STO questions

[Sharp-kun]

What's the end-game like now? We were there for the original "raids" (READ: 5 pugs usually consisting of 4 DPS Tac and 1 Sci Healer) and they were brutally hard, but not in a good way. They required heavy levels of precision in a game that, up until that point, could be summarized by the old Leeroy Jenkins video: run in, blast shit, and hope everything else dies before you do.

When I last did it the old Borg elite STF's had become faceroll in pugs. The newer ones aren't much better.

They also equalised the rewards between the Borg ones (no longer shields from one, engines from another etc). This means everyone just runs Infected Space now. The 4th Borg one (Into the Hive) is actually challenging on Elite but there's no additional reward for doing it.




Has this Galaxy reboot fixed the Dread?

[StarSword]

Has this Galaxy reboot fixed the Dread?

Fleet Galaxy Dread details

Nope. You still need to go to a lot of effort to make dual cannons usable on it. And unfortunately, even with the extra tac console it's still an engi tank in a game where power creep has gotten to the point where tanks and healbots literally don't have a role anymore.

I'm not kidding about that. These dayse even the squishiest tacscort can pack in enough heals that it'll last reasonably well against about anything in the NPCs' arsenal*, and even on Elite death consists of "take a fifteen second time-out" if you brought ship components along to fix injuries (which most people do). In PVE if you're not meaningfully contributing to DPS or packing offensive sci for applications like crowd control, you're just slowing down the rest of the team.

Basically, if you want to fly a Starfleet cruiser, the really usable choices for PVE are the Avenger-class (offense-over-defense KDF-style BC that's dual-cannon capable without a whole lot of jury-rigging, but lacks native cloak), the Sovereign-class (excellent choice for aux2batt builds, although you're basically forced to use its lt universal slot for a science officer), the Excelsior-class, or the tactical Odyssey.

I fly a Fleet Avenger.

* The exception being the Voth. They're basically tailor-made for making a tacscort jock's life a living hell. They're slow, but they love to throw up these impenetrable shields that outlast a typical escort alpha strike, and their beam overloads and transphasic chroniton torpedoes can put a hurting on a cruiser.

[White Haven]

STO suffers badly from powercreep, such that the STFs are fuck-easy now. There are a few exceptions, but mostly they're due to broken mechanics of one sort or another. It's still fun to play, but there's very little challenge if you don't wear your pants atop your head (or if you are not in a group full of other people who wear their pants atop their heads).

[Lord Revan]

btw do you know how long will it take for the restrictions for newly created accounts to go away?

[Agent Sorchus]

I think it is 10 hours, however if you get 140 ish dillithium you can buy a single zen on the dillithium exchange and immediately ignore the restrictions since their system counts you as having payed. Or at least last I checked.

[Skywalker_T-65]

It's been some time since I've played, but I remember having fun with STO. I do so love my Ambassador.

As others have said though, the end-game does get rather problematic content-wise. Last time I played, I found remarkably little to do other than tool around replaying missions or doing STF's for the occasional goody. Probably why I haven't played in so long. Though to be fair I haven't tried the Voth stuff yet.

[StarSword]

Though to be fair I haven't tried the Voth stuff yet.

It's reasonably fun but the storyline needed a lot more work. (I'm one of those really nitpicky guys who cares about having things make actual sense.) Basically there's five main things to do:

• Ground PVE territory-control battle zone that lets you fight dinosaurs with freaking laser beams on their heads. God as my witness, I am not making that up: that's the actual phrase one of the devs used. It's fun if you've got halfway-decent ground gear (no need for a ground-specced character), but time-consuming.
  
• Space PVE territory-control battle zone. Rough and not busy enough to complete the bonus objective in my experience.
• Mini-mission-based sandbox zone. I do the daily and leave.
• "The Breach", a space raid instance that borrows heavily from the ROTJ Death Star run (surface attack to blow a hole in a Voth fortress-ship, dive into the hole and follow the corridors until you reach the reactor, blow that up, then GTFO). Good source for Dyson marks and easy-peasy in a decent beam cruiser. Elite is hard on tacscorts for various reasons.
• A couple of different featured episodes, the second of which blows a Voth city-ship-sized plot hole through the entire story justification for the Dyson scenario. Still, they're well-written and -choreographed individually, and at least we got Michael Dorn voicing Worf out of it.

@Lord Revan: I'm @starswordc in the game if you're interested. I play about once a week these days.

[Lord Revan]

this might seem stupid but what does UTC stand for (time zone wise)?

[Elheru Aran]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

[Elheru Aran]

Ghetto edit to add:

One thing that does get old with STO is their weekly site maintenance. This tends to happen during prime playing time for me (I'm a night-time worker, so I play in the daytime when the baby's napping). So, that's frustrating. It's something like a couple hours in the morning, Pacific US time, which means it's right about now. Should wind up soon, but still.

