[Petrarch]

Crystalline Entity Event Returns

This is the first we've had the event for some time now, runs for 3 weeks starting on Thursday 16th. They appear to have made a few tweaks to the event version of the queue, changes are as follows:

The following are some of the bigger changes:
There is now a 30 second mission briefing time before the queue begins. This allows players time to join the queue and read the briefing if necessary, before taking on the Entity.

The Entity shards that it deploys are now immune to control effects, this allows the feature more room to breathe as the queue progresses.

Small Shards will no longer buff the Entity’s damage for the entire queue. Instead, they will give the entity buff stacks towards a more powerful Energy Release after its Absorption Phase.

This change results in a potentially stronger Energy Release attack. In response to that, we’ve added a growing AoE indicator to show the area of the Energy Release and how long it will be before it goes off.

The Entity Beam attacks no longer apply a Flight Speed debuff to players
.
Instead, Large Shards on Advanced Difficulties will apply a Flight Speed debuff if they are able to explode on a player.

The Entity is now entirely Immune to damage while in its Absorption Phase. We wanted this phase to be about avoiding the Energy Release and preventing the shards from buffing the attack.

The Entity Absorption Phase is now 15 seconds long rather than 30 seconds. This was the case on Advanced versions of the queue but is now in parity with Normal.
Once the Entity has been destroyed it will explode into many Small Salvageable Crystal Fragments, these fragments can be destroyed to gain 1-5 Salvage from each of them!

These changes will not affect the Crystalline Catastrophe non-event queue with the initial rollout.

[Scarlett]

Ooooh, immunity from damage = longer time in queue = no more smashing glass runs.

I'm a supporter.

[Generator]

Ooooh, immunity from damage = longer time in queue = no more smashing glass runs.

I'm a supporter.

Agreed.

[Bridger]

The Entity shards that it deploys are now immune to control effects, this allows the feature more room to breathe as the queue progresses.

That is dummer

[Kuret'iklan]

bad changes I hope don't make it to the regular q

[WelshAvenger]

That is dummer

Maybe they got sick of science ships spamming GW and torp spread to finish the queue in three minutes? (Like I used to in my sci torpboat)

[Scarlett]

To brag a little, my current FAHCR set-up let me park forward facing and usually get 3rd place in CCA. Either that's awesome or broken and as much as I love the ship as a Sci Captain, I can't help but think it's the latter.

I'm sure these changes are for the event only. And you can quote me on that

[WelshAvenger]

To brag a little, my current FAHCR set-up let me park forward facing and usually get 3rd place in CCA. Either that's awesome or broken and as much as I love the ship as a Sci Captain, I can't help but think it's the latter.

I'm sure these changes are for the event only. And you can quote me on that

Done!

[Sul-Matuul]

To brag a little, my current FAHCR set-up let me park forward facing and usually get 3rd place in CCA. Either that's awesome or broken and as much as I love the ship as a Sci Captain, I can't help but think it's the latter.

I'm sure these changes are for the event only. And you can quote me on that

Yeah gotta agree.
I could park my JHDC about 3km from the entity and just spam TS3 with CF2 onto it all the time and still get 1st place. I know healing was involved in that placement but even with all the Tholians raging at me i had no issues.
The queue is a bit too easy i think, and the entity was little more than a helpless target, the only time you'd really suffer was if the Tholians ganged up on you.

Anything to make it more interesting is good. Though i'd honestly prefer a return to the original CE mission; now THAT was a challenge.

[Generator]

Either that's awesome or broken and as much as I love the ship as a Sci Captain, I can't help but think it's the latter.

Hmm...

In all seriousness, I kind of agree. When my Rom Science officer can do that in her Fleet Malem, it feels weird. (If course, I always try and stack my odds, I make sure I have a Tachyon Beam ready to debuff when the Absorption phase comes.)

I look forward to seeing how this plays out on Monday night (first chance I'll have to check it out).

[Petrarch]

This has echoes of the CE of old and how it changed and it remains to be seen if history repeats itself.

In the early days, the CE was a total joke, you could kill it off in under 5 seconds. Cryptic took notice of this and changed the queue. Now, instead of being a total pushover, it was pushed just as badly in the opposite direction and became a rock hard experience. Difficulty on the tricky side of not impossible is fine, but this version of it dared to tread the borders of utterly futile and people generally avoided the queue after that.

That's how we got to the current format, which is again easy by today's standards. Lets just hope if they made the changes to the regular queue, we'll not end up with another abandoned STF that never pops.

[WelshAvenger]

another abandoned STF that never pops.

Did Cryptic ever discuss implementing anything to bring people back to the queues or are they still saying that empty queues are a display error?

[Petrarch]

Did Cryptic ever discuss implementing anything to bring people back to the queues or are they still saying that empty queues are a display error?

Something they have planned is for random queues with better rewards in Age of Discovery. Effectively you queue up and take your chances wherever you end up.

Not an ideal solution but it's at least something in the right direction. To be honest, if they had something like that implemented years ago, we may not have had the situation we do these days.

[Petrarch]

Double XP is also returning tomorrow alongside the CE. XP event runs until the 20th.

[Sul-Matuul]

Something they have planned is for random queues with better rewards in Age of Discovery. Effectively you queue up and take your chances wherever you end up.

Not an ideal solution but it's at least something in the right direction. To be honest, if they had something like that implemented years ago, we may not have had the situation we do these days.

Noy sure that would work but it is interesting at least. You'd suffer if you didn't have a sort of "jack of all trades" build though. Imagine randomly ending up in HSE with your goofball mines + viral matrix build, lolz.

Tbh, i don't think it's all about the rewards, i mean they do play a big part for most people i'll not deny. The fact that STO is extremely grind oriented these days is a problem that leads to the feeling that one must grind out marks and dilithium via the most time efficient maner. This is not terribly good in terms of the game's health i feel, it just turns it into more of a part/full time second job for most, rather than a bit of relaxing fun. When the only reason you play a fun video game's content is a measure of how much you get as a reward, something has gone drastically wrong somewhere. STO needs to get out of this rut it's stuck in.

With that in mind i'd say revamping the old queues is a good place to start. The old Borg ones are very dated now and could do with some attention to let all manner of builds shine in them. Not every map needs to be a DPS race, the old nightmare level CE was a great example, though perhaps a bit too difficult. Procyon 5 is another good example, but again suffers from the old time:reward monster that rears it's ugly head once more.
If they can create content that we enjoy playing regardless of the rewards because the fight itself is the fun, then i'd hope it would open up more of the vast majority of queues we have at our disposal.
It's such a terrible shame that most new players joining after ViL or AoD will never really experience the fun of running 90% of the PVE maps with either friends or random players. That's a lot of content they will never get to try out.