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Star Wars: The Old Republic |OT2| In a F2Play galaxy far, far away
- Thread starter Cystm
- Start date
BattleMonkey
Member
So do we think life day will actually be an in game event or because of the Q&A recently, it will just be some holiday themed items in the cartel shop? I know they supposedly were not for following our real world holidays in game, but lifeday is canon.... lolz
StudioTan
Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
I think it's going to be both. As much as I'm looking forward to the new WZ this update is a bit light on content, I'm guessing they're going to be having some Life Day event with it.
HarryDemeanor
Member
I hope it's both.
BattleMonkey
Member
Think it's a decent update. New warzone, new tier of pvp gear, and all the new space mission stuff and upgrades. I wouldn't mind an event too of course but last event was treated as one of the 6 week content updates so I have doubts.
It's a nice set, was kinda disappointed in the size for it's cost, but if you can get it on sale it's a really cool kit.
You threw me off with that avatar change!
I'm really hoping for a world event too, and they gave the impression in that Q&A that the Life Day cartel packs would be in before Christmas so (I'm referring specifically to the talk about that new celebrator mount)... I won't hold my breath, however.
A new warzone and new PVP is plenty content for me, because that's mainly all I do. I'm sure the PVE folks will not be as pleased, but even another 6 weeks til new PVE stuff (so 3 months total) is still much quicker than it was early on after release.
On a side note, my scoundrel is 35 now, and sage 38...going to have to find a guild raiding story modes to get geared so I can get back into raiding on the pub side. You know, in between all that PVP I'll be doing
.Say whaaat?
Hopefully they roll this out shortly after 1.6, since they are increasing the gear gap a bit between new 50s again.
Edit - Or, should I say rather they are increasing the size of the transitional gap for new 50s; the time frame isn't changing, just the effectiveness of Recruit MK-2 relative to the time frame a player requires it.
Edit - Or, should I say rather they are increasing the size of the transitional gap for new 50s; the time frame isn't changing, just the effectiveness of Recruit MK-2 relative to the time frame a player requires it.
BattleMonkey
Member
Eh, then what is the point of even having expertise anymore?
I think this is awesome, personally. I never liked Resilience in WoW or Expertise here. GIMME PURE STATS BABY! LEMME WIN ON SKILL, etc etc, nub whine about gear, etc etc. lol
But yeah, this. I mean, I don't mind the change...it's just, why have it now?
To ensure that to get PvP-relevant gear you have to PvP. PvE gear will still get your face stomped.
BattleMonkey
Member
But you are given a set of pvp gear as soon as you hit 50, so it makes much of the grind pointless. The statistical returns are pretty weak. They want to keep the gear separate, but then they also just give you a suit for each when you hit 50.
Take away expertise does not take the gear advantage away when your still going to have statistical improvements. The expertise stat differences from the sets were minimal in the first place, yet people still would whine about getting stomped due to gear... yea that whole 4% advantage totally ruined your game.
Just seems pretty silly change when it's not going to really change much. Your still going to be dealing with gear progression tiers but now focused on different stats. Yet they keep expertise so you don't use PVE gear.... so the grinds for both will remain along with the progression.
I agree with everything you said except for this. 4% expertise is 4% more damage dealt, 4% less taken, and 4% more heals. It doesn't sound or look like much, but there's a reason you queue in a WZ and see folks in recruit and adjust your expectations accordingly. The 4% expertise plus the large amount of stats from Recruit to Battlemaster (and smaller amount to War Hero) adds up to a big gap.
Skill will always trump the gear, but skill with gear will always trump skill with none.
I will say you have a good point about gear progression and the why of it if they are gonna give away max expertise in the starter set...but I dunno how else to do what they want off the top of my head.
Right, they absolutely want two grinds in the game. That's their intent.
This way the grinds remain, and the small sense of progression stays, but the stat advantage within the PvP side of the game is compressed further. I'd prefer to see it eliminated altogether but that would remove the grind aspect and neither the developers nor many MMO gamers who are well-trained at this point want that.
StudioTan
Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
You need the carrot, no matter how small. Just doing stuff for different visual looks isn't enough. Especially in a game like SWTOR where half the Jedis just want plain brown robes.
I'm hoping there is more to it though, they hinted at changing the way they do all end game gearing. What I'd like to see is more variety in set bonuses to help further differentiate people.
Progression doesn't have to come in the form of stat advantages, and in the case of PvP certainly shouldn't. At least, not controlled, instanced PvP. Open world PvP is a much better environment for those kinds of unavoidable gaps because entropy has a much larger hand in the results of the individual fights.
StudioTan
Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
What's your alternative?
