STO: Encountering The Level Cap

Post Soundtrack: “Fly Me To The Moon” by Julie London

One curious thing about this game has been the way the level cap was lowered (along with a corresponding cap to the number of skill points a captain can earn) right before launch.  The previously announced level cap of 50 (nominally Rear Admiral, rank 10) became 45 (rank 5), along with much noise and fury on the official forums over the changes.

The reason I mention it is because I’ve finally reached it myself, after 4 days and 13 hours of time /played.  Meet the newest member of the Discordia family, the Discordia-D.

The tier-5 ships become available upon reaching level 41, after which you have another 4 levels to play with them before hitting the brick wall of the level cap.  This is equivalent to the level cap in WoW, where all further increases to your character’s abilities come from your equipment (which in STO means from Bridge Officers, along with ship and personal equipment).  Unfortunately there’s barely any endgame equipment available at this stage, and only one place to get it.

At launch, once you reached the cap there was only exploration quests and DSEs (deep space encounters – a space-combat PvE system where you and a random group of other players would get to kill packs of hostile NPCs) – there are only enough missions to get you to the cap, and no more became available once you reached it.

They’ve since introduced the hub for the initial round of end-game content, amusing referred to as “Raid Episodes” (which WoW players may recognise more appropriately as “5-mans").  Unfortunately it would appear that there isn’t going to be any larger-group content any time soon, so this will be all there is, once it goes live (apparently sometime next week).

The hub consists of a new space sector, with a corresponding new exploration zone.  A new series of three once-only missions became available featuring the Borg and Undine, presumably setting up the repeatable 5-man content yet to come.  A new defend quest is available for the zone (where you’re fighting off borg probes, spheres and cubes), and a daily exploration quest offers 5 tokens that can be used to buy epic Mk X equipment for ship and player – the token gear is apparently to be used to fill gear-gaps in preparation for the 5-man episodes.

All in all, it’s become fairly lacklustre.  Even with the new content slowly filtering down from the developers, the impression I’ve received is that the real end-game intention of the developers immediately post-launch is that players will just roll new characters to go through the levelling grind again, either as Federation or if they enjoy PvP, as Klingons (who are still pretty much bereft of any other levelling method).  And with the immediate limit of 3 character slots (with another two slots available for players who’ve taken the leap of faith with a year or lifetime subscription) this is a quite limited alternative (and no hint of when additional slots will become available for purchase).

It’s feeling more and more like I’ve reached the limit of my patience with the game as it stands, and am considering cancelling my subscription and move on to whatever the ‘next game’ will be (if I don’t return to WoW) – revisiting STO in a few months may prove more satisfying, when they’ve not only given players at the level cap variety in things to do, but have also knocked down more of the gameplay and balancing bugs that still have potential to annoy and irritate.

I’ve also spent quite a while trying to work out what game STO reminds me of, and finally figured out that it’s the super-casual-friendly free-to-play title Free Realms.  In STO the occasionally-challenging space combat can be fun, as can the occasionally-entertaining (albeit more primitive) ground combat, but with the complete lack of any kind of death penalties the game comes down to a you-will-win-if-you-play-long-enough grind that undermines what little complexity the game offers (and that complexity is something that the game does its best to deny you access to, due to pretty dire in-game documentation).

One a more personal note, one little bug that left auto-teaming broken until very recently meant that I ended up soloing all of the content until I reached the new hub at level 43.  Between that, and the severely instanced design of the game world, I’d have to say this MMO was (for the duration of the levelling process) not bad as a single-player game.  As a social title, though?  In my experience it has failed quite comprehensively.  Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the sandbox nature of Azeroth in WoW, but the instanced-everything nature of STO has been very isolating, and even Fleets (the guild equivalent in-game) are currently limited in function to another channel to chat in and some extra bank slots.

But for all my complaining, the game has been kind of fun.  The environments are bright and colourful (apart from the ones which are, by design, dark and muted), and the ship combat can be entertaining.  I’m still in two minds about dropping the game, as it can be a fun little time-waster; I’m just wary of subscribing to a game on this basis.

Well, I should probably see about updating my Priest PvP gear guide now that the new arena season has arrived – although maybe I’ll work on it after I do my STO daily (the singular one that’s in-game at the moment).  And enjoy some more screenshots.

