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PVE bolster!


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PVE bolster was proposed in the pvp section of the forum. It is a good idea, isn't it?! just imagine: "green"/naked players automatically boosted to top pve gear within any FP HM/OPS! Discuss!

 

Just because Bioware messed up PvP bolster, it doesn't mean they should mess up PVE.

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It is a good idea, isn't it?! just imagine: "green"/naked players automatically boosted to top pve gear within any FP HM/OPS! Discuss!
NO!

 

Have you seen Cunning gear with Shield or Defense attached to it? Yeah, I don't want BioWare deciding what my best gear is for NIM or HM OPS. :p

 

Plus what the use in playing long term, if gearing up for new challenges is no longer a issue.

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I don't have to end up grouped with people still using level 30 greens when I run groupfinder? Yes please!

 

Seriously, I love how the complaining goes, especially in the pvp forums. Without bolster, there are endless posts whining about people not putting on their free recruit gear. Bolster is introduced to put everyone at the recruit gear level (unless they have better pvp gear) and all of a sudden people hate that everyone is (essentially) wearing recruit gear? Give me a break.

 

Also, it's not top tier pvp gear people are getting bolstered to. I'm sick of that hyperbole.

Edited by namesaretough
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I don't have to end up grouped with people still using level 30 greens when I run groupfinder? Yes please!

 

Seriously, I love how the complaining goes, especially in the pvp forums. Without bolster, there are endless posts whining about people not putting on their free recruit gear. Bolster is introduced to put everyone at the recruit gear level (unless they have better pvp gear) and all of a sudden people hate that everyone is (essentially) wearing recruit gear? Give me a break.

 

Also, it's not top tier pvp gear people are getting bolstered to. I'm sick of that hyperbole.

 

Right now, bolster is putting people at Partisan gear level (and higher if you mess with mod swapping/removal).

 

I'd like some free arkanian plox.

Edited by Jherad
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I found this funny until I realized people are serious about this.

 

One major component to PvE content is obtaining gear and itemizing in order to complete higher level content. Bolstering players to the recommended gear level in FPs and Ops would defeat gearing altogether. Players would clear new endgame content within hours of its release because gearing wouldn't be necessary if they just raise you to the recommended stats. Talk about killing part of the challenge in endgame.

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Im pretty sure pvp players are making the comparison to show bw/ea how stupid bolster is right now.

 

As a pve player who pvps as well, I cant say that I blame them.

 

When they show up to a raid in partisan and I show up in Black market, they get no break. If the guild isnt willing to drag them through, they likely arent getting picked and are being told "get better gear".

 

Yet now when I show up to pvp with my pve gear, Im being given a free bonus that I did not earn. I paid my dues in pvp previously, I got my gear. Now its all useless. They removed the expertise. Imagine if they had removed the stats from dreadguard, rakata pieces and said "At 55 everyone is even again." PVE players who spent time augmenting, spent time getting top end gear, would go berserk, and rightfully so.

 

I think most pvp players understand that an expansion results in their gear eventually becoming obsolete. I just cant recall any expansion where gear that was "elite" the day before became "completely worthless" the next.

 

So I hope that BW/EA goes back and rethinks this.

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Im pretty sure pvp players are making the comparison to show bw/ea how stupid bolster is right now.

 

Thanks for understanding - I actually have no interest in PvE gear, but bolster is crazy right now.

 

It isn't even about EWH gear being 'useless', far from it. It's that I just 'upgraded' 2 pieces of EWH to Partisan (The new tier 1 lvl 55 pvp set) and after the effects of bolster there was zero improvement.

 

None.

 

But I need partisan in order to get conqueror.

 

It's like coming from full dreadguard, then being told you need to grind another set of dreadguard before you can get the new set.

Edited by Jherad
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I

 

I think most pvp players understand that an expansion results in their gear eventually becoming obsolete. I just cant recall any expansion where gear that was "elite" the day before became "completely worthless" the next.

 

 

You just described every single wow expansion ever.

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You just described every single wow expansion ever.

 

Which is why a lot of us play SWTOR, and not WoW. I rather liked that my purples were powerful enough that it took a while to upgrade them in Makeb. It reminded me of everything I'd gone through to get it, and none of them were casually tossed aside for a piece of green trash. I'd take the mods out of them, and slip them into my old, familiar gear, breathing new strength into my long established look.

