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Macecrest

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  1. I really like Taugrim's blogs and almost always agree with his opinions on SWTOR PvP. I felt let down by 1.2 balance changes, but I hope this game gives me reason to resubscribe in the coming months. Based on the 1.2 changes, the designers seemingly took what players felt was really good balance and threw it out the window. BW apparently did not hear that players liked most of the pre-1.2 balance, so they came up with a new model (rightfully termed a "gibfest"). Clearly there was a miscommunication. Or more to the point--a lack of communication. So, what should BioWare do first? Open up the lines of communication with PvPers. It is abundantly clear that the designers didn't know what we liked about the old system. Scrap the "wizard behind the curtain" mentality and level with your customers to see what needs to stay and what needs to change. Dedicate a section of the Q&A to discuss your design paradigm for PvP. Remaining silent for too long only tells players that there is no real design goal and you are, in fact, taking shots in the dark to see what sticks.
  2. This game is by no means unplayable for me, but I find that it is riddled with bugs and sometimes has that "beta feeling". I could patiently work around the frequent crashes and persist through the pvp exploits, but I find that it has become too much for a subscription-based game. Ultimately, I unsubscribed because I just wasn't having fun anymore. I recently started playing with some old friends of mine to see if it would renew my interest in this game, but we quickly lost interest when we realized the only thing we could meaningfully play together was 10-49 pvp. Don't get me wrong--lowbie pvp is fun, but it shouldn't be the only means of playing with your friends. We wanted to quest together, experience each other's stories, and overcome heroics and flashpoints, but we didn't all play at the same speed. So with the group divided and everyone forced to play a single player progression game until max level, we just stopped playing.
  3. This thread got me thinking about the most underused unique abilities that scoundrels bring to warzones. XS Freighter Flyby: Pretty decent aoe damage that is worth the 3 second cast if it hits 3 or more targets. Oh, it's flashy too. Take advantage of its flashiness and force clusters of enemy ranged dps and heals to scatter like flies. Best of all, this ability does not go on cooldown until you finish the cast. So you can make those healers dance all day by cancelling the cast early. Note that this isn't your primary style of controlling the enemy healers, but its handy when all of your stuns/cc/interrupts are on cooldown. Smuggle: Some people hate it, some love it. The range on it is really small, so its best used to just cover 1-2 people while you sneak your way to a node. The logic is this: if the enemy cant see you and your teammates coming, they cant call incomings properly. A few things to note about this ability, though. Smuggle does not work well with snipers/gunslingers dropping into cover, so be careful not to ruin their opening attacks accidentally. Also, due to the short range on this ability and the effects of server lag, you pretty much have to walk right beside, or on top of, the people you are smuggling in.
  4. Nice to hear of successes like this. The point of the post is to cut through all the whining of "battlemasters can faceroll to win" and prove (at least to yourself) that there is some merit to the idea that skill makes a difference in PvP.
  5. This has to be the best idea for social hubs since digital alcohol. I would spend all of my time at the fleet cantina watching huttball feeds and news reports about the other warzones. Just make sure we are watching replays of games or games on a delayed feed. This is to ensure that guilds don't take advantage of live streams and communicate the enemy strategies over voice chat.
  6. Well, my scrapper scoundrel hit 50 soon after 1.2 hit and I started the dreaded PvP grind in recruit enforcer gear. A few weeks later, I'm in full battlemaster gear and I'm feeling like PvP is a little too easy on my server. So, I decide to slip back into a full recruit enforcer set and see how I fare in warzones. I thought to myself: if I revert to recruit gear, my improvement with the class should show. I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised. My numbers varied depending on the game length, but my highest damage done in recruit gear was 250k, placing second in damage for the warzone. I compared this with my personal best of 330k done in battlemaster gear just days before. Just weeks ago, I would have never pulled 250k in recruit gear--150k was a good game when I first started. There is clearly a difference in performance with the same gear. So what changed? Well, over the past few weeks my understanding of class and warzone mechanics has increased. I would argue that this is what most players refer to as "skill". I don't think anyone could quantify skill and come up with stats like "I'm 30% better than when I started", but you can at least notice a difference in performance from when you started. It really is satisfying to realize just how much better you have become over the course of a few weeks or months of grinding. I would challenge all war heroes and battlemasters that tire of facerolling to try this out once in a while and see how much they have improved from recruit status. Yes, you are placing yourself at a disadvantage to the people who cling to their superior gear like its the only measure of what they've achieved. Just realize that winning and losing warzones doesn't matter so much when you're trying to measure your skill, and the game will become quite enjoyable.
