Star Trek Online Discussion Thread - Delta Rising

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Ok, I just went ahead and opened this new and fresh thread to discuss all things STO.

2 years after the beginning of Free to Play and with the release of the Delta Rising expansion it is a great time for returning players to experience a lot of new gameplay, harder challenges and a lot of new higher quality content.
Also new players can take a seat in the captain's chair for the very first time and set course to the Delta Quadrant (after dealing with lots of stuff near home first, of course).

What better way to start this discussion thread with the new gameplay trailer featuring The Doctor, Tuvok, Seven of Nine, Harry Kim and Neelix...

Enjoy

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxdNb5GDQz8&list=PL9BDAD0D1BDF2FF68&index=9[/yt]

 

[T J]

Ahhhh! Love that new thread smell!!!

I'm absolutely loving Delta Rising! My new Guardian class starship the U.S.S. Mustang is tearing up the Delta Quadrant!

 

[PlainSimpleJoel]

I'm yet to have withdraws from the game, as I take a break (I'm interstate). Looking forward to playing it later next week when I get home. Might look at the website, to see the changes.

 

[Amaris]

So far the story is good. I've done the first 3 missions, and they've been interesting and engaging. It's great to hear the actors from VOY getting a chance to reprise their roles. Some people have complained about their non-T5U/T6 ships getting blasted to pieces in PVE, but I have a T5 and it's still in one piece, so I'm not sure what their issues are.

That said, it looks like so much has been added. For a casual gamer like me it almost feels like too much, because of all the grinding that will have to be done. I mean, there's dilithium needed for everything now, unless you have piles and piles of credits to get it off the exchange.

Still, so far things are looking great, the art department has done a stellar job, and I can't wait to finish the story to see where it goes.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Yeah, that complaining is bollocks.
I have not upgraded any ship gear (though the ship itself).
but the 10% more shield and HP don't account for much.
ship mastery will be far more beneficial.

Anyway, everyone who says he gets blown up too much just has his existing weaknesses exposed which could be remedied very easily.
last night a few of us played a few missions together on Elite difficulty with upscaled enemy numbers.
glorious space battles with a bit of a challenge, but no bigger problems.
we even PUGed ISA (Infected Space Advanced) and won with optional where I have seen people whine it is impossible for even 20-30k does ships.

 

[Vendikarr]

Yeah, that complaining is bollocks.
I have not upgraded any ship gear (though the ship itself).
but the 10% more shield and HP don't account for much.
ship mastery will be far more beneficial.

Anyway, everyone who says he gets blown up too much just has his existing weaknesses exposed which could be remedied very easily.
last night a few of us played a few missions together on Elite difficulty with upscaled enemy numbers.
glorious space battles with a bit of a challenge, but no bigger problems.
we even PUGed ISA (Infected Space Advanced) and won with optional where I have seen people whine it is impossible for even 20-30k does ships.

I leveled to 60 on Tribble on Elite, with a ship at T5-U and Mk XII gear. I blew up a few extra times until I got the hang of the new enemies and what they were doing. Compensate for that and your good as gold. You can't simply plan to out DPS then all, you have to see what they're doing and adjust accordingly.

The Vaadwaur love those spacial charges or whatever they are. But they don't follow you so if you keep moving you can avoid most of the boom. Also, this is observational on my part, but they seem overly succeptable to energy drains. It seemed when I got one on a Vaadwaur ship their defenses melted away quickly.

The Hierarchy has a thing for mines. So if you fly a ship with fighers, keep them on intercept. Also you may want to stay at range with them when possible. Their weapons don't hit hard, but those mines do.

 

[intrinsical]

The only ship I had difficulty with on Elite difficulty is the Vaadwaur Heavy Artillery Vessel. That thing has a ton of shielding AND hullpoints.

 

[Tirius]

I have to agree that the difficulty increase - so far -is managable. I'm levelling up my sci main with his so-so fleet star cruiser (it's not efficient, we just have fond memories together), nothing upgraded except the ship itself. And while some of the fights take longer, at 54 I've not exploded yet. I't just a matter of adapting, like the Hierarchy's sensor jams requiring sci team that I normally only use for shield heals. Ground is another story, but I've just not built my character for that.

