Brawler Archive
Thread: TOP BRAWLER ISSUES in need of Balancing
FluxHavoc wrote:First of all.. lemme just say that I want to remain constructive and not turn this into a flaming match. That said..
I just don't get you guys. First of all you unarmed brawlers don't even have to shop for weapons when you first start out. You just go and beat people up with your fists. Whereas, if you want to go with a weapon you'd actually have to first look for one before you can even begin to advance. Currently on Ahazi there are only a few known swords in the entire galaxy. I wield one. Two other guys do. And there's one in the bazaar auctioning at 800 credits....
and your points is...? so unarmed gets to save 800 credits on a weapon. most of them are going to spend it in the hospitals and cloning facilities now.
Second of all. I don't get why you guys are so tripped about Beserk. It's a starting skill. You don't expect to rely on your starting skill, no more than you do your survival knife or your CDEF pistols. Before the patch I was seeing brawlers do upwards of 1000 damage (yes 1000, with polearm) with beserk on. This is just three days in the game!! It's absurd and sick what you can do with a starting skill like beserk. That's like being able to craft droids the moment you are an engineer. Is that your expectation of a starting skill?
no, flux, it's absurd and sick what you can do with berserk. it's not quite so impressive given the low starting damage of unarmed. why are the unarmed guys so pissed? have you actually looked into unarmed? i know the answer to that question: you haven't, and that's why you don't get it. berserk is the only starting skill worth a anything to unarmed, and by no means is it a guaranteed win. in fact, for some unarmed brawlers, it's the only way they can compete. making it weaker certainly does not help them. 1000 damage with a polearm? big deal! a novice unarmed does 100 damage berserked if he's lucky. at expert unarmed, you'll do 200. OMG NERF IT!!
I think the devs whacked it with a nerf bat because they want you to use the other skills you've gained other than the staritng skills. The only thing is that they should have upped the damage of other skills while lowering beserk. Unforunately this is not the case.
no. they should reduce the HAM costs of all brawler skills so that brawlers aren't killing themselves as much as they are the mobs. i don't need berserk if my other skills don't do the mobs job for them.
Another thing. Why is everyone so fixated on unarmed? Really. I find it much more cool to dish out damage plus do special attacks with a weapon. I really don't care for smugglers (woo slicing) or bounty hunters (killing more NPCs?..) or TKA (zzz).........
meh. troll. maybe we like it. to each his own.
And now people say fighting with brawler is too hard. Trust me once you get sword it will get so easy. Right now I'm downing opponents left and right (especially humanoid ones), ones that con white or even red...
telling us to switch disciplines solves nothing. and here i thought you said you were going to be constructive...
The point is that Berserk was the only useful tool for a novice brawler, and it is no longer anywhere near as useful. It's not a matter of damage. It's a matter of a profession starting with five skills that suck. Those skills suck for all of the melee trees, but at least the other melee trees have damage on their side. Unarmed has nothing to start with, and that is my problem.
And yes, I do consider comments detailing how you find the concept of unarmed uninteresting in a thread like this one to be trolling. Telling us to change professions is in no way constructive.
Brawlers also don't have a support skill line built into their profession like marksmen have, which makes pure brawlers have the disadvantage of not having the defenses they need to survive. In fact, there is no support skill line at all designed to increase resistance to melee damage. Marksmen can avoid melee damage by kiting; they can decrease ranged damage by learning the ranged support line in their profession. Brawlers cannot avoid melee damage; brawlers must spend an additional 15 skill points in order to start learning any innate ranged defenses.
Brawler specials cost alot, more so than ranged. The brawler's best damage per cost special (berserk) can fail, while still taking damage. When it succeeds, each individual hit can still miss. Berserk also forces you to give up control of your character, limiting your options in a fight, preventing you from burst running to flee. Other specials give you bonuses as inflicting statuses and do decent damage, but inflict alot of damage on yourself. Unarmed brawlers do less damage, which is expected and rightfully so. They also attack faster than other brawlers, forcing them to use more specials and consume more HAM.
