Commando Archive
Thread: Was this update to Commandos a joke?
I seriously would like to know why we were alluded to believe that this patch would actually increase our special moves to a point where they would be worth using. This profession to me has done nothing but give us a means by which to climb our skill ladders (the Launcher Pistol giving HW Exp. fix). I have absolutly no intention of mastering Commando anymore.. why would I ever in my right mind want to churn out 350,000 HW Exp. for the next level in Flamethrower to get absolutly no special move anyway. I already wasted time making all the prior experience for Flamethrower Spec I and II only to be rewarded with special moves that I would never want to use. Less than 1000 damage with a 15 second delay is obsurd. So.. we get a little bit of fire damage bleed afterward. The overall damage over time is so pathetic that I will never be using these skills. The best part is that later on, all I have to look forward to is "upgraded" versions of these special moves... and from hearing reports on here, those aren't really worth the damage over time to use either.
So my question.. was this a joke to tease us? Seriously... we had absolutly no input to help in this process to develop our own profession via the Test Center due to lack of resources there. This means we were unable to voice our opinion on what would become the much awaited monthly update. Now if we are to actually pay another month's worth.. we can wait until the next full update to see if they even acknowledge that the current changes still don't do very much at all for our profession.
I have to say the idea to offer up correspondants has been a great idea.. a gateway for the voice of the masses to land directly on the devs ears. The problem is that this has seemed to become a voice falling on deaf ears. We seriously need a purpose in this game.. and right now there is absolutly no reason to become a Commando unless you just REALLY enjoy the particle effects and lagging other people's machines.
The key problems IMO still stand as follows:
1) Damage over time output from "heavy" weapons is extremly low -- I back this up by simply displaying a few 1000-1900 damage shots with my pistol using stopping shot over a small period of time. Even using marksman abilities I can use a fast pistol and put the damage over time rate of heavy weapons to complete shame. I have yet to find a real reason to ever want to buy or use anything besides my Launcher Pistol. Grenades damage over time is not well at all either.
2) To-hit ratio.. perhaps tied in with the 0.0 ideal range and horrible accuracy modifiers -- this is extremly evident to anyone attempting to use their weapons. The Launcher Pistol thankfully fires fast enough and hits way more often than the other guns to make up for this. However... for our "extremly powerful" guns as it was so put... we can attempt to use a special move.. have approximatly a 50% chance of landing the shot due to standing upright at around 18 meters.. this is yet another reason why these specials are not worth our using. You miss once, you don't fire again for ages. I should also mention grenades here as well (misses often, AoE issues, and slow).
3) Diversity/Specials in general -- for a later time when they perhaps give us full attention and would like to actually fix our trees.. I hope they really do notice our lack of special moves/abilities and usefullness in any form of combat. Currently two of our trees, the Acid and Flamethrower, are mirrors of one another with just a different type of gun to use. This is far too similar to climbing marksman trees where you get certifications for say... 3 different new pistols... and you can use all the identical special moves with them. However, in our case, we have two different trees altogether in which these guns are placed, with absolutly nothing really different in our specials. This would be the same as making a seperate tree for every pistol, rifle, carbine.. in essence.. it seems like a complete hoax to make us level both of these trees when it seems more fitting to be in one tree. Also tieing into this is our now seeming role as a Pistoleer with Commando as our "side profession thing that we do when we are bored". In order to make use of our Launcher Pistol besides just aiming and firing with its slow fire rate, we have to now train pistoleer to have ANY specials to use. Every single other combat profession at least has its own special moves to use with its "main weapons".. even if its just a couple.. we have to climb a completly different profession to use any of ours.
4) Resources -- this may be a moot point.. I could very VERY well understand the comment about making these guns extremly rare.. IF.. and this is a real big IF.. they actually did large amounts of damage like Q had said. Even with decent quality resources, the stats on these guns is far from exceptional and we do not have any means to really increase this output besides our troubled special move usage. However.. for these guns as they are.. the resource issue is quite a pain for those of us who are just trying to see how bad off we really are.
