Good afternoon all,

I would like to start by saying I LOVE THIS MISSION! It is about time that there has been some challenging missions that make players engage their brain instead of just wildly mashing Space Bar. There has been alot of griping on the forums about how difficult this mission is and I for one and glad there is some challenging content. Beating an easy game is not much of an accomplishnemt in my book. But I digress. I teamed up with a random bunch of people putting together a group from Zone Chat. We ended up with 2 Tactical Officers, 2 Engineers and one Science Officer. I Raided for about 3 years in WoW and it is one of the things I enjoy about MMO games. Longer missions tha require planning and teamwork. I also enjoy analyzing on the fly and adjusting strategy accordingly. I'd like to cover some of my observations as we progressed through the mission.

Phase I - Space Mission. Excellant execution. There were to many enemies to just go in and lay waste to everything without a plan but not so many that you were banging your head against the wall. We found that the "Fedball" Tactic from PVP works very well in this portion. Spreading out tends to bring additional groups into the fray and usually ends up in the majority of the group dead. Stay close together and focus fire on a single target. Start with the Probes. They go down the fastest and will significantly reduce the amount of incoming damage rather quickly. Next the spheres, then the cubes. We kept one ship on the Gate at all times, destroying the 3 smaller nodes first, then the Gate itself. Usually an Escort. The tactical cube is fairly easy to beat but it can be slow going.

Phase II - The gauntlet. Another rewarding section of the mission. This was just insane at first. Borg coming in droves, Interlink Nodes keeping them from being killed, and enemies beaming in behind you. We soon settled in and worked on figuring out what was going on. Again, The "Fedball" tactic worked very well. Stay in a tight formation, advancing slowly and focus fire in a single target. Take down any Interlink nodes first. Take the Drones, Proto Drones and Infected Drones down next. They go down quickly. Then finish off the Heavy Tactical drones and the Elite Tactical Drones. This section ends with a mini-boss who is pretty straightforward. Kill his minions, then kill him. Above all, TEAMWORK! TEAMWORK! TEAMWORK!

Phase III - Shield room. Hmmm...Platform Jumping? Really? We did not make it past this phase. I do not normally have issues with platform jumping but in this case I do. Latency was a large factor in many of the deaths we encountered. Even a half second lag would cause a fall into the Plasma pool that means insta-dead. Start with the Platform on the right and work clockwise. If you start from the left, you have to backtrack to get to the last platform and it takes to much time. Jump over in a single file line. Colliding with another player will alter your path. We had several instances of players knocked off the platforms by another player trying to cross at the same time. Once we figured out how to get everyone to the first platform we worked on clearing them in a timely fashion. We found the fastest way to clear the platform is by using your melee strike to knock the drones into the plasma. They will respawn, but only once, then the platform is clear for a minute or so. Once the platform is cleared, you must enter a code into 3 seperate nodes at the same time. The shield will drop and you have 4 minutes from that point to clear the other 3 platforms. If you take longer than 4 minutes, the node will "adapt" and the shield will come back up. You can look at the node and see a progress bar above it to give you an indication of how much time you have left. Select 1 tactical officer and 1 medical officer to begin clearing the next platform while the rest of the team drops the shields and uploads the virus.

This is all the further we got before losing players to "going to bed, work comes early" This is merely MY opinion of the strategy needed to complete the portions of the Epidose I have seen, based upon 3 years of end game raiding. As I experience the rest of this mission (hopefully tonight) I will add my additional thoughts. Your thoughts and comments are welcome though I would ask for constructive inputs only. "This Sucks!" might make you feel better but ultimately it helps no one and we learn nothing from your experience. I also have little sympathy for those that want the game handed to them and are not willing to put in a little effort to beating the content. In my opinion, that is what End Game content is all about.

P.S. Thanks to the Dev team for giving us some challenging content!

I'm gonna mostly agree with this, other then to note that the gauntlet in phase 2 was a LITTLE long, slightly less trash woulda been appreciated.

and I fully agree that the platform jumping, while a great idea, is too easily screwed by lag at bad times