/wave

STO: Cruisers – Speedy Molasses

Post soundtrack: “Love Resurrection” by Alison Moyet.  (I’m on a brief 80s kick – enjoy it while it lasts)

Another post, and another tier of ship opened up for my enjoyment.  Fortunately it’s challenging to play.  Unfortunately they’re rather a little aesthetically lacking – and they’re not a class of ship for the impatient captain.  Anyway, meet Miss Exploration Cruiser, my shiny new tier 4 ship.

Needless to say, that’s not her real name: she’s the USS Discordia-C, NCC 99309-C (tradition is a wonderful thing). 

As I’ve mentioned previously, there are three ship classes in tiers two, three and four.  (Tier five gives you two subclasses for each class, but that’s a tale for another post)  The starter ships, the tier one Light Cruisers, are jack-of-all-trades (and as you would expect, masters of none).  As a player levels, the three different ships classes that become available upon reaching Lt. Commander (level 21) begin to differentiate themselves more clearly:  the escorts increase in turning speed and weapon power, and science vessels are more effective in their role as support class (while still possessing mobility and decent damage capability).

Cruisers are defined by three things:  their ability to mount a large number of weapons (4 fore and 4 aft at T5), their ability to take massive damage, and a turning radius the size of a small planet.  Needless to say, these all increase with each tier, although the latter is rather unpopular with the masses.

The turning radius is a tad annoying, but to be honest it wasn’t that much of a jump from the T3 cruiser – I think the secret is to have the right engineering consoles, and custom power settings.  For a cruiser, the consoles I look for first are EPS Flow Regulators, which effectively regenerate power much faster.  This allows you to fire you weapons faster, your shields regenerate slightly faster, and adds a little to your turn rate.

I use custom settings for all four settings:

Weapons:  75/45/25/55
Shields:  45/75/25/55
Engines:  25/25/50/100
Balanced:  55/60/25/60

I tend to switch between them where it’s needed, but with the level of equipment I currently have there’s a degree of set-and-forget (followed by quickly-change-when-being-pwned, on occasion).

• Weapons is great for groups of small ships – frigates, fighters, birds of prey.  Also good for low-level content if you’re helping friends.
• Shields is fairly self-explanatory – a life-saver against named ships.
• Engines is what I switch to if I want to turn quicker (when out of combat, at least).
• Balanced is just that – a fairly balanced power distribution (I tend not to use it though, as the other three settings cover most situations).

My secret to successful cruiser captaincy is to have spare auxiliary power available whenever you can (hence my slightly higher aux settings), which leads me to my next secret.

Beam arrays are fun.  Conventional wisdom appears to be that a cruiser can’t successfully stack beam arrays because chain-firing them will reduce the cruiser’s weapon power dramatically, which in turn reduces their damage.  It might be my power settings, or the EPS consoles (or maybe both) but I don’t have any problems with weapon power and don’t have problems killing any nasties either.  (It’s actually quite satisfying watching fighter packs melt away under a 5-beam-array barrage)

The fun thing about beam arrays is that they play to the strength of a cruiser, which is the much-maligned large turning radius.  The fun thing I’ve found is that the slow turns make it fairly easy to keep my target broadside, which is within reach of both fore and aft banks.

The hardest part (after making sure your speed is adjusted for best effect – faster means larger turn radius, slower means smaller) is spamming the spacebar to keep firing everything while holding down the turn key.  (Needless to say, I’m getting a sore thumb – I’m beginning to consider investing in a gaming keyboard like a logitech g13 and setting up an autofire toggle to get around it)

On a more general note, there have been some interesting missions and tidbits of information that show up as you progress through the sectors.  The Romulan sector has some novel missions, not least of which is probably the mission that felt most like a Trek episode to me, which involved “ghosts”.  Amongst other missions, you also visit the remains of the Hobus system, the location of the supernova that facilitated the Trek movie reboot last year, and not only explains it but also weaves it into the game plot quite effectively.

Time for some more screenshots from the last few days.

Yes, I’ve been a busy little starship captain.  And as soon as the server comes back up, I’ll likely be busier for a little longer yet.

/wave

STO: 2nd Time Lucky

Post Soundtrack: “The Gods of the Yoruba” by Gerardo Frisina

The head-start is almost over, and what have I achieved?  Well, the highlight so far is probably my tier 3 heavy cruiser, the USS Discordia, NCC 99309-B.

