Development Cycle Archive

Master Brawler is a futile profession after publish 7. War cry 2 is the only ability worth having with Master Brawler. The ability to delay an enemy for 20 seconds in very useful...the ability to stop enemies that aren't attacking you anyhow, which is the new change, is useless.

Kyla Eri

IMO, the brawler class (and by extension most of the melee related classes) should fall into the realm of the "backup weapon". There should be advantages and disadvantages to using brawler skills instead of marksman skills for combat as follows.

Advantages over marksman:

Brawlers should be quite powerful against humanoid opponents when closer than 10 meters, much more powerful than a marksman at the same level at the same range.

Brawlers should be able to engage a single opponent in combat without triggering a group aggro. This reflects the more silent nature of hand to hand combat, as opposed to firing a blaster shot, which alerts everyone in the surrounding area.

Disadvantages from marksman:

Brawlers should have very poor defense against ranged attacks, this would make people use a ranged weapon (simply for that ranged bonus)until the range closes to melee range, and then remove the weapon. This is more in keeping with how star wars was, and will add to the star wars feel.

Brawlers should do extremely poor damage against creatures. Think about it in star wars terms. If I punch a bantha in the leg, how rediculous is it to think I can actually destroy it in a timely fashion? Furthermore, martial arts are designed to work on humanoids, not on creatures.

Bottom Line:

Brawlers and marksmen should NOT be balanced to each other, but balanced to how they work in star wars. In star wars people used blasters unless in extremely close quarters, or they knew they were in a ranged weapons free environment, or they were a jedi.

If you want to move away from the EQ in space feel the game has now, and move more toward star wars, you would encourage blasters to be the primary weapon for the vast majority of players. This is the way to do that, while still allowing brawler skills to have their use as very good "pullers" of mobs. Making it so they only aggro one baddie at a time, they could then kite toward the group. This should not be considered an exploit, because its what han solo did to the stormtroopers on endor, leading them into an ambush of rebels and ewoks. This should be a viable group tactic for brawlers.

This same general pattern should follow through all the melee classes in terms of their role in combat.

My main complaint here is that assuming the combatants start at a distance of over 15 meters, a master brawler vs master marksman fight should end 95% of the time with a master marksman victory, regardless of which weapon either is using from their class. That is just the way star wars was, and I dont see a reason to stray from the source material here.

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