 

This, I like. It's part of what makes SWTOR amazing, that we can customize our looks at will, simply by moving pieces of gear into our Shells, and blows away the "Transmog" nonsense that WoW does.

 

What I'm not fond of, however, is way they're approaching PvP and PvE as two similar entities. I agree fully, that there shouldn't be as much limitations as Recruit > EWH was. And if Bolster actually worked like it was supposed to, that would be fantastic. But it's not. Which is a frustrating thing to deal with, compounded by the fact that Conqueror gear is actually worse than the blue level 53 gear you can get for a smattering of Basic comms. Which is also BoE, so you can get it from your alts, as opposed to the BoP PvP gear.

 

They took a step in the right direction. Get people involved in both sides of the game. But they didn't take it far enough, if this is their vision. Rather than give free bolster to PvE gear, in order to compete, they should have added Expertise to PvE, and made a progression model that requires both PvE AND PvP gear to reach full optimization. It wouldn't really be that hard to do, either. Simply create a full tier that you can obtain from either PvE, or PvP, from the lower brackets. Which would be HMFPs, or SMOps, and Warzone Comms. Then, for the ultimate tier, split it. Half comes from PvE, half comes from PvP. You get three pieces of your 4 set from either side, as you could have, say, chestpieces overlap, split bracers/belt and also implants and earpieces/relics. Add weapons to both sides, and go from there. You can perform in the first tier with relative ease, but if you want the best your character can be, you'd need to do Hard OPs, and obtain Ranked Warzone comms.

 

No more of this "PvE Carebears in my WZ!" or "PvP noobs in my FPs!" Because all gear, no matter how you obtained it, would work for everything. And we could all, finally, get along, and stop hating each other based on our preferred method of play, and get back to what we all can agree on. Killing everything in sight.

Edited by Zuntrios
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I enjoy both PvP and PvE in SWTOR. Here's the thing: PvP and PvE are two different types of challenges.

 

PvE is about learning mechanics to defeat a computer-controlled boss that acts in (generally) the same way every single time you fight him. For the most part, any player with reasonable intelligence can google a guide to a boss fight or simply learn it through trial and error, and master the mechanical portion of the fight. Literally the only thing that makes a boss fight challenging after the first few attempts is the gear check. If you bolster players in PvE, there's pretty much no reason to do a raid more than a couple of times. You beat it once or twice and you've mastered it. Nothing changes, so there's really no incentive to do it again aside from gear.

 

PvP, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal. The thrill in PvP is pitting your skills against another human opponent trying to outplay and out-think you. Other players can constantly change and adapt in ways that AI-controlled opponents simply can't. You can't learn PvP from a guide on the internet because no two PvP encounters or matches are going to go exactly the same way. Simply memorizing mechanics isn't enough; you have to actually adapt on tactically on the fly. Because of its ever-changing nature, PvP innately has more longevity and replayability than PvE, and doesn't need a gear grind to artificially inflate its lifetime. PvP has a higher skill ceiling, and that should be the emphasis, NOT gear. So yeah, leveling the playing field via bolster means that whoever wins a fight won because they're the better player, not because they spent more time grinding gear.

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As a player that plays both PvP and PvE, this suggestion makes sense for the only reason to make players that dont give a **** about pvp understand how awfull mechanic the bolster is when it comes to top level PvP. My answer is "NO" of course, although the bolster HAS to be REMOVED from lvl 55 warzones.

 

No. Just, no. We don't want inexperienced pvp'ers in top level ops.

 

Can all others say "no we don't need inexperienced pve'ers in top level WZ's" ?

 

Think before you type.

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Plus what the use in playing long term, if gearing up for new challenges is no longer a issue.

 

That's exactly what the PvP community have been asking. Why does someone who does a lot of PvE get to have the best gear in PvP also?

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PvE is a gear game. PvP is a skill game. Gear progression is certainly important (and should mean something) in PvP, but it can't be the primary focus like it has been in the past. There are a number of really good reasons for this, but one of the most obvious ones is that there is no separation of warzones based on gear score. Part of this is due to lacking tech in the game, and part is due to comparatively low server pops, but the largest contributing factor is that warzones aren't designed to be stratified in the same way that PvE content is. Think of it this way: when you go into a PvE instance in your top-tier gear, do you randomly get assigned to fight Soa in Story Mode? Would you find it interesting if you did?

