This week's Q&A has been posted. Is anyone surprised that there's no mention of healers?

There was this one:

Zannis: Any chance on allowing companions to show in the Operation frame? As a healer, I do a lot of questing with a friend, and I'm unable to replace Party Frames with the Operations Frame since we can't see our party member's companions with this option turned on.

 

Damion Schubert (Principal Lead Systems Designer): Funny, we were just talking about this the other day. I'm working on the design now, but have no ETA of when this will get to you.

Not healer specific, but it is healer relevant.

The response makes it sound like it was something that just occurred to them the other day, out of the blue. Funny, cause it has been a Healer complaint for a long time, albeit a minor one for endgame.

As to why there are no Healer questions, perhaps there aren't any healers asking questions? Perhaps there aren't enough left to do the asking...

I liked this one myself:

mr_ruiz: Smuggler/Operative Question: As the only classes without a stance/form of some sort (even all companions have a couple), is there any plan to add something like that to these classes for additional utility? If not, why?

 

Austin Peckenpaugh (Senior Designer): I'm personally a fan of stances for how they communicate to others and how they help add structure to the already burgeoning character advancement options, but those are developer reasons to love stances. As a player, it's nice to be able to have a sense of someone's spec at a glance by seeing their stance, but for me, the appeal ends there as long as the absence of a stance doesn't mean I'm "missing" something. To answer your question specifically, adding stances to these classes is certainly an option in the future, it just needs to be appropriate and serve a purpose. We don't want to introduce a mechanic for no other reason than to have it.

You mean, like Tactical Advantage/Upper Hand?

The response makes it sound like it was something that just occurred to them the other day, out of the blue. Funny, cause it has been a Healer complaint for a long time, albeit a minor one for endgame.

As to why there are no Healer questions, perhaps there aren't any healers asking questions? Perhaps there aren't enough left to do the asking...

probably a heaping serving of truth to this. I know i posted questions to the first few Q&A, especially when the 1.2 notes were announced. Now, i kinda just don't care enough to put in the time and energy to ask the question again.

Exactly. I haven't done so either.

There was a period of 2-3 Q&As where they said they were going to not take questions but just answer things asked on the forums. I sort of expected them to answer questions from multiple forums, but all the questions were trivial crap from the General forum or from the PvP forum.

I stopped asking about 2 sessions ago. They are obviously steering clear of the issue. Talk a bout the elephant in the room that no one is talking about...

To be fair though, at this point the topic needs a separate venue or perhaps and entire Q&A session devoted to the topic. There really are a lot of questions that deserve answers at this point and to just give a quick answer to one of them in the Q&A would almost be as insulting as the entire lack of acknowledgement much less communication that has occurred to date.

I stopped asking about 2 sessions ago. They are obviously steering clear of the issue. Talk a bout the elephant in the room that no one is talking about...

 

To be fair though, at this point the topic needs a separate venue or perhaps and entire Q&A session devoted to the topic. There really are a lot of questions that deserve answers at this point and to just give a quick answer to one of them in the Q&A would almost be as insulting as the entire lack of acknowledgement much less communication that has occurred to date.

How much money would you put on the odds of that?

~$64?

i had the same thought, and the realization - "wow, they really don't look at the forums at all."

 

probably a heaping serving of truth to this. I know i posted questions to the first few Q&A, especially when the 1.2 notes were announced. Now, i kinda just don't care enough to put in the time and energy to ask the question again.

I realized this months ago. They are going to do whatever they want to do regardless of what the community wants. It's their game. We just play in it. I hope they learn one thing though. Customer service is very important to any corporation.

I stopped asking about 2 sessions ago. They are obviously steering clear of the issue. Talk a bout the elephant in the room that no one is talking about...

 

To be fair though, at this point the topic needs a separate venue or perhaps and entire Q&A session devoted to the topic. There really are a lot of questions that deserve answers at this point and to just give a quick answer to one of them in the Q&A would almost be as insulting as the entire lack of acknowledgement much less communication that has occurred to date.

What we've got here is a serious failure to communicate. It's a problem this developer team needs to correct. Making a great game has players and developers constantly sharing ideas and trusting each other. I find this faith both ways lacking.

Have a good day.

What we've got here is a serious failure to communicate. It's a problem this developer team needs to correct. Making a great game has players and developers constantly sharing ideas and trusting each other. I find this faith both ways lacking.

Have a good day.

well, it's actually a pretty appropriate reflection of Bioware's lack of experience with MMO.

with console type games, the amount of communication / customer relations is minimal. you release the content, people are either happy with it, or they're not. the degree of feedback is used in development of DLC or something, but you never have to deal with adjustments to the core game.

maybe the BW employees need to go back and read their own EULA - that the game experience can and will change - and realize that it's not a one way street, where the only change in game experience derives from the developers, that the players are equally capable of making game experience changes.

it's a fundamental difference between MMO and console game, that Bioware seems to be incapable of adapting to.

well, it's actually a pretty appropriate reflection of Bioware's lack of experience with MMO.

 

with console type games, the amount of communication / customer relations is minimal. you release the content, people are either happy with it, or they're not. the degree of feedback is used in development of DLC or something, but you never have to deal with adjustments to the core game.

 

maybe the BW employees need to go back and read their own EULA - that the game experience can and will change - and realize that it's not a one way street, where the only change in game experience derives from the developers, that the players are equally capable of making game experience changes.

