Delta Rising

sums it up actually

everything got harder and more complicated
rewards were reduced... difficulty raised
story is not that bad but clearly not what they promised
(you would think that based on the intelligence theme they would have done more but no)

everything in the game all of a sudden has become more expensive while like already mentioned the rewards were reduced

maxing out a char easily costs you 4-5 times more dilithium than one year ago and since you can not avoid crafting anymore it takes ages to get to the point where you have a good ship with good equipment

I find it OK when they raise the difficulty when you need more time and value to finish. Its kinda challenging. Besides the NWS PVE all the rest were doable. NWS has been the only challenge so far. What is odd on the difficulty - they raised it too much. Advanced PVE are now what NWS was before. I just witnessed one that was finished by the team. During the others the team vanished and so did i after several minutes. Thats kinda frustrating and i dont believe a T6 ship or lvl 14 gear would then make the huge difference. Thats what eventually needs more tweaking.

I also find it odd to go grinding during the episodes just to be able to continue. The episode missions should cover the requirements - all the rest just distracts from the story - unfortunate. They introduced 3 new and famous ST "actors" - but so far its not the enrichment for the story that someone would expect. Am not yet through the whole episode - excited how it develops.

I hope there are some adjustments to the difficult scale - or at least the rewards to keep the pace...

there will be adjustments to the difficutly with the next patch

Hitpoints of NPCs:
normal -20%
adv. -30%
elite +10%

thats it

What bothers me more is that everything has become so expensive.
Prior season 10 i had a maxed out ship... now i had upgrade it (hint: you can buy ship upgrades on the exchance).
The T6 ships are under-performing from what ive heard... but they have unique starship traits.
From what i can see you can slot 4 starship traits... which means you need to buy 4 t6 ships if you want to fill all trait slots.
With costs of 3000 zen (or 30€) per ship this is certainly not a cheap investment in order to max out your char again.
12000 Zen for 4 ships and their traits is.... insane.
You could also buy the full delta pack... that costs 12500 zen but you got a few more ships in it.
Still the costs are too high.
If you dont want to buy zen for real money you will have to spend currently about 2million dilithium for it (while you still can not refine more than 8000 per day.... not to mention that currently its hard to earn that much dil).

Next to that you have to upgrade your equipment.
Best possible is epic lvl14 equipment now.
Ive of course done the math.
Of course we start with very rare mk XII equipment ... thats what we already have.
To MKXIV you need to upgrade 2 levels and for the epic status of the item you need to do another 2 upgrades.
So you will end with at least 4 upgrades to max out your equipment again.
The first lvl upgrade is usually not that hard to do. Some items require ~30.000 techxp some others ~100.000. Next level costs the double and rarity upgrades cost even more.
Its save to assume that a full upgrade per item requires to fill 400.000-600.000 xp.
You can of course use superior upgrade modules which have 12.000 xp or experimental superior upgrade modules and you can use upgrade accelerators.
However fact is that you need to be lvl 15 to create such upgrade modules... and fact is also that the components for such modules are extremely rare. So after 3-4 upgrades you are out of resources. Upgrade accelerators are even harder to get... you got some during the event a few weeks ago and you get 2 of them during the new storyline but thats it. The only other way is to buy them from c-store which is very expensive.

In the end you are forced to upgrade with "improved tech upgrades". Those only cover 5.000 techxp so you need for just one item about 80 upgrades.
that also means that you have to pay 1000 dil for each tech upgrade and infact the best way to get such upgrades (if you can not craft them) is the exchange where one of them costs about 100.000 EC.
So that would cost you 80.000 dilithium and 8mio EC for just one item.

Well... you have 8 space weapons... 4 equipment items (shields, impulse engines, warp core, delector), 4 ground items (shield, armor, 2 weapons) and 11 console slots to upgrade.
That are 27 items.
27x80.000 dil = 2160000 Dilthium
27x8mio EC = 216 mio EC

If you have these resources + 12000 zen you can restore the status quo where you had your ship maxed out.
I dont even want to think about the fact that I have pretty much every item set which also needs to be upgraded and that i have 8 toons.