5) Communication/Priority -- the root of it all... it was just very recently said that if a profession was really "broke" then there could be hot fixes to make appropriate adjustments. Hot fixes are far less tested and are way more risky.. but in essence this would be a much more viable means to get this profession up to at LEAST par level. If we can not even test things out on the Test Center.. then there is not much difference than throwing it out in a hot fix and letting us"test" it on liveservers.. its quite close to whatwe are doing right now with our changes. We have been waiting for these changes to our profession for quite some time now.. and some of us who are old Phase 2 and 3 testers have been waiting even longer.. and what we received today has me quite appaled. I try not to flame at all.. I try to be constructive and offer support and help in any way.. but I don't like thinking that I will have to pay another month to be a Pistoleer/Musician in waiting for a full workingCommando profession again. I was very optimistic for today's update.. extremly even... I was expecting to hit for around 2000 damage perhaps after being told the delay after using our specials would be justified by our high amounts of damage. I know myself and thousands of others have taken the words relayed to here to mean so many things.. there is very little hardcore information being delivered.. and I can't say this is Q's fault, but we really would like to know such things. If I was told by a Test Center player with a gun to test these specials, or by Q or some other voice that this was what I was waiting for, I would have QUICKLY voiced my opinion on the topic. We need to be considered a higher priority than we currently are.. and we REALLYneed communicate better (hopefully somebody is hired for this really soon).
I know this entire post may have positive and negative feedback from others.. some people may be thrilled with these changes.. I however am not. I have experience almost every side of this game in the length of time that I have been playing it. I must say I wish I would of just played an elite combat profession or bounty hunter, because my hopes of the Commando ever being fixed before live release or anytime "soon" after the live release have been shot. I will continue to hear out what the devs have to report for awhile.. and dabble in the game messing around.. but I can not say I am having a lot of fun here right now after being given rump roast when I ordered a filet mignon. I have some pretty tough patience.. and while thinking we were working well with the devs through our correspondant I stayed very optimistic.. however I am losing my optimism and lacking in fun to continue participating in this. Like I said.. I will stay around and play and monitor the updates as things go.. but I want to be a combat profession, not a Bounty Hunter like everybody else, and something more diverse than an elite pistoleer/carbineer/rifleman.. but if I can not do this anytime soon, I will take a lot of time back for myself and away from SWG and have fun with "real life" again 
I sure do hope the devs can give us a nice shock to make us feel both appreciated and useful in the game.
Nice post, i didnt read through all of it but skimming through it i'd have to agree with most. Lets take a look at a recent post by Q:
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The good news is we are tracking the reactions to our posts. We can't change everything based on the vocal people of the forums, but we are hearing you. Even with our changes, people aren't happy with commandos, for example. We're going to work on them more (and also see how the current changes play out on live over the next few days).
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Although we've heard this before, maybe the fact that there were over 200 complaints in the dev response post mixed in with many people quitting....maybe they will rethink their idea of close range heavy weapons 
One can only hope.
I titally agree with the devs opinion that Hevy Weapons should be point blank weapons....saves someone else the trouble of killing us
point blank rocket launcher = most retarded thing I ever read
Yes I don't think I pointed that out quite well enough in my initial post. The simple concept behind close ranged heavy weapons is quite insane in itself. I have no idea who in their right mind would WANT to stand close to their target when throwing a grenade at it, much less shooting a blazing ball of flame or a small warhead. So yes the game measures distance in meters.. however you have to take into account the distance by which creatures can hit you, the speed and reaction time that is needed to get away, and the pure fact that standing that close with a gun that does such marginal damage is complete suicide.. if you miss just once you are toast since you have to wait 15 seconds to fire a second shot off. Miss that shot and you better pray you can pull out a pistol can spam warning shot quickly (well quickly after the 15second timer)to try it all over again.
Yes.. this scenario is for soloing.. but in grouping its not much different. You stand close enough to monsters that you can draw the agro from your tank brawlers or pets, yet you do such minimal damage that its not even worth putting yourself at that risk. The distance is a huge flaw in design and concept moreso than implementation I believe. I don't forsee how anybody could say "lets make rocket launchers more effective up close"..... I would just hope that we get some nice feedback regarding THESE changes and information behind whether or not we can see any quick/hotfixes anytime soon to at least make us feel worthwhile as a profession at all. This was intended to be a step in the right direction... but it seems all too much like somebody tripped and fell in the process and only gave us half a stride.
~Caoilte - Commando
Yet another little thing I would like to add.. this is directed towards our community here.