Maybe not, but I've never played a game where it didn't that I cared about. I love chasing new gear. That's why I play. I'd say it's why most play, besides the relationships. It's the foundation of endgame in MMO's.
Well, first off I don't think there's much evidence to support the claim that visual skins wouldn't at least be a good starting place for moving the progression rewards to. It's the primary system currently used by almost every other form of competitive gaming sans a few notable examples and given that almost every other genre of gaming currently has far more competitive PvP environments compared to this genre, I think it would be a good place to start. Especially in a game like SWTOR where the look of gear is not inherently tied to its original source mode; if there is unique looking prestige gear that they can wear outside of PvP people are going to go after it.
It's not as if SWTOR's current progression system always has a carrot to offer. Plenty of people hit the end of the treadmill and simply get off, waiting for the next tier of gear before they ever go back and participate. The ones that ever get there are the ones that would probably be in PvP a lot even without stat advantages if there was more recurrent progression rewards offered for their time investment, which you could do in much simpler ways. Hell, something as simple as significant credit rewards would keep those kinds of players participating. There are more creative solutions I'm sure, especially considering PvP players have access to the same crew skills system but no important unique options available to them through that system. PvE players can learn a lot of unique and powerful schematics through long-term PvE participation; it should be long-term PvP players that could craft and sell warzone consumables, PvP skins, and other things like that.
The other main limiter in participation is content, much like PvE. PvP however doesn't need to share any disadvantage of gear being a potential block to get to that content, so simply focusing more on releasing new warzones and warzone changes is going to work to maintain participation numbers. So long as there isn't a large barrier to entry, the more visible that stuff is the more people are going to wander in to check it out. Right now I think that doesn't work very well; a lot of people are going to poke their head into PvP to check out the new warzone on Tuesday and have it promptly obliterated by significantly better geared players. Lots of these people remain at near-zero participation because of this, and instead of new content being a real strong gainer in participation it's just a reminder to a lot of people why they don't PvP regularly.
Mind you, this discussion is totally avoiding the topic that one form of progression has a directly negative impact on the quality of the competitive gameplay itself throughout this path of progression and one doesn't. Personally I think that's a non-trivial issue itself.
StudioTan
Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
You haven't really provided any alternate ideas or said anything to convince me that non-stat based progression would be better. At the bolded, I've played MMOs where gear doesn't mean much and there is very little incentive to keep playing for me. Guild Wars 2 is the more recent example. Beyond exploration there was no reason for me to keep playing that game, it was completely boring and pointless.
I don't PVP in any games beyond MMOs so I don't care how they do it but if such a system could be made to be compelling in an MMO I'd be interested. Nothing you said seemed interesting to me though.
Well, if the negative effects of gear progression itself on PvP are not a concern for you, it makes sense that you don't care to solve it as a problem.
I'll say this, though; listening to Hinkle on the TORWars podcast the other day, it's clear that they are compressing the amount of vertical movement in their progression pretty significantly. From an intent perspective, that's probably all competitive PvPers in this game can hope for.
As things stand the top-end of SWTOR PvP is pretty much shit and nearly non-existent, so I am really hoping they have things in store for their hardcore PvP crowd. Most of the implications of their upcoming changes are focused on entry-level players and improving the average level of participation in general; good things, but with a further minimized gear curve I'd rather they start looking at brand new avenues of progression and not just a gear tier with the same graphics and an even smaller stat jump than before. The difference between WH and EWH is incredibly slim and simply isn't compelling.
Well yeah, but we've been saying this on here and folks have elsewhere since rated warzones were released.
That has nothing to do with gear progression, just design flaws. Lack of solo or four man queues. Lack of real incentive to do rated because as a pug or average team against a top tier team you can't even get enough medals to amount to anything. I've been in games on both sides of that, in the top team on the server for a while and in a pug-filled bottom feeder, and it sucks for both teams so folks just don't do it.
Folks love the competitive aspect, and they love playing with their friends, yeah. But for the most part they all leave when there is no more carrot to chase. That's how SWTOR lost most of it's subs, lack of carrots. No more PVE, no more PVP to progress into. Getting rid of it isn't the answer, as that's why folks play the game.
You argue that the carrot shouldn't be there, and then the carrot is too small. I'm of the opinion that even a small carrot is better than none. We don't need a big gear gap in PVP every few months, just something to tell the difference.
StudioTan
Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
DOTA isn't an MMO though. MMOs, at least the ones that I play and including SWTOR, are RPGs and as such are about character progression and development. The entire point is to take your character from a useless peon and become a hero at the end. If you remove all vertical progression then all you're doing is moving your character sideways all the time and I don't think that most people want that.
