Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

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Oskuro
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Oskuro »

Right now I'm watching Spoony's Vlog on STO. He's not very happy with it.


(And before someone berates me for linking him, I just link it for completeness, the guy reviews a lot of stuff, and I personally don't agree with him all the time, but it's good to see different opinions)
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Oskuro »

Still watching the Vlog, but I can share Spoony's feelings regarding the whole exploration and "boldly go" issue, of course it was to be expected from an MMO. At least the missions, from what both Spoony and you guys say, sound neat.

Also, I agree with him that Judgement Rites and 25th Anniversary were the best Star Trek games out there :)
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by White Haven »

Hooo boy did they break shields this patch. It's a break in favour of the players, so Boldly Go to places you don't belong while the sun shines, shields are nigh indestructible at the moment. Like 'I can tank two entire fleet action spawns in a science vessel' broken.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by PREDATOR490 »

Meh, a trip to DS9 and getting sucked into a Terran Federation fight quickly ended up getting everyone killed who entered. +14 to me and it seems phasers have been given a random chance to drop the shields of targeted ship amoungst other systems. You can actually see if on the weapons listing. Not sure if thats intentional because disrupters dont have their bonus anymore.

That said, I kinda like the frail nature of Romulan ships. Its pretty commonly established the Romulans prefer suprise attacks rather than the brute force approach the Klingons use. The shielding situation seems a bit wierd, my escort is able to engage quite a bit but the Terran Federation ships were decimating anything due to this new phaser ability to randomly drop shields, the Romulans apparantly rape your crew through shields and explosions almost exterminate your crew if you get hit in the blast wave.

It appears they buggered up the Broken Ice ground action though. Cant complete objectives anymore and the Crystaline Entity action was a complete joke. I warped in, saw a fleet of people sitting still. Waited for the spawn, bang a big crystal mass appears 5km, every single ship didnt even move they just sat there and let loose with everything. 1 Minute later - mission complete.
I felt rather insulted, the Klingon Fleet action puts you against 3 dreadnaughts and that really requires a fleet to do. This action just felt like a slap in the face.

Additionally, Memory Alpha is really pissing me off with the lack of info on how you upgrade stuff. Each dude refers you back to the same NPC that only upgrades the stuff you can already get upgraded at the starter station. Its crap MKII stuff as well so now everyone I see is wondering where you upgrade the higher quality stuff. It says you meant to do stuff for her but there is nothing she wants you to do. They still havent fixed the exploration badge thing so getting better consoles and equipment via that route is broken.

Its good to know they expect this game to hit release in under 5 days AND intend to completely revamp the skill system to boot.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by SylasGaunt »

I've noticed how the enemy shields seem to take longer to bludgeon down as well.

On the upside they seem to have fixed the deep space encounter leveling because they were spawning way too many dreads and battleships if you were limited to 5 players. I'm also no longer getting those massive alpha strikes that were cropping up which is good.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by White Haven »

You're not getting alpha-strikes because your ship is the next best thing to Star Wars shielding in Trek. They seeeriously borked it up.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Bounty »

I want to go on a cool-sounding mission but I can't find anyone to play internet spaceships with me :(
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by SylasGaunt »

White Haven wrote:You're not getting alpha-strikes because your ship is the next best thing to Star Wars shielding in Trek. They seeeriously borked it up.
Uhm.. you seem to be misunderstanding. I meant that the first guy into a spawn no longer neccesarily gets deluged with a dozen or so torps, resulting in any defensive skills he or she may be using being utterly worthless in the face of it.

One of the things the new patch did was tone down both the number of torpedoes in the salvos (Neg'vhars were tossing out something like 4 or 5 torps in one salvo and there was usually more than one of them in a spawn) and how often they get tossed out.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Mr Bean »

I have to agree with SylasGaunt, before a Neg'vhar would regularly double team me to death. I could fight two at once and not win but make a long fight of it. However during the first part of the engagement they would throw up about 5 torps each which would rip my shields down to nothing and kill me. After the first torp spam it was a long drawn out fight but the initial alpha always wrecked my shit. No matter what defense or facing I used it might as well have been a Turbolaser for all the good my shield and hull left me.

