Commando Archive

i agree the modifier need to go away

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IdrisTycho wrote:

I have mixed feelings about the leveling system. On the one hand I hear what most of you are saying and it is tough to deny that one hit incaps do very little for adding a sense of adventure or complexity to the game.

Joe Newb says, "It is level 38, I am level 18. If I fight it I am dead in two hits."

Not exactly exciting to think about. On the otherhand, the new system prevents the soloing of group content, which is a good thing.

The older system allowed you to stack your defenses and offenses in order to fight things that you should never have been able to fight solo. This created other problems, like people soloing everything. Stackable defenses and offenses coupled with the artificially capped exp system and you virtually had to solo everything to get good exp.

The leveling system in the CU has forced grouping on people; and not gently either. It simply creates a scenario where if something is sufficiently high level, you must group. The business about 1 hit incaps from level 300 creatures will be remedied soon I am sure, so I am really not to concerned about those. I am talking about stuff that is closer to our level, but we can't imagine fighting it because it will kill us easily.

The main negatives of the CU are

• forced grouping


• stats and skills playing less of a role in winning or losing


• the feeling that you can not play beyond your means, as one poster put it, you can't be the hero.

The postives are:

• PVE balance is easier since a level can directly determine the health and damage capability of a creature vs. the player


• Exp rewards can be scaled properly instead of having to cap rewards for creatures to avoid exp farming.


• Grouping between high and low level players can occur easily.

I believe that with a little work, the current level system could be tweaked to be close enough to the older system that most would not mind it. Think of it as a pendulum. Before the CU the pendulum had swung all the way out to the right where stats were all that mattered, defense, accuacy, mitigation, damage, speed, armor piercing, etc. Now the pendulum has swung to the left and hovers over level being all that matters.

The solution to this is to find a happy medium. Something that ensures that no player will ever solo a Krayt dragon, while at the same time allowing him to use equipment and skill selection to his advantage vs. things that are at least in the ballpark of his level. We need a general widening of the playable level range.

If as we level higher and higher, the range of levels that we can fight also grows, it makes it possible to find content that is not worthless to fight and has some chance of hurting us. Right now if I am level 50 and a mob is level 30, it has no chance to hurt me. Likewise if the roles were reversed I would have no chance of hurting it. I am saying relax this a bit as we level. Don't make things red and purple so fast, and don't make them green and gray so fast either. Give us a larger range of things to kill. And make our stats meaningful against the stuff that is within our level range.

That has to be the goal of the coming high level content phase of testing.

Unfortunately I fear they will be spending far more time correcting things like: miss-certified weapons, CTDs, skills that don't work, skills that do the wrong thing, crafting problems, exploits, and the list goes on. They have created a system where a balance can exist between the extremes: "I can solo a krayt because I have the perfect setup", and "I can't kill anything solo that is greater than 10 levels higher than me."

All they have to do now is tune it.

Message Edited by IdrisTycho on 04-19-2005 12:33 AM

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This is probably the real reason for the institution of the leveling system, to hold players back from soloing group intended combat, as you say.

But it really to me seems like the lazy way out. If you're in the midst of this huge combat revamp, doing the important things like getting rid of 80-90% resist armor, buffs that increase your HAM by 300%, and uber weapons; why can't the balancing be done with these things in mind without putting in a system that FORCES you to only be able to fight creatures in a narrow band around your level?

I think everyone assumed that the whole purpose of the CURB was to make grouping viable again and eliminate players soloing group content. But don't artificially force it on us with a leveling system. Make sure that weapons, armor and buffs are limited to a managable level (as they have done) and that creature AI and abilities in the high end are sufficiently fearsome and powerful (as they say they are doing).

Let players play the hero, and if they can take things a little above the average, then thats what being a hero is all about. But limit it by natural means (high end creature AI), not by this crappy leveling and damage modifier system that keeps us from taking them on even if we had the ability.

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TK-132 wrote:

Where's the "Whoah I can't believe I won part!" of the game now. This is way to basic. If you let level determine so much no person can ever be a "Hero" or above the NPCs. Were just as dumb and useless as they are. Now I'm nopt saying lets all solo Con Purples. No I'm saying there should be just the slightest of chances to solo a Con Purple using the right stuff and just getting lucky. Isn't that what makes players unique? Not being on a set level that determines what we can and cannot do? Take that away and SWG loses a lot of it's appeal to MMO players.

