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Thread: Gaarawarr's Beginner’s Guide to PvE Combat, Post-CU
Gaarawarr's Beginner’s Guide to PvE Combat, Post-CU
(This is meant to be a basic guide to understanding the overall ideas behind the way combat works after the Combat Upgrade but is subject to change on the whim of a Dev. This information was compiled through personal experience and observations in-game and reflects how things actually work, not necessarily how they were meant to work.)
1. Combat Roles
Role - def. The usual or expected function of somebody or something, or the part somebody or something plays in a particular action or event.
Before the Combat Upgrade, the lines between roles were blurred to the point of oblivion. Your role in combat wasn't defined at all by your actual profession choice, but instead by the quality of armor you were wearing and how you had "stacked" your defenses. While the lines can still be slightly blurred due to those same reasons, a group filled with people that know their profession-based role in combat will function much smoother and with less hassle, and needless death, than one that doesn't.
To help people know who was what role in a group, the Devs added role-indicators next to your name/health that are supposed to show what role you have decided to play in that group. While it was a nice idea, no one really pays attention to it, much less actually puts up what role they are going to play. One of the reasons is that there are way too many choices, many with two different levels. What's the point of having so many different choices? Apparently just to make everyone feel good about themselves and give them a nice pretty picture to look at when they go from a basic profession to an elite one. That's it.
As far as the group functionality goes, there are only three true roles in any given combat situation. Tank, Damage, and Support. These are not necessarily pure roles as some people mix and match some of these functions in their templates, but for the purpose of this guide, we will talk about them in a pure sense. Once you understand the basic roles and how they function in a group, you'll have a better understanding of how each role complements the other and have an idea of how to mix parts of those roles into your template and use them appropriately.
Tank
IRL defined as a heavily-armored combat vehicle with a cannon and machine guns. It's also a pretty apt description for our purposes as well. Usually the tank in your group will be someone who not only has good armor for the situation, but also the defensive modifiers to back it up with. The damage output for the tank is usually best if it's very high, higher than any other damage in the group, but that isn't required. What's more important is that everyone knows what the tanks job is, including the tank, and they help the tank do their job.
The tanks primary role in the group is to manage the mobs in such a way as to keep everyone else from dieing during the attack. In a perfect world, this means choosing the target, initiating combat and holding the targets attention until it is dead. This isn’t a perfect world however, so it doesn’t always work that smoothly. Factors such as “hate”, social behavior and level-based aggression can make a tank’s job very difficult. Even more so if the group members aren’t working together to help the tank keep control of the target. We’ll discuss that more in the section on “hate”.
Damage
Don’t be fooled by the name. You’re not there to just deal damage as fast as you can hit your special buttons. If you think you are, then you’re not helping your group function smoothly. You’re just trying to show off. Cut it out. There’s a reason DPS was added as a stat on your weapon description now. The overall damage per second during the ENTIRE battle is what is important now. Not just how much you can deal in the first 5 seconds of combat. Remember, this is PvE, not PvP. If you know your role in a group and the group is working together, there is nothing in this game you can’t kill and there’s no reason anyone in your group should have to deal with a trip to the cloner or res sickness.
Your role in the group is to deal CONSISTENT damage while your tank protects you and the rest of the group. If that means you have to stop attacking at some point so that the tank can keep control or so others can stay alive, then that’s what you do. Remember, it’s your overall damage over time that is your contribution to the group.
Support
IRL defined as to keep from weakening or failing, to strengthen. Pretty apt. Whether you’re healing or applying states or debuffs, your job is to support the tank and the damage dealers as they kill the target. The more states and debuffs you can apply to a target, the more of an offensive advantage your group has, even if it’s a minor one. Also, in most situations, but not all, the more you keep your group healed, the better off the group is. I can’t stress enough how important having dedicated support is to making your group successful in high-end combat.
Most people have bits and pieces of these roles in their template already as it helps to round out your character for those times when you’re on your own. That doesn’t mean you should use them all when you’re in a group however. Having defined roles that everyone understands and follows can help a group outing go from a disaster waiting to happen to poetry in motion.
2. “Hate”
With the Combat Upgrade came a new way for creatures to determine who they should attack in combat and if they should leave that target or not. Hate. IRL defined as a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands action. Once again, pretty well described. There are many ways to make a creature hate you. Get too close to it (in the case of an aggressive creature or an NPC you have bad faction with). Attack it. Attack its friends (in the case of social creatures). Attack its lair. Heal someone doing any of the above. That covers the main ones you’ll have to deal with in combat. Each has it’s own level of hate that it applies. It is this hate that a tank manages during combat to keep the target under control.
