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THe problem is not in defensive cooldowns but in current approaches


omaan

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Devs have stated that there are too many defensive cooldowns and the game should be more dynamic. Defensive cooldowns are not the problem itself, the problem is in set bonuses/tacticals overpowering them. Same set bonuses and tacticals you provided for no reason, which are destroying balance. Like it wasn't enough for marauders to have obfuscate which saves their team mates from death? Devs also gave them force bound set bonus allowing marauders to fully neutralize enemy team damage. They also gave EP set bonus to pt's so they could both do tonnes of damage and be tanky in addition to support provided by their marauder comrades with obfuscates and force bound debuff.

 

It is set bonuses and tactical items you should nerf/rework/buff instead of touching our dcds we so hardly enjoy to use while playing ALL types of content in swtor (and i mean not only pvp and pve but also story content etc).

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They also gave EP set bonus to pt's so they could both do tonnes of damage and be tanky in addition to support provided by their marauder comrades with obfuscates and force bound debuff.

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That works only for AP discipline and only in an arena setting. To be honest I never liked the idea of making powertechs the pure glass cannons. It makes PT DPS specs broken because they are OP if they have support, and useless if they are on their own. And a Meteor Brawler set makes pt playstyle super boring: pop EF, jump in, explode.

 

My idea of balancing would be separating combat styles/disciplines into 3 types for damage dealers:

Tank/Damage (more defensive cooldowns), Heal/Damage (the healing abilities), Escape/Damage (kiting, stealth, teleport, cc immunity). And for support roles, it could be Tank/Heal, Heal/Escape or Tank/Escape, but they will lose a lot in damage output. The loadout system (choosing A, B, or C type of ability) can take care of that.

Right now if you look at the best performing specs (for PvP) they can do either T/D/E (fury mara), D/H/E(lightning sorc, oper dps, snipers to some extent, tho they are very close to perfect E/D) or T/D/H (mercs, jugg tank with grit teeth, pt with pocket guard/heal)

Edited by Voroschuk
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I think set bonuses and tacticals are what makes your toons dynamic. And looking at the new utility tree system, you'll be able to build out your toon for the type of content you are doing.

You don't create more choice by reducing the amount of abilities. That's like chopping a pie into more pieces and pretending you've created more pie. All you're doing is stealing more and more substance from characters. tacticals and bonuses are fleeting and are not permanent things. they can enhance what's already there certainly, but I shouldn't have to rely exclusively on armor sets to get any depth from my character. You also can't have depth and a deep dive in only 6 inches of water. Also if they want us to have more customization, you don't create more customization by stealing abilities. They've even said themselves they want to reduce ability quantity, yet people are still pretending we're going to have more options, which just boggles my mind. It's also wholly unnecessary.

 

They'll revamp the game to do a massive nerf, but they won't revamp their game to update old mechanics as they should have done to start with. That just stinks of lazy development in my book. No it won't be easy, but there's not some massive flood of abilities like they claim.

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I’ve also pointed out in my feedback that this “balance” reason for nerfing DCDs is a problem of Biowares own making when they added horizontal gearing with tacticals and multiple gear sets that make some combos too OP.

They are lying to themselves (and us) if they think it’s the DCDs causing balance issues in pvp.

 

Let’s look at mid pvp as an example where there aren’t any tacticals and limited set bonuses.

* Bolster takes care of gear so everyone basically has the same stats

* In mid pvp where only lvl 70+ can have one type of set bonus per class, the games are pretty balanced (when match making works and puts similar lvls together) and TTK is much lower than at lvl 75

* In mid pvp the performance of the game runs smoother

* There is much less Desync and lag affects and FPS is better too

* In lvl 75 the Desync can make it nearly unplayable sometimes

* In lvl 75 TTK is much higher with certain “cheese” builds

 

What’s the differences here?

* At lvl 74 we already have all of our DCDs, so it’s not them causing the increased TTK at lvl 75

* At lvl 74 we have less performance issues from the game engine, so it’s not DCDs causing the problems

* At lvl 75 we gain 1 more utility and horizontal gearing with multiple gear sets and different types of tacticals Bingo

 

Now I don’t think it’s that last utility choice that’s causing the balance and performance problems. But I can’t rule it out. So the solution is limit it to 8 utility choices instead of 9 and test it. I’m 99.99% sure the results will show it’s not that.

Which means the greatly increased performance issues since 6.0 and balance issues are because of horizontal gearing system they added.

