Class changes and balance in Game Update 1.3

Dear Devs,

First thank you for communicating some of your design philosophy and the reasoning behind changes. I greatly appreciate this kind of communication and hope for more in the future. That being said, the actual changes you're making seem hard to square with your stated philosophy.


Your stated intention with these changes is to make Gunnery/Arsenal ammo management more reliable, and giving a constant 1 ammo/6 seconds is certainly more reliable, however from my perspective it seems to be reliably lower. A raid buffed commando can hit 40% tech critical chance without much effort which makes grav round crit at 65% with the two piece set bonus. My gut instinct says that that will generate more than one ammo every 6 seconds. Can you provide the math showing that the change will lead to better ammo management than what is on the current live servers for a command with a 2 piece set bonus and a crit rate of 38-40%? Would that same fact hold true if Cell Charger was fixed to proc on Full Auto like it is supposed to? If the ammo regen isn't an improvement than you've just made gunnery DPS reliably worse, and I'm sorry but the performance of the design team to date has unfortunately not made me, or the community, inherently trusting of your math. Provide the math or please just leave Cell Charger alone. (All that being said, the change to charged barrel/barrier is very welcome, though I'd still like charged barrier to go back to 2% per stack).

Along the same line of thought regarding stated intentions vs actual changes we have the changes to Shadow/Assassin tanks.

My question is, if a 35% nerf to the buff from Combat Technique is a "much smaller amount", what were you going to have to lower that by if you just adjusted that and didn't touch the self heal? 35% seems like a pretty huge cut, though the overall impact on damage taken might not be huge I guess. However the whole approach seems to overlook the fact that while a 12% heal is well and good for mitigation over the course of a long fight under sustained DPS, the inferior cooldowns from these tanks combined with lower guaranteed passive mitigation makes such tanks easily gibbed if a lot of damage goes out quickly which is either going to limit the kind of encounters you can make, or more likely make shadow tanks completely irrelevent in end game PVE as more challenging, high damage encounters come out. Self-heals don't help you if you take so much damage that they become irrelevant.


Finally, some advice if you care to listen. In general, people are better at adjusting to small incremental changes rather than broad sweeping changes. If you took all the changes made in 1.2 and spread them out over a year, people would react much better, and most likely many of those changes would prove unnecessary. If you make a bunch of changes and break things you have to go through all the changes to figure out how to fix it. If you make one change and break things you know where the problem is. An example is the changes to Demo Round. You increased it's damage based on pre-1.2 numbers, then fixed a bug that was giving those numbers and haven't seen fit to change things beyond this upcoming change to charged barrel. You say commandos are hitting targets, but again you've lost whatever inherent trust you might have had. Which brings me to the other reason you should institute changes slowly. Because broad sweeping changes gives us the feeling that you don't know what you're doing, and aren't sure how to fix it. Little changes suggest things just need a bit of tweeking. Big changes indicate you did it wrong the first time, and big changes following big changes indicate you simply have no clue what you're doing. Right or wrong, that's the impression you give.


TL;DR Your stated design philosophy and actual changes don't seem to agree at face value, and small incremental changes would be better for you overall than big changes.

so 150 to 115% is going to be the same lolz? bro go on your shadow or sin in the test servers man you will just rage how flipping horrible the class is now.

I personally think healing on a sorcerer is fine. The only time there is an issue it's because of threat generated by healing (tank aggro change should help) or when someone in the party is in a hurry and will not wait which causes a wipe.

Sounds like you need to add your personal heal to your rotation... That is the stated design intent right there in the blog.

First off, Sage/Sorc isn't the best healer for PVP or PVE. There are better choices. Additionally, I do perfectly fine as DPS on my Sorc in PVP. But that is because I know what I am doing. In PVE, similarly geared, or lesser Mercs or snipers out perform me by a significant amount, even though they shouldn't.

I am very disappointed with many of the tank changes. While Jedi Guardians certainly needed help in the AoE threat department, the changes to threat are completely unwarranted and very unnecessary to the point of dumbing down the role to the point of boredom. Managing threat with intuition and a well managed threat rotation is something that I have always enjoyed about tanking. It is also a great way to separate more and less skilled tanks competing for THE most limited spots in an Operation.

With threat management gone as something tanks need to worry about significantly, what else is there for us to do? I can't understand a fundamental change like this. In every fight, each role has to worry about something that is unique to them. DPS worries about maximizing damage given the situation/phase, Healers worry about keeping everyone alive, and, prior to 1.3, tanks worried about keeping threat on the boss (with survival via cooldowns as a secondary concern)... with everyone having to adjust to the mechanics of the fight, whether that be not standing in fire, changing DPS targets, or repositioning the boss as a tank.

I do not understand how completely eliminating threat as something to be considered and, most importantly, worried about, makes the role more fun to play AT ALL. At the end of the day, every player in this game is just pressing buttons when you break down the MMO to the most simplistic level. By buffing tank threat so needlessly and excessively, you have made (on the whole) our button presses by far the least significant in the game. That is not something that anyone should celebrate.

Repeal the tank threat stance bonus.

Bro that's not even the point, the 115% armor is a huge nerf man. Right now a shadow tank can't even 1v1 a marauder anymore. much less hold 2 to 3 ppl. we just became the most horrible class in the game both pve and pvp. I honestly don't think they have any idea what their doing, it seems they are in panic mode because of in experiences players crying how "over powered shadows are" its bad enough in beta we were nerf really bad now this crap again is just bloody silly, i could have live with the less healing part but seriously 115% armor? just what is the point of even playing a shadow or an assassin or even playing at all? It takes skills to be a shadow and a assassin, far beyond the skills of easy class like 1 button spam for gunners. ( no offences) Now i found out they mess with the relics as well? this game just became a video game for 9 year old.

Playtest it! Over and over again. If performance is, indeed, falling short of target, they'll adjust it.

If it is actually on target, adjust your rotation.

If that's true, then the other healers are way too powerful because sorc/sage healers are noticeably inferior.

The blanket nerf to burst is important though, and wasn't apparent - I wish they'd discussed their thoughts on that as it relates to healers.

I have tested as well and my "rotation" is flawless it's not rocket science, it doesn't take any skillz, it's common sense to most. The class is fail sauce with 1.3, thank god I have 4 other 50s but seriously if BW is going to nerf over QQs they will be nerfed soon too, someone is always OP to noobs who don't read tool tips and skill explanations or understand their class's mechanics. This is a silly nerf, shadows/sins are OP only if you allow them to be, TKT is what restores health mainly and it can be stopped and a shadows edge defeated, they are not OP if you understand the game at all it's sad really.

Other tanks needed their buff, but the hammer wasn't necessary for the shadows, you just put that class in the "garage" for most of us. See how many play shadows lol, happens in every MMO after a harsh nerf like this, shadows/sins will be rare and noobs will scream about others being OP, wash, rinse, repeat and smile lol

***Hey Bioware serious, serious question I hope others press as well till we get an answer. Are you going to give shadows/sins advanced class resets? After all it did say when we selected the class it could perform a tanking roll and after 1.3 it will no longer be able to boast that. DPS (if you can call that vs sage) and utility will be it's bread and butter. Seems only fair. I would have picked sage as an advanced class if presented with shadow as a utility/dps build. Maybe I am weird lol