Before I start, yes I know it must be a shocker. The MMO Star Trek: Online is still around and yes yet another expansion has happened. The bulletin points of this expansion are:

• Increased Level Cap from 50 to 60.
• New Ships (As always) and a new tier of ships, Tier 6
• New area of space: The Delta Quadrant.
• New Abilities and type of Bridge officers

I’ll go into detail of each of those further along but first the main culprit: Raising the Level Cap. This is the only MMO I’ve ever played. I have never touched World of Warcraft or anything else such as it. ST:O is the only MMO I enjoy simply because I’ve been a Trekkie most of my life and this game makes me happy. That and you get ships to make things go pew-pew and BOOM!

I’m digressing, as I was saying…I just recently leveled one of my toons and suffice to say it felt like it took an awful amount of work and time. Granted looking back and leveling up to level 50 before seems too easy now. You could level up to max before you finished all the story missions. My Romulan character I maxed out half way through and my others leveled up once every two missions. Now on wards to level 60, you’re lucky if you even make a dent in your quest to level up even once in one story mission.

Onward to the detailed criticisms: If you’re a fan of space combat, which I am, you might want to take of ground battles for the time being. NPC ships have way too much HP to deal with. A recent patch nerfed it on Normal Difficulty mission but of course that also means you’re taking a XP hit as well. Advanced and Elite difficulty settings don’t seem to have been nerfed as much as on the whole feel like your spending way too much time just trying to kill one ship, let alone a squadron and the XP you gained from doing a mission on harder settings just don’t feel worth it. Almost feels like you might as well do the same mission on normal settings and do it 3 or 4 times to level up once instead of doing it on hard settings once or twice to level up. Of course teaming up makes it much better, especially if someone is a Veteran (people that paid for lifetime membership) they give you a very minor boost in XP but hey that’s well worth it.

Ground combat doesn’t seem to have taken much of a painful hit. You might have to fire your weapon a few times more than you use to but since most people, even without trying, have decent equipment to fight the baddies it’s not that bad. Of course, unlike a certain patrol system in the Delta Quadrant (Algara System) where you can get 1K of XP per ship destroyed when you play on elite difficulty, ground even on hardest level doesn’t give you near as much as that but since it’s so much easier, it’s a crap shoot really.

The R&D upgrade system: If you have a favorite weapon of any type or favorite shield on your ship or self and you want to continue using it without having to find something better, you can now use your Duty Officers to upgrade your items. Since I focused on just leveling up I didn’t bother doing it but I tried it afterwards and was extremely disappointed in it. Using so much resources to “level up” one of my ships phaser banks only to have it do only about 40-50 more damage than before going against a ship with, on NORMAL difficulty, has something between 200K-400K of HP (Pre-Nerf), was not worth it.

In defense of Cryptic, the fact that they didn’t have any MAJOR bugs happen on the launch of this expansion compared to last year’s Legacy of Romulus (servers maxed out and I couldn’t play for about 5 days) and all the features they said they added WORKED out of the box is great. Wonderful to see Cryptic learn from the past and the fact that the first weekly patch to come along nerfed HP and balanced it, somewhat, with XP shows that they’re working on balancing everything. But obviously with ANY MMO out there, lots of out spoken, raging, and screaming at this unbalance. As with MMO’s changing so drastically, these rage-ers and pointing out the end of the world and everything else related to the amount of anger they have. And the amount…to put it loosely….overreactions to this is honestly appalling. Granted it’s not as bad as when that CoD player threatened a developer for changing stats on a weapon or the amount of stupidity that’s going on with Gamer Gate, but just like those mentioned, it’s just as stupid.

DIGRESSING!!!

Now the detailed positives: The ships they’ve added to this, which I bought one, are actually quite good. I personally bought the Guardian cruiser as the other Federation ships visually look awful to me but that’s just my personal gripe on how Fed ships should look like.

But the added abilities that come with Intel ships and Intel officers are quite entertaining and helpful in a fight, in space or on the ground. The Guardian is quite a maneuverable ship and the HP it has it significant. Being an engineer with this ship, I very rarely need to worry about staying alive, or even keeping the shield up, the hull is tough enough to handle a fair amount of fire. With the added tier of ships, T6, you get the added benefit of ships leveling up as you use them. T6 and T5-U (Tier 5 upgrades, will go into that later) unlock passive traits that give buffs to your ship. The passives are different depending on the ship. Carrier usually have a passive buff of faster launching time for fighters, cruisers get more hull points and/or defense buffs, and escorts usually get more damage and/or critical hit chance increase.

Each ship that can be leveled has four passive abilities and one star ship trait that is unlocked at level 5. T5-U’s do NOT come with a star ship trait. The star ship trait you get is different again depending on the ship. The one my Guardian has is getting a chance for your crew to do “desperate repairs.” When you’re in combat and you lose shields and hull points, your crew will randomly repair to 100% shields and depending on the state of hull, either 100% hull or at least 75%. It should be noted that this has been my expense with this trait and your results may vary and also that this trait will apply to ALL of your ships as long as it’s active, not just your Guardian.

The added benefit of an Intel ship using Intel officers’ abilities in space is very useful. One of my two abilities I use on my Guardian I personally call “The Troll Cloud.” When activated, a probe is launched at the target and detonates creating a small bubble cloud around the ship which not only makes the target receive more damage but also has the “chance” to cause the ship to lose control, ie. It starts rocking and rolling all over the place. Activating this ability on the biggest ships gives you chuckles as you make Borg Cubes the size of planets spin around and bounce for a few seconds.