I’ve been delving into the awfulness that is the forums (admit it, I don’t think there’s any official forums to a game this popular that isn’t heavily troll-enriched, and the STO forums are no exception) in order to pick up tips on cruiser captain talent builds (important considering Cryptic have yet to finish setting up any re-spec options), boff (bridge officer) talent selections, and equipment tips.  Needless to say, there is indeed some gold amid the dross – if I’m feeling enthusiastic, I might even post some links at some stage.

Basically I’ve just been doing what I do so well, which is levelling quickly – Commander Noube is currently sitting at level 21, which is Commander Rank 1 and (as the screenshot above demonstrates) opens the third tier of ships up for captains.  (New ships become available at 11, 21, 31 and the last tier at 41 – the current level cap is 45, i think)

I’m finding levelling is fairly smooth going, although I’ve come across the occasional small drought (possibly due to my haphazard route across the sector map, where I haven’t exactly followed what would appear to be the designer’s expectation) which I’ve evened out with some time spent doing exploration missions.

There have been some buggy quests still, including one that took four attempts to finish – fortunately the second though fourth attempts were only from the last spawn point in the ground portion of the mission, which was not as frustrating as restarting from the beginning would have been.  And one ground fleet mission seems to be bugged quite thoroughly (although the name of it escapes me), leaving it almost impossible to complete.

But for all the buggy quests, the ones that do work can be quite…  absorbing – especially the ground combat missions.  Yes, it’s all fairly formulaic (although it’s more ‘Kill 10 boars’ than fed-ex quests), but I’m enjoying it on the whole.  The scenery brings to mind a combination of the TOS physical sets and the corresponding matte paintings the gave those sparse physical locations a sense of scale.

Some examples from my time levelling:

Back to space, though.  And cruisers.

For those who aren’t playing the game, there are three ship classes.  Cruisers (epitomised by the Enterprise in the original series and the Enterprise-D in TNG), Escorts (the Defiant in DS9) and Science (the ship from Voyager).  Their roles are very roughly equivalent to tanks, dps and healers respectively.  But only very roughly, as each can have considerable overlap thanks to the abilities of the bridge officers who occupy your bridge, and the abilities that each class of captain possesses.  (Confused yet?  Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into it much further for the time being, so it won’t get any worse)

In the beta I went with an escort, because laser pewpew!! is fun (and it’s the most straightfoward ship class to play).  When I was reaching level 20 or so, however, it was becoming pretty rough going – the Romulan missions were wiping the floor with my escort.  My current cruiser, however, is getting through the same missions a lot more effectively (and with a lot fewer deaths) – my dps may be lower, but it’s hard to underestimate the toughness of a decently equipped cruiser.

Anyway, I’ve been working on upgrading equipment and items and crew as I’ve progressed and it’s going fairly smoothly (other than the occasional server downtime, which works wonders at ensuring that I get things done away from the keyboard).  I’ve not quite run into the brick wall that is the sharply reduced turning speed of tier 4 cruisers, but the reduction of speed from the T2 to T3 has given me a taste of what to expect – it’s a good thing I’ve been reading up on the subject, or it could have put quite a damper on my enjoyment of my chosen ship class.

There’s not really much more to say for now, other than “I’m enjoying the journey.”  So here’s some more screenshots to make it look like I’ve been busy.

But it’s time to boldly go – the server is back up, and Starfleet needs my services!

/wave

STO: Thoughts Following Beta

Post soundtrack: “Captain Bacardi” by Antonio Carlos Jobim

Well, the beta has finished (albeit with more than a little mass spawn-camping – I’d describe the end-of-beta event as more whimper than bang) which means it’s time to start girding my loins for the head-start in a few days.

I did manage to complete the primary goal I set myself; namely to reach Captain rank (level 21).  The questions now:  What class will I level as?  What class of ship will I specialise in?  What haven’t Cryptic shown us yet?  And most importantly, why do they insist that this severely instanced game is massively multiplayer when (if the beta was anything to go by) you’re unlikely to see more than a dozen people at any given non-mission location?

The last is probably the single thing I noticed most from the beta – hopefully it’s just a side-effect of it being beta, and numbers will be higher after launch.  But the game seems to lack the equivalent social spaces that capital cities in WoW are – the STO starbases are surprisingly tiny (like the opposite of the Doctor’s TARDIS, much smaller on the inside).  Again, though, I’ve yet to see how this server setup (fragmented though it may be) works with the numbers that the launch might (should?) bring – it’s the opposite of WoW’s setup, with one server which is divided into multiple shards for each location; all the shards for a location seem to share a single chat channel, however, and it’s simple to switch between shards.

