You hardly remain unbiased yourself as you pointed out yourself “Deception is not very good”. Is it justified that some specs are “not very good” and others are more or less mandatory? Allowing “FoTm” to reach divine levels does no one any favors. People that plays broken classes ofc want their classes to remain broken so they can faceroll and spam emotes with little effort, this however is not favorable for the potential future of the game unless you are fine with milking the Cartell market dry and have it end up like Tera where people only log on to open loot boxes and trade outfits?

 

I sincerely ask people to try remain unbiased and refrain from stating the obvious or this article will just be discarded as another troll post, which was not the intent.

1. I have no idea what you are talking about.

2. Nobody is unbiased. I am personally biased in favor of BW deleting assassins from the game and moving the tank tree over to sorcs (similar to druids), because BW clearly hates this class. Let operatives be the only stealth class.

3. I was talking about deception because he was comparing hatred to deception. I was pointing out that giving hatred just a bit more passive defenses like he recommended would do nothing to help the spec.

4. The point of my entire post was that as long as 4dps vs 4dps solo ranked exists, the game will never be balanced because balancing 4dps vs 4dps is simply impossible. Trying to balance all the class is a waste of time. Trying to balance all the specs is even a bigger waste of time. And hoping BW does something to bring balance to this ridiculous game mode is the biggest waste of time of all.

In my experience, 99% of mercs are horrible. While the other classes have many players of variable skill, the merc is unique that it basically only has the elite players like asana and everyone else is a horrible backpedalling clicker. Probably due to the fact the class is so braindead easy to play it draws the worst people. If they only gave them the shield for example, it wouldn't change anything, they would be back here complaining the next day.

On that it's true, most mercs are horrible. It's also why when 5.0 dropped and everybody went arsenal, that peoples got really surprised on the french servers when a strange two-man group started wrecking everyone with dot merc. Peoples tried it, only to notice that it was actually harder to play than Arsenal, and most mercs that did swapped came back to it asap. The issue lies then more around Arsenal lowering the skill standard for most players than anything else. Just like everybody in this game became horribly bad since companions were all able to heal suddenly, or that almost everyone you see is just terrible in PvP since most veterans players left. Swtor has a tragic case of "peoples are actually getting worse over time instead of improving", which is unlike anything I've seen in other mmos tbh. Another amusing thing to note however is that snipers, who got buffed as hard in 5.0, weren't suffering from the same issues of "almost every sniper is bad". There wasn't just that many snipers because the class requires skill. However, the 5.0 buff maybe got them a bit too easy to play, as their population suddenly became much more noticeable.

However, this is an interesting and true statement, as usually the goal of ranked, even solo, is to have *actual good players* earn their win, and not have more than 100 mercs get gold rating in one season (against less than 20 on some other class at the time. It says a lot). So overall, this balance change wasn't made to "balance" the game around good performance, but more to overbuff bad players. If I were to really overthink about it, I'd say that BW buffed the class that they were playing at the time, since these buffs weren't targeted for optimal mercenary play.

Deception is not very good, so I don't know why you are using it as a standard. Out of all the "viable" specs, it is probably the worst one. Ironically one of the things that keeps this spec out of meme tier is the fact that very few people realized that it should be first target after PT. They are given more freedom to quickly dish out their front loaded burst and then taunt/off guard people. Try focusing the assassin next time and you will see how good deception really is. A little more passive defense will do nothing for hatred. The spec itself is an oxymoron that never should've been made in the first place. A light armored melee DoT spec that has no defensive CDs to speak of, whose setup time is huge and specializes in fluff damage ... is suddenly going to become good because of a little more passive defense? Are you serious?

While not as good as our current FOTM, I'm not finding Deception "bad" or "not very good". It's kind of what operatives used to be in late 5.X -> overall pretty balanced but overshadowed by the stupidity of FOTM, and works well enough if you're a really good player. It's squishy as ever, and clearly the devs had no idea of what to do with it in 6.0, but you can still make it work in most scenarios if you're good enough, which like you and I said earlier, most peoples aren't. It's sure however that Deception isn't good only for its burst potential, and requires really good crowd control/protection usage to be decent.