Ranged have warning shot to scare away attacking creatures. Brawlers have lunge, that will lower posture and stick the creature in place for a turn. Warning shot buys the ranged more time, more distance and costs much less to use than lunge. Lunge cannot be used to stop a group of creatures so you can get away because the posture only lasts one turn; by the time you execute lunge on te second creature, the first is already up. Brawlers have no ways to ease escape like marksmen do. Also, berserk, the best damage skill, inhibits escape by preventing any other command from being executed (ie burstrun, lunge).
To summarize, brawlers take too much damage for the following reasons:
1) Their class fighting style forces them to recieve damage in any 1v1 fight.
2) They have no skill line to boost innate melee defenses.
3) Specials inflict too much damage to self.
4) The skills brawlers have promote taking more damage; no skills are available for reducing damage.
These are all of the basic problems I see with brawlers fighting solo. When you put brawlers in a group, you get more complex problems spawning from the base underlying problem that brawlers take too much damage.
Some of the problems with groups:
1) A group of ranged can start dealing damage sooner than a brawler, resulting in the brawler getting less XP.
2) Large fights result in the brawlers taking the damage and having more downtime; while brawlers are healing, ranged can continue, resulting in the brawler getting less XP.
3) Brawlers take more damage, taking more wounds, resulting in the brawler needing more downtime to heal wounds. More wounds means a larger credit sink for tipping medics/entertainers.
4) Brawlers are closer to enemies and are the enemies' primary focus; this results in more incapacitations, death and untimately more downtime.
As you can see, everything about a brawler's profession promotes taking damage. Brawlers currently have no methods to reduce taking damage like ranged professions do. Many people say that there is no such thing as a "tank" in this SWG. I disagree; everything about the gameplay of a brawler states that the brawler is meant to take the majority of the damage. That in itself defines the brawler class as a tank.
Personally, I don't think the damage for brawlers are bad. I do, however, feel that brawlers are really punished by the lack of innate defenses, and the high specials cost. Optimally, I'd like to see a support line in the brawler skill tree purely devoted to defenses, much like the ranged support line of skills. I know that won't happen because there are already 4 skill lines in the profession and there is just no room. It is a must that specials cost be reduced. I feel like my brawler does more damage to herself using special than the enemies do inflicting damage; in some cercumstances, I know this feeling is true. It is sad to see that this class that is obviously designed to play the tank role of the game have no skills that help in the role of being a tank. I'd really like to see some more innate defenses in our brawlers.
agreed
I wont rehash anything that anyone else said but I agree with everything in the first post especially the damage one.
I aggree with the first and third points of the orignal poster, but he's way off with the second.
No risk? Who is it that's so certian all someone has to do is turn and walk off and they get some sort of free pass at vapping whatever they happen to be shooting at? Have you SEEN the animals in this game? CRAP for ai. Each and every single one runs DIRECTLY at you, closing the INCREDABLY SHORT 62 meter maximum engagment range in 3 seconds or less. Every creature in the game I've seen can outrun any non burst running pc, and burst running turns your to-hit into -50, btw. Lastly, becuase of posts like this one about "your invincible once you turn around and run" the melee engagment range in this game is on the order of 8+ meters. That's over 14 feet, for gods sakes. Something 2.2 times my body height away from can attack me the whole time I'm running off and I have some sort of free pass if I just "kite"? I honestly think your other two points are very valid, but the second is proof that you havnt spent much time at all playing a ranged weapon charecter.
Hatch, I was a Beta tester. I am quite familiar with the game mechanics of both Brawler and Marksman.
Just last night I switched over to Marksmen, picked up and pistol and managed to level 3/4 of the way thru Expert Pistol skill. My observations as a comparative analysis between the two:
1. In 4 hours time, I was able to advance thru the Marksman trees what took me 3 days of playing as a Brawler. Reason? Mimimal if any downtime as a Marksman... Why? Because by the time mobs get into range, they are 1/2 to 3/4 down on health already. I was using the cheapest D18 Pistol I could find on the market and no armor what-so-ever. I was literally 3-shot killing white cons with Overcharged Shot before they could even get to me. I dont want Marksmen to get hit with the Nerf bat, but I must say that Overcharged Shot is much more Unbalancing than Beserk ever was...
