Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Is it my imagination or...
Eh? I am a master CH as I stated before Tal-N and I cannot solo shear mites or malklocs without my grauls being completely trashed after fighting one mob for half an hour...then I have to heal them up for ten minutes and am paying out more than its worth for that through the stims...my TKA master friend can go through awhole waveof shear mites without stopping to rest and then heals himself up in 2 mins with meditate. Thats why he's always with me on hunts....I CANNOT SOLO.We are both masters of an elite proffession and he is far superior in combat to me and a CL50 Gurreck both in pvp and pve.
I'm not sure what your definition of CH solo is, but shooting stuff with uber weaponry while you have a pet out is nothing to do with CH power, thats the combat proffession doing the work. I as a MCH ONLY I cannot solo Dath lairs at all. Maulers do what? 300 hit? certainly not anywhere near as much as an elite combat hit.
Meatlumps? Are there any PC's that are elite combat that cannot take them out in quarter of the time a pet can? someone with pistols 3 could probably do it with a bit of tactical play. I'm a master of a supposedly offensive elite profession...I should be able to solo meatlumps the same as everyone else who's an elite masterand I sure as hell can't take them out at the same speed the others can.
I'm not sure why everyone isn't grasping the simple fact that BE and CH are chained at the wrist...can none of you see that this will hurtthe BE as much as the CH? less CH = less BE business. Its that simple so i'm not sure why you think its a super idea to get rid of the majority of CH's even if they were overpowered.
Death to **edit** Wars!
Yes this is star wars..but its also a game and cannot be an exact replica of the star wars universe...the same way that there aren't a million commando's running about, half the populationaren't bounty hunters and soon to be hundreds of jedi......i'm not sure I recall people shouting WTB JEDI HOLOCRON in the movies either......your point is absolutely moot.
I'm not sure what your definition of CH solo is, but shooting stuff with uber weaponry while you have a pet out is nothing to do with CH power, thats the combat proffession doing the work. I as a MCH ONLY I cannot solo Dath lairs at all. Maulers do what? 300 hit? certainly not anywhere near as much as an elite combat hit.
Definition of solo is when a player goes out by themselves hunting. I'd not call pets additonal players so even with them your going solo.
Indeed a master CH cannot solo a lair on Dathomir, since they cannot drive off the groups who will typically assist each other a MCH is forced to send their pets in against overwheming odds. I'm fairly sure that they could clobber their way through a lair of Malkloc but not much else aside from perhaps Bolma or the weaker Kwi. The fact that a pet causes only around 300 damage is besides the point, they have around 10k of HAM which is alot more than any player is capable of plus they have resistances equal or higher to what a player can get from armor (even after this patch). Then there's other factors but the list is endless.
But in the end you have pets that are around CL30 and above that are an even match for even a player, sure the damage is lower but they have the staying power. But we're getting off of the point here about the new system. This isn't about the CHs being overpowered, it's about how the current CL rating system in the game wasn't reliable. This unfortunatly effects the CH directly but it was needed for the BEs cloning system, the droids that are coming out plus the fact that to be fair you couldn't tell how tough certain enemies were and the higher end content simply wasn't hard enough. (groups of 6 people taking down a Krayt, thats just plain wrong)
The changes to the CH tree were indeed needed, any master can agree that it was frustrating for a 4/4/0/0 to have the same benefits as a master on the whole.As for those nerf'd species which were so popular beforehand... well we all know why they were popular. One way or another you'd have seen complaints either from them being increased in their CL rating or from being downgraded. One solution could have been making them super-rare, however given the current population of existing Grauls and such that wouldn't have been a solution.
But please don't preach about MCHs having it hard compared to other professions, alot of them have their trade offs and in the cases of commandos they worked (i worked) damned hard to get up there plus it doesn't leave many skill points for complimentary skills while a MCH can tackle similar things as a master commando but with less than half the skill points spent into their profession.
For a start making your font larger isn't helping your 'I'm an adult and all CH's are kiddies' arguement one bit. To me it points out your frustration.
Thats the normal font, I dunno why it changed when I copied and pasted it into the quote and it didn't look that much larger than when I posted it. Plus i didnt say ALL Chs were kiddies, I'm saying a large vocal majority is. If all CHs were kiddies then that would include me and many of my friends who have CHs on one server or another.
as a MCH only I cannot solo. Therefore the fact remains that it is the power combo's that are to blame for the unbalancing, not CH. And no, no matter how many times you say it, I cannot 'clobber' my way through a Malkloc lair without a gun wielding character backing the pet up.
You are doing something wrong then. If my Gronda can fight it's way through a Khabu lair without any assistance from me then a Rancor or a Graul can do the same for other kinds of lairs which are half the stats of the pet(s) I've also got a few MCH friends who often take only their pets into combat on planets like Lok. So the statement "a MCH cannot solo" is nonsense. You cannot solo Rancor, however you can solo a Gnort. These changes to the CL ratings simply mean your going to see a Rancor being able to solo more than it can at the moemnt becuse of the balancing, while a Graul Mauler can solo less.