 

But instead of admitting this mistake and recognising that players warned them of this last expansion when they were developing it on the pts, they try and shift the blame to DCDs that have mostly been in the game since the launch.

It’s the same disingenuous sleight of hand BioWare has used for years to deflect their own mis-steps when they don’t listen to player feedback. They are just trying to fix a problem they created that will create another problem and drive more players from the game.

 

But because they made such a fuss over horizontal gearing and made it an RNG hell grind to get some items, they can’t or won’t back track on it for what ever personal / corporate reasons.

 

When the easiest fix to most balance issues in pvp is to bring back pvp specific gear that is one set per class. That and separating utilities into pvp and pve builds and adjusting some of the passive immunities that certain abilities give.

This would also help (but not fix) the performance issues. Most of the performance issues are due to all the added extra mobile abilities they added to the game since launch.

 

Bioware say they added all these extra DCDs since launch, but as another thread has shown, that’s mostly untrue. Where as they’ve constantly increased and added to extra mobility to all classes in nearly ever other expansion. It’s at the point now where some classes move so fast it would have been considered a speed hack prior to 2.0.

On top of the speed and extra gap closers or escapes that nearly every class has now, they’ve constantly added more stuns, mez, slows and CC to some classes. And to combat that they added lots of passive immunities or utilities.

Combine all of that with tacticals and 20 different gear sets and that’s why we have performance issues and balance problems. It’s definitely not the DCDs causing that problem.

 

If BioWare want to fix game performance and enjoyment (which should be their number one priority as far as I’m concerned), then they should be concentrating on what’s actually causing the problems instead of trying to obfuscate it.

 

I think we all understand they can’t tell us all their secrets, but they need to be more open and honest with the players, especially those doing the testing for them and providing feedback. What good is our feedback if it’s skewed to begin with because they aren’t honest with us about their reasons?

 

Sadly, it looks like BioWare are going to do what they always do. Ignore overwhelming player feedback and make more fundamental mistakes that drive away more players in the long term then they attract in the short term. Which could be a fatal mistake this time since they’ve driven so many players away that they have to bribe people to play some group content or it would never pop.

 

I’m really hoping cooler heads will prevail this time and some common sense will win out for once and BioWare will back track on this idea to remove or amalgamate DCD abilities and utilities to dumb down the game to fix problems they created with another system players warned them about last expansion. If not, we really don’t have the population anymore for the game to survive another mass exodus like 5.0. If they bungle this expansion, I fear the game won’t last another 18 months.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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You don't create more choice by reducing the amount of abilities. That's like chopping a pie into more pieces and pretending you've created more pie. All you're doing is stealing more and more substance from characters. tacticals and bonuses are fleeting and are not permanent things. they can enhance what's already there certainly, but I shouldn't have to rely exclusively on armor sets to get any depth from my character. You also can't have depth and a deep dive in only 6 inches of water. Also if they want us to have more customization, you don't create more customization by stealing abilities. They've even said themselves they want to reduce ability quantity, yet people are still pretending we're going to have more options, which just boggles my mind. It's also wholly unnecessary.

 

They'll revamp the game to do a massive nerf, but they won't revamp their game to update old mechanics as they should have done to start with. That just stinks of lazy development in my book. No it won't be easy, but there's not some massive flood of abilities like they claim.

 

Awe, Freezing Force -- these are niche abilities that I don't care about much. Freezing force can be fun in certain situations. I think the last time I used it was on Izax hull cutter droids (with the dot utility). And Awe is great for certain pvp situations. But I don't consider either of them to be particularly necessary to my enjoyment of a guardian. For Saber Throw and Saber Ward: meh. They even have generic names. Throw 'em in the trash or combine them with similar abilities. (saber throw = hew; add saber reflect to the first few seconds of saber ward; whatever)

 

Give me more set bonuses, tacticals, skill tree loadout thingies.

