Dancing Lessons

"The hall is rented, the orchestra engaged. It's now time to see if you can dance."

- Q, "Q Who"

I've never really warmed to The Next Generation. Over the years I've watched most of the episodes and there's no doubt that there are some classics in there, but if I were to rank the Trek series then it's TOS and DS9 first, with TNG sitting somewherein the middle of the second tier... though still above Voyager.

In part this is due to me being old enough to have watched TNG during its original run, and that means I sat through the awfulness of the first season week by interminable week. Nowadays everyone knows that S1 of TNG is bad, but back then... well, maybe it'll be better next week?

Season Two is better. Still a bit iffy in places, but with good episodes like "The Measure of a Man" and "A Matter of Honor," and of course "Q Who," in which Q speaks for all of us who suffered through season one and calls out the TNG crew for their insufferable smugness, then hurls them into their first encounter with what would become that era of Trek's iconic menace: The Borg.

The Borg present a problem which can come up when a game is based on stories from another medium. They were, inevitably, the original endgame adversaries in Star Trek Online - who else would it be? The Ferengi? - but how do you balance encounters with such a dreaded foe? Make them too strong and they become a chore to go up against, but make them too weak and they won't feel right.

It's a bit like the situation with the Ringwraiths in the Lord of the Rings Online. That game also had to deal with the most iconic enemies of that setting being way above the power level of the player characters, and did so by keeping them mostly off stage for a long time. The first fight with one of the Nine, when it finally came, was a really memorable moment, and took me completely by surprise.

The Borg in STO are formidable. Not as nigh-invincible as they were in TNG - more like their Voyager incarnation - but definitely harder to handle than other foes I've encountered up to this point, as they should be. Generally the balance is good, except in the penultimate mission of the arc, which culminates in the boss fight I've alluded in previous posts.

This was one of the toughest fights I've had in any MMO in years - at least in a mission designed to be soloable - and as difficulty spikes go far surpassed even the encounter with the D'deridex Warbird that gave me such a rough return to the game at the start of my last run.

I fought this boss a bunch of times, racking up so many injuries that I was debuffed into the ground by the time I gave up on it. Then, after my interval on Nimbus III, with better gear and a lot of reworking of my away team's skills, I took another run at it. This went slightly better and a couple of times I got it down to its last 25% or so of health, but I simply couldn't get past that, and since it fully regenerated every time I respawned I was still beating my head against a brick wall. A thinner brick wall perhaps, with a few dents in it, but a brick wall nonetheless. So I backed off again, swallowed my pride, and dropped the difficulty back to Normal. I had fnally admitted that I was out of my league.

Q would be pleased.