Now, do I think they have to do something about the gear disparity in end game PVP? Yeah, it sucks right now as a fresh 50, but I don't think they should remove it altogether. The key is to narrow the gap such that even with lesser stats you can win on skill, while still giving people who put in the time a reward for their efforts that gives them an advantage.
I'm certainly open to other forms of progression but I need something to work towards and a shiny new pair of boots with a red strip instead of a blue one isn't going to cut it.
No, I am arguing that the idea of "the carrot" is not inherently linked to the stats of your gear. I want them to minimize the amount of goals that result in PvP-related stat gains and start increasing the number of goals that reward basically anything else; vanity items, unique looking gear sets, speeders, credits, Cartel Coins, Legacy benefits... you can't tell me this game has any shortage of ways to reward players for things. In PvP specifically however the way stats influence the game is not positive and you can see a receipt of this in the fact that they have to manually come in and regulate the effects. We're sloughing off gear sets like old antlers not because players don't care for the looks but because the stats tied to them die a relevancy death.
Before an expansion manages to even come out for this game all of the content that hands out any kind of PvE gear short of BH/Campaign quality is going to be irrelevant because they'll be forced to mail you just as powerful gear in the mail upon hitting 50 just so you can enter a warzone.
BattleMonkey
Member
You think the competitive arena of TOR pvp is shit, fine, but that has nothing to do with gear progression. That is purely on the issues with the lack of support for ranked gameplay once it was implemented, carrot on sticks to draw the "hardcore", and just the player base in general not caring to take part or leaving to other games. None of these proposed gear changes are going to help make TOR suddenly grow a highly competitive pvp gaming scene so not sure what it has to do with a discussion on the progression though.
Getting rid of expertise is not going to get rid of that entry level issue and it's just going to force things to continue as they are as the progression of stats will always leave the newbies behind and BW will have to continue to give out improved entry level gear... just as they are doing currently, so these changes feel pretty pointless. It would be better to just get rid of the gear grind perhaps but obviously not everyone will be too keen on that. GW2 has attempted to make gear progression not important and it's obviously had mixed reactions.
What will BW do? Frankly they shouldn't bother since I don't think anyone has come up with a better solution that pleases a majority and what they are doing is just attempting to slow things down instead of really make any changes.
I dunno but they want to change things and it kinda sounded like they might also be looking at changes to the PVE progression too? Maybe they will be in general getting rid of progression entirely as GW2 has tried to do... perhaps that is how they plan on getting around the issues that are going to come up soon when the level cap is increased. I wouldn't mind seeing instead simple exclusivity awards for doing content, like unique mounts, visual items, pets, etc.
TOR is not going to become a competitive game, it's a MMO so it's just a component of a larger game. Games like DOTA were made to be nothing more, than a competitive game. But the wall TOR puts in place will always be there in that players can't simply download and play, they have to grind out a character to lvl 50 and invest money to really put any work into being "hardcore" pvp player.
For World PVP stuff, I agree. But the instanced stuff is an arena MOBA. It's cooperative, goal based, and competitive. You unlock it at level 10 and could conceivably only do it all the way to 50.
I am fine with gear based progression in every other aspect of the game, but it should be even in PVP. When I lose, I want it to be because my team was outplayed, not just outgeared.
Solo ranked, cross-server, and gear equalized is my dream for WZs. And I already consider it the best aspect of the game.
9 times out of 10, unless your class sucks, being outplayed is why you lose. I have played both with and against you on Jaina/Zizzy, and you don't really have a leg to stand on here about gear or skill. You both had gear and were skilled, and I just don't buy you lost because of gear. You may lose because the rest of your team lacks gear, but even at a gear disadvantage, bottom line is that most likely there is also a skill or knowledge issue.
You can still be schooled by recruit/bm geared players in full war hero if you suck, and vice versa. I think you and Wallach are greatly exaggerating the gear gap in this game. As I said before, 4% is significant, but great players are great more or less regardless.
I hear this all the time. People are turned off from PVP when they enter at 50 because of gear, or so they say. WH is OP!!! Like I said, I hear it like 5 times a day in general chat in WZ's or in the op wz chat...but the truth is, they just plain and simply aren't good enough.
You can't roll into 50 PVP for the first time and expect to compete with people who have been doing it daily since January and February. It's just not gonna happen. That's not a gear issue, that's a skill issue. If you gave them WH gear, they'd still be lacking in skill, and therefore get owned by skilled players.
I was talking more hypothetical.
I've actually never had a full set of the top gear as I find the grind tedious. I am usually half-and-half by the time they release the next tier.