To make sure that you don’t accidentally become the tank when you’re supposed to be damage or support, you need to monitor how much hate you’re creating towards yourself. If you’re role is damage, the best way to measure is pure numbers. Keep an eye on how much damage you’re dealing to the target. If you out damage your tank, you will quickly become the new one. If you are a healer, you can look at a similar number. Exactly how much are you healing each time? If you wait for the tank to get low on health and then slap a huge heal on him, you will quickly take his place and find it very hard to get rid of it as you now slap those same heals on yourself. Just like damage, smaller, more consistent heals will keep your tank in good health and keep your hate level down.
An important thing to note here is that when your tank is surrounded by multiple targets at once, make sure he is dealing damage to all of them before you heal him. If he’s not, then EVERY CREATURE he isn’t attacking will now be attacking you. The same goes for AoE attacks from damage dealers. Keep this in mind if you see your tank get grouped up on. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll let you know not to heal or attack. Sometimes as a tank, you just have to take one for the team. If it’s better for the group for the tank to die and everyone to regroup, then the tank needs to let you know that.
3. Social Behavior
No, I’m not referring to what is witnessed in cantinas across the galaxy. I’m referring to the tendency of some creatures to assist others from their lair during combat. It doesn’t matter if they’re aggressive creatures or not, if you attack them either their friends will come running or they will run back to their friends, get help, and come back after you. Either way, it’s not always an enjoyable experience, especially if you weren’t expecting it. You’ll quickly learn in your trip through the galaxy which mobs are social and which aren’t. Quick tip: if it has “swarming” in its name, it might just be social. 
There is one last example of social behavior. Whether it was intended or not, there is currently very aggressive, social behavior witnessed on non-social creatures when you are attacking one of their friends near the lair as new ones “pop” out of the lair. It doesn’t happen with every lair, but if a new creature pops from the lair while you’re battling near it and immediately has a ? over it’s head, you know you’ve found what I call a social lair. You can move away from the lair while still battling and you’ll be fine, but get too close and it seems that the lair itself conveys social behavior on each creature it pops out while you’re near it. This can be very unexpected and is the cause of many, many, many needless deaths and griping sessions as everyone yells at everyone else thinking they hit the lair. As long as you’re aware of this though, it is easily controllable.
4. Level-Based Aggression
It used to be that if a creature was aggressive, it would become aggressive toward you at the same distance as everyone else, whether you were a pure crafter or a expert combatant. With the introduction of visible combat levels on creatures and characters, this has changed. Now you are “aggroed” (attacked) at different distances based on your combat level. A CL1 crafter/entertainer will be aggroed by a creature even at a large distance while a CL80 combat character can get very close to a creature before it gets aggressive.
The best way to visualize this is to think of having an invisible sphere (yes, it is three dimensional) around your character, an aggro-radius. This aggro-radius starts out as a very large sphere at CL1 and gets smaller and smaller as you go up in level. This sphere does NOT stay a fixed size, even when you’re level 80. It can get bigger, or even smaller still, based on the level of the aggressive creature. If you are CL80 and you see a CL5 aggressive creature, you can pretty much walk up to it and pet it as your level far outweighs its aggressiveness. Whereas if you see a level 89 NPC, you will get aggroed from a further distance than you are used to with your usual level 80 creatures.
If you’d like a demonstration, go to the krayt graveyard poi on Tatooine. There are usually three different types and levels of krayts in the graveyard all near each other. If they are all grouped together and you slowly approach the group by inching forward 1 meter at a time, the highest level krayt will attack you before any others even realize you are there. I hope you cloned…
5. Level-Based Damage
Along with a change in the way aggression is handled by level, there was a change on damage related to your level. The higher your level is compared to a creature you are attacking, the more damage you do and the less damage you will take. On the flipside, the higher its level is compared to yours, the less damage you will do and the more damage you will take. This differentiation based on level also affects your ability to apply states, it seems, as well as how much xp you get off your target.
6. Group-Based Combat Level
Currently, when you group with another person, the combat level of the group is determined by the highest level character. This new level will affect the level-based damage system, but it will NOT affect the level-based aggression system. A level 60 grouped with a level 80 character will take damage as if he is level 80, but they will still aggro creatures based off their level 60 status.
