The cam movement on ground is awesome, all you need to do is set it to "free camera" and "follow type:never" and turn off the annoying zoom on aim mode (its an option), then its fully smooth, its the first changes i always do after creating a new toon.


Hmm thats odd i've been playing games since the 80ties like you too and i can't remember much games that had better looking ones or more fluid melee annimations (im not speaking about the normal, but the combi moves here like 212, 221 etc..) in fact a lot of them look like motion captured here.

True that could be better and more customization would be nice there.. in fact klingons need to get kits and armor to showup at all.. very few kits have models for klingons at all.


I wish the spacers would stop making suggestions to ruin ground pvp just because they don't like the pve (i don't even disagree on the borigness of pve), its the absolutely only aspect of the game thats not totally boring currently - at least for me and several others i pvp with regularly. Reading suggestions to make it more like tabularasa (a game that failed hard) or to get a mass effect cover system will just slow ground down so much that it will just seal the fate of this game even faster.

Very much agree. The Martial Arts system is fun, but it's useless. Even fully skilled, it's useless.

While I can see keeping the DPS low, increasing expose chances and CC effects could help a lot.

If Martial Arts can't be buffed to make it a viable alternative to a weapon (since it occupies a weapon slot) maybe it should be changed so it no longer occupies a weapon slot. It never really made sense to me that you get reduced to a single melee attack type when armed, especially since melee attacks are so much weaker than weapons.

It's tremendously frustrating that a fully-skilled character with traits to buff melee damage can't hold their own, but melee NPCs practically 1-shot you.

Something I'd like to see for ground combat; that I feel would help; is this set of commands for BO's -

http://forums.startrekonline.com/sho...d.php?t=159161

I created that thread some time ago; but I still feel having better control of BOs would be immensely useful; and potentially make the ground game a bit more interesting as you wouldn't be stuck doing 90% of the work yourself. (Well okay you might; but your officers would at least put on a decent show of competence for once.)

As a matter of general polish there's a few things that bug me that might be nice to have fixed too; though they don't really impact the gameplay, just the visual -

First - please force BOFFs to set up deployables adjacent to each other. Maybe it's just me but it looks rather silly having a turret, a mortar, and a shield generator stacked on top of each other like some mad scientists ultimate device or something.

Second - NPC Turret groups really need to be deployed more carefully. Right now they're just a big bunch of turrets on the rare occasions they appear - instead; when there's a turret group on a map; think to yourself: "If I were commanding the defenses of this location, where would I put these for maximum effect?" - At a dead minimum make sure they have LOS to most targets without shooting through each other.

Third - I'm not sure how to achieve this... but NPCs need to act more... in character I guess. Having them randomly rolling around shooting without paying much attention tot heir surroundings really hurts verisimilitude. They don't have to be 'smarter' necessarily; but they should act like they have some idea of how to behave in a combat situation. Obviously this one is probably not going to happen; but I can dream...

*Edit*

Fourth - It would be nice if Drones and Turrets we create could be either set to fire specific kinds of weapons. Example: Tetryon Turret, Polaron Turret, etc... Many of these already exist in one form or another. It's not a huge deal; but if you kit your entire crew out with Tetryon weapons, it can feel awkward to then see phaser fire from your turret or drone.

*edit edit*

Along with the above... maybe consider turrets that fire bolts? It seems like the vast majority of the turrets in the game fire bolts; the turret itself appears designed to fire bolts... but for some reason fires a beam instead. A beam turret, at least as I'm remembering from DS9, looks more like a dome with a continuous phaser strip around it; which clearly isn't what we're using. At the very least consider it as an option.

Finally, also on turrets - Consider re-thinking the 'turrets knock you down when they explode' thing. On the one hand: Yes, it's nice verisimilitude. However when you're an engineer with many deployables, and an enemy does a single AoE attack that kills them all, you can end up being juggled by your own deployables, which is kind of annoying.

Consider instead random effects for destroyed deployables; like, 50% chance nothing special happens (it just breaks), 25% chance it explodes with knockback, 25% chance something special related to the type of deployable happens. (Maybe an AoE explosion of the appropriate damage type for turrets, an AoE shield drain from a shield generator, etc...)

