Personally I thought the sorc questions were asked very poorly, now whether or not it warranted the answers is another question. As for the vanguards, they're getting some nice buffs with 2.4 so they're moaning has paid off.

Response to the "Sorcs were asking for ponies and unicorns" argument

(And I felt it necessary to mention that melee anti-kiting has also been buffed over the time period described in that post, a couple of posts after that. Examples being smash obliterate no longer respecting roots, vengeance given speed increase, vanguards getting hold the line baseline, etc.)

Response to the "Sorcs were asking for ponies and unicorns" argument

 

(And I felt it necessary to mention that melee anti-kiting has also been buffed over the time period described in that post, a couple of posts after that. Examples being smash obliterate no longer respecting roots, vengeance given speed increase, vanguards getting hold the line baseline, etc.)

The nerf to overload was also shared with assassins/shadows. The removal also crippled madness for assassins which was already fairly weak compared to its mirror. And for the root on knock back, they have stated they want to get away from hybrids and have people focus on full 36 point builds.

The whole 'heal to full' was quite silly and that sorcs 'easy to play, hard to master' can almost be applied to every spec/class. If the majority of sorcs/sages I see in warzones didn't try to face tank melee or stop using force speed while using backpeddle I might get behind the hard to master what not.

They literally came out and said the exact same thing about deception last year in that just about everyone was playing it wrong.

Anyways I thoroughly enjoy my sorc and while some things could be added I hear a lot of sorcs suggesting that its unplayable and while that may be the case for arenas a very small percentage of players and an even smaller amount of them being sorcs/sages I only know of a handful of sorcs personally and while some did well they needed to have excellent players backing them up.

They have stated that they will be taking a harder look at class balance when 2.5 approaches as they are putting a hold on the class answers to avoid rewording of the questions being asked off of the answers given assuming they were not the answers that the majority of the players playing said class wanted.

Class balance is always something I find fascinating. I play with a guy who is nothing short of amazing on his PT even after the changes in 2.0 and he cannot wait for the buffs coming with 2.4. To me class balance comes down to this, do you balance around the average skill cap or by the classes overall potential in the hands of something who knows how to play a class?

Given the vast gaps in skill that this game still has in PvP and in PvE it is something that will always have negative results by the players who play the class which is getting the short end of the stick as they have gotten comfortable with how there class performs which usually goes hand in hand with ''I'm rerolling" and you should too and then obviously it leads players not playing classes which have gotten buffed as FOTM or for this games case FOTY since rage/focus has been quite strong since forever and the same goes with operative/scoundrel healing.

And I have lost my train of thought as I have been going from the phone for work and back to this post and I think this started as why these particular set of answers are taking longer than others because VG and sorcs feel they got shafted on their answers.

The nerf to overload was also shared with assassins/shadows. The removal also crippled madness for assassins which was already fairly weak compared to its mirror. And for the root on knock back, they have stated they want to get away from hybrids and have people focus on full 36 point builds.

Of course sins/shadows got nerfed along with us sorcs, as they share the same knockback (and we also share the nerfed whirlwind). Perhaps not coincidentally, they're also the other class that's in the doghouse (not discounting the fact that mercs were stuck out in the cold forever, too).

Also, I would point out that the other classes with AOE knockbacks 1) still have such knockbacks at 360 and 2) do not need to spec into some form of movement impairment on the knockback. Mercs get slow, snipers get root. No need to spec.

I can understand why Bioware might want to make 36 point builds "worth it" but given the way AOE knockbacks function in this game it was ill-advised to remove the utility of ours from 2 of 3 specs. Especially as ours has the shortest knockback distance of the three, in addition to only being a cone vs. 360. Now the sacrifices our knockback makes relative to mercs/snipers might make sense if ours was the longest of the three, but as it is, it is hands down the worst.

The whole 'heal to full' was quite silly and that sorcs 'easy to play, hard to master' can almost be applied to every spec/class. If the majority of sorcs/sages I see in warzones didn't try to face tank melee or stop using force speed while using backpeddle I might get behind the hard to master what not.

 

They literally came out and said the exact same thing about deception last year in that just about everyone was playing it wrong.

Well, to be fair it can be supremely difficult for non-healy sorcs to avoid facetanking with constant rootlocks that they cannot escape from. The fact that our overload, bar lightning spec, does nothing to prevent the enemy from coming right back to us within 1 GCD and continuing to lay into us while we are so rootlocked does not help matters. It's why there was so much gnashing for fadeout baseline from DPS sorcs who were told to LOS and heal to full.

I switched to lightning last night because I wanted to DPS and (especially because I'm widely known as a healer) I was chain rootlocked for 10+ seconds constantly and focus fired. When I even managed to survive for 10 seconds under such conditions, it was only because I was using everything else I had. I did not want to facetank; as a healer I am used to being able to neutralize rootlocking to a large extent, but when I was a DPS the enemy team decided I would be trapped in place and shut down and, lo and behold, I was shut down (in some warzones to the point where I did more "healing to full" than damage LOL).

