Dancer Archive

As a Dancer I feel that our profession unfortunately has little to offer to the galaxy other than novelty. Mostly because we have very few useful abilities. This was not the intention of the game designers however I believe that there are several things which could be implimented which would make greatly help our profession. The problems which I mostly wish to adress are constantly AFK entertainers and worthless skill tree branches.

1. Accept Audience option.

The recently added option of denial of service was a step in the right direction, however it does not go far enough. What should be implimented is an 'Accept Audience' option. When a player starts to watch you, you are presented with a menu of either accepting or rejecting them as an audience. This means no more free healing from the always AFK scantily claddancer in the corner of the Cantina. Often times players intentionally look for AFK performers so that they do not need to tip them. Having an AA command would greatly increase the tips given to performers as well as penalizing those who are AFK(I myself am often AFK, and I feel that I do not deserve the same bonuses as someone who is ATK).

2. Greatly lower Entertainer healing rates.

The reason I suggest this is that many players spend the 15 points in entertainer so that they never need to bother with entertainers. The healing rates of a novice entertainer are high enough that it completely devalues investing points past novice. This needs to change. It is true that it will penalize novices who desire to advance in entertainer, as fewer people would want to watch them. This obstacle is overcome by joining groups as a novice entertainer so that you share the group experience and you will increase the groups total dancing experience by participating. What I suggest is a huge reduction in wounds and fatigue healing rates provided by cantinas and low levels of entertainment healing. Once you hit the elite professions of Dancer or Musician your healing rates should increase to roughly what they are now.

3. A look at the dancer skill tree.

Dance Knowledge: The most sought after tree as it both increases our experience and gives us nifty new dances. By far the best of our skill trees.

The Rest: hurdles whose only current funtion is to make reaching master dancer more difficult. Sad but true. What we should be asking the devs for are to make our skill trees something other than hurdles. When we invest our points into something they should in return give us something other than just being a step closer to the coveted title of Master Dancer. The following are some suggestions which would make our skill trees more valuable.

Fatigue Healing: Best fixed by adding the accept audience option so there will be no more freebies.

Wound Healing: same as fatigue except that it should also be added that mind wounds heal one category at a time instead of all at once. It penalizes us, but it does in turn make this tree actually valuable instead of worthless as it is now. Currently Mind, Focus, and Willpower, all heal while watching/listening to someone. I would like it to be changed that only one stat heals at a time.

Dancing Techniques: First lower the cost of the special affects, secondly improve the mind enhancements by first making them affect the performer themselves and secondly making them last until a player either logs or is killed and has to reclone. This would only work also if the accept audience command was added so that people did not just run in to get the free buff.

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A good start, and I think you're right on this part of it but I disagree on how to achieve a remedy.

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1. Accept Audience option.

The recently added option of denial of service was a step in the right direction, however it does not go far enough. What should be implimented is an 'Accept Audience' option. When a player starts to watch you, you are presented with a menu of either accepting or rejecting them as an audience. This means no more free healing from the always AFK scantily claddancer in the corner of the Cantina. Often times players intentionally look for AFK performers so that they do not need to tip them. Having an AA command would greatly increase the tips given to performers as well as penalizing those who are AFK(I myself am often AFK, and I feel that I do not deserve the same bonuses as someone who is ATK).

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If you've been in busy cantinas, you know that the traffic of players in and out can be frenetic at times. Do you really want to have to click-click-click every time someone /watches you? That means you're clicking instead of interacting, roleplaying, entertaining. I don't think this is the way to address the problem, but I've made my views clear on this board often enough. Madonna, Britney, Fifty Cent and Kid Rock, et al don't have the option of only performing for certain members of their audience.

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2. Greatly lower Entertainer healing rates.

The reason I suggest this is that many players spend the 15 points in entertainer so that they never need to bother with entertainers. The healing rates of a novice entertainer are high enough that it completely devalues investing points past novice. This needs to change. It is true that it will penalize novices who desire to advance in entertainer, as fewer people would want to watch them. This obstacle is overcome by joining groups as a novice entertainer so that you share the group experience and you will increase the groups total dancing experience by participating. What I suggest is a huge reduction in wounds and fatigue healing rates provided by cantinas and low levels of entertainment healing. Once you hit the elite professions of Dancer or Musician your healing rates should increase to roughly what they are now.

