I'm all for challenging content, but there's a difference between real and artificial difficulty in game design.

Real difficulty is giving NPCs the ability to intelligently heal and buff themselves and support one another.
Artificial difficulty is overpowering enemies to the point of eclipsing the player's ability to deal with them on level terms.

Artificial difficulty is often tedious and frustrating, whereas real difficulty requires thought and strategy. What we have at present is the epitome of artificial difficulty. The Borg are too powerful, easily capable of destroying a player before they have a chance to react while simultaneously ignoring the constraints of weapons range. The D'Deridex Defender NPC is a good example of real difficulty because it's capable of healing itself when needed, has strong firepower that isn't completely overwhelming, and can debuff the player's defenses. In other words, the D'Deridex Defender is on a level playing field with the player. The Borg are an uphill battle of epic proportions.

You want a challenge? Write a letter to the development team asking them to overhaul the abilities and artificial intelligence governing the Borg NPCs.

As far as the Borg go, I've always said that as a Cube gets closer to destruction its weapons should diminish and its hull regeneration should start to SKYROCKET.


This would be caused by the whole "crew" of the cube going into repair mode and the ships weapons being a secondary action.

The ship would still be fighting, but the real challenge at that point is getting the hull to KEEP dropping rather than stalemating the process.

That actually sounds like a Borg cube. I could actually live with this.

True .
I've felt that with the introduction of the New STF's , they have tried to raise the bar -- possibly to a level to which we will be raised once we complete the Omega Rep system , and in theory that all sounds good , but there are a few problems :

- ITH Space suffers from a bit too many crits and the first part just suffers from bad map making .
You can't distinguish between foreground and back ground and NPC's .
All have the same general geometric shapes , all are colored the same , all are lighted the same .
I't like fighting paper white starships with a white wall as a back ground .

- If someone leaves ITH Space , on Elite at least it turns into a 40-60 min slug fest . It's quite mind numbing .

ITH Ground on Elite is un-doable for pugs at the moment , an I have failed with a number of non-pugs as well (all Sci team last night) .
I have one last tactic in mind to try before asking for some kind of nerf there .
I would not as for a nerf if that map (the last room) was bigger (by at least 1/3) , but as is , you get sandwiched and creamed .

On one hand that is true .
On the other -- this game still suffers from the flaw it began with , and it's showing up right here in our faces (again) .

You have a single player experience All the way from Lvl 1-50 , and THEN you somehow are supposed to know/understand team/group play .
And now , on top of that , you HAVE to play missions on Elite to get your BNP .
Sure PUG's seem worse then before -- more ppl are pugging it as a number of STF dedicated communities are pretty much in chaos / not functioning .

EliteSTF chanel chat chatter has gone down by more than 1/2 .
The_Hive + TheRealSTFChanels are mostly silent .

So yeah , ppl who still want to play STF's are pugging it .
And as my (pre-s.7) sig says ... cross your fingers ... .

Stuff the Borg - they're overused , overrated and downright boring now.

So far as I am concerned, the only enemy that should be able to flat-out faceroll us should be the Iconians.

Just wanted to chime in here. I have never used the Assimilated Ship set beyond the Assimilated Console itself, so I never had the benefit of the hull heal or any of that stuff. I too have felt like the Borg Plasma has been hurting my hull a little more than it did before. My guess is it's something else.

Perhaps something was done to the way Resists are handled? I always equip a +35 Plasma resist but it feels kinda like I don't have much resist at all.

The other suggestion is I noticed some funkiness with Hull percentages after s7 where I would have 107% Hull or showing 47,000/43,000 HP.

I'm still pretty sure that the new craze in hull-burning plasma is due to how MANY torpedoes we're getting hit by.... The borg seem to use them a lot more freely now. The issue isn't the 350 points in plasma burn, it's getting hit by three torpedoes and having three different 350-point plasma burns going at once.

I also seem mine go from 100 to 30 after getting hit with nothing or I should say a little green dots coming out of no where.

I too am being affected by the so called "invisible" torpedo. I was playing an elite STF the other day and watched in surprise as my Oddy's shields went from full to nothing and my hull go from 100% to 15%.

From my experiments last night the Aegis set actually works pretty well against the plasma burn. The Reactive shielding goes up to 5 almost instantly and then the burn simply does not hurt your hull that much at all after that