Brawler Archive

Background:

Before I begin, I want to inform you that I was a beta 3 tester and have played both brawler and marksmen professions. The brawler profession really appealed to me early on, not because at the time they did a lot of damage, but because of the role they played in a battle. I enjoyed playing up close and personal and being the person that keeps the enemies off others and keeps the other alive. I love brawling, and I don't want to give up my brawler. However, I see problems with the profession that I and many people have tried to bring to attention prior to release. Due to hurried changes close to release and not knowing exactly how the changes would effect the result of the game, its hard to state concisely what the problems are. Now that time has passed and we have all felt how the changes have effected the game, I'd like to contribute my thoughts of the problems with brawlers.

Overview:

Brawlers really make the difference in a group. Having a good brawler or two in your group will determine whether your group dies. Brawlers are the only characters that have specials that skills that reduce enemy damage output. Brawlers also have movement stopping skills that keep the enemies off the marksmen on focused on the brawlers, mainly taunt and lunge. When I'm brawling in a group, I play to save peoples lives. I use my status specials to reduce enemy's overall damage, then I engage and keep an eye on everyone's HAM bars. If someone is getting hurt, I run to that person and pull the creature off of them with lunge. If another brawler is getting beaten badly, I use taunt to grab their attention. That is how I see the role of the brawler. When I'm in a fight, I am doing what is on the title of my profession: brawling. Brawls are just that: brawls. Its a big free for all in large fights, and I have the skills to manage fights and control the enemy, so that others don't die. Thats right: because I'm there, marksmen and other brawlers don't die.

So while I'm frantically running around engaging enemies and pulling enemies away from others, what am I doing? I'm contributing a major role to the group, enemy management. I'm also causing major damage to myself for every time I come and save your life. Most specials that I use to help out the group costs more than 100 HAM points. These being warcry, intimidate, taunt, and lunge, the major life saving ones being taunt and lunge. At the end of a battle, what do I get in return? I get 1/10 the experience as the marksman beside me, 1/10 the amount of health left as the marksman beside me, 10 times more wounds as the marksman beside me and 10 times more downtime than the marksman beside me. At the end of a large fight and we're healing in a camp, it urks me to hear marksmen gloat: "Wow! Nice fight. I got 1200 XP for that kill." I think to myself: "Wow... I contributed a whole lot more than spamming bodyshot; I saved your life and got 150 XP." There is something definitely wrong here.

Whats Wrong:

Special Costs are high. Especially the ones that play support roles. I use a lot of specials, and I use them all. A lot of times, by the time I get through using my specials and actually begin to attack, I've used up 1/4 of my HAM. This severely limits my effectiveness in battle. I'm also very surprised at how much taunt and lunge costs. These skills are specific to stopping an enemy and forcing them to fight you. You're going to be calling damage onto yourself by using these specials; why would it hurt you 100 HAM for each time you used it?

Specials fail. They fail a lot. I'm not talking about the single hit specials; I'm talking about the status effects that consume a lot of HAM: warcry, intimidate, taunt and berserk. These specials seem to have about a 60% success rate, which mean that they are not reliable to use in a pinch. They consume a lot of ham for every use, regardless if it fails or not, which means that the functional costs of using them are about twice as high, because it takes an average of 2 tries to get these specials to take effect. I also find it moot that berzerk itself has a chance to fail on top of each individual hit while berzerk has a chance to fail.

Specials don't last long enough. If you need to contribute all of your status specials to a fight, you spend so much time trying to get them to take effect that by the time you get them all in effect and actually begin fighting, they wear off and its time to put them back up. The only exception to this is Berserk, which almost lasts too long. Berserk is a burden. It seems as though every time I use it, someone gets into trouble and I need to go save them, however, I can't because I'm berserked. Berzerk needs to last a shorter amount of time, but cost less too.

No experience for contributing. This is my biggest concern. A brawler has a tough job to do. I have to keep an eye on up to 20 HAM bars at a time. I have to associate which dwindling HAM bars goes to who, get there and grab the MOB thats on top of him. On top of that, I have to micro manage my HAM as the battle persues so that I don't incapacitate myself from trying to help too much. It really bothers me that it gets to the point that I have to stop using specials to pull aggro to me, otherwise I would kill myself from the HAM costs. All of that aside, I do a whole lot of work compared to your average marksman; I contribute more, and I get punished for it. Personally, I don't care about how much damage I do; I do care about how much experience I get for doing all this work. The amount of experience a brawler gets for what he does should be at least as good as what a marksman gets. I don't mind taking all the damage; I actually enjoy being the glue of a group. Just give brawlers the experience they should have earned for contributing to the group.

Hit modifiers are bugged. This is a small thing, but my hit modifier always says -5. I don't know whats going on, but at least it should be 0. We don't have a varying range liked range people do, but I'd think it should be positive or 0.