One of my favorite Intel officers’ abilities on the ground is the “Tripwire Drone.” My officer will put a drone on the ground then kick it towards the enemy. Anyone baddie caught in the radius of the drone will trip and fall to the ground. When the drone reaches its destination, it explodes causing anyone that was knocked over and has just gotten up to be knocked down once again. Helpful when you’re swarmed by a group.

Ship upgrades: Since T5 ships have been around for so long and that there are so many of them Cryptic didn’t want you to feel like you spent all that money on them for nothing, they have a token you can buy for 700 Zen ($7) for one or 2K Zen ($20) for a pack of four to upgrade any of your T5 ships to become a T5-U. Your ship gets an added console slot depending on the ship and you get four passive abilities to unlock for that ship. Most ships get an HP buff with this upgrade so you won’t feel useless when fighting with your T5 ship past level 50. One of my favorite ships, Odyssey Tactical Cruiser, can be upgrade but I have yet to do it. After all that trying to level up, I need a break.

For the classic people of ST:O feeling like the games end game content was too easy originally, now has a challenge. The classic end game content, sorted by difficulty into Normal and Elite, now have a new option. The game now has Normal, the original “Elite” missions are now called “Advanced” and now “Elite” missions are the hardest of the hard. The Dev’s have warned you need at least uncommon (Green) max level equipment to even have a chance to win in Elite missions, ground or space. I have yet to play any Elite missions and quite frankly hearing some of my fleet mates try and play some advanced missions, I never want to touch elite.

All end game content now has added objectives in missions. For example, when going against Snowflake (The Crystalline Entity) on normal, an optional mission will occur when it’s about to activate it’s AoE weapon which is “Keep at least 50% of your group alive.” On normal difficulty this is optional. If you fail your rewards at the end will not be as much. HOWEVER, on Advanced difficulty that optional now becomes mandatory and if you fail it, the whole mission fails. You are given a “complimentary prize” if you fail but of course it’s not nearly as much as if you had won. And this “optional/mandatory objectives” applies to all end game content so you have to learn them before you do something insane like do an advanced mission for the first time ever.

Another added plus to the level cap increase was “Specializations” for your captain. There’s only three right now to choose from but they’re going to add more in the future. Once you reach Level 51 you start getting points towards specializations which add buffs, passive or active depending, to you, your officers, and/or your ship. You can have one Primary Specialization Tree and one Secondary Specialization Tree active at a time and can switch them at any time as long as you’re not on a mission.

One secondary tree everyone and myself likes is an active trait called “Rock and Roll,” with a related trait being “Magic Carpet Ride,” which to true Trek fans they get the reference. Once unlocked it give you the benefit of activating an animated roll maneuver that makes you completely immune to all damage (Except secondary effects from weapons such as disable) and unable to turn your ship for four seconds. It’s very entertaining to see even the clunkiest ships rollover and evade all damage. The primary tree you can choose from right now gives your captain buffs. One makes your secondary weapon abilities (ground combat) have a shorter cool down and another gives you a buff when your flanked. I have personally not unlocked everything but that’s the added plus, unlike your Skills you unlock and only have a set amount, Specialization can ALL be unlocked, now and forever. You do not have to choose one skill over the other.

My overall experience with this expansion has been, quite frankly, mixed. Seriously mixed. At the very beginning of the expansion launch, the fact that the servers didn’t go down and that now game breaking bug (server crashing, game crashing every 5 mins, etc.) appeared and only minor graphical glitches made me, along with a lot of others, very happy. If you’ve been a part of the game for a while you know that almost 7 out of 10 times whenever they patch something…ignoring expansions…they fix one thing but create another 2 or more problems. But at the beginning the expansion….the hit points…MY GAWD THE HITPOINTS…made it very, how you say, SUCKY. But the very first patch after launch they downsized the hit points in normal mode…thank the gods for that. The end game queue system still works, however, no one is using it seems. Normal end game missions don’t produce enough rewards to be worth it and Advanced and Elite missions are too bloody hard to get into, let alone actually finish without it auto failing within the first minute of the match. I am one of those people who aren’t playing any end game mission.

With that, I will say that they are listening…and by that I mean trying to muffle the amount of RAGE they’re getting on the forums to the point that they’re making anyone who wants to post wait 5 minutes between posts…and are slowly but surely fixing/balancing/making-people-less-angry with every patch. I’m happy to see them do this, ignoring the fact that they’re going to nerf fighter craft (space combat pets) but they are balancing out the end game queues so that Advanced missions won’t be so hard nor have as many hit points.

As I write this they’re running a special, limited time, mission called Mirror Invasion, a queued event that grants you a large amount of rewards, including a special shotgun, after finishing it 14 times. It runs for 3 weeks and every time you finish it after 14, it gives you a fair amount of rewards as well. I’m personally using this these rewards to make back all that I lost buying my Guardian as I did not actually use money to get it, I used the in game exchange…using in game resources to convert to real in game money…to buy it and was hoping to upgrade some of my other ships however I could only get just enough to buy the Guardian.

MY FEELINGS ARE MY OWN!
No wait…that’s what you are asking me when it’s really me asking me so I can answer you.

That’s putting it simply. Maybe if I didn’t have 3 toons to upgrade and work on and get maxed out as I did before this whole thing. Maybe if I started from scratch with only one and worked my way up to max it’d be a different feeling but since myself, along with A WHOLE BLOODY LOT of other people had plenty of toons to level up and make them take WAY too long than we’re used to. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of tricks. I do hope they get it all balanced out which I’m sure they’ll find a middle ground soon. Sooner would be better. Sooner rather than later. Soon…..DO IT NOW CRYPTIC!