The chat system is also irritating, especially after I’ve had time to get used to chatting with the WIM addon.  There appears to be a single chat window, but it’s possible to create additional tabs within in which you can filter different entries into (such as combat messages, team or fleet massages, specific channels and the like).

I didn’t play around with it that much, though, so I’m not sure just how configurable it is – I was mostly just solo-leveling, so didn’t miss it much.  (There’s a “Report Spam” right-click action available, which also sets that player as ignored – a positive sign, given the spamming I’ve grown accustomed to in WoW.)

There are group-PvE instances called Fleet Actions which have the potential to be fun, but the reward structure for completing them is currently completely broken; the highest dps participants are eligible for rare equipment as loot, which is quite blatant in its bias against cruiser and science vessel captains.

Plus this is the first game I’ve encountered that allows players to be spawn-camped by PvE mobs, thanks to a perfect storm of upwardly-adjusting mob level and numbers (the more players joining an instance, the more higher-level mobs spawn to match the players, but if players leave the high-level mobs remain there) and a single spawn location which has a PvE mob spawn adjacent to it (once I zoned in with my T2 escort and was flattened in seconds by 4 escorts and 3 frigates).  Spawn-camping also occurred in ground PvP matches – hopefully there will be some fixes coming for that.

Balance (especially in space combat) seems to be a work-in-progress, when I went from the ease of T1 ships, to challenge in my T2 escort, and then hitting something of a wall while working towards my T2 escort.  Perhaps my choice of captain skills, bridge officer skills and equipment is at fault - which brings me to my biggest complaint:

Cryptic seems to be not only the name of the developer, but also their documentation philosophy.  Seriously, if you want to work out a levelling strategy for your captain that won’t gimp you at higher levels, you’re going to need to rely on the forums.

The tooltips for your skills (even with the added information they now have, although it’s hard to believe they could have displayed less) offer minimal information about what they do and which abilities they affect, and the numbers they do offer are pretty useless without a baseline to compare it to:  “+5 to Photonics” means very little when they don’t say what Photonics actually is. 

Apparently, however, this is by design – if you’re a theorycrafter, the designers are going out of their way to frustrate you.  Fortunately I’ve picked up some useful information from skill discussions on the forums that I’m hoping will keep me from being the STO equivalent of a hunter wearing spellpower gear with +spirit gems.

Hopefully the servers will at least pretend to be stable, and the bugs won’t be too overpowering – I’d like to at least get my 30 days out of the game, as I’m not certain at this stage that the game will hold my attention long enough to get any subs out of me.  It’s entirely possible that there’s more content in the release version that wasn’t in the beta, and indeed I’m hoping that is the case.

Plus, release means people seriously starting to create fleets, along with a larger pool people to level with – that was probably the thing I missed most, people (ideally who I know, but I guess that comes with time) to talk with.

My plan?  So far, to level an Engineering captain in a cruiser, with a view to being a damage-sponge at higher level.  I might roll an escort captain (for the pew pew) as well, depending on how long-winded the leveling process is, but it’d depend on my enthusiasm.  Plus there’s always the option of rolling a Klingon captain as well, but with no quests and only PvP it would really depend on how entertaining post-release PvP turns out.

Of course, hopefully my copy of Mass Effect 2 will be delivered soon as well, so STO may face some stiff competition for my time.  We’ll see (but I suspect ME2 will win, at least briefly).

One last query of my handful of readers – are any WoW bloggers giving STO a try, who would be interested in forming a fleet?  “Azeroth’s Pride” has a certain appealing ring to it…

/wave

A Break From WoW Means More STO

Post Soundtrack: “Star Trekkin’” by The Firm.

Gosh, it’s been a while since I posted…  I guess I should explain.  My enjoyment of WoW has been in sharp decline (again – sorry Blizzard, but Icecrown just hasn’t done it for me, and chain-running 5-mans was never an particularly appealing alternative), so in my attempts to cast around for a distraction I decided to invest some bandwidth in the Star Trek Online open beta.

Meet my latest time-waster, Lt. Commander Nuobe, my Federation-side character in the Star Trek Online open beta.

I’ve leveling Nuobe to L15 and a Horde, I mean Klingon, captain to L13 so far, and I think (despite having run into some quite amusing bugs so far, most of which will hopefully be getting patched pretty soon) I’d likely get my money’s worth from picking it up when it launches.