Suggestions:

First and foremost: experience needs to be fixed. Brawlers get a fraction of the experience for contributing more to a group. They are also limited to how much experience they can earn over time soloing, due to the amount of damage they take and the downtime that is mandatory. There are lots of ways you could attempt to fix this by creating magical constants used to shift the experience in a certain direction, but I propose something more exact. Give experience based on the damage you deal and the damage you receive. Receiving the damage from an enemy contributes just as much if not more than dealing the damage to the enemy. This will balance the experience that is so skewed in the marksman's favor. This will also help rationalize the extreme costs of some specials; because I'm using a special that takes 100 HAM points, I'm being damaged that amount and I will get experience for contributing to the group when I would normally not get anything. Take note that I'm not suggesting giving extra experience for taking damage; that can be exploited. Each enemy has a certain amount of experience that is split amongst the group. This would only split the experience more evenly, based off how much everyone rightfully contributes to the group.

Ham costs are high; specials efficiency and effectiveness is low. There is only one thing that can be done about this: balancing. For specials like Intimidate, warcry and berzerk: efficiency and effectiveness is whats important. The costs per a use needs to be justified for the length of time the status lasts. This needs to take in account the amount of HAM wasted on failed attempts. If a special is only effective 60% of the time, then its effective HAM costs are 66% more than what it is labeled. Most of these specials eat through our HAM at 100+ point per attempt. Taking into consideration failed attempts, the effective ham costs are 166+ point per success. For a brawler to give up a whopping 166+ points per special, they need to last a long time, much longer than they are now; either that needs to happen or the costs need to be lowered. As for specials taunt and lunge: I see no reason for their high costs. Both of these cost me more than 100 HAM to use, and are used primarily to stop enemies from attacking others and forcing combat on you. Yes, there are PvP aspects regarding lunge, but I see that as a minimal effect because a brawler cannot lunge spam to hold a player and deal damage at the same time. These skills are skills that a brawler uses to help save others in his group that currently do not reward the brawler in terms of experience. Why would you demand such high costs for a skill that is used to put yourself in more danger? I think costs for lunge and taunt need to be reduced. Regarding the specials hit, stun and blind, etc: I think these are about right.

A lot of brawlers will complain that they want more damage and they want more innate defenses. Yes, both of those would be nice to have, but that isn't what is important. Brawlers say those things because they see a system that rewards experience completely based off of damage. The underlying problem is that brawlers are not being rewarded the experience they deserve for contributing to the fight. I honestly don't care how much damage I do. I also don't think that I deserve an innate defense just because I have my fists or a sword in my hand. I can contribute more in a group doing less damage and herding enemies, and I enjoy it. I just want to see the experience spread out more evenly for everyone that contributes, regardless if its dealing damage, tanking, applying statuses, or crowd control.

Conclusion:

I think the biggest problem about the brawler class is that the people playing them don't know what the developers designed them for. A lot of people that played melee characters from other games expect hard hitting combat professionals from the brawler profession, this is not the case in SWG. Other people associate brawlers as being tanks, a known role from other games as well. Considering that there are no defensive bonuses in the brawler tree like there is in the marksman tree, this isn't the case either. Personally, I see the brawler professions as playing a crowd control role. We run around and keep the enemies stunned, distracted, on their knees, intimidated, or anything else that prevents others from taking damage. However, my vision falters as well because our specials that allow us to do this hurt us too much.

Any way you look at it, the game gives us the short end of the stick due to the lack of experience we get for what we do. We don't hit hard, so we don't get experience that way. We don't have the defensive endurance to last in a fight, so we can't accrue experience over the length of the fight. We hit ourselves hard using specials that give us no experience for using them. I have no idea what role the developers want the brawlers to play in combat, mainly because in any way I look at it, we are not designed to excel in any role that I can think of. I and I think many others would really appreciate a response to the question: "What is the role of brawlers, and what do we have that allows us to perform that role?"

You know what is horrible? We all, including yourself write such well thought out and maturely conveyed messages blatantly exposing the faults of the Brawler, some of them which could be remedied in simple skill/xp etc table modifications, and we've got not so much of a peep from the dev's. I think we should at least get some sort of formal response at least acknowledging our existance and what we are saying. I wasn't in Beta but from what I was hearing Brawler was real nice then and there was a lot of whining to nerf them, my thoughts are the Devs had a vision for brawlers earlier on and they couldnt keep that vision because of the rampant bitching to nerf them, and they bent to testers' wishes and decided thats it, you got what you want now deal with it, and decided never to touch it again. Since were basically askign them to to some extent undo what they did to satisfy the beta testers..I dunno, my 2 cents.

I agree with the HAM costs, but I haven't done much fighting with groups yet. It is a bit of an irritation to do Intimidate, Lunge and others and have it cost so much from attributes while being attacked.

My experience is similar. How do we go about getting this thing read/acknowleged?

Another great post about the brawler weaknesses. Hopefully they will get around to fixing them. I suggest sending them an email feedback. I sent them mine.

Again nice post.

Angry, flaming troll posts in all caps normally yield the fastest results to getting your content read. Its too bad though, because I refuse to stoop to that level. I guess we'll just have to be patient and hope a developer stumbles into this board.