 

it's a fundamental difference between MMO and console game, that Bioware seems to be incapable of adapting to.

I think their single-player background also goes a long way towards explaining a lot of their behavior. A single-player game is their game, and we just consume it. In an MMO, the community is part of the game itself, and therefore we produce part of the experience. They have to surrender some control, but the end result is a stronger player attachment.

You can see this in their UI add-on decision. They created a game that is fundamentally very similar to WoW in all of its core gameplay structures. It is therefore reasonable to assume that people will play it very similarly to how they played WoW, and if you are hoping to attract former and current WoW players you can assume they will bring certain expectations. Then you create a game with an extremely limited UI, and refuse to allow players to design their own UI addons. You devote a huge percentage of resources for a major content release to UI customization...that fails spectacularly at addressing some basic UI necessities. Anyone who has ever played an MMO (rough guess 90+% of the SWTOR market, allowing for a large SW-only fanbase) immediately recognizes all of these flaws, and it decreases their opinion of the game.

If, instead of taking the console-style approach of "it's all up to us," they had adopted the MMO approach of "use the community," then they could do what WoW did and save themselves a ton of time. The stock WoW UI was pretty terrible for years. Add-ons provided key functionalities that varied by class. In time, Blizzard would take the most popular and useful and add them into the core UI. This outsourced the ideas, the initial implementation, and the testing, freeing up resources for other uses.

And Bioware has the advantage of not pioneering an industry (I know WoW wasn't the first, but it blew the walls off of what was considered the tiny MMO market). They should have surveyed the market first and released a UI with most of the core functionalities that have been added over the years to their competitors in place. Instead we get a 2007 era Blizzard stock UI, no ability to fix itself, and a response of 'trust us we will get this right' that proves woefully untrue.

feedback from the weekend GW2 beta seems to indicate it's a good (and hard) game.

i've already lost a few guildies to it (as in, "cya swtor, i'm going to GW2" - not just "i'm gonna play both").

i expect the trend to continue, and actually, accelerate, as more competitor games come on the market. even though ToR and D3 aren't in the same genre, i expect D3 to take a good chunk of ToR traffic..

feedback from the weekend GW2 beta seems to indicate it's a good (and hard) game.

 

i've already lost a few guildies to it (as in, "cya swtor, i'm going to GW2" - not just "i'm gonna play both").

 

i expect the trend to continue, and actually, accelerate, as more competitor games come on the market. even though ToR and D3 aren't in the same genre, i expect D3 to take a good chunk of ToR traffic..

I've heard mixed things on GW2, although most of the negative has been within the TERA community. Once you move away from the locked-on tab-targeting style of WoW and into more freeform combat, going back to it is pretty painful.

A handful of my guildies are planning to drop SWTOR for D3, and most of them have participated in the beta. It's not really an MMO, but it does take up a fair amount of time and support playing with friends. The emphasis on small guild content in SWTOR (4/8/16 content, with most not doing 16) makes it vulnerable to losing market share to games that allow for small team multiplayer, even if they aren't true MMOs.

Okay guys so I've been reading through this post for the past 15 minutes. And I agree I've just finished lvling my guardian tank. And ofcourse I'm going to roll a healer so I went scoundrel. Yes if notest that soc/sage healers are OP which I find redicausly annoying. I want to have a good healer that is both fun and great to heal with. My scoundrel is heaps fun so I don't really want to reroll sage healer as iv done the Jedi roll. I want something both fun and great to heal with instead of just fun and incapable off mass heals

Could someone please give me some closer on this.

Would be much appreciated.

Okay guys so I've been reading through this post for the past 15 minutes. And I agree I've just finished lvling my guardian tank. And ofcourse I'm going to roll a healer so I went scoundrel. Yes if notest that soc/sage healers are OP which I find redicausly annoying. I want to have a good healer that is both fun and great to heal with. My scoundrel is heaps fun so I don't really want to reroll sage healer as iv done the Jedi roll. I want something both fun and great to heal with instead of just fun and incapable off mass heals

 

Could someone please give me some closer on this.

Would be much appreciated.

Scound/Operative healers are viable in ops and PvP (as much as healers can be in current PvP since 1.2). However, Sage/Sorc can put out more HPS over any sustained fight that requires any amount of AoE healing. The reports from various healing/damage meters bear this out. (See other threads). If you enjoy playing a scoun/op, then play one. You can complete all content as one, especially since the tweaks in 1.2. However, an equally geared and skilled sage/sorc will almost always put out more healing in a 8 man and way more in a 16 man due to the scaling of their AoE.

Those at Bioware argue the sage/sorc AoE doesn't scale with more players, which it obviously does. They would argue water is dry and up is down if it fit with their misconceptions.

This reads like an ASPCA commercial spoof.

That is an incredibly vague comment to make to a 70+ page thread.

Those at Bioware argue the sage/sorc AoE doesn't scale with more players, which it obviously does. They would argue water is dry and up is down if it fit with their misconceptions.

It absolutely does scale !! But it's also capabable of being a very inefficent heal in 4 man content.

It absolutely does scale !! But it's also capabable of being a very inefficent heal in 4 man content.

If Ray Rice runs for 400 yards in a Pee Wee football game, it is terribly inefficient. That doesn't make Ray Rice any less awesome.