marks from ground STFs. The days of carrying two Mk X kits in to The Cure Applied Elite on my Tac and Sci are long since gone. I do miss tanking Aramek at times.
Yea... I've noticed that ground seemed to give more marks too. My fleet actually came up with a rather fun way to play Cure Ground.
We called it the Sword Run.
Go in with melee weapons and cut up everything in sight. Was funny as hell, and very fun. The downside though... was fighting Armek. We usually had our medic tank him and we shot him when we could. But the dang Cover Shields were a PITA. Couldn't just rush up to him because apparently more people triggers some kind of AoE that is nasty.
As far as the grindfest we have now. Ehh.. I did space ones to kill time for the CD's to reset. I always got most of my marks from ground STFs. The days of carrying two Mk X kits in to The Cure Applied Elite on my Tac and Sci are long since gone. I do miss tanking Aramek at times.
Yea... I've noticed that ground seemed to give more marks too. My fleet actually came up with a rather fun way to play Cure Ground.
We called it the Sword Run.
Go in with melee weapons and cut up everything in sight. Was funny as hell, and very fun. The downside though... was fighting Armek. We usually had our medic tank him and we shot him when we could. But the dang Cover Shields were a PITA. Couldn't just rush up to him because apparently more people triggers some kind of AoE that is nasty.
Yeah, Aramek's oribital bombardment can still play hell on a stacked up group. Some of my newer characters have died to it from being to close to others.
Ive said this before but STO needs a new difficulty level above Elite, "Hardcore" I would call it, something like Diablo or other grindy MMO games have, to compensate for the "power creep" of players and give those players something to focus on.
some players asked for a higher level when we only had normal and elite, cryptic created and recreated the normal, advanced and elite system we have now.
it was meant to be that normal was basically unchanged, advanced was supposed to be what elite once was and elite was harder then it used to be, only problem is they messed with all of the difficulty's across the board putting in instant fails where there shouldn't be any and increasing the shied and hull strength of the baddies on all levels.
this is basically what killed the queues in the first place and although they have made some changes so its not quite as bad as it first was nothing has been the same since.
I really don't want to go through all that again by adding yet another level of difficulty.
No, the fail conditions and the stat increases were good. The only problem is the devs turned Advanced into yet another Normal as a response to Normal players who insisted on playing Advanced and whining about it every time they didn't get carried by someone better.
As for Elite, well that never lived up to it's name in the first place.
I could see them making some kind of system that syncs up the stats of the group to either the average stats of the group, or to a preset set of stats that the stf was designed to be played with. With such a system it might sync up the group's stats in a pug to be within 5-15% of the average stats of the group, or to be within 5-15% of the preset stats of the stf, in both cases this would preserve the experience for the group as a whole an keep the stf challenging without actually making a true nerf to any abilities.. This would not really nerf anyone so much as level the playing field abit. Also this would still allow those same players to make private groups for stfs if they want to keep their unaltered stats to play thru the stf. Though i do still think there needs to be more incentive to do the content than merely the mark/dil payout for completing them.
I would definitely like to see the stfs have unique drops tied to each of them, as well as the different difficulties too. Though even the idea of having a return of the connected ground/space stfs that give you both increased payouts, but also chances at unique rewards for completing them as well. Maybe have it be a mission you get from a operative from the different reps, that contacts you with a mission requesting you finish specific stfs for a reward. Though I will also say I wish that optionals in the stf instead of paying out additional marks as they do now, would instead payout elite marks instead making it that getting the opitionals was more appealing, such as that if you got all three in say normal it would payout one elite mark while in elite it might payout two elite marks.
Are you mad at them for easy the game having easy PvE content? Give them some raids/challenge with rewards and an actual/another difficulty setting maybe they'll stay away..
As far as the grindfest we have now. Ehh.. I did space ones to kill time for the CD's to reset. I always got most of my marks from ground STFs. The days of carrying two Mk X kits in to The Cure Applied Elite on my Tac and Sci are long since gone. I do miss tanking Aramek at times.
Yea... I've noticed that ground seemed to give more marks too. My fleet actually came up with a rather fun way to play Cure Ground.
We called it the Sword Run.
Go in with melee weapons and cut up everything in sight. Was funny as hell, and very fun. The downside though... was fighting Armek. We usually had our medic tank him and we shot him when we could. But the dang Cover Shields were a PITA. Couldn't just rush up to him because apparently more people triggers some kind of AoE that is nasty.
That was allegedly Gozer's idea. It's a chain lightning attack similar to that one the Klingon ships use. I've heard that peeps who are REALLY good can gank him in melee before he uses it.