[Lord Revan]

Ghetto edit to add:

One thing that does get old with STO is their weekly site maintenance. This tends to happen during prime playing time for me (I'm a night-time worker, so I play in the daytime when the baby's napping). So, that's frustrating. It's something like a couple hours in the morning, Pacific US time, which means it's right about now. Should wind up soon, but still.

that's why I asked cause this is more or less prime playing time for me atm and the maintenance won't be done for another hour (roughly 19:30 for me), sure I could play during night but during the week I'd prefer to sleep.

[Lord Revan]

Thanks for the gear, I've taken the Warp core to use and will take the mirror universe ship to use once I hit level 45 (yeah I leveled from 1 to level 40 or so in less then a week without rushing that much).

[Elheru Aran]

A brief note now that I've started another character (a Klink again, had to delete my first one).

Is it me or are the Borg encounters more or less totally pointless when you're a pretty low level? Unless you get lucky and there's some high-level guys in your party, you're basically going to be a bunch of noobs milling around taking potshots at the cubes and dying one by one very quickly...

[StarSword]

A brief note now that I've started another character (a Klink again, had to delete my first one).

Is it me or are the Borg encounters more or less totally pointless when you're a pretty low level? Unless you get lucky and there's some high-level guys in your party, you're basically going to be a bunch of noobs milling around taking potshots at the cubes and dying one by one very quickly...

Nope, not just you. Had the same experience with Kanril Eleya (my Fed) and I'm having it now with Brokosh (my KDF). High-level players that take part in the Borg invasions tend to carry a lot of groups because the new toons just don't have the DPS.

It's possible to take the Unimatrix out with a group that has all T3 ships (I've been there), but it requires everybody to be paying attention and all targeting the same shield facing. Endgame players on new toons tend to forget that.

[Lord Revan]

btw is it possible to play an Ambush style in space combat with the KDF or Romulan Republic characters?

[Agent Sorchus]

btw is it possible to play an Ambush style in space combat with the KDF or Romulan Republic characters?

Kinda. Against players it's a very high skill ceiling, and probably the highest gear requirements in the game. I've tried and ended up doing nothing. Romulans have it easier but not that much easier. You can't deal pressure damage at all, it literally has to be a single massive hit through shields, often only a crit even then. The other option is to play a stealth torpedo boat, buuuuut torp boats are hard (they deal miniscule amounts of damage) and you have to pay real money for the only two ships that can fire torpedoes from cloak.

And in PvE there is basically no point cause the ai is dumb as shit and can often see you through any amount of cloaking.

And as far as cloak detection, in pvp it's important cause there are those overgeared high skilled bird of prey drivers out there, but in PVE ai stealth doesn't work like player stealth so you can't see them anyway.

PS never put points into stealth skill, it doesn't do jack shit.

[Lord Revan]

I really wish the game would "notice" what species you're playing, I mean my KDF character is an Orion but the NPCs don't treat her any differently then a generic Klingon, also I assuming I can somehow get my hands on the Zen the Orion ships are KDF only right?

[Scottish Ninja]

Yeah, that always bugged me. I'd love to see something like Orion and Gorn mini-factions, like the Romulans, but automatically aligned with the Klingons. Probably too much to ask from Cryptic at the moment though, especially with the wrinkle of having to sort out existing characters.

For bonus funtimes, try "Everything Old is New" and "Night of the Comet" with you and your away team dressed in authentic TOS uniforms, and get questioned about your strange-looking uniforms. For even more funtimes, this.

[Simon_Jester]

Then there's the "Peppermint Patty" effect; you can picture female officers going their entire careers constantly saying "AND STOP CALLING ME SIR!!!"

The uniform thing is if anything even sillier.

As to the D-7 idea, I can think of one issue: all the truly old ships you see in STO (The Miranda, the Connie, the D-7, let alone the NX-class) are strongly implied to have been heavily modernized, with weapons and shielding updated to reflect 150 years of technological change. You can kit them out with things like quantum torpedoes that simply did not exist in the TOS era.

So it may well be that even if you show up in an actual D-7 hull, you're still insanely conspicuous. It'd be like appearing in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars with a "sailing ship" that carries an outboard motor, World War II artillery, and a crew with a Stinger missile launcher in the crow's nest. At a glance, you might look like you fit in, because the ship has a wooden hull and sails. But anyone who spends more than a few seconds looking at your ship will notice how anachronistic it is. So you still need a disguise.

