I have been running the TFO “Defense of Starbase One” with three lower level toons all flying T6 ships. I want to see how the experience is starting in a T6 all the way to the ‘end game’. This includes the newly minted Vulcan character I recently created and wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
Many of you likely know that lower level characters are able to participate in some of the TFO/PVE missions. The game has a system of scaling lower level player to match the level of 50+ players. I am not sure exactly how the system decides to match these lower tier characters with the actual level 50+ toons in these PVE missions, but there is an indicator when the player enters the PVE mission that the level is being boosted.
What I have determined is the weapons hit harder, the hull and shields are boosted and special abilities are dramatically enhanced. The lower level toon is still inhibited by less weapons bays on the ship, fewer consoles, and fewer BOffs. I did notice that at Lt. Commander and Lieutenant, the Chains of Fire console active ability was an absolute beast. Literal hellfire that destroyed powerful enemies with ease. Now that all three of these toons have pushed past the Commander level it seems the scaling is backing off and that ability is far less impressive.
Overall I think the scaling level works well, I’d imagine it is a difficult thing to process not over powering nor under powering and it seems to work. The biggest hurdle for low level characters in these PVE missions is the sheer lack of BOff abilities. I have ended up with a smoldering ship and sometimes an exploding warp core as I patiently wait for those precious few BOffs to come off cool down.
I am definitely slow poking this level up process. I do one mission a day with each of the three low level toons and average about a level a day as a result. I am also working on completing the new Reputation system with my primary toon and earning the special T6 ship tokens as well right now.
For anyone getting into the game fresh, you have a golden opportunity to fly a very powerful ship right from the beginning and that was not available to us ‘old timers’ in the game. Just remember that the C-store ships you buy with Zen are unlocked account wide. So any characters you create in the future will have access to those ships providing they are in the right faction. (Klingons don’t fly Fed ships, and vice versa, Only Romulans fly Rom ships). The T6 ships are expensive, but they are also going to be viable all the way to level 65. Kudos to STO for making this change. Now if they would only make scalable weapons available at the dilithium store and reputation store, that would be awesome. Oh and Cryptic, if your reading this, probably not, but why isn’t dilithium account bound instead of character bound? It would encourage player to create secondary toons if their primary could send them a gift basket filled with dilithium. Just sayin’.
Star Trek Online 