And I fully believe that you can salvage Hatred, but it would require more than a mere 15% damage reduction if BW really intends to let the current FOTM stay as they are. But if we're really talking balance, then it's clear that some FOTM should be adjusted as well. Hatred performs exceedingly well against snipers, as a dumb example, and anything that goes below 40% hp will get instantly killed by Hatred, which is a really strong point, but doesn't compensate the fact that most class right now takes forever to get under 40% HP in the first place (which maybe should get looked at, I dunno, but maybe it's just me who likes unforgiving errors when playing)

Well they tried that ... many times. Hatred in 3.0 and 6.0 deception are examples (sticking with sins since you brought them up) and people kept whining and complaining about being focused. I'm going to say this again, because you seem to have missed the point. It is IMPOSSIBLE to balance 4dps vs 4dps in a deathmatch. There will always, ALWAYS be one class that is the first target. ALWAYS, no exceptions. Balancing by power will do nothing but exacerbate this.

That's true, and it's really funny to see that when even the most bonkers defensive cooldowns in the game can still be threatened by a single class, then everybody yells that this class is too OP. But the bonkers defensives are cool, I guess. It's okay to be OP, but not okay to suddenly learn that you're winning just because you're OP. The Deception buff in 6.0 was way too much and badly implemented, and badly nerfed as well (Ahah, what if the autocrit only applied to Duplicity-maul and procced assassinate, so once every ten seconds ? Wouldn't that be wild and suddenly way less OP and dumb ? )

Remember how everyone "pinky swore" to start using tank gear if only the crits would be blocked by absorb. People don't want balance, they want their class to be OP, that's all. The people who actually want real balance don't post here complaining. It's the old phrase "dear company, please nerf paper and buff rock, scissors is fine, signed rock".

The problem with tank gear wasn't only crits not being blocked by absorb/shields. It's also that Defense is a completely garbage stat in both PvE and PvP. Had they reworked defense stat to make it passively reduce damage taken and increase your damage dealt by a smaller amount than power (and thus, reworking some cooldowns to make them protect others instead of yourself), then tanks would have an actual incentive to gear with tank gear and would have as much of an impact than when gearing as dps gear. But again, BW doesn't understand any reason behind players actions, and so they just... Nerfed tanks damage, for nothing in the end since we STILL gear up with dps gear as it's the only way to make an impact in game.

All of this to say that Bioware continuously makes the wrong choices whenever a problem is presented to them, and each time it is mostly because they have no understanding on how their game works and how peoples play their game. And as long as this will be the case, then indeed, it will be "impossible" for them to balance solo-ranked around two 4dps comp, no matter what skill rating they are, and thus "impossible" to balance the whole game. But I'm pretty sure that if some good players were to think about it for two or three weeks, you could have a much better and balanced game that it is right now, at the cost of some potential reworks and drastic changes.

(Note that I'm agreeing with you on most points, but I'm not here in the sake of arguing in favor of BW making a change, because we know that they won't and if they do it's gonna be even worse. I'm just here to say that it is possible to at least lower the gap between most class/specs, if you know what you're doing. I'm clearly not speaking about BW making these changes, and I hope that if they try it, they will ask good players to come up with these changes instead of even attempting to make them. But it won't happen, we know that. )

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I'm sorry I really don't understand what you are trying to say. You say one thing, and contradict yourself right away.

My point is simple. As long as solo ranked exists (specifically 4 dps vs 4 dps) balance is impossible, because there will always be one class that is first to be focused. That class will be meme tier.

I think your problem is you don't see classes as they are in reality. You have some kind of very very specific idealistic view of what classes should be (which you don't explain) and you judge against that. That is probably why you think deception is balanced. You are not judging against reality, but what you think these FOTM classes should be (which you don't explain). Anyone can play that game. I can have an idea of what all classes should be and say hatred is perfect, just all these other classes need to be fixed.

I honestly do not understand the point you are trying to make.

My point is simple. As long as solo ranked exists (specifically 4 dps vs 4 dps) balance is impossible, because there will always be one class that is first to be focused. That class will be meme tier.

AP PT is the first target rn and it's pretty far from a meme tier, not sure if your point makes sense bro