Combat in Star Trek Online can be a frustrating experience, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
For all that combat is an integral part of most MMOs it's only rarely that combat is the point of the game. Combat is something that happens when you're playing the game but it's often not why you're playing the game. There's a lot of routine encounters where, assuming you're on-level and not hopelessly undergeared, you're going to win. The challenge isn't whether or not you can kill an enemy so much as it is how quickly can you kill it... and then kill x more of them to meet the quest objective.
There's a couple of reasons for this. One is that as MMOs have become more solo-friendly it's become necessary to balance content - particularly open world content - so that it's doable by classes and builds of wildly varying ability. Related to that is the fact that MMOs are ultimately all about progression and it's only rarely that anything will stand in the way of that progression for long.
(At least until endgame, which is dominated by an entirely opposite philosophy. Endgame is all about slowing progression - not stopping it, but reducing it to a crawl. Consider how often you swap out gear while levelling compared with how rarely you do so once you're chasing specific drops in endgame.)
So combat in MMOs can become very routine. In some games almost any enemy can be defeated by running through a pre-determined attack rotation until it's dead, and this is especially true when the default difficulty of the game is very low and can't be altered. That lack of any challenge can become a dealbreaker for me and I've run up against it several times over the course of this blog - most notably in Lord of the Rings Online and in Neverwinter. It's also the reason why I haven't returned to World of Warcraft in more than two years.
(Actually there's now several reasons why I haven't returned to WoW, but I'll talk about that some other time.)
None of this, though, is a problem in Star Trek Online.
STO is heavily instanced, much like City of Heroes, and this allows the use of difficulty settings to raise (or lower) the challenge. Star Trek Online has three settings - Normal, Advanced and Elite - and at some point during my first run I'd went up to Advanced. I don't recall when, but that was what I was on when I came back to the game.
As I wrote in a previous post that didn't go well, and I dropped back to Normal difficulty for a while before going back up to Advanced. The reasoning behind doing that was what I call The Shotgun Rule.
The Shotgun Rule: If I'm playing DOOM (1993) and I'm going through entire levels using only the shotgun (and never running out of ammo) then I should increase the difficulty.
In STO and other MMOs if I'm completing quests using only my attacks - no buffs or debuffs, no heals, no consumables - then I should increase the difficulty. Once I remembered what I was doing in STO and adjusted my loadout that was where I was on Normal difficulty. Most of my abilities were going unused because I had no need of them, so I've went back up to Advanced and stayed there.
It's worked out well. Combat encounters are challenging and interesting (the two tend to go together) and I'm having to make full use of my abilities and use actual tactics. It's also shone a spotlight on weaknesses in my build, such as when a series of disastrous firefights during one mission made me take a long look at my bridge officers' gear, at which point I realized that a lot of it was falling behind the curve and would need to be upgraded before I went into the next encounter. All of which is good. I'm not a min-maxer by any means but I do like to see how far I can push myself with the character I have, and STO offers a lot of ways to change things up. That's interesting too.
It's also, like I said at the start of this post, occasionally really frustrating. The combat in STO doesn't follow the standard model for MMOs, especially in space. Enemies are less numerous but more dangerous,and take longer to deal with.
And some of them hit really hard. I've stayed loyal to the Bird-of-Prey class and it's very much a glass cannon. So much so that on several occasions I've been blown to bits in basically one shot. Even my Blaster in City of Heroes isn't that fragile. It's only rarely in an MMO that an enemy can do a one-hit-kill outside of some group content.
That can be frustrating, as when I racked up close to a dozen defeats against the D'deridex Warbird I encountered at the start of this run, and even more in "Mars, the Bringer of War." As much as I like a challenge I won't deny that those were controller snappingly annoying fights, especially the latter.
But no enemy I've encountered so far has been unbeatable, and knowing that any fight I go into in this game might be that tough keeps me on my toes. It keeps me focused. It keeps me interested. It keeps me involved.
And that's not a bad thing.
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