I'll be taking my main tac in his Steamrunner for the next run - he's a pure DPS build with top-level gear, but with only HE1 for science powers. It will be interesting to see if for once he actually performs worse.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

I just played a fleet alert.
We cleared Wave 3, but time ran out halfway through wave 4.
Were fighting Tholians.
We had one T2 player in there, which a couple of good endgame players can compensate for.
Otherwise there was a Jem Hadar Dread with us and a Phantom.
here I can confirm complaints about unnecessary high hitpoints.
Those Tholians were much tougher than the Borg cubes in Borg Disconnected.

I uspect this is unintentional, since this is a mission for level 10-60 and not for level 60s only.
Will probably be fixed.

This is the only mission I encountered so far that seemed out of balance.

I have heard the same thing about No Win Scenario, though there it probably is not a bad thing when no one can complete it except fully maxed level 60s in T6 fleet ships.

Strategies against Delta enemies will be interesting to develop.

For now I found that having science team available is very important.
A lot of them use science debuffs like the Hierachy with their sensor jam.
When you face more than one of them wait until they all hit you with it (they usually do that more or less at the same time) and then clear the debuff from all of them at once.

 

[intrinsical]

I just let my pets attack first, let them get sensor jammed. Then I move in for the kill. One thing that I found interesting was a huge dps increase in my ship just from levelling up. My Recluse used to do 15k dps at level 50 in the old ISE. Yesterday at level 56 with the almost exact same ship (+1 extra Vulnerability Locator) I was doing 23k dps in ISA.

 

[Palladin5]

I rounded up all my dilly and my Zen and bought the Delta Pack. I used the upgrade token to upgrade my Oddy. I have been flying the missions with T5U and XII gear and so fas seems very manageable. I did a few standard STFs (conduit and cure) and holy cow sliced through them like butter. After a few more levels I'll start playing with my T6 ships to see how they both do with the harder stuff.

 

[Joel_Kirk]

Just want to echo in on the difficulty for the 'Advanced' levels:

Yes, there is a new bit of difficulty. Yesterday, while playing one of the crystalline catastrophe's (Advanced) the group I was a part of weren't able to complete it.

We found the crystalline going down slowly but surely, while Tholians were being a nuisiance (some who weren't really feeling my beams or sci attacks). Many of us were getting consistently blown up, and I even made a remark to the 'team' that the level is now a bit more difficult.

Over time, everyone left the scenario.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Blamo and me tested out my new strategy for Cure Space Advanced. Worked like a charm.
We completed the mission in almost half the time neded for teh optional, while the rest of the team took pot shots at the incoming BoPs and Raptors.
Once the shipyards were incapacitated they joined us and we cleaned out the rest of the Borg together. The carrier is now escorted by 2 spheres but I barely noticed them and it went down almost as fast as before.

 

[pteal1979]

Just want to echo in on the difficulty for the 'Advanced' levels:

Yes, there is a new bit of difficulty. Yesterday, while playing one of the crystalline catastrophe's (Advanced) the group I was a part of weren't able to complete it.

We found the crystalline going down slowly but surely, while Tholians were being a nuisiance (some who weren't really feeling my beams or sci attacks). Many of us were getting consistently blown up, and I even made a remark to the 'team' that the level is now a bit more difficult.

Over time, everyone left the scenario.

The same happened to me on Tuesday, just after the launch everyone else bailed after 15 minutes apart from me.
The recluses has hull hp of 1 million, and the entity had hp of over 22 million.

 

[Joel_Kirk]

Just want to echo in on the difficulty for the 'Advanced' levels:

Yes, there is a new bit of difficulty. Yesterday, while playing one of the crystalline catastrophe's (Advanced) the group I was a part of weren't able to complete it.

We found the crystalline going down slowly but surely, while Tholians were being a nuisiance (some who weren't really feeling my beams or sci attacks). Many of us were getting consistently blown up, and I even made a remark to the 'team' that the level is now a bit more difficult.

Over time, everyone left the scenario.

The same happened to me on Tuesday, just after the launch everyone else bailed after 15 minutes apart from me.
The recluses has hull hp of 1 million, and the entity had hp of over 22 million.