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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by White Haven »

The point is that after the shield buff, you could take that kind of an alpha and shrug it off. It truly is silly.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Oskuro »

Well, they could add the batmobile-wanktastic-armour from the Voyager finale in the next patch. And Cube instakilling transphasic torpedoes! And while they are at it, why not a ship-mounted superlaser? Wait... wrong franchise :roll:

Of all the things being commented about Beta, what really unsettles me is how little time they have left before release. We'll see, but this might end up being another case of "released too early"

Also, a couple reviews, these mainly favorable:

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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Kamakazie Sith »

I got the feeling that they made enemy ships weaker to assist with the beta testing of the content. Afterall balancing the ships is far easier, and less annoying to your clients than broken missions.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Kamakazie Sith »

Mr Bean wrote:I have to agree with SylasGaunt, before a Neg'vhar would regularly double team me to death. I could fight two at once and not win but make a long fight of it. However during the first part of the engagement they would throw up about 5 torps each which would rip my shields down to nothing and kill me. After the first torp spam it was a long drawn out fight but the initial alpha always wrecked my shit. No matter what defense or facing I used it might as well have been a Turbolaser for all the good my shield and hull left me.
I read on the state of the game notes that this fleet alpha strike has from time to time wiped out entire teams of UFP ships. Removing that was an important fix. It seems the fleet battles really feel like Star Trek fleet battles.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by SylasGaunt »

On a side note I do feel that swung the pendulum too far the other way for shield strength. On the other hand if they tone it down a bit things'll be lovely since they addressed the biggest things about fighting NPC groups that I noticed.

1.) The unstoppable alpha strike of doom is gone.

2.) enemy ships spread their fire out a bit more now instead of targeting everything on one guy and murderizing him so that even if the torp alpha strike isn't up you still get mulched.

3.) The enemy spawns in deep space encounters were too big and too tough for the 5 person limit they'd enacted.

Shielding does need to be toned down but that's a comparatively easy fix they can do.

That and the Crystalline Entity needs a serious buff. Seriously, shortest. FA. EVER.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

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1-4 battleships, 1-3 cruisers, 3-6 escorts was too much for a 5-man team, Sylas? In what early universe were those difficult odds pre-patch?
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

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White Haven wrote:1-4 battleships, 1-3 cruisers, 3-6 escorts was too much for a 5-man team, Sylas? In what early universe were those difficult odds pre-patch?
One where the AI was able to wipe out a good chunk of your team in the first couple salvos. especially if you had the bad luck to get the AI focus firing one by one on them which did happen.

That also depends on their being a full 5 man team in the instance, and that all 5 are working together, which is rarer than I'd like.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by GuppyShark »

Reducing the Alpha strike just makes the decision between 'fast regen'/'high buffer' shields meaningless.

They'd better not make the whole game easy.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

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GuppyShark wrote:Reducing the Alpha strike just makes the decision between 'fast regen'/'high buffer' shields meaningless.

They'd better not make the whole game easy.
In some areas it was BAD. Like as in I wondered if the enemy ships were player controlled bad. Here we are in our Tier 1 and Tier 2 ships crusing around when in comes the Klingon's with the equivalent of Tier 4 battleships. Alpha strikes taking out one ship at a time. When two battleship focused fire on you, your lost shields. So 5 on 7 except three of those are battleships and four birds of prey so first guy who takes a shot gets nuked to high hell and the four other ships have to split up and quickly double-team the BoP down then focus fire on one battleship at a time. But the battleships always focused fire on one ship at a time and stayed together so even a standard salvo could smash down your shields and drop your hull by 20% to 40%.

It's much better now but it seems ships are much harder to turn than before.

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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Vympel »

Right now I'm watching Spoony's Vlog on STO. He's not very happy with it.