[Elheru Aran]

Part of the problem is how STO runs. To make things easier for the servers and what not involved, it takes the approach of simply using a base set of stats and then skinning it out as required. Thus Klingons are one set of stats for characters that get either a Klingon, Lethean, Nausicaan, Gorn, whatever skin; the base stats are the same, there's really no benefit either way. There are simply too many alien races with too many individual properties to create realistic player units for each one.

It's the same situation for the ships, which is why within the same class any starship will have the same performance and stats no matter how much you change their appearance. Take Federation level 1-10, the Miranda, Shikahr, and Centaur are identical under the skin.

It would be lovely if they could program in a little more variety, but I do understand that's probably somewhat beyond their capabilities...

[StarSword]

I really wish the game would "notice" what species you're playing, I mean my KDF character is an Orion but the NPCs don't treat her any differently then a generic Klingon,

That's one of my biggest problems with the game, honestly, and it's not limited to the KDF.

• Every Starfleet mission seems to be under the impression that the PC is a human. Kanril Eleya (my Fed tac) is a Bajoran but everybody in Hathon treats her like some idiot who's never been to Bajor before. Do you idiots not see the ridges on my nose? Likewise, there's a diplomatic mission on Vulcan dealing with an ambassador from the Romulan Star Empire that makes every Vulcan PC look like they slept through their entire grade school history class.
• Every KDF mission period assumes the PC is a Klingon. My KDF engi is a Lethean (and Federation-educated, no less), who according to the backstory Cryptic wrote are only KDF-aligned because they're being paid. And yet Brokosh is still babbling about honor and glory and spamming gratuitous thlIngan Hol.
  There's this one mission, "Alpha", where you can beat some information out of a captured Tal Shiar guy, after which he calls you on being an honorable warrior when you're just a brute. In my head, Brokosh smashed his face over his knee and grabbed him by the hair and yelled in his face, "Do I look like a fucking Klingon? I have teeth running down the middle of my face, you stupid pointy-eared nincompoop! No, I am not a fucking honorable warrior, I'm a gorram merc!"
  And that's before you get into the ones where Cryptic got lazy, copy-pasted the script from Starfleet with minimal changes, and even occasionally forgot to change "Starfleet" to "Klingon".
• Remember that diplomatic mission on Vulcan I mentioned? It reaches a new height of silliness if you're playing a Fed-allied Romulan, considering that the Romulan Star Empire and Romulan Republic are mortal enemies.

also I assuming I can somehow get my hands on the Zen the Orion ships are KDF only right?

Correct.

Then there's the "Peppermint Patty" effect; you can picture female officers going their entire careers constantly saying "AND STOP CALLING ME SIR!!!"

Actually, VOY: "Caretaker" has it that "sir" is, indeed, the appropriate form of address for a superior officer in Starfleet regardless of gender. Janeway just personally doesn't like being called "sir", hence her telling them to call her "Captain" or "ma'am" (and the latter only in a crunch).

As to the D-7 idea, I can think of one issue: all the truly old ships you see in STO (The Miranda, the Connie, the D-7, let alone the NX-class) are strongly implied to have been heavily modernized, with weapons and shielding updated to reflect 150 years of technological change. You can kit them out with things like quantum torpedoes that simply did not exist in the TOS era.

The NX flavor text states that it's not really an original NX. It's a replica built with current tech, because the game runs on rule of cool instead of what would actually make serious logical sense for the organizations to do.

[Lord Revan]

Then there's the "Peppermint Patty" effect; you can picture female officers going their entire careers constantly saying "AND STOP CALLING ME SIR!!!"

The uniform thing is if anything even sillier.

As to the D-7 idea, I can think of one issue: all the truly old ships you see in STO (The Miranda, the Connie, the D-7, let alone the NX-class) are strongly implied to have been heavily modernized, with weapons and shielding updated to reflect 150 years of technological change. You can kit them out with things like quantum torpedoes that simply did not exist in the TOS era.

So it may well be that even if you show up in an actual D-7 hull, you're still insanely conspicuous. It'd be like appearing in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars with a "sailing ship" that carries an outboard motor, World War II artillery, and a crew with a Stinger missile launcher in the crow's nest. At a glance, you might look like you fit in, because the ship has a wooden hull and sails. But anyone who spends more than a few seconds looking at your ship will notice how anachronistic it is. So you still need a disguise.

well I think it would more like the Iowa-class battle where you might even have some of the original parts but you've modernized the ships so heavily that it wouldn't pass anything but a casual long range inspection, I assume the same deal is with the T'liss Light Warbird (aka Romulan Bird-of-prey)

the NX-class is explicitly using only the look of the old class and is completely new build and possibly the T'varo Light Warbird as well

as for the form of address it's actually common in Star Trek to address officers of both genders as sir (Janeway is unique in that she insists Ma'am or Captain instead of sir).