It does seem like it.

 

[syberghost]

I'm a little perturbed with them right now. The deal the volunteer forum mods had with PWE was that we're not under any quotas, not required to log in on any schedule; we just moderate when we read, at our own pace. If they want to give somebody an assignment or a requirement, it has to be an employee, and we aren't getting paid, so there's no pressure and no assignments.

But the new guy fired several of us for "inactivity", and not only didn't tell us it was going to happen, but didn't tell us AFTER IT HAPPENED. He's not responding to emails; he didn't even comment until one of us took it public on Twitter. I'd been active on the moderator forum acknowledging recent policy changes as recently as a couple of weeks ago, and PMed him in game about something last week. Another mod had informed us all (including in the moderator forum "AFK" thread) that he was dealing with personal issues and would be off for a while, and been assured this was no problem, since we're not under any quotas or anything.

Fired anyway. Logged on one day to find I'd lost access to mod forums and my signature had been forcibly blanked and title removed.

Kinda pissed.

 

[Cyke101]

I've heard most of the complaints about the difficulty stem more from STFs than the story missions themselves. And while the story missions are indeed tougher, I think end-game players had been spoiled a bit and are trying to compensate for these new challenges. Personally speaking, I like that the new challenges in story mode put my ship at risk. I haven't died yet, but there's a certain thrill to having the ship nearly blow up -- just like in the show! But even the difficulty difference between a lv. 50 Undine mission and a lv. 52 DQ mission is pretty stark, which is a good thing imo -- strange new worlds and all that. Story missions where you can just wade through fleets because of high DPS really take away the role-playing immersion and player investment in the story.

 

[intrinsical]

I'm a little perturbed with them right now. Kinda pissed.

My sympathies for you and the other mods who were fired. I've been Druid community lead for Vanguard since alpha stage and have faced similar issues in the past. Fact is even though we may be granted a few more powers than the rest of the players, we're volunteers and are still considered as outsiders to the dev team. So long as there's no PR issues, they are usually more interested in what they can get out of us rather than what they can do for us and the community at large.

That said, there's always two sides to the story. A couple of forum posters and I have been having issues with one particular mod for the past few months who we felt has gone overboard and was overly rude. I'm not going into details as to what the mod did, but I know several players have alerted smirk about what this mod had posted. So maybe some of the mods were fired for legitimate reasons?

 

[Joel_Kirk]

I've heard most of the complaints about the difficulty stem more from STFs than the story missions themselves. And while the story missions are indeed tougher, I think end-game players had been spoiled a bit and are trying to compensate for these new challenges. Personally speaking, I like that the new challenges in story mode put my ship at risk. I haven't died yet, but there's a certain thrill to having the ship nearly blow up -- just like in the show! But even the difficulty difference between a lv. 50 Undine mission and a lv. 52 DQ mission is pretty stark, which is a good thing imo -- strange new worlds and all that. Story missions where you can just wade through fleets because of high DPS really take away the role-playing immersion and player investment in the story.

I've noticed the difficulty ranges are from 51 - 59, PvE missions. (I haven't yet started the actual Delta missions since I want to upgrade stuff).

But yeah, many of us were spoiled for a long duration...now, we have to rethink our builds.

Even though I'm in my sci Recon I still manage to hit 3rd place in the Starbase 24 PvE mission once or twice even before the Delta Rising change.

 

[syberghost]

That said, there's always two sides to the story. A couple of forum posters and I have been having issues with one particular mod for the past few months who we felt has gone overboard and was overly rude. I'm not going into details as to what the mod did, but I know several players have alerted smirk about what this mod had posted. So maybe some of the mods were fired for legitimate reasons?

Entirely possible. My objection isn't so much that we got fired, it's that we haven't HEARD any story; it was just out of the blue, with no explanation even after the fact. It's been days. smirk not only has my email address, he's got my friggin' cellphone number. And Skype handle. And every other IM. And I'm in Cryptic's chat server 10 hours a day.

I'll bet you the one you've had problems with is still there. You can look and see who the mods are by pulling up any forum and looking down toward the bottom.