Development Cycle Archive

Smuggler needs a thread... Why the hell do I keep picking professions which get pissed on?

Well, I can't put it any better than electricnomaddid. Considering the amount of COMBAT our characters have to do to reach smuggler, and the amount of COMBAT we have to do to level up in Smuggler, I'm completely boggled as to why we were left out of the In Concept COMBAT character listing, in favor of scouts and rangers.

The threads that have been started here are very disappointing to me, as this was not the impression that I recieved about what "In Concept" was going to be. I was expecting to see threads started about ideas that the devolpment team was tossing aound - to get feedback from the community on those ideas. I didn't expect it to be a vehicle for generating ideas via the playerbase. I did expect an Open Discussion thread (and I am happy to see that it is here) to allow idea expression by the players.

Overall, I think that if the ideas that are being explored in the developement team were listed here, there would be fewer miscommunications and incorrect assumptions, both from the development team and the playerbase about the direction of the game as a whole and the individual components in the game.

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Baroun wrote:

Rather than havea limit of one droid out for everyone, how about doing the following:

1) Develop code that adds together HAM, Armor, and damage to derive a CL for a droid when built

2) Everyone get's the ability to call a CL10 pet

3) Novice-DE-0000 gets the CH-ish ability to call droids by total CL of the droids, and a +5 to total DroidCL's. Thus, they could call a Probot and a CL5 droid (maybe an R5 with a repair module to repair the probot)

4) Each box of Droid Refinement allows the DE to refine their control over droids, and they get +10 to total droid CL.

5) Master DE gets a +10 to total droid CL

This would give DE's something we all wanted; The ability to call a Droid Horde. When the Roger-Roger droids are added, they'll be CL10 (max CL for a droid, anyone can use _one_) , but a Master DE could call 6 (the free one, one for each of 4 Droid Refinement boxes, one for Master).

Six level 10 pets should about balance the pair of Rancors the CH's have been known to wander around with...

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Thunderheart, three quick comments:

1. The players most in need of development attention are the non-combat players. It is demoralizing to see only discussions started and finished about combat professions and players. We have events that are combat only, story arcs that are combat only, all interesting missions are combat only, and the only long-term discussion of any volume has been the combat revamp or GCW revamp.


2. STOP SAYING YOU WILL DO THINGS TOMORROW OR NEXT WEEK OR ANYTHING WITH A DATE. Just....STOP giving times and dates when you will post stuff. I haven't seen you hit a time or date YET that you have said. And stop saying other people will post things at certain times. Your credibility suffers with ever date you claim. It's like the father who promises to go to his sun's baseball game, and never shows.


3. In Concept would be better served if you came out and said "The developers are thinking X, what do you think." I am positive that that is what we ALL thought "In Concept" would be about. It is painfully obvious you don't get what communication is in this environment. First off, it is well-known and proven in psychological studies that "monster threads" do not transfer information, but instead conceal it. Further, it is empirically obvious that if you just open up open comment threads all over the place, you simply dilute player input. You have divided us, and scattered us. The only players who are making themselves heard to the entire SWG community are ones who are spamming forums all over the place. Hardly a good example you would want us to follow.

RbT

Can't find a specifically appropriate place to put this, so this seems closest.

In the combat revamp, I think one thing that's very important is to crack down on stacking. The reason? Having stackable modifiers makes balance far too difficult. You have to make the modifiers per profession low enough that stacking 3 professions' worth of them isn't unbalancing, but then the modifiers in a single profession are useless, crippling those who want to master.

Instead, do the following: For offensive modifiers (speed, aim, accuracy), have them be specific to the profession, with the exception of marksman, which would add all types of modifiers in the appropriate lines (smuggler pistol speed/accuracy as well as pistoleer speed/accuracy and BH pistol speed/accuracy in the pistols line, for instance). Bounty hunters are the big culprit here -- they need BH carbine speed/accuracy and BH pistol speed/accuracy that specifically apply only to BH carbine and pistol moves. Likewise, the carbineer and pistoleer speed/accuracy mods shouldn't have a bearing on BH moves.

For defensive modifiers, there should be three categories: ranged/melee, state, and evasion. Ranged/melee modifiers and state modifiers should not be based on what weapon you're wielding, but shouldn't stack. Instead, you should use the highest afforded to you by a single profession. So if you're a master TKA, you should be carrying those high modifiers no matter what weapon you're actually using, although once you've achieved master TKA, it's unlikely that you'll improve your defenses by learning defenses in another profession. Now, evasion defenses (block, counterattack -- which needs to attack back like creatures do, and dodge) need to be tied to the weapon. A rifleman can't dodge, he can only block. But if he happens to have pikeman as well, with a higher block modifier, he can use that instead of his rifleman block modifier.

This retains the value of cross-training professions for small advantages, while keeping the balance under control by limiting the possible modifiers to only what a master of SOME profession is capable of. So you can take a very offensive-oriented profession and give it a boost to defense by learning another one that has a strong defense, but can't boost either offense or defense beyond what a master of some profession can achieve alone.

Fix this, and the rest of balancing becomes manageable.

I got a couple of thoughts reading through the other in concept for combat classes stuff...

I think that entertainers should be able to give a buff at master, call it morale boost which passively buffs defensive and offensive mods like block/dodge/counterattack and accuracy for a similar period that master dancers and musicians give mind buffs.

also... someone who is a master dancer and master musician should get a new peroformance that buffs both mind primaries and secondaries at the same time so that they dont have to listen to/watch two performances from one person for the same effect.

just my thoughts