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Lets make Crystalline Cataclysm Actually CHALLENGING/FUN again
zerokillcf2011
Member Posts: 545 Arc User
Without getting into changing game mechanics to make it harder....just be SMART. It is a THING that thinks after all.....so now they are teaming up and learning from dieing THOUSANDS of times.....and the result is:
1) IT MOVES! Like it did in the show, so dumping GW3 and all that becomes a little less effective
2) On advanced que there are TWO or THREE entities, so you would have to communicate and team up and "space magic" wouldn't be the kill all as the cool down would make it more difficult with the entities spread over the map
3) Get rid of ONLY Tholians as the baddies, make it like Starbase Defense and randomly select from "universal" baddies: Tholians, Borg, Iconian, Sphere Builders, Dominion, Mirror Universe, and Cardassian/True Way (This prevents anti-tetryon builds from ruling all as with multiple entities the mission would run longer and thus defense builds would come BACK into style on this event)
4) Create and ELITE map that has 4 or 5 entities
Even for the regular crystalline catastrophe PVE I would suggest #3 would still be more fun, and possibly all of them.
1) IT MOVES! Like it did in the show, so dumping GW3 and all that becomes a little less effective
2) On advanced que there are TWO or THREE entities, so you would have to communicate and team up and "space magic" wouldn't be the kill all as the cool down would make it more difficult with the entities spread over the map
3) Get rid of ONLY Tholians as the baddies, make it like Starbase Defense and randomly select from "universal" baddies: Tholians, Borg, Iconian, Sphere Builders, Dominion, Mirror Universe, and Cardassian/True Way (This prevents anti-tetryon builds from ruling all as with multiple entities the mission would run longer and thus defense builds would come BACK into style on this event)
4) Create and ELITE map that has 4 or 5 entities
Even for the regular crystalline catastrophe PVE I would suggest #3 would still be more fun, and possibly all of them.
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- aim for first place
-fly in a Tier 3 ship (did that yesterday, was fun)
- remove your shields
that sort of Thing
question: you want Things more challenging - do you Play storyline missions on normal or advanced Level?
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
- Haven't tried a T3 ship yet, did do a T1 Connie.........which blew up a lot, but was different
And I play on normal usually for the first run through of new missions, then bump to advanced for replays.
And my point is just that the majority of my Cataclysm runs last less than 60 seconds (again, 11 chars, prob 3-4 runs each a day for the last 7 days so far) is a problem. I know it's power creep and all, just saying in general "advanced" ques.....aren't. Everything should be bumped down a notch. Advanced down to normal, Elite to advanced, and the new Elite should be HARD. When ELITE first came out it was VERY HARD to beat WITH active communication, and IMPOSSIBLE with just a random group pug doing their own thing. That's all my point was in reference too, as most of the PVE ques are dead....I don't see them being changed. But Crystalline Catastrophe/Cataclysm ALWAYS has players, so just make it AVAILABLE as a challenge if you so desire.
Take all my suggestions, add them to an Elite que then for Cystalline. Done.
1. It already moves. However, so do a lot of Gravity Wells and other leashed anomalies these days...
2 and 3. The Tholians revere the Crystalline Entity as a sort-of-God (they're both crystalline, after all). Therefore the selection of Tholians as the guardians is "thematically appropriate", however, there's no need to deal with the guardians while nuking the Entity. I would actually propose the following: Add an "optional" to normal for "killing all Tholian Guardians before killing the entity", and making it "mandatory" on Advanced: via the entity being immortal until such time as all Tholians are destroyed.
4. Much like the STFs (and all other STO content, for that matter), we're repeatedly nuking the "one true secondary Entity that visits on blah/blah/2109", not killing off thousands of different entities. So having "the whole family" along for the ride isn't exactly supposed to happen. However, a full squadron of Elite Level Tholians having to be killed before tackling an elite level Entity has "promise" to making the map take forever (especially since teams might have to bring more pew-pew to tackle the Tholian Guard Wing)...
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]
The Breech Event took longer. Was more challenging. For same reward. I didn't bother. Neither did most other fleet member. Some only did it on one toon.
if you want challenging - do that for yourself (like advanced missions). Others see that as grinding and want to get it over with. When they raised the lvl to 60 all my gear was second rate - I am still grinding to get my 18 toons some top gear. I Need marks and Dilithium. I cannot catch up with xp to max out all specialisation trees - but I want to be at least up to date with my gear and not be a liability to my PvE Teams.
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
Space Magic is the kill all on this encounter because of the specific changes made to the entity that makes it far more vulnerable to space magic. Adding two more entities won't change that. Just make it take longer.
Tholians are friends of the CE. The other races would be attacked by the CE itself. Thematically this doesn't work well.
Elite? Yes! More entitities? Won't do much.
STO's condition in my view at the moment is a grind-house casino which will go on and on until people are fed up with grinding. Being forced to self-nerf in order to have an enjoyable experience to me ruins any sense of progression or desire to acquire new things. I'm having more fun playing lowly alts. But for proper strategy and challenge, team coordination, build tinkering outside of DPS chasing, STO's not the game for it for me anymore.
Luckily, it isn't the only online game.
I like that fix too. Make it a mission success requirement to destroy the Tholians. That works for me.
so you are playing this on the easy que? and are commenting at all on my thread to make it harder because.............why? Obviously this thread isn't for people like you, so I'm confused by your need to make any comment at all?
So you are saying the game works 100% the way it was designed and that makes you mad? You have to struggle and work to get a fully kitted end game character? And that get's harder and involves MORE work when you have many end game characters......hmmmmmm....it sounds like the solution to your problem and time management skills and all, may be to just focus on the handful of characters you CAN handle? I mean if you are using alts for dilithium farming, that's fine.....but if you want all 18 to be 100% maxed out on everything and you are finding that difficult, then BRAVO to the devs for still apparently leaving some difficulty in the game! Esp considering the level 60 and the skill tress have been out for a long time now.......