For the record, I am not one of those backpedaling with Force Speed active sorcs--I hold the current #3 RWZ healing record on my server (despite the fact I've only found a few ranked games here and there as my guild has trouble getting more than 4 interested people on at the same time). Admittedly I didn't transfer to Bastion, but still I'm very familiar with the class, its strengths, and its weaknesses.

Healy sorcs, in contrast, are very very slippery (one of their big strengths is the difficulty in rootlocking them), but their ability to Make Them Pay for wasting a stunbreak is practically nil because our knockback is so weak and to KB+slow costs us not one but two globals (it really should only cost one, slow should be built into the knockback). To say nothing of horrendously long casted mez (that we almost never use in PVP except for the occasional fakecast as a result of such long cast).

Anyways I thoroughly enjoy my sorc and while some things could be added I hear a lot of sorcs suggesting that its unplayable and while that may be the case for arenas a very small percentage of players and an even smaller amount of them being sorcs/sages I only know of a handful of sorcs personally and while some did well they needed to have excellent players backing them up.

Indeed, after 2.0 I actually switched back to maining my sorc, retired my operative entirely until the heal to full debacle clearly indicated the devs wouldn't care whether or not sorc heals were welcome in arenas, and my scoundrel became something of an afterthought. Again, until now, where if I want to be viable in arenas, I must play FOTY.

In before "Don't Balance Around Arenas Lest We Have Never-Ending Balance Crusade:" This would not be nearly as big an issue if we could still have 8v8 Ranked, where there is more room to accommodate a wider diversity of classes without gimping your team for competitive play. But the smaller the team, the more class imbalance gets amplified--and competitive play is getting forced into smaller teams.

They have stated that they will be taking a harder look at class balance when 2.5 approaches as they are putting a hold on the class answers to avoid rewording of the questions being asked off of the answers given assuming they were not the answers that the majority of the players playing said class wanted.

 

Class balance is always something I find fascinating. I play with a guy who is nothing short of amazing on his PT even after the changes in 2.0 and he cannot wait for the buffs coming with 2.4. To me class balance comes down to this, do you balance around the average skill cap or by the classes overall potential in the hands of something who knows how to play a class?

 

Given the vast gaps in skill that this game still has in PvP and in PvE it is something that will always have negative results by the players who play the class which is getting the short end of the stick as they have gotten comfortable with how there class performs which usually goes hand in hand with ''I'm rerolling" and you should too and then obviously it leads players not playing classes which have gotten buffed as FOTM or for this games case FOTY since rage/focus has been quite strong since forever and the same goes with operative/scoundrel healing.

 

And I have lost my train of thought as I have been going from the phone for work and back to this post and I think this started as why these particular set of answers are taking longer than others because VG and sorcs feel they got shafted on their answers.

I really do hope the Combat Team pays more attention to class balance--the fact that we've started using FOTY to replace FOTM is just sad. But after burning myself out on trying to get H2F retracted and replaced with bona fide answers to our class questions, I must say my interest in this game has waned a lot and I've found myself going back to EVE Online for the first time since shortly after SWTOR released. And last night was my first time my guildies had seen me on in about a week.

Considering I played for a few hours daily right before H2F, that's just sad. I'm not sure how much longer the Combat Team can continue waiting on class balance before there are no classes that are actually played left to balance.

I switched to lightning last night because I wanted to DPS and (especially because I'm widely known as a healer) I was chain rootlocked for 10+ seconds constantly and focus fired. When I even managed to survive for 10 seconds under such conditions, it was only because I was using everything else I had. I did not want to facetank; as a healer I am used to being able to neutralize rootlocking to a large extent, but when I was a DPS the enemy team decided I would be trapped in place and shut down and, lo and behold, I was shut down (in some warzones to the point where I did more "healing to full" than damage LOL).

As a sorc, I completely agree with your previous post that you quoted and with most of the things you mention in this one, but I can't agree with this part.

You were focused.

It doesn't matter if you were focused because they know you are a good player or because you were mistaken for a healer or because it just happened. The enemy team did what they were supposed to do: they recognized who is a threat in your team and killed you as soon as they saw you. They used their brains. And trust me, that's a pretty rare sight these days in PVP.

ANY DPS, let alone a light armor wearing glass cannon like a Lightning Sorc/TK Sage, should die easily if focused and shut down by more than 2 players of the enemy team. That's the whole point of being a DPS.

I understand your point wasn't that BW should make us immortal, but I just wanted to point out that this is probably a bad example.

As a sorc, I completely agree with your previous post that you quoted and with most of the things you mention in this one, but I can't agree with this part.

 

You were focused.

It doesn't matter if you were focused because they know you are a good player or because you were mistaken for a healer or because it just happened. The enemy team did what they were supposed to do: they recognized who is a threat in your team and killed you as soon as they saw you. They used their brains. And trust me, that's a pretty rare sight these days in PVP.