  7. This exactly. I recall reading the game design blogs in World of Warcraft back in its prime. Players wanted huge changes right away, but game designers responded with a very important reason why they don't make sweeping changes. They said players generally respond negatively to too much change in a short period. WoW designers were always asking themselves "how much change is too much change?" and carefully paced their game design to reach a point where the majority had fun and balance expectations were eventually met. When I first saw patch notes for 1.2, i thought to myself "I really hope this isn't too much too quickly". For better or worse, 1.2 implemented a new PvP design across the board that many players reacted negatively toward. If this game is going to survive at all, I really hope 1.3 changes much less in class balance.
  8. Scrapper Scoundrel is quite satisfying. I love the idea of a stealth melee class that uses a shotgun for their biggest hits. PvP gameplay seems very strategic, as blowing your defensive cds at the wrong times can leave you feeling fragile, and using your stuns and roots with bad timing can mean your prey gets away. Telekinetics Sage plays a really good support class, especially if you dip into the healing tree to max your bubble effectiveness. Toss those bubbles on teammates taking damage, then switch back to full time dpsing and aoe to keep the enemy healers on their toes. Very satisfying gameplay. Other advanced classes I've tried but didn't like so much: Sith Assassin - madness seemed to be the most effective spec pre 1.2, not sure about now Sith Juggernaut - i was terrible at tanking pre-1.2 and didn't enjoy the dps specs post-1.2
  9. This thread may as well be titled: Should endgame progression be primarily vertical or horizontal? For the readers that aren't familiar with this terminology, here is an excellent resource: http://taugrim.com/2012/04/19/why-games-should-scale-horizontally-instead-of-vertically/ It is quite apparent that vertical progression is the industry standard for most mmo games today, and SWTOR is no exception. My personal opinion is that SWTOR could have been amazingly innovative with gamewide horizontal progression. Every planet could have remained relevant for all players, no matter what level of progression they had reached, and we might have avoided the fleet-centric population problem that some players disliked. Levels and stats would disappear, making PvP balance that much easier to achieve. A huge benefit is that any "level" player can group with any "level" player to experience content together and enjoy meaningful progression. I don't claim to know why the game designers chose one direction for the game over another (actually, I'm not sure if anyone outside BioWare knows) but I do think the problems we are facing at endgame are the direct result of the choice they made. I think legacy in 1.2 was a good step to bring more horizontal progression into the game, but I fear the innate vertical design of SWTOR is holding it back.
  10. A short prematch of only killing sounds really good. I'd make the ball spawn randomly between the first 30-45 sec of the match. (i.e. the ball can spawn as early as 30 sec or as late as 45 sec into the match)
  11. I played about 10 matches today on my scoundrel (lvl 29 now) and noticed a huge difference in rewards today. A win would net about 130 comms and a loss netted 70. Medals seem to be much easier to get now, though as a scrapper scoundrel I still cant manage to hit for 2.5k (oh well). I averaged about 7 medals per game, with my lowest being 4, so I was not worried about meeting the minimum medal threshold. Commendations gain is higher than before 1.2, but so are gear prices. The resulting reward system felt more like it did pre-1.2 (which is a good thing imo). I still have no firm opinion on whether I enjoy the overall design paradigm shift, though the low time-to-kill does make it a zergfest (reminiscent of pre-resilience WoW). Healers are hardly immortal anymore (though sage/sorc are still hard to kill even 2v1). I guess I could say that from a scrapper scoundrel point of view, I don't hate the current design.