Ive said this before but STO needs a new difficulty level above Elite
The map the OP is talking about is ISA. Infected Space currently doesn't HAVE an Elite map available. And you want them to make a map beyond a level that isn't even there right now?
They could always apply the same thing to Tac consoles they did to Engineering and Science consoles-a "Diminishing Returns" algorithm. say, each additional console of the same or similar type adds 30% less performance than the one previous, possibly with the decline starting with the third console. Thus, having 4 consoles of the same type would give
worked thusly:
Value X= statted bonus from a given console by itself
x
(x-30%)
((x-30%)-30%)
((x-30%)-30%)-30%
for example, where X=30 (iirc, Purple energy console at Mk XII)
30
20
13.3
4.4
added together a total stack of 64.7
vs.
the present:
30
30
30
30
which provides 120.
the difference in damages from a 3 console cruiser or battlecruiser, and a 4 console setup, isn't all that big, right? except that an Escort or Raider gets more innate bonus to weapons power. Likewise, the difference between 4 consoles and 5 isn't that big, assuming same/similar tac consoles in use. This would probably rein in a LOT of the powercreep, while still leaving 'room' for all the build-doffs and such to boost DPS, the only thing it would really do, is rein the numbers down enough that Cryptic isn't tempted to give Dreadnought stats to Borg Probes.
The built-in workaround, of course, being to vary the console types-either using the configuration-specific consoles (say, a Beam console in there with your Antiproton consoles, or a cannon console in there), or by varying weapon type consoles (3 consoles for Antiproton, one Beam console, and a torp console for your follow-on shot, or maybe a manifold console on a beam build to get around the diminishing returns.)
Kinda the way you might mix RCS with (+turn)Armor consoles to get your defense up.
sum total impact, I wager, would be a 'nerfing' of the 120K-plus leaguers down, a mild inconvenience for the mid-range 30K-50K builds, and no net change for low-end builds. Cryptic could still make money off refined dil. for upgrading costs, (30% of gold Mk XIV is still going to leave you more than 30% of Purple or Ultraviolet MK XII)
The math on how Tactical damage buff consoles work resembles diminishing returns, even the Spire ones. Depending on your build, a fifth console might add 3% to your dps. In fact the 200k+ builds are using either one or none for actual Tactical consoles or even the Lobi Store consoles. It's the Embassy Plasma consoles that are the highly sought after ones, right after Plasmonic Leech. These consoles give a pretty dramatic increase in dps.
I saw earlier in this thread that someone suggested a 50% reduction of damage for FAW, this would probably hurt lower end players more than the higher end ones. If this nerfed happened, my 200k+ build would lose between 10-20% of my total dps in my runs. The higher end players are working in multiple things that the average player doesn't fully understand: ie. haste, armor pen, damage resistance debuff, power management, cooldown reductions, damage sources, etc. Most players in the game don't know about concepts like "damage category oversaturation", where a 30% increase in damage can actually be way less than a 10% damage increase. Almost all of the game mechanics have a diminishing returns type of effect built in, it's the high end guys that are minimizing these diminishing returns using multiple mechanics. The lower end doesn't really do this, so one thing that is hit hard will affect them to a greater extent. Just a rough guess from parses I've seen, they would probably lose between 30-40% of thier dps if they use FAW.
You can nerf stuff all you want, but the simple fact is the better players with better equipment and better ships will do far more than Captain Average Joe.
it's the high end guys that are minimizing these diminishing returns using multiple mechanics. The lower end doesn't really do this
The lower end doesn't have to do that though, as their build + gear isn't being as impacted by the limitations. Because they're still back on the lower end of the progression path.
The way I would go about dealing with high dps-ers is simply to add FBP to a great many targets and laugh maniacally as they melt their own ships. Yes it's cheap, yes it's nasty but it'd work.
The way I would go about dealing with high dps-ers is simply to add FBP to a great many targets and laugh maniacally as they melt their own ships. Yes it's cheap, yes it's nasty but it'd work.
that...is not actually a helpful suggestion at all. It's a FUNNY one...from a certain point of view-but there's this little problem of "Cryptic can't afford another player exodus" to consider.
Well I suppose it does depend a great deal on how much players are willing to adapt but it should have the effect of reducing the top end of safe output while not having a major effect on the low end players.
I enjoy playing basketball. When I feel like it, I walk to a court at my local park. Sometimes, there are only scrubs playing. Sometimes there's a player or two playing that are vastly superior to myself. At some point in a pickup game, I might pass the ball to a guy that actually goes up and does a slam dunk. Can I do a slam dunk? No, I'm quite out of shape. So what's my reaction to him dunking? I quickly realize, "hey, I should pass that guy the ball whenever he get's even relatively open."