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One of my biggest fears with the damage multiplyer leveling system is:

Bob the Master Rifleman is the best at what he does. No other rifleman on the server is as skilled as he is. Bob doesn't like to do combat all the time though, and is also a Master Droid Engineer, living out his Star Wars dream. But since he only has one combat profession,his CL is not at the maximum of 80, even though he's better with his 1 combat profession than most players are with 2.

Bob the Rifleman: "Hi there, I'd like to join your Deathwatch Bunker group"

Fred the Squad Leader: "Welcome to the group! I assume your CL is 80?"

Bob the Rifleman: "Not quite. I'm only a Master Rifleman."

Fred the Squad Leader: " Damn. Well sorry Bob, but we need another CL 80 or we won't survive the bunker."

Bob the Rifleman: "But I'm the best Riflman on the server!"

Fred the Squad Leader: "I'm sorry Bob, being the best doesn't matter. We just need another CL 80 character so that the Super Battle Droids won't be purple to us and we won't get slaughtered because of the damage multipliers."

Harry the Commando: "Hey, I have an alt character thats a CL80 Ranger, we can put him in the group and hide him in the corner somewhere so the rest of us 7 can go ahead with the bunker!"

Bob the Rifleman: "But I want to actually play the game and contribute!"

Fred the Squad Leader: "Sorry Bob, the 7 of us are more than skilled enough to take on the bunker, we just need a CL80 to get the group level high enough to get rid of the damage multipliers" *boots bob from group*

Message Edited by Enix_Dayspring on 04-20-2005 05:58 AM

I could not agree more with making the level system go away.

The devs say (if I haven't completly missunderstood it) that it is your "Combat Level" that is displayed, but that can be busted by stating one simple fact. A person who's taken every SP into brawler, will still have the same CL when he equipts a ranged weapon. By not having novice marksman, that tells me that ones skills are on a level where you hardly know what end is pointed to the enemy. Now, if you don't even know what end to point towards the enemys, how can you be considerd a CL 80 player.
The current Live system takes into consideration what weapon you have equipted, and that to me shows a much truer Combat Level.

With those facts at hand, it's not a Combat Level but rather a Character Level. Where crafters are severly punished. If they are still going with this, then they should devide up the SP into combat and crafting SP. Becouse most other MMO's have a separete combat and crafting system.

The main problem I see is they keep making changes like this was a linear leveling system. Its not.
Our skill based system was dynamic. I can understand the damage modifiers, its a decent enough deterent, but right now its going unchecked. Its not working as a deterent, its a prohibitor. There is a big difference there.
Alot of people, including me have come out comparing this whole system to EQ. The EQ mechanics worked, and if I dare say, do have a place in this game. I said a place, not center stage. I am afraid that this game really will turn into a clone of EQ. By that I am refering to the high end content. SWG is designed to get you to the top end game fairly quickly, so the bulk of the players are end-game people. For me in EQ, the end game was all about raids. You get a huge group going. You go up to the planes of time or whatever, fight your way into the throne room of some god and follow the exact same plan as every other combat engagement, just on a larger scale. What I'm tying to get at is in EQ, the tank wouldn't last more than 2-3 hits without the support of the healers. The healers usually had to be in a group all to them selves and they had a rotation going on where they would cast full heal. If they did it right and no one missed, or got killed, or F*ed up the tank would live. His health bar was a yo-yo but it was the only way to keep him alive. So you got this tank getting full heal every second or two, and this high end creature doing almost enough damage to one hit kill him every second or two and you barely hold on by a thread. Meanwhile you have all your nukers and secondary tanks doing all the real damage and trying like mad to do as much damage as possible, withought actually outdamaging the tank and thus drawing agro.
It was a system. It worked in EQ. My concern is that SWG combat is not like this. It shouldn't be like this. You fight a krayt dragon.. ok. I can see this system fighting a krayt. But SWG for me isn't about krayts. Its about living a story and that means going down to the DWB, or making a run up to the corvette. That system doesn't work in places like that. I don't want it to work in places like that. SWG combat is more fast paced. Its more about taking or at least dealing with multiple opponents (hello pvp). The tempo of combat in SWG doesn't have room for a linear level system. It just doesn't. Broadening the con levels will help (i.e. white is +-3 levels instead of 1) because it give just a little more variety to the creatures you can put in the game. Damage modifiers have a place, but not as prominent as the one they currently hold. A purple con should be out of question for you. I don't dispute that. But there are ways to make it out of question without making it ludicrously impossible.
On the other hand, most of the problems I have is with the real high end stuff, which isn't balanced yet. So who knows. Maybe we will see our characters and groups max out at level 80 and nothing in the game will be over level 100. Then I'm sure we will all be complaining its too easy.