Edited by Rion_Starkiller
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  • 2 weeks later...
I just had a fight in solo ranked agaisnt healer,pt and double mara....pt took EP set bonus, marauders took force bound set bonuses. You know what? They are unkillable....literally, there is no chance one of them dies no matter what our team did. EP boosted pts shield so it lasts longer and absorbs tonnes of damage at start and both marauder where using roar one after another applying force bound debuff to all our team in addition to obfuscates...we did zero dps despite the fact that our team had 2 gold players and one decent player with full 300 augments. I mean yeah devs were pretty wrong and naive when they added these overpowered set bonuses which allow dps specs to survive LONGER THAN TANKS OR HEALER lmao
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I just had a fight in solo ranked agaisnt healer,pt and double mara....pt took EP set bonus, marauders took force bound set bonuses. You know what? They are unkillable....literally, there is no chance one of them dies no matter what our team did. EP boosted pts shield so it lasts longer and absorbs tonnes of damage at start and both marauder where using roar one after another applying force bound debuff to all our team in addition to obfuscates...we did zero dps despite the fact that our team had 2 gold players and one decent player with full 300 augments. I mean yeah devs were pretty wrong and naive when they added these overpowered set bonuses which allow dps specs to survive LONGER THAN TANKS OR HEALER lmao

 

I do want to point out some of the ironic elements of this post. Force Bound IS the pvp set bonus, yet it is too broken even for PvP. The PvP sets seem to either be OP, Force bound, or good enough but at the sake of a major dps loss, something like Operative's debilitator, which I think is about right in terms of scaling (though concealment needs a nerf).

 

In regards to EP, it is a bit overtuned when looking at PVP, However for PvE it is basically required due to it giving PT tanks a similar cheese to reflect and shroud with their power yield absorb.

 

So yeah, make PvP set bonus restrictions, but in regards to force bound I think a "fix" is to make it function the same as a taunt, making the dps loss not apply to when the team is attacking you.

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Awe, Freezing Force -- these are niche abilities that I don't care about much. Freezing force can be fun in certain situations. I think the last time I used it was on Izax hull cutter droids (with the dot utility). And Awe is great for certain pvp situations. But I don't consider either of them to be particularly necessary to my enjoyment of a guardian. For Saber Throw and Saber Ward: meh. They even have generic names. Throw 'em in the trash or combine them with similar abilities. (saber throw = hew; add saber reflect to the first few seconds of saber ward; whatever)

 

Give me more set bonuses, tacticals, skill tree loadout thingies.

 

The reason you don't use awe in solo pve, is that you were going to win the fight anyways, and the enemies are so weak you can just instantly aoe them down. The reason you don't use freezing force in pve, is that enemies don't even bother to try and run away.

 

It's not that certain abilities being restricted or removed are niche, it's that pve enemies in SWTOR are stupid, weak, and built to fail instead of challenging the player.

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The reason you don't use awe in solo pve, is that you were going to win the fight anyways, and the enemies are so weak you can just instantly aoe them down. The reason you don't use freezing force in pve, is that enemies don't even bother to try and run away.

 

It's not that certain abilities being restricted or removed are niche, it's that pve enemies in SWTOR are stupid, weak, and built to fail instead of challenging the player.

 

Yep, and then when you do harder pve, like nim (16m in particular), the mobs are immune to mezzes and physics.

 

I've been saying the game is way too easy on these forums, but it seems there are many subscribers (and new players) that would not be able to handle higher difficulty. So now the devs want to nerf DCD's, but people hate ability pruning. Can't win :D

 

I blame 4.0 for faceroll pve. Not that the game was difficult pre-4.0, but it became outrageously easy with level sync. IMHO, vanilla fights/mobs/planets have been broken since then.

 

You don't create more choice by reducing the amount of abilities. That's like chopping a pie into more pieces and pretending you've created more pie. All you're doing is stealing more and more substance from characters. tacticals and bonuses are fleeting and are not permanent things. they can enhance what's already there certainly, but I shouldn't have to rely exclusively on armor sets to get any depth from my character. You also can't have depth and a deep dive in only 6 inches of water. Also if they want us to have more customization, you don't create more customization by stealing abilities. They've even said themselves they want to reduce ability quantity, yet people are still pretending we're going to have more options, which just boggles my mind. It's also wholly unnecessary.

 

They'll revamp the game to do a massive nerf, but they won't revamp their game to update old mechanics as they should have done to start with. That just stinks of lazy development in my book. No it won't be easy, but there's not some massive flood of abilities like they claim.

 

The current system gives us very cookie cutter class specs, with the only differentiation being utilities depending on content -- pvp or pve. By dynamic, I mean that being able to choose your set bonus and tactical, you customize your toon more so than anything else. Now imagine you can choose your abilities, or ability effects, beyond Build A or Build B (per PTS), then pair that with more set bonuses and tacticals.

 

FYI, we can't talk about datamined info here, so I'll just leave it at that.

Edited by Rion_Starkiller
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