 

Of course not. It also probably isn't very fun for Soa, knowing that every time his instance is created, he might get matched against a raid group who out-gears him by 6 full tiers. Well, that's basically what PvP was all about pre-2.0. People are fond of trotting out that the gear separation in PvP wasn't that bad. Yeah, that's rubbish. I've seen the stats, and I know how things are calculated. The gear separation was immense. When I can queue into a warzone and end up fighting a player who has a 25-30% damage and mitigation bonus against me, that's not fun. For either of us. The player in top-tier gear probably got it PvPing because he enjoys PvP. Unless he's a very strange player, he probably doesn't queue into PvP exclusively to curb-stomp noobs: he likes the challenge and the ever-shifting tactics. I can't offer him a sufficient challenge because my gear cripples me, and he can't offer me an even playing field for the same reason.

 

Another really good reason that PvP can't be a gear game in the same way that PvE is comes from the way that PvP gear is obtained. I can sit at the off node and pick my nose for a few dozen hours and "earn" a full set of Conqueror gear. Yay, me! Say what you like about PvE focused players, but they do need to work harder to acquire their BiS. If you don't clear a boss in PvE, you don't get loot. It's as simple as that. Thus, PvE gear has a dramatically higher intrinsic value than PvP gear due to the time and effort invested in its acquisition. This implies a number of things in addition to the separation of PvP, chief among them that PvP gear *cannot* be viable in serious PvE since it is far too easy to obtain (and we saw the consequences of allowing this pre-1.2).

 

It's also worth noting that gear, in PvE, is how you unlock subsequent tiers of content. PvP is all a single tier, and so there is no content progression to match the gear progression. It would be like if the only content available in PvE were level 50 story mode flashpoints, which could be ground again and again to achieve BiS gear, by which the content becomes trivialized. That was the situation that we were in pre-2.0 with PvP, and it wasn't really fun for anyone except those who thrive on ganking the poor sods who were foolish enough to solo queue as a fresh 50.

 

Thus we have bolster in PvP. Bolster serves a couple of purposes. First, it levels the playing field at an entry level and for casual PvPers. Rather than having an unavoidably massive statistical disparity and handicap due to gear differences, we can have an extremely minor differential and a focus on skill. Players who are good at PvP but don't grind the gear can come in and be successful and contribute to their team. Players who are bad at PvP but who still have their full BiS (and yes, these people *absolutely* exist) will suddenly find themselves steamrolled in every match. That sounds like a good thing to me.

 

The second thing bolster does is it makes PvE gear viable in PvP. I know that's controversial, but it's absolutely fair. As I outlined, PvE gear is dramatically harder to obtain than PvP gear simply as a function of how loot drops work. If you're a bad PvEer, you don't get gear. It's as simple as that. People aren't going to be grinding BiS PvE gear as an "easy path" to success in PvP, since BiS PvE is harder to obtain. Thus, the people coming in with their PvE gear will simply be casual (but potentially quite skilled) PvPers who primarily PvE.

 

The thing is that bolster is a really fine line to walk. For obvious reasons, Partisan *should* be superior to bolstered BiS PvE gear (it isn't currently). It shouldn't be superior enough to completely bias the coin flip in an encounter, but there should be an advantage. Conqueror gear even more so. Bolster gives BioWare very fine-grained control over the exact disparity between bolstered gear and top end PvP gear, which is a very good thing, but it's going to take them a while to get the system precisely right and balanced.

 

I'm very confident that, given a bit of time, BioWare will find the right combination of weightings to make PvP gear relevant and the progression exist, without creating a significant (read: more than 5-10%) disparity between entry level and BiS. The point is to keep the skill factor foremost while still providing some marginal gear progression. Once that balance is struck, I think everyone will agree that the situation is superior to what we had before. Warzones will be more evenly matched and queues will pop faster since people no longer feel "locked out" of PvP content due to gear disparity. That sounds like a good thing to me.

 

(btw, I don't think any of these arguments apply to ranked warzones, and bolster in that environment is really silly)

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That's exactly what the PvP community have been asking. Why does someone who does a lot of PvE get to have the best gear in PvP also?

 

I can understand PvP players being upset. I don't PvP, think I have have 3 player vs player kills and all of those were idiots trying to grief me. People like that gear matters because that is the only thing they have going for them, because it certainly isn't skill or a PvE infiltration shadow or a PvE sawbones would not just destroy them and their pvp gear.