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As it is now, when my scout goes into a cantina, I already look for the dancer doing the highest level dance -- it lowers my own downtime. What you would essentially do is make the lower level entertainers worthless and further nerf their Entertainment Heal XP. And belonging to a group does not raise your Entertainment Healing - that is based solely on how many players are /watching you. Making it a group benefit only encourages AFKing again.

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Fatigue Healing: Best fixed by adding the accept audience option so there will be no more freebies.

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Personally, I prefer to leave the healing alone and give us the ability to actively target players and buff them. Right now, Master Dancers give a sizable mind buff to those who /watch for 10 or 15 minutes, but most players don't even know about it. We should not just be healers, we should also be buffers, and with the emphasis on Mind pool in PvP right now, we would become very valuable.

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Wound Healing: same as fatigue except that it should also be added that mind wounds heal one category at a time instead of all at once. It penalizes us, but it does in turn make this tree actually valuable instead of worthless as it is now. Currently Mind, Focus, and Willpower, all heal while watching/listening to someone. I would like it to be changed that only one stat heals at a time.

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You have to be careful waving that nerf bat around -- and that's what this would be, a nerf. We don't need nerfed, we need enhancement. We're already weak and insignificant enough.

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Dancing Techniques: First lower the cost of the special affects, secondly improve the mind enhancements by first making them affect the performer themselves and secondly making them last until a player either logs or is killed and has to reclone. This would only work also if the accept audience command was added so that people did not just run in to get the free buff.

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I would settle for my proposed active mind buff (for musicians it's Focus/Willpower) lasting as long as a Master Doctor's buffs, or roughly 90 minutes to 2 hours. A semi-permanent buff is a bit much to ask, isn't it?

Sinda wrote:

As it is now, when my scout goes into a cantina, I already look for the dancer doing the highest level dance -- it lowers my own downtime. What you would essentially do is make the lower level entertainers worthless and further nerf their Entertainment Heal XP.

I think you missed the point here. What he's saying is that too many people spend 15 points for Novice Ent. and heal themselves because it heals too fast. Need to make low level healing painful so that people don't just get Novice Medic and heal themselves.

And belonging to a group does not raise your Entertainment Healing - that is based solely on how many players are /watching you.

Wrong. If you are in a group, you will gain Ent Healing Xp even if no one is watching you. You will just gain more if they are watching you.

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Yajedi wrote:

I think you missed the point here. What he's saying is that too many people spend 15 points for Novice Ent. and heal themselves because it heals too fast. Need to make low level healing painful so that people don't just get Novice Medic and heal themselves.

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I think a nice, easy solution is to have the benefit for solo work be half or less of the actual task. Instead of healing 10 BF per pulse, you heal 5 BF. This means that you can still watch a Novice Entertainer and heal up, but unless you are serious about your entertaining, you're going to heal yourself very slowly.

I personally feel this should apply to Medic too (try giving yourself stitches; I bet it sucks!), but that's another thread.

Right now the only penalty for dancing for your own sake is that you don't get Ent Heal xp. And that's no big deal if the player isn't going to pursue this profession.

As for "accept audience," I'll once again speak my mind that I feel this is a bad idea. If such a feature were introduced, I'd stop being an entertainer because I'd be too busy playing pop-up killer instead. And I'd rather play the game than chase down buttons. I can find some Java games on the web where I point and click in order to advance. They don't cost $15 a month.

If the choice is to allow AFKer to leech off the system or to have pop-up hell, then I choose to let the AFKers thrive. There are better solutions for AFKing. I'd rather not ruin the Entertainer profession in an attempt to chase off the AFKers. Sure, napalm will take care of your crow problem, but then you have no crops left.