I’ve stopped raiding for the time being (I let the healing officer know of my decision – fortunately they have sufficient healers that they’ve been able to continue in IC without me), and basically just log on to do transmutes and make cloth while I take my break.  Needless to say, I suspect my WoW posts will be few and far between while said break transpires.

However I’ll probably post a little about my STO experiences, as it’s proving to be an entertaining little timewaster (and there’s room to get into the game mechanics a little bit, from what I’ve seen so far – the documentation is pretty awful from my experiences so far, hopefully something else that’ll be improving when the game goes live).  It’s certainly a change after so much time spent with WoW, but with my dissastisfaction with my dwarven horde it’s come at a good time to have a solid chance.

Between the PvE-focussed Federation missions, the PvP-focussed Klingon equivalent, and of course the possibility of PvP between the Feds and Klingons there appears to be enough content (and with enough variety) to keep me busy for a while, and it might even be fun.

I’ve also been spending a good few hours playing Defender Chronicles on my ipod touch, and it’s a blast – well worth giving it a try, if you’re a fan of RPGs or tower defense games.

I’ve not forgotten about WoW, however – I’m planning on doing an update to my Disc Priest PvP gear guide after the next arena season starts, and I’ll probably also update my disc priest levelling series once I…  well…  do some more levelling of her.

So be patient, stay tuned, and live long and prosper.

/vulcan salute

Of Rogues and Oculus

Post Soundtrack: “A Banana Split For My Baby” by Louis Prima

I’ve been working on OldDingle lately, with a view to getting him to 80 and doing a multitude of random heroics to buy Phingle a set of heirloom gear to speed up her leveling.  Sure, it’s not the most time-efficient way to do it, but it’s an interesting experience viewing the leveling grind from a non-dwarf perspective (and an effective distraction).

OldDingle is currently sitting in Thrallmar, having logged off before the server reset with only a half-bar more XP needed to reach 60 and buy a flying mount (which won’t be the undead drake mount pictured).  His gear has been improved by the handful of quest reward greens he’s picked up so far, but it’s still a long way to go to 80 – flying training will help the process, though (although epic flying is still some way off).

With the reduction in expert training and regular flying mount cost that came with patch 3.2.2 (taking them down to 250g and 50g respectively), it was easy to pick up sufficient gold through the AH to cover this expense – OldDingle and Phingle are currently sitting on around 1k between them.  Speaking of Phingle, she’s sitting at level 24 in Tarren Mill, patiently waiting for her heirloom items while complaining about the decor of the inn.  (It’s a good thing she’s the patient type)

Alliance-side, Ringle has purchased her 2nd hippogryph (and is only three more days away from becoming an exalted champion of her fifth and final tournament faction) and Mingle is slowly working towards having enough rep to be able to buy the awesome pants pattern from Ashen Verdict (she has the primordial saronite to purchase it, and only needs 1650 more rep – she’ll also be able to upgrade to the revered rep ring at the same time).  Ringle also has some Ashen Vanguard rep under her belt, but as an alt has had less time in Icecrown than Mingle – she’s picked up the first rep ring, but the second is some time away.

Finally, with the number of random dungeons I’ve under my belt since the patch, it was with no small interest that I came across news that Oculus is to get a loot buff (in an attempt to reduce the number of players dropping group when they arrive).  The extra couple of badges will probably be handy, but the chance of getting the Reins of the Blue Drake is pure icing.  I just hope the chance of them dropping is higher than for the Reins of the Blue Proto-Drake which allegedly drops from Skadi in Utgard Pinnacle – I say allegedly because I’ve never seen it drop, in all the months I’ve run it on my various alts.

It’s actually interesting how much more often I’ve entered an old instance (it usually happens in Gundrak, HoS and Oculus) and one or two people drop group immediately – it’s usually the tank, and equal chance of one of the dps (if I’m on my healer) or the healer (if I’m on my rogue).  I doubt they’ll be adding additional rewards to the other dungeons – Oculus has been unpopular pretty much from launch (my issue with the place was that I never enjoyed the mounted combat), and I think its’ negative reputation has only worsened since then.  With the growing number of people bailing from instances (at least in my limited experience), getting players to stay is a battle I don’t envy Blizzard.

For now, though, it’s time to flee for the safety of my bed before the sun rises – funny how time flies when you’re busy (or attempting to look like you are).

/wave