 

ANY DPS, let alone a light armor wearing glass cannon like a Lightning Sorc/TK Sage, should die easily if focused and shut down by more than 2 players of the enemy team. That's the whole point of being a DPS.

 

I understand your point wasn't that BW should make us immortal, but I just wanted to point out that this is probably a bad example.

Eh, true enough. But while lightning remains the last vestige of a cc sorc, its escapability (especially for being that light armor class, isn't light armor supposed to equate with mobility?) is surprisingly nil.

A class that must kite and LOS to survive, yet has no cooldown whatsoever to break a rootlock scenario--that is an oxymoron. (Especially when anti-kiting has been buffed as much as it has in this game)

If fadeout was baseline, I could have at least root overloaded, sprinted off, and Made One of Them Pay at least a little bit for trying to kill me before the other bunch of them leapt right back for the smash.

As it is, it really doesn't take more than 2 smashers to rootlock a lightning sorc in excess of five seconds and doublesmash before the lightning sorc can do much of anything (bear in mind the constant double leaps). One smash mara alone can rootlock a lightning sorc, thereby making a mockery of the Combat Team telling us to kite, though thankfully smash hasn't quite reached 1-shot autowin against sorcs yet. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the Combat Team sees to that.

Hey everyone,

 

Unfortunately I am the bearer of bad news today. It looks like the Combat Team will need some more time to finish your questions, so we will be posting these next week. While it may seem like a quick and easy thing to answer these questions, the team wants to make sure you receive thorough answers, which does take time. I understand this is not ideal, but we appreciate your patience and apologize for the delay!

still waiting

Hey folks!

 

Just a quick update on the answers for Shadow and Mercenary. The Combat Team is hard at work on the changes coming for 2.5 so your answers will be coming a bit later this week. Courtney will be the one posting your top 3. I will be out of town for a couple of days so you wont see my name lightin' up the devtracker. Play nice while I'm gone.

 

Thanks!

 

-eric

So I have a stupid question. If the reason for not providing the answers on time was because the team is hard at work on 2.5, how is it that they will be given at all before 2.5? I mean, aren't they still working on 2.5 this week and next week too? And the week after, and ...

I'm a bit worried that with a major patch being released this week, we're looking at the end of the week at best, and if something significantly wrong appears tomorrow with the ability changes already coming in 2.4, they're obviously going to be preoccupied with that. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm sensing the procrastination here is really going to come back to haunt you, especially since it pertains to two of the classes that arguably have some of the greatest perception problems by the community. Anyway, good luck.

Not to sound rude but how are those answers coming along Courtney Woods and when can we expect to see posted.

I expect to see an announcement on Thursday that they're almost done again, but they won't post them so close to Friday, so we'll see them put off at least another full week...again.

I'm a bit worried that with a major patch being released this week, we're looking at the end of the week at best, and if something significantly wrong appears tomorrow with the ability changes already coming in 2.4, they're obviously going to be preoccupied with that.

Unless, of course, they are timing the release of the questions to coincide with the patch so that people are distracted by the content and patch issues and don't have time to adequately respond to the questions. Pretty cynical on my part to think they may be that deceptive, but if they don't have good answers and are just going to blow smoke at us, they'll want something shiny to distract us with so that we are too busy to bust up the smokescreen.

Why is that Mercs/Commandos always get slapped in the face? Why can't we get something as simple as questions answered in a decent time frame? Why do you hate us so much?

THREE questions...that's all it is...THREE questions lol

THREE questions...that's all it is...THREE questions lol

Plus the other three, so six. But anyway.

Plus the other three, so six. But anyway.

The person I was quoting was talking about Merc/Commando - they were only allowed 3 questions.

I expect to see an announcement on Thursday that they're almost done again, but they won't post them so close to Friday, so we'll see them put off at least another full week...again.

Tuxxy!

<3

BBBooooooommmmmmmmm!!!!!

 

Mercenary | Shadow

 

Make sure to give us your feedback!

Thanks Eric.

Also please pass my thanks along to the dev team--these answers were considered, thorough, and well worth the wait. Appreciated.

Thanks Eric.

 

Also please pass my thanks along to the dev team--these answers were considered, thorough, and well worth the wait. Appreciated.

This.

There were also some juicy tidbits in there for those of us who must Heal to Full. I do not know to what extent that feedback received therefrom may or may not have affected the shadow/merc answers, but even if the Combat Team is considering changes to ranged classes generally rather than re-opening sorc questions point-by-point, it might be a good idea to update the sorcs as to where you guys want to take the class in 2.5 and take the opportunity to outright retract Heal to Full.

As a matter of principle, no class should have to go digging around in other class rep answer threads to glean bona fide answers to the questions that their class asked!

Don't leave us sorcs out in the cold!

Thanks Eric.

 

Also please pass my thanks along to the dev team--these answers were considered, thorough, and well worth the wait. Appreciated.

They were actually. Very nice replies eric...please pass along our "thanks" for the effort they obviously put into these. It was apparent they not only read, but also took the time to understand the questions...that meant a lot!