Uneven diffuculty inside missions?

chryckan · August 2017

Is it just me but doesn't the difficulty of opponent you face fluctuates widely in missions.

I don't mean that different missions have different difficulty. I mean that in the same mission you at one moment face foes that can barely pen your shields just to get one shotted the next fight.

Maybe it's because my character just reached 60 and I'm still flying a T5 ship still with mostly looted/reward gear but I'm dying a lot during pve story missions.
Either I win a space battle without even really having to worry about buffs or abilities or I die faster than my heals can help and just have to respawn and repeat until the It's just weird and frustrating since there don't seem to be any logic to it.

antonine3258 · August 2017

It can depend on enemy type too compared to ship, or bad luck with criticals - which mission are you having trouble with?

walligig · August 2017

I notice this sometimes too. Recently I started a new klingon toon. I got to level 10 and tried Brushfire on advanced. I got through the first 2 patrols without too much of a struggle. Then I got to the So'na battleship and it wiped the floor with me. After struggling with it for 30 minutes I gave up and went off to do another mission. In my case though the So'na were probably not meant to be taken on at level 10 or at least not on a difficulty higher then normal. So enemy type can matter a lot.

killer1986chris · August 2017

I've found similar in pretty much every game once I get to a boss type critter.

spiritborn · August 2017

Essentially it depends on heavily on what kind of mob you're dealing with IIRC some mobs that you face on early levels haven't really been updated to be a challenge to max level players while others have been updated or started that way to begin, not mention that a lot of high level enemies depend on a gimmick of some sort (in case of the So'na it's disabling your shields which is one of more annoying ones).

antonine3258 · August 2017

Just as an example - Breen rely heavily on energy drain and slowing powers - if your ship doesn't have very good drain resistance or ways to boost powers and ways to clear subnucleonic, they can do a lot of damage and not take much back.

davefenestrator · August 2017

Or fighting plasma weapons and you don't have Hazard Emitters slotted or don't use it properly, then your goose is cooked

Or fighting tractor beams or mines and you don't have Polarize Hull or know how to use evasive maneuvers, then you're in a bit of a jam

arionisa · August 2017

I've seen it on most FEs. The episode is written for level 60 players, and is full of NPCs with 6-8 weapons per ship that also have various high "rank" powers, some of which can only be countered by higher rank BoFF/Captain skills. Skills that a lvl 10 player in their T2 ship just plain doesn't have access to yet.

Even though the damage output of each individual enemy weapon might be scaled down due to the player level, they are still facing ships with 2 times the amount of weapons per ship (or more), having the same effect as throwing 2-3 times as many ships at them at once. That is along with the ships having and using powers that can not be countered as the necessary Captain/BoFF skill needed isn't available to the lvl 10 player.

I get around this by the simple expedient of accepting the mission while it still a Featured Episode, but not actually playing it until I get that toon to a level where he can actually complete the mission without requiring a 1-2 hour grind trying to kill the last big boos. Yes, I actually slugged away at that Tzenkithi boss you had to "defeat" on your way to the moon when that was an FE for over an hour with my lvl 10 toon before giving up. Came back after I hit lvl 20 and had a slightly better ship and skills and took him out in a decent length of time.

As long as you accept the mission while it is still a Featured Episode, you can go in and play it even after it ceases being an FE and goes to being a lvl 60 only mission, including replaying as much as desired, even if you are nowhere near lvl 60 yet.

avoozuul · August 2017

One thing I have found is it is useful to rely on the help from allies to take down the battleship, you need to try and take down the minor enemies first particularly the ones your allies are focusing on, so when the battleship is the remaining enemy all your allies and you ca focus on it to make short work of taking it down.

postagepaid · August 2017

There are some FE fights where abilities fire off less at lower levels (mirrors & smoke) but as said above that fight was a grind even knowing about hitting the front because the health was just stupidly high and allies did bugger all to help. Similar ally uselessness happens in the final borg arc mission except thats partly because the borg ship moves so much faster than the fleet who cant follow beyond half impulse so you just have to hope the pathing slaps the borg into a wall.

Brushfire has enemies that spawn in during the end space sequence that are triggered by torg's ship going down to 0 and that cutscene, this is design flaw that obviously got past whoever they had testing it.

Outside those some fights can be tricky and almost push you into pausing to make sure abilities like hazard emitters aren't on cooldown.

Ground can have a few WTF moments as well partly due to abilities and partly to inept boffs and level design.

walligig · August 2017

postagepaid wrote: »

Ground can have a few WTF moments as well partly due to abilities and partly to inept boffs and level design.

Yeah, The Cardassian arc comes to mind. They love to spam their grenades and your boffs just don't have the ability to roll out of their blast radius. Breen Captains can be a problem too because your officers will just stand there and get nuked by that cone attack.

anodynes · August 2017

postagepaid wrote: »

Brushfire has enemies that spawn in during the end space sequence that are triggered by torg's ship going down to 0 and that cutscene, this is design flaw that obviously got past whoever they had testing it.

The cutscene triggers when every other Klingon ship is destroyed, and Torg's is disabled, at around 2-3% hull. I know this because I always focus on Torg first, and it certainly doesn't trigger when his ship is disabled if there are any other enemy Klingon ships active. Aside from that, the design flaw was not that the Son'a and Tzenkethi spawned in during that cutscene, but that they were hostile before the Son'a hailed you. That was fixed at least a week ago, so they hail you, then become hostile when you refuse to stand down.

Uneven diffuculty inside missions?

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