That's the normal, natural reaction to realizing that I have a really good player on my team. My reaction isn't to walk off the court. Sit down and pout over the fact that I am not as good as this other basketball player. The natural reaction is to keep playing my game and pay attention to and learn from the better player. Maybe, I'll get into better shape if I try to. And maybe just maybe, I can dunk one day.
The solution to this disparity is to continually try and improve yourself. Learn from those that are better than you instead of blaming them and trying to bring them down to your level.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
I think people who regularly play STFs have run into those 100-155k damage build players. That's more than the collective DPS of a "normal T6 (mk 14 geared)" 5 Person Group in The Conduit Adv. Not only does it ruin the challenge completely it furthermore incourages undergeared people to join adv/elite queues. But when these "DPSguys" aren't present the run is a guaranteed fail. Many may enjoy the quick runs, i don't.
I am not sure why severely undergeared people would attempt various advanced and elite queues. To be perfectly honest it doesn't take much to create a relatively solid build. It may take a little more resources than you like, but most of all it requires a little bit of research and gut. That is to say, the courage to take a leap and try new things.
For example, you can get a very solid build by getting let's say the Narcine Aquatic dreadnought carrier for the current 60 million credits which takes about 12 master keys to acquire. You can then get a full set of phasers with the Quantum phase set, or a full set of polaron weapons with the Chronometric set if you did the research and acquired the knowledge of their existence. Then you can get advanced hangar pets from the dilithium store along with various reputation consoles by doing research into what each reputation and the dilithium store has to offer.
I think Cryptic underestimated the resourcefulness of some people when it comes to dps-building.
Or they underestimated the lack of resourcefulness of the people who cannot climb the DPS latter in any significant capacity. There are a lot of players out there who want to be spoon-fed all the information and knowledge about this game. These forums provide some ample evidence of that shown by the number of requests about builds.
The worst thing that just happened was a 2 hrs afk ban from queues. I got damaged badly in ISE so i had to break away from combat to heal up which took a bit, when i returned to combat i realized everything was destroyed already except the tactical cube, i got a few shots off before even that thing melted like ice in the sunshine. Boom, the whole run was over in less than 5 minutes. Just great, 2 hrs afk ban for not participating enough.
You must have stayed out of combat for a very long time since there is ample time between the first group of enemies and the final tactical cube to get several shots in. Well, a good strategy is to attack the targets that people don't often attack in the first place like the groups of spheres. That will net you a lot of inflicted damage.
I know you guys payed a lot of real money to get all the consoles and abilities that are required to do this insane dps but somewhere deep in your heart you know it isn't right, don't you?
And I think people know somewhere deep in their hearts that laziness and complacency are rarely rewarded and appreciated by their peers.
Truth be told, I find many players unreliable in queues and I realized that the surefire remedy to that is to simply focus on my own performance. This meant increasing my own damage and survivability to the point where I became less independent on others and can do my own thing while still knowing that I contribute in a significant capacity.
I am fully aware that we all have to start somewhere and I do not judge those players or those who are perfectly happy with where they are. But there is an abundance of players out there who have played this game for a longer period of time and are completely unwilling to get the necessary resources (whatever that may be) to acquire better gear and ships, and also lack any sort of strive for character performance improvement yet have the gall to complain about the people who are more powerful, have the gear/ships and contribute in STFs. Those sorts of complains go on my blacklist.
[...] I quickly realize, "hey, I should pass that guy the ball whenever he get's even relatively open."
That's the normal, natural reaction to realizing that I have a really good player on my team. My reaction isn't to walk off the court. [...]
Why is it that there are always people who miss the point like this?
The equivalent of STO's balance in a PvE match is not some guy being able to do a slam dunk. It is one guy being able to play completely alone against the opposing team and having no chance whatsoever to not win at least 60:0, never doing anything but 3-point baskets.
It's a very sound equivalent. The player that can dunk on a regulation court can essentially score at will against the average joe schmoe player. The standard reaction to such an event is "wow that guy is good" not "wow you are a bad guy for being so good."
He has every right to be on that court, same as anyone else.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
I am always grateful if there is a 100k+ DPSer in the pug PvE - he makes up for the ones who think they can do advanced Queues when they shouldn't. I was recently in one ISA where there were 3 (!!!!) Players doing less than 5k.
Seriously those 100k DPSers don't neccesarily enjoy pugging that much either...
Also there is a slight balancing factor - Borg shoot at the Players who do most damage - in some games I attracted 60% plus fire of the whole Team.
