A STF that has absolutely nothing to do with actually killing anything. Just pure survival. This is actually partially a friend's idea, but I'm going to ninja it sense he's been quite about it. The rules:

1) You can't leave a 5km sphere.

2) There is no end to the borg, they just keep coming without end. Blow one up, and another tougher warps right in.

3) You must survive 5-15min. At the end of the 15min. victory is declared.

Edit: That, Survive without dying or at least a limit on the number of time you can die.

The lore: You're not there to stop the borg. Your there to provide a creditable distraction so someone else can stop the borg. Why are you a creditable distraction (As if five vice admirals wasn't enough of a target)? The team is attempting to capture a borg communications or transit center.

In truth, I expect it to fail, but here is a STF I'd like to see. Either it's going to highlight a problem, or I'm going to be pleasantly surprised.

This is something I'd like to see; maybe have it like the Hive where it's dependent on X team members alive at all times.

Something like this would be good to include as if done right it may even encourage more team play and thus encourage strong healer and science ship builds to try to draw and then soak up firepower or debuff enemies to limit their danger. The idea of enemies being quickly replaced with harder ones is interesting as that would actually discourage destroying them (so full on damage builds are out).

I think it would need to be done in waves though; where a single wave is too powerful to simply ignore and tank against unless you actually take some of them out, but the more your destroy the quicker the next wave arrives.


I think for this to work best it shouldn't be Borg, but instead something else with an important enough reward that people are encouraged to play it as much as possible (and thus consider changing their build to do better at it); if it were just another Borg STF then people would just ignore it until they get fed up of grinding Infected and Khitomer (which are by far the easiest ones to beat regularly).

I like the idea of it not being a borg STF.

I wouldn't think it would it would be better in waves though. The whole point was to encourage tanking as much as the others encourage pumping out huge amounts of damage as fast as possible. If they come in waves or are not a credible, eminent, and ever present threat you lose the diving force to tank.

I guess I didn't say as much: The point was the enemies would have weak hull, be or have impressive weapons. So if you had to you could kill one, but it can't be something you should just do. A "Belly of the beast" scenario.

For example, the team is inside a very very large unimatrix ship or 1,000 ship fleet. They could shoot down the attacking sphere or high-yield torpedo, but the would result in the enemy commander deciding you needed more attention. Resulting and bigger and more things being sent your way.

That is, instead of rewarding damage focus, it punishes it.

(Yes, while I think it a good idea, it is also a commentary on STO's history. )

A while ago I brought up the idea of flying a squadron of shuttlecraft inside a Unimatrix to blow it up from the inside. I was kind of hoping that's what Hive Onslaught was going to be.

This is just a variation of the No Win Scenario, just remove the anything you have to defend and mandate that all players must survive until X amount of time. If they die - they respawn but cannot move until everyone wipes and it fails.

Could it be done - Yes
Would it be done - No

This would not be a good STF - This would be a good Fleet Mission because the only ones that are likely to be effective at it will be pre-made fleets.
Your average queue group is going to get slaughtered and those players will simply jump to other missions instead.

Effectively what happens on the ground STFs. People dont do them because they suck and the effort vs reward is not worth it.

If you were to do this mission - Make the enemy someone OTHER than Borg. The Borg have been done to death and I can quickly see yet another mission where random Borg ships are one-shotting people.

The Dominion / Klingons / Romulans would make a good candidate - Space version of DS9 Siege of AR and a ground version where you have to hold the line

If not the borg? I'd think the Iconians. They have the a plot device to move a fleet of unlimited size a unlimited distance at will. If anyone makes sense to have as a enemy you don't want to draw too much attention from, I think it would be them.

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Honestly? I think you would be surprised by two things, causalityeffect. The first, I'm cynic enough to not believe anyone can do it too, but simply because the game has almost gone out of it's way to prohibit or punish tanking in any way.

Second, I can think of a number of people that would want to try simply because the other special task forces are so massive damaged focus. It would be something for them to shine in what they like doing. For example, did you know it was possible to do the cure space elite with the Borg never firing a shot? Insanely tedious, but possible.

Coming up from underneath the cubes can be kept out of range when attacking the probes. Once deployed and on their way to the kang the birds of prey, raptors, or cruisers will not actually return fire until they reach the kang. There is a gap between the cubes and the kang that they are out of range of the cube and will happily let you obliterate them with out a peep.

sounds like a no win scenario...but wait that's already in the game.

Well what I suggested was that the waves would arrive sooner the more you kill; so if you just pour damage into the current wave then you could end up with the next, harder wave arriving much sooner, or even immediately; so you'd either be trying to weather the current wave, in which case the next wave would take a very long time to arrive (if at all), or if you start really wiping out the current wave the next one comes in a lot faster.

However, the numbers of each wave needs to be enough that tanking alone isn't sufficient, otherwise you'd get players simply leaving the first group of enemies alive intentionally in order to avoid them being replaced by harder ones. As much as I want to encourage more proper tanking and supporting roles, if that's all that a team is doing then it would be pretty boring. I think enemies need to be destroyed, but you're trying to balance that rate to the minimum you can kill to survive, without killing too many and being overwhelmed.

Basically, the point should be survival against the odds, but everyone should have something to do; rather than escorts being unwelcome their point is to try to keep enemy numbers low without rushing the next wave's arrival, or they can also focus on destroying enemy projectiles or temporarily drawing their fire if a tank is taking too much damage, that kind of thing. Currently in the STFs we have escorts, and we have ships that wish they were escorts, because the whole thing is about damage and little else; I don't want to see the opposite be true with no escorts at all, but some kind of balance, which is really what all STFs should have but meh, I don't see the current ones changing drastically any time soon


Iconians would be interesting; we have to be due a season with more actual Iconian involvement by now anyway, so some suitable STFs for it could be fun. Or it could be time-travel related, sending you back to when Iconians were at their height; I would love to see a "Temporal Task Force" to group together time-travel missions and gear (instead of the stupid Lobi store).

Ok, waves don't sound quite as bad.

A third of the reason to do it is I'm a cynic that wants balance. I want to exclude escorts. Not because they're a "evil race of no goods". If they put a tank-only task force in I see one of three outcomes:

1) I have a place I can do what I like in peace. The loud can point to "that as where you should be", and pretty much further the divide. I'm perfectly happy with this as it digs "this is your role, tank" people a deeper hole as they kiss their tanks goodbye.

That is, if someone don't want to respect people as anything more then a tool for their pleasure, the people have a place they can't effectively follow.

2) It highlights the balances issue so glaringly it must be tended to.
2A) They make it worse in which case they by proxy declare they don't care enough to do it right and alienate a even larger part of their player base.
2B) They actually fix it. In which case we not only have balance but a new task force.

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As this being like no win? Again, that rewards damage far more then it rewards tanking or support. It almost mandates support, but you can get away without it. In fact some of the more successful no-win run I've been in have been light on support. Not what this is meant to be about.

Honestly, you missed the point.

A mission already exists in the game which promotes survival - Its called the No Win Scenario

You want an STF version of that ? - Fair enough, all Cryptic has to do is copy that mission so that the enemies are Borg and you get Omega marks for it.