  12. The kolto tank "waiting room" suggestion works best when there are no healers keeping people alive, and the direction this game is going, it seems healers are going to stop queuing for pvp anyway. However, there is no guarantee that the group won't have ALL heals and tanks (ive played plenty of matches like this). With these rare group compositions favoring survivability, the "waiting room" suggestion may even keep those players benched for most of the match, which means they won't be getting medals or having fun. What I would suggest however, is a system borrowed from Firefall (a third person shooter mmo currently in beta) where every game begins with a short period of "waiting for players". During this period, both teams are allowed to roam the field and freely kill the other team, receiving whatever rewards may apply for doing so. During the "waiting for players" period, all map objectives are disabled (such as turrets in alderaan, or the ball in huttball). Once both teams are evenly populated, all players are teleported to their gated starting area and the match begins as usual. I personally love how the above system ensures both sides are evenly populated, while giving players the chance to do what they queued up for: PvP. Additionally, allowing players to rack up medals in the prematch period gives them a better chance to be rewarded at the end of the match (which is currently a huge issue in 1.2). Another suggestion to alleviate population imbalances is to create incentives for the low population side to queue for pvp. We've seen this done in other MMOs for PvE purposes. A shortage of tanks meant long queues for dps and healers, so tanks that did queue received a "call to arms" bonus container with random rewards inside. The same system could implemented for PvP queues, giving any class/player an incentive to fill empty spots in PvP matches. I'd be interested to hear how else the community thinks PvP population imbalances could be fixed.
  13. I agree, AFKers don't deserve rewards. I'll fraps my games if you really needed proof that I'm making an effort. Keep in mind this game was 6v8 for the majority of the game, which made it hard to do anything worthy of a medal. After this match, it is evident that this system does not reward stealth capping playstyles. I chilled at the snow turret with another scoundrel waiting for the moment to jump the lonely sage guarding it. We nearly got the cap too, but the sage broke the tranq and called his friends before we could kill him and cap. Making plays like these is really depressing, as you wait patiently to stealth cap and the only rewards received was the medal the sage got for spamming heals on himself until help arrived.
  14. I usually play Sith, but I rolled a Scoundrel recently to hopefully unlock some of the new legacy features. When I level a character, I usually PvP to keep my valor rank capped for my level so that the grind at 50 seems like less of a chore. I'll note that before 1.2, PvP while leveling was actually pretty fun. Winning mattered much less than it does now. A win would net you 100ish comms, while losing would net you 70ish. The rewards were pretty nicely priced too, giving us something to grind toward and finally use at milestones like lvl 20 and lvl 40. PvP before 50 felt like a nice distraction from the campaign and let you earn rewards that made your character look impressive and feel stronger. The only complaint I had about PvP is that it rewarded too much experience and left you feeling over-leveled when you resumed your PvE campaign, but that wasn't a huge deal. http://i1063.photobucket.com/albums/t518/nbcantu/Untitled.png For altoholics like myself, PvP is no longer worth playing below level 50. The matchmaking system suffers from low population, so we end up in matches like this one with 6v8. Pre-1.2 a guaranteed loss like this one would reward 50 or so comms when you played well, which softened the bitterness of the loss. But I waited in queue for 30ish minutes, played the match for another 15 mins and got NOTHING. No experience to further my character, no credits to burn on crew skills, no comms to buy pvp rewards. Getting nothing for your time is not a good feeling for an MMO player. Investing time and effort into a match should reward you with something tangible. Prices for lvl 20 and lvl 40 gear pre-1.2 seemed ok because a typical pvp match would net an average of 60-70 comms. When I saw 1.2 had raised prices, I thought "oh wz comms must be way easier to get now". Nope. One of the few matches I won rewarded a maximum of 60 comms. A crushing defeat nets you nothing. So gear prices are up and wz comm rewards are down; this sounds like my time is being devalued. After playing swtor for a few months, I'm left feeling frustrated with the changes to casual PvP. I didn't mind getting stomped before 1.2 because I was getting rewarded for my time and effort. With the rewards reduced or completely gone, PvP feels pointless. The game needs to place more value on the time I put into PvP. I wont make any remarks on 1.2 class balance because I haven't played enough to determine whether I like it or not. If nothing else changed, I would make the following changes to the 10-49 bracket: 1) raise the rewards for pvp (this might happen if the medal system gets fixed) 2) lower the prices of the lvl 20 and lvl 40 gear
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