I think you missed the point here. What he's saying is that too many people spend 15 points for Novice Ent. and heal themselves because it heals too fast. Need to make low level healing painful so that people don't just get Novice Medic and heal themselves.

I understand his point, but anyone who's ever advanced very far up the skill tree knows how precious 15 points can end up being. I don't consider this a threat at all, but rather any nerf to healing only affects dancers. Not the dabbling novice.

Wrong. If you are in a group, you will gain Ent Healing Xp even if no one is watching you. You will just gain more if they are watching you.

I spent too many hours dancing in Theed with a maxxed entertainer group and no customers to agree with this. There were nights when I would get zero Ent. Heal XP, and that was in spite of being in a maxxed group -- someone still has to watch you, but you get nothing otherwise no matter how big your group is.

I can understand the so aptly put pop-up hell, I can see how that would be a definate problem in a highly trafficed cantina. So perhaps a pop-up is more trouble than it is worth. I do think though that something should be done. Perhaps a /clientele command which would add someone to your list of accepted viewers. This would not cause you to suffer pop-hell but you would have to deal with a great deal of spam and tells. I think that while that may be a burden it would also provide more incentive for others to roleplay with dancers and not just harrass them. I know that much of the roleplaying that I do is often based off of need. I would love to see situations arise where some new player comes into a cantina and is hurting badly and asks the dancer/musician to be added to thier list of clientele and the dancer/musician says " So what's your story?". The new player is forced to either make something up on the spot or wait on the normal cantina rates.

I am happy that I am seeing threads about improving the mind buff of dancers somewhat, however there is something which ocured to me about game balance and making it on par with doctors. The amount of resources that a doctor needs to produce a buff is very high, so there is a large cost. The current buff that we provide costs us nothing except time which is not to be devalued. However if dancers seriously wanted a bigger buff I would propose that we gain the ability to make recordings(musicians) and videos(dance) which would cost resources like a doctors buff. The recording/video would only be able to be used in a camp or a building and would require a certain number of minutes to work. Of corse all such things would self destruct since as advanced in technology as the star wars universe is, its marjeting should be just as great...i.e. recording companies sell things on a per use basis

I do like the idea of halving healing rates on oneself, but I still like lowering them across the board. It may look like a nerf but in terms of functionality it is a buff for us. Medics have a similar problem but not nearly as bad since mind wounds are less common and the basic level of healing a medic provides has a big drawback, in that it causes mind wounds and fatigue loss; we dancers have no equivilent. What this is doing is increasing the scarcity of an important resource...i.e. wound/fatigue healing. Now if the healing rates decrease, we will be in much more demand and thus because of this new demand for our services we would be buffed and not nerfed. Supply and demand

I am fairly certain that when you are grouped and dancing entertainment xp is divided amonst the group. Not 100% posative on that but fairly posative.

"Personally, I prefer to leave the healing alone and give us the ability to actively target players and buff them. Right now, Master Dancers give a sizable mind buff to those who /watch for 10 or 15 minutes, but most players don't even know about it. We should not just be healers, we should also be buffers, and with the emphasis on Mind pool in PvP right now, we would become very valuable."

I agree. Allowing the entertainer the option to target a player would really make an impact in the game. They still may not tip us, but they will know we were doing something special. hey, you could specially target those who tipped you.

Your my hero, Sinda!

"What should be implimented is an 'Accept Audience' option. When a player starts to watch you, you are presented with a menu of either accepting or rejecting them as an audience. This means no more free healing from the always AFK scantily claddancer in the corner of the Cantina."

Hear here!!!

It will solve the AFK issues (both AFK dancers and people goingAFK while they heal) in one step, and it will allow us more control over who we heal. A great idea.

"Madonna, Britney, Fifty Cent and Kid Rock, et al don't have the option of only performing for certain members of their audience. "

No, but they get paid upfront for their performance. We do not. Let's face it, only at certain times do many players come in to be healed. Frenetic accepting of an audience is not a real issue. If you'd rather converse than accept an audience at these times, just do nothing anddon't accept the audience - it's as simple as that.