I think calling for a nerf of the top Players just Shows that you have given up on trying to improve your own game and blame it on others (unless they are obusing a bug).
I also read here that some wnat the fleet consoles to be nerfed - probably Players who do not grind to donate to fleets. And now are upset that those who grinded hard to get top gear and help the fleet...
18 characters
KDF: 2 tacs, 2 engs, 3 scis
KDF Roms: 3 tacs, 1 eng, 1 scis
FED: 2 tacs, 1 eng, 2 scis
TOS: 1 tac
all on T5 rep (up to temporal)
all have mastered Intel tree (and some more specs Points)
highest DPS: 60.982
Look, I'm a DPS chaser. I like the "challenge" of improving my build... Mostly because that's the only challenge to be had in the game (it used to be PvP, but the powercreep has made that utterly ridiculous).
The challenge isn't completing an STF, the challenge is completing it faster. It's nearly impossible to fail them, everything dies too easily.
It's easy to forget the challenge this game presented back in the old days, where five players would have to struggle vs a tac cube (some of them blowing up). Now you can take out the whole Borg fleet by yourself. No wonder Cryptic has started making time gated missions.
A poster above tiredly joked "nerf everything!". Yeah, that's in fact pretty much what *needs* to happen.
Starship traits for example need to be dropped from 4-5 to 1-2. Same goes for the space rep traits. Personal traits need to be halved.
Attack Pattern Alpha and other tactical buffs needs to only affect weapons, not also buff science skills.
EPG needs a huge nerf... mostly because they've added so many traits/consoles that buff it.
Universal consoles need to be limited to 1 only.
The weapon drain mechanics need to be returned to what they were originally.
The powercreep is why we lost the old Borg Elites.
Actually, we "lost" them because they were pretty poorly designed, and MMOs in general have been moving away from the "2 hour dungeons/raids" type gameplay in general, since no one wants to spend that much time on one dungeon.
Yes, because 60-second STFs and Alerts are so much better. Might as well just press a "get loot now" button
Comments
Yea... I've noticed that ground seemed to give more marks too. My fleet actually came up with a rather fun way to play Cure Ground.
We called it the Sword Run.
Go in with melee weapons and cut up everything in sight. Was funny as hell, and very fun. The downside though... was fighting Armek. We usually had our medic tank him and we shot him when we could. But the dang Cover Shields were a PITA. Couldn't just rush up to him because apparently more people triggers some kind of AoE that is nasty.
Yeah, Aramek's oribital bombardment can still play hell on a stacked up group. Some of my newer characters have died to it from being to close to others.
No, the fail conditions and the stat increases were good. The only problem is the devs turned Advanced into yet another Normal as a response to Normal players who insisted on playing Advanced and whining about it every time they didn't get carried by someone better.
As for Elite, well that never lived up to it's name in the first place.
I would definitely like to see the stfs have unique drops tied to each of them, as well as the different difficulties too. Though even the idea of having a return of the connected ground/space stfs that give you both increased payouts, but also chances at unique rewards for completing them as well. Maybe have it be a mission you get from a operative from the different reps, that contacts you with a mission requesting you finish specific stfs for a reward. Though I will also say I wish that optionals in the stf instead of paying out additional marks as they do now, would instead payout elite marks instead making it that getting the opitionals was more appealing, such as that if you got all three in say normal it would payout one elite mark while in elite it might payout two elite marks.
My favourite is watching the Crystalline Entity die in 10 seconds to exotic damage from temporal ships, not even letting it get a pulse off.
Daizen - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Selia - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
My character Tsin'xing
The map the OP is talking about is ISA. Infected Space currently doesn't HAVE an Elite map available. And you want them to make a map beyond a level that isn't even there right now?
What?
The math on how Tactical damage buff consoles work resembles diminishing returns, even the Spire ones. Depending on your build, a fifth console might add 3% to your dps. In fact the 200k+ builds are using either one or none for actual Tactical consoles or even the Lobi Store consoles. It's the Embassy Plasma consoles that are the highly sought after ones, right after Plasmonic Leech. These consoles give a pretty dramatic increase in dps.
I saw earlier in this thread that someone suggested a 50% reduction of damage for FAW, this would probably hurt lower end players more than the higher end ones. If this nerfed happened, my 200k+ build would lose between 10-20% of my total dps in my runs. The higher end players are working in multiple things that the average player doesn't fully understand: ie. haste, armor pen, damage resistance debuff, power management, cooldown reductions, damage sources, etc. Most players in the game don't know about concepts like "damage category oversaturation", where a 30% increase in damage can actually be way less than a 10% damage increase. Almost all of the game mechanics have a diminishing returns type of effect built in, it's the high end guys that are minimizing these diminishing returns using multiple mechanics. The lower end doesn't really do this, so one thing that is hit hard will affect them to a greater extent. Just a rough guess from parses I've seen, they would probably lose between 30-40% of thier dps if they use FAW.