Umm, you do actually know what the word 'profession' means in this game, don't you? As you are obviously confused, creature handler is a profession, brawler is a profession, doctor is a profession, all those seperate little tiers are different professions. A single character can have multiple professions. The strongest 'profession' CANNOT BY DEFINITION be 2 professions. CH plus something, anything, else, CANNOT be the strongest profession, since it is TWO professions. Its not an assumption to state that CH and TKA are different professions, its a statement of fact. Clear now?
Ok. Then why is anyone trying to "balance the professions"? That's a meaningless statement - since a player can have multiple professions and can combine them in interesting ways. They should be trying to "blanace the 250-skill-credit-combinations" instead. People don't have to choose a single profession, but they do have to choose a single 250-skill-credit-combination.
yet you seem to actually be in favour of the CH+combat profession imbalance that is currently the case - well, I *think* that is what you were trying to say, your post is a little garbledas far asan actual point being made.
I am in favor of the ratio of power versus skill credits being the same for any combat class. I think the more skill credits you spend on combat, the more powerful you should be. So I don't care that CH+pistoleer is more powerful than CH or pistoleer. It OUGHT to be - it costs twice as many skill credits to master both as it does to master either one. I don't mind that Doctor+TKA is very powerful - that costs a mountain of skill credits. I don't care that doctor+TKA is less powerful than CH+pistol because doctor is not purely a combat class.
That's an important distinction. I can accept that when someone chooses to devote skill credits to a crafting or healing class, their combat effectiveness suffers when compared with someone who devotes himself entirely to mass destruction. That makes sense - it's these tradeoffs that allow a player economy to happen in the first place.
On the other hand, I think BH's are underpowered for their skill-credit cost - getting master BH costs all but 33 of your skill credits. They have NO crafting abilities except those in the scout line, and traps don't work on humanoids. They should be walking death machines, yet CH+ranged can go places and do things they can't. I'm not sure that's a good idea.
I think that the other three melee classes are underpowered because they costs the same number of skill credits as TKA. They should all be just as powerful as TKA.
Clearer?
--Insomnia
Ok. Then why is anyone trying to "balance the professions"? That's a meaningless statement - since a player can have multiple professions and can combine them in interesting ways.
A profession needs to be balanced so that the benefits from different trees are the same meaning and also balance them with each other so that higher skill point investments give larger benefits. If the profession is balanced within itself then dabblers should see significant shortcomings compared to people who invest into the profession more than them, also the professions need to each have certain adventages and disadvantages over one another.
A profession needs to be balanced so that the benefits from different trees are the same meaning and also balance them with each other so that higher skill point investments give larger benefits. If the profession is balanced within itself then dabblers should see significant shortcomings compared to people who invest into the profession more than them, also the professions need to each have certain adventages and disadvantages over one another.
Balanced within itself is one thing, and is a good goal. Generally, when people talk about balancing professions, though, they're talking about two professions balancing against each other ("professions need to each have certain adventages and disadvantages over one another"). It's ok for professions to have advantages and disadvantages over one another as long as their total usefullness is the same. And it's not OK for professions with the same role and skill cost to be unbalanced (the melee classes, for example - the all spend the same skill credits to do the same thing, and TKA does it better than the others for no good reason).
The trouble is that when you decide that professions needto have advantages over one another, you have to ask yourself, "what if a single player takes both professions?" I'm not talking about dabblers here - I'm talking about mastering two professions. They should focus on balancing skill-point-combinations, not professions. A combat profession is a completely artificial distinction - every combat character strives to kill things and will use his alloted skill credits to accomplish that.
It's the design-team's failure to consider skill-point-combinations instead of professionsthat leads to the weirdness we see today. Especially with CH because one character can use the full power of CH while using the full-power of his combat class. This isn't a problem with, for example, pistol and carbine combined because you can't use the full power of carbine while at the same time using the full power of pistol. You can only hold one weapon.
Another problem with the current design is that specials are given out in an all-or-nothing way, which makes the box that grants the special much more valuable than all those that came before or after it (last-ditch, for example).
The cheap-ass solution is to move all the cool stuff into the master box. While this prevents "dabbling" it also encourages "grinding" because it means that anyone who is not a master doesn't have much power. It's also antithetical to the whole skill-point system.
A better solution would be for specials to be like skills. For example, as a pikeman there's nothing stopping me from picking up a pistol and going varmint plinkin'. Nothing, that is, except my zero pistol accuracy and lack of weapon certification.
What if, for example, last-ditch had a skill mod like pistol accuracy? Anyone could try it, but your low score in that ability would mean you'd suck at it. Then they could spread the "last-ditch-skill" points throughout the smuggler tree. Then someone who had one column of smuggler would have one-quarter of the "last-ditch-skill" of a master smuggler. But at the same time, every single skill box in the smuggler tree would make the smuggler a little more powerful, so you wouldn't feel like you were grinding through useless junk to get the one box you actually care about. You could repeat that for every special.