I'm still on the fence about DR, but all of the above comments are pretty accurate so far. I spent a long time on one mission last night vs. The Hierarchy and I have a high DPS ship. I was doing damage, but the regen rate on their cap ship was insane. I would take it down 30% then it would regen 20% a moment later. Drops were standard on Advanced mode, which is disappointing.

most of the content is unplayable with my ships and equips so...imo, DR is nothing but a dil and ec nerf

its worse than expected

i tried to get a weapon from ultra rare to epic (which has cost me 8mio ec and 50k dil so far) but that does not work this way
its not not that when you reach the tech xp goal your item would upgrade
the item only has a chance to upgrade

my mk14 ultra rare weapon remained a mk14 ultra rare weapon after this try to upgrade it b
but with a 2% chance to get a rarity upgrade on the next try

so upgrades to mk14 should be no big deal... rarity upgrades will ruin you
you should expect costs of multiple mio dil for that

I've played the first four episode missions and did one run through of borg disconnected.

The missions follow the same template as always: go to green circle, interact, kill red guys, speed through the dialogue. It just takes a little more work and tedium than should be allowed.

The STF was an absurdity of button mashing.

I wasn't even close to maxed-out before this thing came along, but now I have zero chance of doing so. It is clear that the power creep will forever accelerate past my ability to keep up. I've never had more than a million EC and a hundred thousand dilithium. I must abandon my dreams of being a commodities trader and mad scientist. As soon as I max reputation, commendations, and assignments, I'll probably get bored and quit.

what bothers me most with the PVEs is the reduced dilithium amounts and the briefings
i mean... in worst case you have to wait a minute before all player accepted the mission... 10 seconds before it launches... then another minute for the briefing
Of course a briefing is important for players that did not play the mission yet. But it would be better if the waiting time can be skipped when all players have closed the briefing screen.

The Dilithium reduction has massive impact on PVEs.
Im not sure if you have taken a look at the number of queued PVEs yet... but there are not many.
I remember times where there were hundreds of PVE players at the same time. But meanwhile there is only a handful of people queueing these mission.
Where are the players?
Not on the foundry since the foundry does not work anymore.
They are also not getting their dilithium from the dyson ground battlezone. I was there last evening and there were only 10-15 zones active. There were times when there were 30-40 active zones. (btw. you will find me there more often in future... i need dil)
You also dont see that many ppl on ESD or or in sector space and i have my doubts that everyone is playing the story missions atm.
So... where is everyone?
Offline?

ship upgrades are per ship "class" for the entire account

if you have a defiant then all defiants on your account are upgraded with one token
if you have a ship pack e.g. Odyssey or Vesta then all of the ships in that pack can be upgraded with just one token

you can buy ship upgrades on the exchange (they cost less than 10mio ec) which in my eyes is way better than 700 zen.

btw. ive been trying to get more accurate numbers on gear upgrades:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.…951&posted=1#post20045951

Where is the joy of playing, if you can upgrade easily and dont have a challenge to fulfill
If everything would be easy then you soon will loose interest^^

On that side i can understand why they made it as it is. On the other side i strongly believe that more players would have more joy, if they would tweak one or another part.

im not saying that it shouldnt be a challenge
im just saying that it shouldnt be frustrating

a game needs to be motivating... you need to see that you make progress
this gear upgrade system is just one thing... frustrating

Quote

As it is at the moment, it would take the average casual player years to get to the pre season 10 level again.

well, my calculation which was very optimistic (as it turned out) was not even based on casual players.
5,3 hours dilithium grinding per day + x hours trying to make EC.... and that over a period of an entire year (day by day... without exception)
I dont know how long your day is, but mine is only 24 hours.
Casual players are online 1-2 hours? Some of course more.
But that means they need multiple years... IF they dont want to buy ships... IF they dont want to support their fleet.... IF they only have 1 loadout and no alternative equipment.... and if they have only one toon.

next nerf
hangar pets and actually all space combat pets (including saucers) are getting their hitpoints and shields reduced

before they were getting killed within seconds... now they already explode in hangar bay