The lower end doesn't have to do that though, as their build + gear isn't being as impacted by the limitations. Because they're still back on the lower end of the progression path.
Well I suppose it does depend a great deal on how much players are willing to adapt but it should have the effect of reducing the top end of safe output while not having a major effect on the low end players.
That's the normal, natural reaction to realizing that I have a really good player on my team. My reaction isn't to walk off the court. Sit down and pout over the fact that I am not as good as this other basketball player. The natural reaction is to keep playing my game and pay attention to and learn from the better player. Maybe, I'll get into better shape if I try to. And maybe just maybe, I can dunk one day.
The solution to this disparity is to continually try and improve yourself. Learn from those that are better than you instead of blaming them and trying to bring them down to your level.
For example, you can get a very solid build by getting let's say the Narcine Aquatic dreadnought carrier for the current 60 million credits which takes about 12 master keys to acquire. You can then get a full set of phasers with the Quantum phase set, or a full set of polaron weapons with the Chronometric set if you did the research and acquired the knowledge of their existence. Then you can get advanced hangar pets from the dilithium store along with various reputation consoles by doing research into what each reputation and the dilithium store has to offer.
Or they underestimated the lack of resourcefulness of the people who cannot climb the DPS latter in any significant capacity. There are a lot of players out there who want to be spoon-fed all the information and knowledge about this game. These forums provide some ample evidence of that shown by the number of requests about builds.
You must have stayed out of combat for a very long time since there is ample time between the first group of enemies and the final tactical cube to get several shots in. Well, a good strategy is to attack the targets that people don't often attack in the first place like the groups of spheres. That will net you a lot of inflicted damage.
And I think people know somewhere deep in their hearts that laziness and complacency are rarely rewarded and appreciated by their peers.
Truth be told, I find many players unreliable in queues and I realized that the surefire remedy to that is to simply focus on my own performance. This meant increasing my own damage and survivability to the point where I became less independent on others and can do my own thing while still knowing that I contribute in a significant capacity.
I am fully aware that we all have to start somewhere and I do not judge those players or those who are perfectly happy with where they are. But there is an abundance of players out there who have played this game for a longer period of time and are completely unwilling to get the necessary resources (whatever that may be) to acquire better gear and ships, and also lack any sort of strive for character performance improvement yet have the gall to complain about the people who are more powerful, have the gear/ships and contribute in STFs. Those sorts of complains go on my blacklist.
He has every right to be on that court, same as anyone else.
Seriously those 100k DPSers don't neccesarily enjoy pugging that much either...
Also there is a slight balancing factor - Borg shoot at the Players who do most damage - in some games I attracted 60% plus fire of the whole Team.
I think calling for a nerf of the top Players just Shows that you have given up on trying to improve your own game and blame it on others (unless they are obusing a bug).
I also read here that some wnat the fleet consoles to be nerfed - probably Players who do not grind to donate to fleets. And now are upset that those who grinded hard to get top gear and help the fleet...
KDF: 2 tacs, 2 engs, 3 scis
KDF Roms: 3 tacs, 1 eng, 1 scis
FED: 2 tacs, 1 eng, 2 scis
TOS: 1 tac
all on T5 rep (up to temporal)
all have mastered Intel tree (and some more specs Points)
highest DPS: 60.982
The challenge isn't completing an STF, the challenge is completing it faster. It's nearly impossible to fail them, everything dies too easily.
It's easy to forget the challenge this game presented back in the old days, where five players would have to struggle vs a tac cube (some of them blowing up). Now you can take out the whole Borg fleet by yourself. No wonder Cryptic has started making time gated missions.
A poster above tiredly joked "nerf everything!". Yeah, that's in fact pretty much what *needs* to happen.
Starship traits for example need to be dropped from 4-5 to 1-2. Same goes for the space rep traits. Personal traits need to be halved.
Attack Pattern Alpha and other tactical buffs needs to only affect weapons, not also buff science skills.
EPG needs a huge nerf... mostly because they've added so many traits/consoles that buff it.
Universal consoles need to be limited to 1 only.
The weapon drain mechanics need to be returned to what they were originally.
Daizen - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Selia - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Yes, because 60-second STFs and Alerts are so much better. Might as well just press a "get loot now" button