*edit edit edit* I keep remembering things >.<

Consider looking carefully at the bolt weapon effect both for space and ground. It could be just me, but especially on Phasers and Disruptors, it feels like they look nothing like the bolt weapons fired in the show. It's more like a weird ball with a tail that isn't even quite connected. It may even be as simple as just needing more bloom; I don't know; but it's bugged me since before launch.

Weapon-wise:

Consider making Sniper Rifles fire one shot per trigger pull in primary fire mode, so as to keep with the feel of being a marksman's weapon. (Obviously you'd want to make that one shot do more damage to compensate)

Consider giving Compression Pistol back it's old (As in Closed Beta old) 2-shot per trigger pull rate of fire. It could be just me, but right now it just seems overly slow for what is for all intents and purposes a 25th century semiautomatic. (It's not a perfect comparison, but it's the closest easily at hand.)

New post since this next bit is unrelated to the above and is more applicable to regular gameplay rather than nitpickiness...


Some new Ground Weapons that might liven things up a tad (or at least, present a few more options for people) -

Beam Pistol - High Power Beam: This is a beam pistol that as a special attack fires a powerful single-target beam. Primarily this is for those who want to use Stun or Wide Beam pistols and have an Exploit weapon available without switching to a radically different design.* Uses the Beam pistol models. (This is basically primarily so people can feign that they're just 'switching settings' on their pistol, like the show, rather than actually switching weapons.)

Bolt Rifle - Rapid Fire: This weapon fires 3-shot bursts** instead of 2-shot bursts like the Sniper Rifle, though the DPS on the standard attack is the same. As a special attack it fires a narrow cone (think about the size of the Pulse Rifle) spray of bolts. It has no knockdown or special effect, and does slightly less damage on it's special attack than the Pulse Rifle - but it can be used slightly more often. Mainly this is for people who like bolt rifles and want an Expose rifle that actually uses bolts.

Beam Assault - Overcharged Beam: Much like the High Yield Beam on Assault Rifles, except an enlarged area of effect and higher damage. Also preferably knock-back rather than push-back. Mostly this is because well... I like the idea. I love the look of the High Yield rifles, but I don't like their present functionality - making them slower and harder hitting as Assault weapons however might just be a winning combination.


Now for the more controversial part of the suggestion - a completely brand new and unusual weapon:

Kinetic Assault - This one might be a twinge controversial - but games like Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force have had portable mini-Torpedo launchers for some time, and I was thinking... we have many different types of torpedoes in STO. Why not harness those extra possibilities on the ground? After all, right now Kinetic damage is fairly limited, and yet it's something you can potentially become highly resistant to. At present you have to ask "why would I bother?" 9 times out of 10 times, at least in PVE. Now you might just have a reason. (This weapon should NOT bypass shields however; it's basically a miniaturized torpedo launcher; which like in space should have to contend with shields; even if the interaction turns out a bit different on the ground.)

Kinetic Assault - Launcher - This weapon's primary fire is a target designator - it does no damage, takes 2 seconds to fire, has a 3 second recharge, and has a substantial -Res component. (Non-Stacking) - The special attack fires off a micro-torpedo of the given type; Quantum, Photon, Plasma, Chroniton, Transphasic; each with their own special effects. The secondary fire has a fairly long cooldown (as much as 20 seconds): this is heavy equipment! - but it also delivers a tremendous wallop. It's an Exploit weapon with a sizable area effect - but unlike most AoEs there is some drop-off as you get toward the edges of the explosion. Essentially this is a once or twice a fight weapon that can be a complete game changer if used right... or basically amount to nothing but an impressive "bang!" noise if used poorly.

Obviously the launcher could probably use fine-tuning from what I've got listed here; but it's just an idea I wanted to toss out since I rather like the concept.

If the ground combat was a little less tedious and repetitive, with a little more variety at the high end (so very, very sick of Borg!), it wouldn't be quite so bad.

STFs should follow the "heroic" model of World of ******** (yeah yeah I know, boo and hiss), where they're done in an hour or less, have a variety of bad guys to fight room to room, and have the fights between the bosses actually go a little more quickly than "shoot borg 30 times."

Variety is the biggest thing here, second biggest is that space is such a brief afterthought in STF structure that any fun I had with Donatra's ship at the end of Khitomer Accord was after hours and hours of a boring, mind-numbing slog through YET ANOTHER Borg base. Bleh! More space, less ground in STFs, until ground is less crummy, please.