It looks like there were two patches last night. The larger of the two addresses player concerns (which I share) that the game has become too easy since the giant patch of the 20th of January. Though if it has left the tier 1 combat as easy as it was, it is going to be a bit of a shock for players when they hit tier 2.
Recent changes added when we unlocked the level cap introduced imbalance to combat at mid to high levels. Closed beta players will be quick to point out that things are much easier than what they remember. To address this we have tracked down the issues and reverted combat back to the intended difficulties. We hope that you will find space combat to be more challenging now, especially starting in Tier 2.
Improved gameplay balance in space
- No direct change in Tier 1 combat
- Increased damage of space enemies above level 11 (Tier 2).
- Reduced science vessel shields and hull by about 10%
- Added more interesting weapons Bridge Officer abilities to enemy ships
- All Romulan/Reman ships now use mostly plasma torpedoes instead of Photons. So their High Yields will be Heavy Plasma Torpedoes instead of Salvos (including their Bird of Prey Frigates).
- Improved Romulan/Reman Mogai – Added Plasma Turret, Dual Beams, Rapid Fire, Attack Pattern Alpha and Evasive Maneuvers.
- Improved Romulan/Reman D’deridex – Added additional Aft Plasma Array, Viral Matrix, Photonic Shockwave, and increased its used of Heavy Plasma Torpedoes.
- Improved all Hirogens ships– Added Transphasic Torpedoes
- Improved Klingon Negh’Var – Added Boarding Party at higher levels
- Improved Cardassian Galor – Added Evasive Maneuvers, and Feedback Pulse
- Fixed Borg shipWeapons (It’s tractor Beam and Cutting beam were note working)
- Fixed Torpedo and Mine powers that were unintentionally harming your own crew.
- Fixed Rapid Fire to work properly.
- Made a tuning pass on Chroniton projectiles
- Tricobalt weapons now have a 30 second shared cooldown.
- Updated the plasma ball to have slightly more direct damage and slightly less DoT damage
- Removed some Federation spawns in Klingon PVE missions that were not granting XP properly
- Added some missing end tier ships to the stores
- Removed a bad Shield HP console that was not working properly
- Reduced the damage from the Metreon Gas in the Briar Patch that was smoking everyone. Sorry Riker, we had to do it.
There as also an earlier one intended to enhance stability.:
- Some players were unable to interact with objects on public maps (such as the ground portions of the Tutorial). These now work more reliably.
- Fixed a crash when inspecting and looking up item information.
- Fixed a crash when using the Tailor
- Additional server performance updates
[…] Star Trek Online Open Beta 20100119a.12 Patch Notes, January 22nd […]