This is exactly what they did with CH in the patch currently on test center - they spread the benefit of the profession across the boxes. They still don't quite understand that XP is inifinte but skill credits are finite (if they understood that, why did they make the best boxes be the ones at the tops of the columns that cost the fewest skill credits?), but they're getting there.
--Insomnia
The reason for the inverse costs at elite is because it's forcing some level of commitment to that profession, if you dabble your actually wasting skill points so it's basically a penalty for dabblers. Indeed the cross-profession problems can never be resolved totally, your talking about well over 434 skills which can be mixed in almost any combination. The best thing they can do is minimize the overpowering by ensuring that profession up each profession is more balanced in it's progression. That means that dabblers would struggle to reach the higher benefits by spreading themselves too thin.
One means is to save all of the really good skills for the lvl3 and 4 boxes of the elite profesisons. At the moment you have some very potent things in novice or even lvl1 and lvl2 boxes. A case in point is you have pistol whip at at melee support 1 in pistoleer. This is actually a very potent attack which should have been moved further up or replaced with something like an area of effect postue down for when your surrounded.
In the end it looks more like some of the devs are focussing too much on the types of exp needed for some boxes, devs assuming that cause combat exp is slow that it's not overpowered to have highly effective skills under boxes which require it. The fact is however that someone who dabbles in pistoleer is very cost effectively handed a knockdown attack that is fast and reliable. There is actually very little need to get the rest of the melee support branch.
As for the CH tree, i think it's finally balanced within itself, i can't think of anything better than a CL increase based on each and every box you take. Mind you saying that a CL30 critter can be achieved with taking just two of the trees still and even under the new systemsomething of that rating is very very potent for a dabbler. Combined with another profession they're still going to be able to take down CL50 enemies all by themselves. Although they will suffer heavy damage to the pet in the process, i personally think that the CH profession should be a far more costly elite than you normally get because even at an entry level pet your doubling your power right away if you even have a lvl4 marksman or brawler skill.
The only other way to contrast this is to ensure that droids are equal to around CL20 so that a CH dabbler really doesn't gain that much of an advantage until they start taking more than half of the profession. People might complain that a novice CH is then marginalized because they start at CL10 and won't be using pets which are equal to a combat droid until they're half way up any two of the branches, however the power of a CH is that they can store alot more pets than someone can have droids plus they can easily get hold of better ones to replace them. So the benefit isn't in the induvidual pets a CH has at first but in the fact they have a small army in their datapad which can be thrown at a target one after another with a 60 second break between them.
A level IV skill costs 14 points to buy.. not just 2. 2 of them cost 28 (not just 4). much like 15 point starting novice skills, advacned professions are bottom loaded on skill points.
Take the max level of pet you can control and divide it by the skill credit cost. What you'll discover is that you get more benefit out of taking a complete column of CH than you do from taking the bottom box of each column. But taking the bottom box of each column costs you 20 skill credits, whereas taking one column only costs you 14.
The root of all balance problems is that the ratio of power to skill-credit-cost is not the same for all patterns of skill credits expenditure. This leads to a world of gimps and clones - gimps are people who didn't spend their points in the right way and clones are people who did. In the case of CH, power is very easy to measure - it's the CL of the largest single pet you can call.
The trouble with this in the CH world is that a person who has two whole columns (34 skill points invested including the novice box) has very little incremental benefit to grabbing that bottom-level box in the third column. It costs him 5 precious skill credits and gives him very little in return. And that's fine - I don't mind dabblers - I'd just be happier if SOE's design changes would have their desired effects so we wouldn't have to sit around gazing into our crystal balls trying to figure out if a particularly powerful way of playing is intentional or not. I'd like to be able to rest assured that the game exists as they intended for it to exist. Then if I don't like it, I could just go play something else and be done with it.
--Insomnia
There are still professiosn that are as badas CH were before too.. Smuggler still has the dirty fighting branch, etc.
When they standardized all professions in 1, 4,4,4,4 1, format, some professions fel;l compressed, with too much given at once, some feel stretched over too many boxes.
The rewards for skillpoint cost vary so widely from profession to profession, it is hard to say that any of them can really truely be balanced in that arbitrary standardized box number (novice, 4 branch of 4 and master).
-T
his is exactly what they did with CH in the patch currently on test center - they spread the benefit of the profession across the boxes. They still don't quite understand that XP is inifinte but skill credits are finite
+++++(if they understood that, why did they make the best boxes be the ones at the tops of the columns that cost the fewest skill credits?), but they're getting there.++++
---endquote---
huh? (+s = my cut)
the best boxes are at the top, because you must buy the lower boxes in that branch to get them.
The typical advanced prof branch is skillpoints listed like this
2 (most CH+ skill)
3
4
5
A level IV skill costs 14 points to buy.. not just 2. 2 of them cost 28 (not just 4). much like 15 point starting novice skills, advacned professions are bottom loaded on skill points.
Taking a second branch at all is a serious investment, but once committed, the payout of skill points should balance with power (Boxes I and IV need to be valuable, while II and III can give bonuses, but are really [in many professions] point commitment to getting the IV box more then anything else.
-T