(And before someone berates me for linking him, I just link it for completeness, the guy reviews a lot of stuff, and I personally don't agree with him all the time, but it's good to see different opinions)
Why should anyone berate you for linking spoony? Seems weird to me. Anyway, spoony's reaction is what I thought when I just saw the videos - the combat looked shit. Especially on the ground.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by Oskuro »

Vympel wrote:Why should anyone berate you for linking spoony? Seems weird to me. Anyway, spoony's reaction is what I thought when I just saw the videos - the combat looked shit. Especially on the ground.
Oh, there's a tendency to criticize people who post reviews as if the review posted was a perfect reflection of their opinions or something, like whenever someone links a Yatzhee review, or a Nostalgia Critic. Of course, some people use these reviews as appeals to authority, so the backlash can be understood, and hence my disclaimer.

I haven't played STO yet, but I agree that the videos do look underwhelming, then again PotBS looks underwhelming too and I love the naval combat (Avatar combat needs improvement though).
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by SylasGaunt »

GuppyShark wrote:Reducing the Alpha strike just makes the decision between 'fast regen'/'high buffer' shields meaningless.

They'd better not make the whole game easy.
I've already mentioned that they swung too far the other way on shield durability but your choice of defensive powers and shield were meaningless in the face of the old alpha strikes as well since if you were the unlucky bastard being targeted when their torpedo salvos were up it really didn't matter what kind of shield you had or what defense powers you had running because the torpedo barrage would still kill you.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

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Go in first. Aggro at extreme range and pull a SHARP U-turn. Punch Rotate Shield Frequencies (if you're an engineer) and Brace for Impact when their alpha is about to hit, follow up with emergency power to shields. Congratulations, not only are you still alive, but you just left their engagement range, and their entire alpha-strike has been wasted on not killing a ship. Start killing things with your team. :)
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by charlemagne »

I hit Commander and got me both a Heavy Cruiser and Escort. Man, Escorts really go through enemies like the proverbial hot knife through butter, it's almost not funny. Granted, still doing low Commander/high Lt.Cmd missions, but still. Heavy Cruiser is also a heavy hitter, 4 phaser banks are nice, BoPs and other small ships just melt. I just wish I could use beam overlead on it already :) I also like the Stargazer-nacelles, very hot rod :D

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Btw, it's true that ground combat is pretty shit. Especially animations are awkward and ugly, and controls are clunky (e.g. no skill queue, just button mashing). While the teamplay with your bridge officers is nice, the whole thing still feels glitchy and just not done yet. It's a bit tedious over time because enemies take long to kill but aren't really dangerous, so it just takes a lot of time. It's more fun in groups though, especially with tall pink aliens who just keep falling over because they go in all guns blazing despite being a fragile nerd ;)

I also begin to hate the skill trees. The layout and options on what to skill are pretty stupid sometimes, and I really hate how you're forced to put points in redundant skills - e.g. it seems to be useless to have points in "Cruiser Captain", once you start flying Heavy Cruisers you gotta skill "Heavy Cruiser Captain". Seems dumb because a heavy cruiser is still a cruiser, those skills should "stack". There's only a couple of skills that affect your performance through all level ranges, like improving starship beam weapons overall is still useful later on and not only at lower levels.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

Post by White Haven »

The Tier 2 skills generally stack with later ones. In fact, Cruiser Captain explicitly states that it applies to all cruisers. T3 and up is when you start needing to specialize, and that's when the poor tree design becomes really apparent especially with the ship captain skills.
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Re: Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

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White Haven wrote:Go in first. Aggro at extreme range and pull a SHARP U-turn. Punch Rotate Shield Frequencies (if you're an engineer) and Brace for Impact when their alpha is about to hit, follow up with emergency power to shields. Congratulations, not only are you still alive, but you just left their engagement range, and their entire alpha-strike has been wasted on not killing a ship. Start killing things with your team. :)
Which does nothing to help anyone who didn't roll an engineer captain, come to think of it it doesn't help engineer captains for a while after starting either. And it doesn't help if you hit one of the spawns which for whatever reason delays the alpha unless you intend to hang around right on the 10k border the whole fight.

And that also doesn't change the fact that relating to the alpha strikes was the enemy AI which would promptly focus fire on the next poor schmuck in range and continue doing so until everyone died.
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