I would like to see people less accusing to poor Q... he is a developer by status and right now is having to play Community Relations with a HUGE HUGE HUGE audience far unlike that in beta. The amount of workload on these guys has risen to levels far beyond what they both have had to deal with or I believe plan for. Therefore I am glad that he even finds ways to at least address us and our profession. I would however like to believe that he can take to heart a little more the problems we really have here and whip some people into shape for making us a real top priority to be fixed QUICKLY instead of waiting another paid month before we feel usable. We should be thankful that we have ANY gateway to try and offer our own personal input here. However, as many times as we state our problems.. its only going to get better if they are truelly heard by all accountable parties.. not just Q.
So please just for the sake of the hundreds of other posts.. don't start bashing on him or others in here on the topic. This isn't meant to be a flame post, but rather one to point out our core problems/issues and to explain just WHY myself and many many others like me are extremly miffed and just about fed up with waiting to play.
Breezer95 wrote:
Another interesting fact that I didn't understand before that is still in the game.. attacking Imperial NPCs will net you much higher damage rates with your flamethrower. Why?? I'm not sure.. it does not hit PCs this hard.. I have not tested this with other NPCs of any kind. I just hit an Imperial Captain for 3500 damage with my special.. yet the HIGHEST damage I can hit any other creature for has been 900.. and I've been using this thing all day.
probably becasue he had a rifle and the game stil treats the flamethrower as a melee weapon...
no its not that.. every single NPC I hit with the flamethrower so far is hitting above normal as compared to creatures......... when it hits
*my SWG world for an edit button
I'd like to check on it.. but yes every one of these guys Ive been able to hit for 1000+ on.. never on a single creature (even those with no heat resists of course).. but only ones Ive hit 3k on are the rifleman and THAT is due to the crap with the swinging, etc I'm sure.. but IMO thats how much we should be doing anyway
One of the things that bothers me the most, besides the useless accuracy mods, the crazy slowness of the weapons, and the suicidal range, is how these "heavy weapons" deal such low damage. On most servers, a rifleman can find a T-21 rifle, perform headshot2 and cause 1000+ damage easily. In a lot of servers, the T-21 is easier to find, faster, and deals WAY more damage per minute than an Acid Rifle with specials. The T-21 fires specials once every 6-8 seconds, whereas a HAR user has to wait in most cases up to 15 seconds to recover from a special attack. I don't see the logic in that. A gun that is in most cases easier to find on most servers than "Heavy Weapons", outperforms a heavy weapon. Heck, an FWG5 can outdamage a heavy weapon. I see nothing heavy about these weapons. When I think heavy weapon, I think about something that does massive damage in a short amount of time from a long rang. Not something that you need to be toe to toe with your enemy and fire a heavy damage shot every 15 seconds or so. At that rate, Commandos ARE the weakest combat class in the game.
From Dictionary.com...
com·man·do- n. pl. com·man·dos or com·man·does
A small fighting force specially trained for making quick destructive raids against enemy-held areas.
There you go, Devs... Think about that definition before you come on here talking about how you fixed commando.
Yes they are the weakest by a long shot.
I am currently only using my Launcher Pistol because the few days before this patch I used nothing but a FGW5 to level Pistoleer up to Stopping Shot. Now I can do over 2000 damage shots (usually 1000 though) with my FGW or my Launcher Pistol. This is rather quick considering the speeds on both guns are under 2.5 and stopping shot isn't too bad of a delay. However my Flamethrower and Acid Rifle on the other hand is doing on average with my special moves around 600 damage with a decent damage over time causing around 1000-1300 damage. The downside is that the initial damage can sometimes be EXTREMLY low (100ish) if it hits at all. Making things even worse is that the fire damage over time will not stack, so there is absolutly no point in using this special more than once ever in a fight.
So right now I am just a Pistoleer gaining HW Experience that is entirely useless to me. I can't say I am at all happy with that whatsoever. There is still absolutly no reward for becomming a Commando OR climbing up the skill boxes that I can see. The points are still better spent elsewhere.. and I'd rather not see it be this way.
So to anyone reading this I severly suggest training Pistoleer currently - grabbing a nicely made Launcher Pistol, and use it to at least gain experience and hope they actually make changes so our skills are useful. The problem is.. every single thing I am doing right now I can do with my other pistols and have absolutly no need for Commando to accomplish it (in fact the other pistols are sometimes better... guns with ability to go through armor, different damage types, faster, some occasions better dmg on some servers).. just a real pain in the butt to know we still have no use and would never really want to use our own special moves.
~Caoilte - Commando