It was and is still the best tactic to stand still and shoot frontal weapons 100% of the time. The increased penetration or dot does not change that. They should drop plasma fields on you, so that you are forced to fly out of it.

This is how most of my STF runs go, from an RP perspective

Tactical, fire all forward weapons!
Helm, one quarter speed forward
Rapid Fire those cannons son!
Helm, attack pattern beta one quarter speed reverse
Helm, one quarter speed forward
Gimmie a torp spread, oh and helm one quarter speed reverse

Its kinda, silly.

I just keep blowing up out of the blue. With full shields and no (visible) weapons impact. And I'm not talking about the Borg torpedo spread you see coming 3 seconds after you blew up.

This is really frustrating. My ship feels like a card box. I'm all pro increasing the difficulty but I want to able to counteract!

My Vor'cha died for the first time in forever, yesterday. I was tanking the elite tactical cube as usual, then suddenly I'm taking thousands of plasma damage per second from a fire and nobody threw me a HE. Full shields + full hull => full shields + dead, in moments.

Not impressed.

Instakills make things difficult and a challenge.

Another way to save your ship is to change to full defensive power when the plasma DOT is on you, when its over, go back to offensive power.

It got pretty ridiculous, massive bleed throughs on top of endless plasma DOTs make you helpless. Cruisers are popping everywhere.

I went from full shields to 60% hull.. but my shields were still up. Hit HE, next hit 10% hull, HE is broken and won't clear for more than 1s... bleed to death.

Happened a few times like that, its more than just the massive torp damage the ships through out because they at least down a shield.

I have noticed this. The STFs were actually very nicely balanced before and I am hard-pressed to figure out how this was seen as an improvement on any level. The only thing I can come up with is that they want to cut-down on the successful optionals so that people will complain less about how they now get nothing for it with the drops removed.

No changes were made to standard or STF Borg enemy NPCs alongside Season 7. A few new ones were added for the Into The Hive STFs, but their addition has had no impact on the abilities of their allies.

Plasma DOTs have always had 100% shield bleedthrough, and high-damage torpedoes have always been a difficult-to-balance issue (to put it nicely).

Borg damage was not increased.
Borg abilities were not beefed up.

That said, it's possible that Borg encountered in Into The Hive are set to a higher level than they are in other STFs. I haven't checked to be certain. But if they are, that means they are rolling on different (higher) damage tables.

What defensive power? Shield? Worthless, that's the problem: OUR SHIELDS ARE UP. The borg are killing us without breaking our shields.

As far as I know, there's no way to fight hull damage outside of passive repair and repair cooldowns. If it is, in fact, the plasma dot, then the only way to stop it is hazard emitters. And that isn't much fun.