Edited by mikebevo
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Who was being locked out due to gear disparity?

 

I started in 50 wzs with my basic free blue gear. I generally would be top 2 in healing, but I was very easy to kill. You know what, that made me a better pvper. Because I soon started to get better gear, I wasnt as easy to kill, but I still had the damage mitigation skills that I learned when I didnt have the gear.

 

Gear wont make you in pvp, but getting good gear was something fun to do while pvping. Otherwise why not just make gear completely irrelevant?

 

Isnt it the same principle in pve? Why should gear help carry you, why wouldnt it be more fair that at 55 every sorc has the same stats, and then if you have the most skills you are the best, its not dependent on gear.

 

Oh wait...

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Isnt it the same principle in pve? Why should gear help carry you, why wouldnt it be more fair that at 55 every sorc has the same stats, and then if you have the most skills you are the best, its not dependent on gear.

 

PvE has hard numerical checks on its fights. If the stats on your DPS's gear are not above a certain level, then it doesn't matter how skilled they are, the boss will enrage and the entire group will fail. The most skilled healer on the server will fail to keep up with the damage in HM S&V if they're still wearing Columi gear. PvP has no such mechanic. In fact, mechanical checks in PvP are (in general) much more lenient, which is part of why wacky hybrid specs and strange rotations can be viable and indeed advantageous. PvE doesn't allow such margins. We can argue all day about skill in one vs skill in the other, but the fact remains that PvE has a very strong emphasis on numeric potential and precise execution. Numeric potential should be a non-issue in PvP since there is no mechanical enforcement of that potential.

 

And yes, the gear disparity is exactly as broad as I made it out to be. A 25-30% numerical disparity between players does not make for an even playing field. More importantly, I can be an incredibly skilled tank, but I would be absolutely facerolled by a mediocre player in better gear. That is the problem that bolster is intended to fix.

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In no way shape or form should bolster or something like it be introduced to FPs or OPs. What would be the point of getting any gear be? Let me ask you this, what would be the point of me getting better gear be if the game just bumped me up along the way? I would not need to buy any gear as I could run around in the same outfit that was given to me when I create a character.

 

The fun in this game is the challenge of the gear progression. In my opinion if you don't want to run with a group that has someone geared in green or has someone that is x levels lower/higher than you, than don't. You have several options which include vote kick, leave the group, or better yet get a group together with friends/guildies or what have you, before queing. Personally I don't mind running with people in greens, adds more challenge to me as a healer :)

 

I have several 50's and I have even managed to level all the way simply doing FP's with two of them. Some FP's were a little challenging along the way, but as I earned my gear things got easier, until the next one was available to me.

 

Developers, please don't consider implementing this PVE bolster into the game.

 

Should something be done about the XP nerf? Ya i think so. A suggestion that I have would be is that if there is a spread of no greater than 4 or 5 levels in a FP, then no nerf. In this way you cant power level someone. In higher levels maybe make the spread 2 to 4 levels. After the spread, normal nerf rules apply. This way your still getting a decent amount of xp for each FP, but the content is still challenging.

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Keyboard,

 

I understand how pve works. Im simply stating that pve doesnt have to work that way. A boss could have X stats and all players could have Y stats. Instead of it being based on gear, it would be based on who did the most efficient rolls, who had the best timing, best coordination. You dont need gear checks, it could go back to the olden days of video games where it was just about skill.

 

That being said pvp is a team sport. If you are undergeared as a tank, it is the job of the healer to keep you alive. You may not win death matches 1 on 1 consistently if you are in weaker gear, but you absolutely can be a valuable asset to a team win.

 

I pve more than I pvp, but never once did I think that I simply couldnt compete because I did not have fully augmented optimized ewh. In fact I only had a complete wh set, not once did I ever think about anyone elses gear. My focus was on winning wzs. Which is more about skill/tactics. Cause wzs are a lot more than just gear fests.

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In no way shape or form should bolster or something like it be introduced to FPs or OPs. What would be the point of getting any gear be? Let me ask you this, what would be the point of me getting better gear be if the game just bumped me up along the way?

 

That's what pvp players are asking right now. I have topped the damage in level 55 pvp in my leveling gear. I have also heard that pve-gear can actually be better than the lower level 55 pvp gear. (Can't remember which one of those was the new wh and which one was the new ewh...)

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