[Lord Revan]

I really wish the game would "notice" what species you're playing, I mean my KDF character is an Orion but the NPCs don't treat her any differently then a generic Klingon,

That's one of my biggest problems with the game, honestly, and it's not limited to the KDF.

• Every Starfleet mission seems to be under the impression that the PC is a human. Kanril Eleya (my Fed tac) is a Bajoran but everybody in Hathon treats her like some idiot who's never been to Bajor before. Do you idiots not see the ridges on my nose? Likewise, there's a diplomatic mission on Vulcan dealing with an ambassador from the Romulan Star Empire that makes every Vulcan PC look like they slept through their entire grade school history class.
• Every KDF mission period assumes the PC is a Klingon. My KDF engi is a Lethean (and Federation-educated, no less), who according to the backstory Cryptic wrote are only KDF-aligned because they're being paid. And yet Brokosh is still babbling about honor and glory and spamming gratuitous thlIngan Hol.
  There's this one mission, "Alpha", where you can beat some information out of a captured Tal Shiar guy, after which he calls you on being an honorable warrior when you're just a brute. In my head, Brokosh smashed his face over his knee and grabbed him by the hair and yelled in his face, "Do I look like a fucking Klingon? I have teeth running down the middle of my face, you stupid pointy-eared nincompoop! No, I am not a fucking honorable warrior, I'm a gorram merc!"
  And that's before you get into the ones where Cryptic got lazy, copy-pasted the script from Starfleet with minimal changes, and even occasionally forgot to change "Starfleet" to "Klingon".

well at least in "Alpha" it would make sense for Morai (my KDF character) to act more like a stereotypical Klingon as Vulcans are explicitly immune to Orion pheromones and it's safe to assume Romulans are as well, though more likely he wonder why "captain" K'Gan (he's actually my first officer) brought his Orion slave girl with him to the interrogation. How ever there's mission where you have to beat the defense codes for the Sol system out of a human (as far as I can tell) captain, if we'd stick to how it would go in canon Morai would walk to captain something like "my dear captain, would you be so kind as to give me the defense codes for the Sol system, so that these people don't have mar that handsome face of yours" and it would work thanks to the pheromones Orion females have.

[Simon_Jester]

Well I think it would more like the Iowa-class battle where you might even have some of the original parts but you've modernized the ships so heavily that it wouldn't pass anything but a casual long range inspection, I assume the same deal is with the T'liss Light Warbird (aka Romulan Bird-of-prey)

It amounts to the same thing- anything other than a quick glance will reveal that the ship has been modified to the point of anachronism. Using a Connie or D-7 this heavily refitted in the TOS era might be less bad than using an obviously new ship of a class totally unknown to them. Then again it might actually be worse.

Think about it: which is Starfleet or the Klingons more likely to identify as a time traveling ship: a completely unknown design that could theoretically belong to an advanced alien race? Or a ship that was obviously intended to look like a 23rd century vessel, but which is packed full of 25th century technologies?

as for the form of address it's actually common in Star Trek to address officers of both genders as sir (Janeway is unique in that she insists Ma'am or Captain instead of sir).

Ah. Well, let's just say that I find it annoying because to me it suggests lazy scriptwriting, not a properly military Federation practice (unless we assume that military authority is by default male, which presents its own problems).

[Elheru Aran]

At least they have the decency to give various aliens a few different traits, like the bite attack for the Gorn. I've found that one useful a few times already.

I do have to say I find their storytelling fairly shoddy pretty often. The faction-specific episodes are reasonably decent-- I'm enjoying the Klink stuff so far, the Romulan was okay even if it was mostly "find us another world and kick Tal Shiar ass", and the Federation stuff is not too intolerable. But when it comes to cross-faction episodes, I find it highly unoriginal to simply stick all factions with the identical episodes-- Nimbus and the Tholian alt-universe are probably the two worst examples so far. Though I do have to say the story of the Tholian mirror-universe event was actually pretty decent, it felt like an actual Star Trek episode with how things just kind of merge into the mirror universe and back out. Complete with timeship deus-ex-machina

The Cardassian episode was kind of boring, though, to be honest. The highlight was the space-walk on DS9. Otherwise, it's running around DS9, shooting Jem'hadar, running around Bajor, shooting more Jem'hadar... ooh, fancy Federation prison... just another bout of shooting bad guys... go back to DS9, hey nice spacewalk, shoot more Jemmies, and that's about it. The mini-mission where you do things for the diplomats was kind of decent, but was total padding.

I'm just grinding at this point with my Vice-Admiral and hoping the Dyson Sphere episodes will be fun enough. Dinosaurs with laser beams... mmm.