2. HAM pool usage is majorly skewed. As a Marksman I literally ran around killing stuff no-stop until I got thru the first two levels of Pistol skill... I was literally laughing at the lack of risk vs the xp reward...After playing the Brawler since last Thursday I was amazed and giddy that I could jsut run around killing stuff without sitting down to regen after every fight. My pools rarely if ever got more than 1/3 of the way down from using Special attacks.
3. Damage output. At the first level of Pistol skill I was consistently doing more damage to the mobs than I was at the Master level of Brawler. Combine this with the fact that I was at range and now taking any damage from the mobs what-so-ever and it felt like I was cheating after playing the Brawler for a week.
4. The to-hit bonus issue was very funny to me. At close range, in Kneel posture I had a +12 - +18 to-hit modifier on the mobs. As a brawler, in standing position I had a -5, if I managed to knock an NPC down to Kneel then I was at 0 to-hit and if you can ever manage a knockdown to prone on a NPC you get a +25 to-hit. HOWEVER, as a brawler, it is impossible to get any blows on a mob that is in the prone position, because between your Lunge and next attack, the mobs are back to Kneel. I tested this on about 20-30 mobs last night, I was unable even once to get an attack on a mob in the prone position before they went to Kneel. Aside from that shouldnt a Brawler have a better chance to hit a Kneeling target than a +0 to-hit? Again, kneel as a Marksmen in hand-to-hand range of a mob yields a +10 or greater to-hit.
5. I never once took damage as a Marksmen when the mob was running away. Something you will notice if you chase a mob as a brawler.
6. /consider. I found this extremely interesting... I have my weapon set up as a hotbutton so that I can compare con with weapon vs unarmed. I found a yellow con NPC to my Expert Level Pistol skill, when I un-equiped my weapon the con went to Dark Blue... I figured I had a good chance of taking out a Dark Blue con with my Unarmed Skills... Umm, nope, Incap'd me and the mob was at 90% strength. I honestly think I would have had more success using Pistol skill against a yellow con than Unarmed vs a Blue Con. I didnt have the heart to try again when I came back for my corpse. But really... should there be that much discrepancy between the con of a mob with Unarmed IV vs Marksmen Pistol III? One con color I could understand, but two? Seems a little off to me.
7. Downtime. I think we can agree that the optimal xp/mob ratio should be when you go after white con mobs. The plain and simply truth is that Marksman have the scales tipped to their side when you compare downtime rates. Regenning after every single fight is necessary as a Brawler. As a Marksman, you can literally chain pull mobs with little or no downtime.
I've given up on Unarmed for now... It's too broken in comparison to Marksman. I cant justify the frustration, headache, and death involved with trying to grind out a skill that has more risk and less reward than a lower skill level of a different profession. And PvP.... fo'get about it.
I will return the Unarmed some day when there has been some kind of balancing, but for now, it's just not worth it... I am pretty sure I am not alone in saying that. For now, put me in the "On Strike Until Further Notice" category.
These are my observations. If you have a difference of opinion, please feel free to "discuss" your side, I will be happy to listen.
-Vvex
I can understand making it tough to climb up to one of the best prof in the game, but... I also noticed that TK isnt the best any longer due to adjustments on damage output and costs and defenses.
We need to have special moves costs reduced
We need Unarmed Damage to come back up. (I do understand bezerk was being abused by armed brawlers. (1h, 2h, pike) but its the Unarmed Brawler thatreally took a major dps reduction because of it.
Now that we see what the damage output is with out Bezerk. We cant fight ourway out of a wet paper bag.
Other Non Unarmed Brawlers and ranged peeps adding to something they dont play, is like me suggesting how to change the medical prof. Or Creature Handling prof. When I have never played on in SWG.
I agree that the brawler class needs a little help, mainly the Unarmed brawlers. Unfortunately it may end up coming at the expense of the Marksman class, since SOP is to nerf and balance later.
I've got one character shooting for Smuggler. I'm focusing on Unarmed just to get it out of the way, because it's so much more difficult than Pistol. My strategy is to get the mobsattention with one shot from the Pistol and thenfight Unarmed until it's dead. I'm about 1/3 through Master Unarmed, and already halfway through Expert Pistol, because sometimes I have to finish them off with the pistol to avoid being incapped.