But I've been on teams that are under-geared and it's impossible to win. Skill is more important, and the gear difference is just a slap in the face.
I'm glad they are closing the gap, but in my dream scenario, it wouldn't exist.
I've actually never had a full set of the top gear as I find the grind tedious. I am usually half-and-half by the time they release the next tier.
But I've been on teams that are under-geared and it's impossible to win. Skill is more important, and the gear difference is just a slap in the face.
I'm glad they are closing the gap, but in my dream scenario, it wouldn't exist.
Wallach said:
I agree with you pretty much on every point. I think the carrot can actually just be handled differently to please the masses, but they should also definitely add in more aesthetic and crew skill rewards. I will elaborate further later, but I just got off work and I don't have the energy in me just now. I will break down what I think they should do. There will even be a chart!
___ lol ____
holy shit chartz
Hey nice, my PT wears that same set. Though I don't seem to have the, uh... accessory.
I really like the Legacy version too, but I haven't gotten around to getting the BH set yet. He was 50 before those existed; my later alts got a set but he hasn't yet. Probably will if I decide to build a PvE DPS set though.
BattleMonkey
Member
Really don't see solo ranked ever happening, as it's something that is just going to have so many issues with players that it pretty much has to remain as a team based system.
If they can equalize everything fine, as long as their still is meaningful rewards but many I feel are going to just be upset with no matter what they change, since so many do want the progression aspect in their MMOs.
I still also want them to get in the multi spec options with the option of having a dedicated PVP spec just like RIFT did. Letting players build a pvp spec also helps with players not feeling like the pve is bringing down the pve and forcing changes that can hurt pve player builds.
BattleMonkey
Member
They can do it, but it's not going to be pretty at all since everyone will become huge asses over every little thing in game and out of game. Get teamed up with idiots who basically ruin your ranking? Oh it's going to bring out the worst in players. Frankly solo ranked sounds completely pointless and further dilute the already small ranked player base. They would need to implement cross server pvp queues at least before attempting it. Single ranked is also going to bring out lot of issues with class balance complaints just how it did with ranked systems when they implemented small arena groups in WoW. The game is supposed to be more designed around team based objective pvp and not single player pvp performance.
They also haven't shown any support for the current team ranked system so I really have no faith or hope for them to start trying more brackets of ranked play till they get their shit together on the current system.
So anybody got tips on being a healer? My reaction time just sucks, and I dunno, I'm just not very good at it at all.
I'm playing on my Mercenary alt, and while I'm going down DPS build, I realized yesterday that there are times when I'm going to have to heal, even though I detest it, and have never played a healer before.
I'm playing on my Mercenary alt, and while I'm going down DPS build, I realized yesterday that there are times when I'm going to have to heal, even though I detest it, and have never played a healer before.
I don't think you'll run into any times when you have to heal. If you want to DPS, that's what you should do. Especially if you are much better at it. You might lose a healer in a FP or something and someone might want you to switch, but if you aren't comfortable it's probably not gonna go too well. If by "not very good at it at all" you just mean not quite as good as DPS, maybe you should give it a go. It just takes practice.
I've played all three (50 sorc and 50 sage (lol, and 42 sage and 38 sage), 50 operative and 37 scoundrel, and 32 mercenary, all healing only) and in order ease of use (aka easy to learn and play) for me it goes: (1) Operative/Scoundrel (2) Sorcerer/Sage (3) Mercenary/Commando.
All that above is from PVP perspective. I have no idea where merc/commando heals are at in PVE since 1.3 came out. All I know is the number of great merc/commando healers in PVP is very small, and from playing my own it seems to take a bit more work due to the hard cast reliance compared to the other healing classes to output the same kind of HPS. What I'm saying is, you might not suck. It might be the class itself isn't a good fit for you and healing. It's a bit more of a learning curve IMO, and healing is kind of a mindset anyway.
Anore and Areoron are amazing merc heals. Anore kept me alive for over 30 seconds with 7 guys attacking me on my sniper last night. That is just wrong. A good merc/commando healer is still my most hated healer target to kill. Ops and scoundrels are damn close though. But we have cleared all the content except NiM Kephess with two Merc heals, so they are certainly viable for PvE as well.
Yep Anore is the best I've seen on the imp side since Gyrs quit long ago. He's an unstoppable force most of the time. When I get in huttball with him, we let him carry the ball if we have no warriors for leap
.
notworksafe
Member
Ugh why is the Inquisitor storyline so much better than the Consular one? Only thing stopping me from playing my GAF character more... That and Qyzen is kind of a lame-o too.
That and Qyzen is kind of a lame-o too.