As a former beta tester, I've continued to do my part by bugging malfunctioning systems things in game, bringing possible exploits to the attention, and giving my expert feedback and viewpoints as a game player, software designer and avid Star Wars fan. I just hope that the developers don't stop doing their part, which is listening to us and working with us to make this great game a superior game.

We all know that the brawler class has problems. As brawlers, we all have our visions of how the class should be. The developers know how they want the class to be, but we don't know what that is; we at least hope that what they want isn't what this profession currently is. Developers: please break the silence and let us discuss with you where this profession is going.

Great ideas. I have one too

How about instead of giving exp for damage taken, how about giving exp for those specials?

Many a fight I taunt, warcry, intimidate and by the time I get 1 or 2 swings in, the mob is dead from the massive damage done by the marksman that gets all the exp.

What has happened a couple times (and mind you this happens on lover level mobs, not the higher ones) I taunt, intimidate before I can get a swing in,the mob is dead in 2 shots from the marksman and I get 0 exp.

I should get something for landing my specials.

The other problem I see facing the Brawler is kiting. I have been kited by an even mob/npc and lunge does not seem to help. It lasts less than one round and most the time it says I'm out of range. I'm Unarmed Master and maybe this problem is not evident so much with weapons, but the range and the duration for Unarmed at least needs to be extended or I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong because currently it's useless

******** 7-09-2003 Emergency Brawler Patch Message ********

We are very sorry that the Brawler issues have not been commented on. We have been hard at work addressing these in code and have to been unable to post a response to let you know we are working very diligently on it.

We think however, that you will be pleased with the results and fixes that are now in place. They will adjust the balance of the class to make you more viable, and give you a far richer game play experience. You will find that upon logging in, all Brawlers will be randomly changed to Marksman of the appropriate skill box. We think that you will find that this resolves all current and future Melee issues.

Regards

SOE Development.

feel my pain brothers... I being a total noob when it comes to mmorpg's, having never played EQ, got really excited about SWG and bought it as soon as it went on shelves, and made my biggest mistake ever. I decided that my first character should be a brawler. And a wookie. So not only am I not a tank as I thougth a brawler would be, but I am a wookie that cannot wear any armor and so I am in fact weaker physically than a cheap cantina prostitute. I get kited all day long and if a MOB actually decides to fight me i get hit EVERY time...interrupting my attacks (did i mention i started off with a slow as heck polearm...nother issue BTW where are the Vibro axes/lances/vibrolances). And Iv been searching out MOBs that give good EXP endlessly but after hours and hours im still finding it risky to go into battle vs a MOB that gives me a lousy 150 exp and that a novice marksman can walk through. How am I ever gonna get to Master Pikeman?

The thread starter is a god for his lenghy in-depth post, and I truly hope the devs get around to reading this post. Oh btw MotherMGA I totally agree with your description of a Brawlersjob in battle...thatof a support role keping the MOB's off of the other players...but then thats kinda a job for a tank isnt it? Itry and give mymarksmen the time and space they need to take out the enemy but most often i find myself dying...getting kited and then dying ...or losing all my action points and dying. Iv died morethan anyone I bet. : ) make that an : ( **edit**game i really dont want to start over and make a char just like everyone else. Arrrg!!!

I think the original post was exellent!! I am playing the Brawler and I do like it but It truly does seem to be the underdog out there. Dont get me wrong I am not looking for a free ride. I played as Necro in Diablo II, Vanu in Planetside. I like the challenges. I do fear however that the experience reward imbalance in a very big problem. . .I dont mind a struggle. I prefer it if most find the profession to difficult, but I dont need to have the road to advancement 5X as long as well.

So armor doent really work. . .So I am more likly to get Ganged up on l . . . .and wounded and hacked and slashed. I dont mind..

The only balancing I need is the reward of EXP .

TexKSAH, the good thing about including damage received in splitting experience, is that it automatically includes the specials you do. Every special that you use consume HAM points, which is the exact same thing as taking damage. One use of a taunt that can save a marksman's life at 100+ HAM points contributes as much as 4 spams of bodyshot that consumes 27 HAM points.

Using a system like this will also force a closer attention to the balance of the Specials costs. If a special isn't very useful in a battle and costs an outrageous amount of HAM to use, people could spam these specials aimlessly to get experience. This would mean a greater attention to the costs of HAM to make sure that the costs of a special justifies its use.

Tgate007, I also agree that the path of a brawler should not be an easy one. I enjoy having a difficult road ahead of me as well and I don't want people to play brawlers because they are easy. Brawling should be hard, and it is. What is wrong is that we are not being rewarded the experience we earn for the our contributions in a group.

There are also soloing tweaks that need to be done as well; most of this can be fixed by tweaking the costs of specials.

Someone needs to combine threads like this, and others that are in this forum, and send it in one large doc file to the devs. Hell I'd even contribute and make ita PDF.

What's with this? Is it so hard for them to reply a "I understand your position. We are looking into this right now." or "We do not feel this is needed. Sorry." ANY reply would do. We get nothing.