At Expert Unarmed I can do 70-90 every 6 seconds, and miss about 1/4 of the time. If I get more than one white con or more than two blue cons I whip out the pistol and waste them fast. My Scout pistol does over 300 damage per hit using Body Shot 1, and much faster than Unarmed.
As a comparision, I started another Brawler and focused on a weapon skill tree, Polearm. I picked up a decent Reinforced Combat Staff when I hit the Intermediate skill, I think it's 48-103 with 4.6 delay. At Expert skill - which took me 1 night, as opposed to Expert Unarmed which took 3 - I'm hitting for 200-300, and I can solo 2 yellow cons without too much risk, and once I took down 5 white cons and lived. A tricked out Scout pistol would have been just a little better and faster than that, with less risk.
In my opinion, the first thing Brawlers need is better melee defense since we have to get in their face to do our job. I can understand armor being required for better ranged defense, but an expert brawler should also be much better at melee defense than they currently are. Unless, of course, it's 'Working as Intended' that brawlers are the toughest fighting class to play.
As far as V-Vex's original 3 points, I also agree. 1) The melee range to hit being -5 seems wrong, it should be at least as good as using a ranged weapon, better in fact since ranged weapons are supposed to be best At Range and not as good in your face. 2) Being hit by fleeing mobs is obviously an AI bug, at least it seems so to me, but I don't have as much experience in that area. 3) And the lack of damage issue, to me anyway, seems to be limited to Unarmed. A decent weapon makes the difference, and it's the Defensive issue that hurts the most - decent armor helps there.
Hmm ... I may be way off the mark here, but .... doesn't it seem reasonable that unarmed brawlers should be 'weaker' in comparison to other professions, at least in the beginning? I mean, you're relatively UNSKILLED and UNARMED and putting yourself well within harm's way of an enemy, and unless you're a Teras Kasi Master, why should you expect to fare better than others who are equipped with weapons/armor, etc.? I understand the argument about other low level skillsbeing more useful, doing more damage, etc., but I don't understand why that's such a huge surprise. Why should a novice unarmed brawler, with NO weapon advantage and NO supplemental skills, expect to be 'on par' with other combat professions? Doesn't this seem like a rather irrational presumption?
Now, don't get me wrong: I think the Unarmed Brawler is an interesting profession. In fact, I'm slowly making my way up the skill tree myself. But, in combat, I NEVER rely solely on my unarmed skills, especially when fightingagainst stronger mobs or enemies with a ranged weapon advantage. I know that, at this time, I'm just a backyard brawler who should expect to be 'pwned' by stronger/better equipped enemies. From my perspective, it is much better toonly use brawling skills against weaker opponents, orwhen you're in a group, or after your main target has been fairly wounded.
It seems to me that this argument should really be about UPPER LEVEL Teras Kasi combat skills versus BASIC weapons skills (not basic unarmed brawling skills versus weapons). After all, this is why people are mistakenly using unarmed brawling to the exclusion of all other skills in combat this early in their profession. People want to be Teras Kasi master fast, and they believe the path to that end should be just as easy as that of the markman. However, I really don't think thatone should be able to make the argument that brawling skills ALONE should be directly proportional (in damage, effectiveness, etc.) with other combat professions of equal level (or othermelee combat, for that matter.)
In my opinion, unarmed brawling provides your character with a number of special moves that are well suited for specific situations/environments, but should not be directly comparable to other combat professions (at least, not until you're a skiled Teras Kasi, and even then, this argument is flimsy and based on several factors.).To me,unarmed brawling is just 'supplemental' to other combat skills, and should only be viewed as such. Let's face it: you put a master of kung fu up against a person with an uzi, standing at 15m away, the kung fu master is dead meat. Period. No contest. But, put them in close quarters, next to each other, and the situationcould betotally different. Remember, this is a science fiction world setting, and unless you're one with the Force, you might want to look into buying a pistol or something.
Unarm brawling skills still havetheir advantages in PvP, but I think people need to start getting out of the all too familiarmind-set ofa Teras Kasi Master beingthe poor man's answer to the Jedi profession.
Meth