Making it heal itself like it used to way back when wouldn't hurt, either.
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You make it seem like having 18 toons is a requirement for the game...
Just don't make the way it used to be when Delta Rising initially was released. I remember hammering away at it on the day DR was released for around 45 minutes before I simply left the advanced queue.
Hint: when you hammer away at something for 45 minutes on Advanced, that's the game telling you to go play Normal. The purpose of having difficulty levels is for players of different capabilities all have appropriate content, not for everyone to get into higher levels and then complain.
Actually, I have forgotten that there was an CCE which is what I meant to type instead of CCA. CCE was a good challenge for me before DR; definitely not a cakewalk.
I was merely curious to see how much effort was needed... and people came and left so it wasn't like there were always 9 other players with me. In fact, there was a point when there were me and another player evaluating the situation.
Adding more Entities is a good way to make BFAW more relevant, so this Queue will also be more like Infected Elite, without actually achieving anything for difficulty or challenge.
The only meaningful change I could see is making the fight against the Entity more complex - but seriously - it's the Crystalline Entity, not a Borg Cube. That it's hard to kill in the first place is questionable. No one ever claimed the original CE was resistent to weapon fire. It was killed by sabotaging the device that was used to establish communication with it - that's basically like killing a person with the speaker from his phone.
If anything, they should replace the CE with a First Contact or Best of Both Worlds strength Borg Cube.
The only thing that's going to make any encounter proportionately challenging for the well-geared is damage reflection... and people LOSE THEIR COTTON PICKING MINDS any time an enemy actually has damage reflection and the 60k and up crowd start vaporizing themselves.
Its not a challenge-based game. Its a pastime. That's not going to change until serious underlying issues in the mechanics are addressed, and that's NEVER going to happen because doing that doesn't fit the business model this keeps this pastime limping along.
Before the revamp, the original CC was often tried like that...by 20 players. That one was Hard. Pretty much only completable by premades that knew the exact right strategy. In pugs, people would get its health down to 33% and then it'd heal itself. But that was years ago it would probably be puggable now.
However:
1) Cryptic heads (geko) have gone on record saying that "more power" is how they know to sell, so powerdash will become powermaddash
2) previous attempts to "add difficulty" were simple number changes to enemy HP/attack with time limits, not challenge
3) the enormous and growing gulf between an "average" player's performance and an "elite" player's performance
4) the fact that rewards are limited to a character, in a game that promotes (to varying levels of success) multi-character play
I think the only real way you could change this up and have a shot at making it at least digestible for everyone would be adding some form of matchmaking combined with scaling "difficulty," but I don't know as the playerbase is big enough to support this or if there's any form of infrastructure that could categorize players.
Finally, make the specialty reward an account unlock in some fashion, to compensate for the increased effort required. Maybe once one character unlocks the reward all other characters of that faction on that account can claim it, or a full unlock on one character unlocks a smaller reward account-wide (up to some maximum), or just any character like the event ships, or...
Because, in the unlikely event some developer actually considers heeding your request, the voice of people who do not want some silly grind event to become more tedious should also be heard. There's always a chance any change they make would affect the Normal difficulty queue.
I couldn't resist.
That event was also nearly impossible to complete too but I think the visual representation was better back then than now. Now it feels no bigger than a Borg cube, even if you are in a larger ship like the Assault Cruiser.
And today, this version of the CC would probabl ynot be a challenge, either.
The reason the old CC was hard to beat was because people hit it with targetable torpedoes and collided with Crystalline Shards. Today, however, those shards will be stuck in the countless Gravity Wells, and the bit of healing from the random targetable torpedo from some idiot will be DPSed away.
And back then CC was not an event you had to run every day for 14 days in a row across 6 alts. It was a fun event you did if you felt like trying it. There were no astounding rewards that justified doing it otherwise.
In short, the game has moved on.
I agree with those three comments.
After the 10x8 parses I took the past week in CCa I would also like to point out that roughly 95% of the players noticing unchallenging CCa matches only “witness” them and do not contribute to them.
5% of the player base are responsible for the unchallenging matches. Interestingly those 5% carrying the matches are, at least to an extent, challenged by clearing a map designed for 10 players almost on their own. This is often my experience as I usually get 8-9 first places out of the 10 runs I do daily.
For anybody who turns out to be bored in CCa on a regular basis I highly recommend our elite space maps. Give them a chance! They are hardly played by anybody. All those sub 10k builds in there will basically guarantee a challenge for everybody, especially me.
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I agree with you. This is why I think CCN and CCA should be left relatively untouched except for lowering team numbers to 5 from 10. A CCE needs to be added, one with greater rewards to serve the high-end players. The CCE is where the suggestions thrown around here could be considered.
The above could entice the high-end players to move to Elite so that those in Normal and Advanced can have a better challenge (rather than just watching someone virtually solo the run).
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My character Tsin'xing
Crystalline catastrophe- First would be to make the Tholians more active in guarding the Entity. I mean it would be nice to see them use hull heals on it at points. Also they could use things like the Tetryon reflective grid at times to reflect damage, maybe use a variation of the Tholian web construct to encase the entity an black the player's fire for awhile.
- Second would be to link the Entity's stats to the number of intact Tholian ships around it. This could be buffs to it's own Hull/health points, damage resistance, damage reduction, and even it's own damage output could be linked to this. Like it were tethered to the ships in some form, as they defended their deity.
- Third maybe have options that are linked to the Tholians in the area, which could give other bonuses like increase dil payouts. The bonus would not need to be huge, but at least enough to be worthwhile to do for many.