Whether this is as intended or not, it is how it is currently functioning and many, many, MANY people do not understand this and get killed over and over because they foolishly get too close to a group of like-level creatures that they think won’t aggro them. What’s worse is when your group has chosen to grind on aggressive creatures and the low-level character in your group inadvertently aggros the entire lair just by standing with the rest of the group because of their aggro-radius being so much larger than the group’s. This is a major thing to keep in mind while in a group as it can cause needless deaths, especially when foraying into high-level dungeons even if the lowest person in the group is still in the 70s.
7. Combat Skill Modifiers/Diminishing Returns
Skill modifiers are gained in multiple ways now. You can earn them permanently through template choices, add them to your clothing and armor thru the use of Skill Enhancing Attachments or wear clothing/armor with them built in, gain them through equipping certain weapons with built in skill modifiers, take foods and drinks that modify them for a given period of time, modify them with buffs from doctors or apply them temporarily through use of a gained skill as in the case of Center of Being for melee and Duelist Stance for ranged. These skill modifiers can affect your defense, offense, or support capabilities thus making your character more effective in combat. What’s more important, these modifiers can be stacked upon each other to make you even more effective in those particular areas.
I’ll admit it, I was a stacker pre-cu….and I LOVED it. What can I say. I was a wookiee with no armor. There weren’t many options for me if I wanted to participate in high-level content. For those that don’t know, a stacker is someone who combines parts of different professions to maximize their stats in particular areas, usually defense. Pre-cu these additions to your stats added as straight numbers to your totals so someone with 200 ranged defense had double the ranged defense as someone with 100. Now that isn’t the case. While you can still maximize your stats by mixing and matching professions, it is done on a scale of diminishing returns. What does this mean? It means the more you add to your stats, the less it matters. Now in that same example, the first person may only have effectively 1.5 times the defense of the other, not double. This is merely an example however, and not a true statement as it really depends on the actual numbers you are comparing now.
The major numbers people look at now are the ones you find on your Character Sheet (ctrl+c). They are Speed, Accuracy, Melee Defense and Ranged Defense and all are based on the weapon you have equipped at the time. In general, these are the main ones you should be concerned about as a newer player, or at least new to understanding combat modifiers. The complete list of skills and modifiers is in your Skill Sheet (ctrl+s). A lot of the skills shown there are also modifiable and are very important to advanced combat. For now, however, we will stick to the main four for definitions. I’ll leave it up to you to learn what the others do in combat as this is meant to be a generic guide.
Speed
Pretty basic. This modifier affects how fast you attack with your given weapon. To see how it equates to your weapon, examine the weapon and look at the modified attack speed. It’s a good general idea of how fast you are attacking. To get an even more in-depth look at the speed, even while using specials, add the time stamp to your chat log and watch your combat log while you attack. There is a hard cap of one attack per second written into the game code, so once you see that you’ve reached this, even while using specials, you have no need to modify your speed any more. You’re done.
Accuracy
This now has two functions post-cu. It affects your chance to hit the target as well as how much damage you will die. The system will compare your accuracy to the specified defense of the target. If you have a higher accuracy, you have a higher chance of hitting on every attack and you will get a small bonus to your damage. If you have a lower accuracy, you will hit less often and for less damage. Needless to say, the higher your accuracy the better in this system. Eventually though, you will stop seeing much of a difference as you add to this. It will be up to you if that difference is worth the effort or if you are going to leave it as is. There are some very good foods and drinks that can modify this number and if this is important to you, you should never be without them.
Melee/Ranged Defense
The flipside of accuracy, this determines how often you get hit and for how much. Pre-cu, the higher these numbers were, the more things missed you. Now, while it does affect if something misses or not, the major factor it determines is how much damage you take. Honestly, you aren’t going to get missed much, even at high levels, but it does happen. What’s important is how much damage you take when you do get hit. What you will usually see as you start raising this level is small differences in damage, from 1-15 different per hit. While this doesn’t seem like a lot, once you’ve had a whole nest of creatures on you at the same time hitting you once ever 2 seconds, the difference becomes enormous. It is these modifiers that need to be high, very high, for you to be a truly effective tank. Combined with the right foods and specials, you can adequately control anywhere from 10-20 creatures at once while your group decimates them.
In Conclusion
This guide was meant to impart a basic understanding of the overall general status of combat currently post-cu. In my opinion, knowledge and understanding of ALL of the above information is what can put you one step above the average player and set you on your way to greatness in combat. I’ll leave it up to you, for now, to create tactics and strategies using this information that can help you and your group tackle higher and higher levels of PvE. Most of all, remember to HAVE FUN out there. That is the point after all.
Gaaraarr
Crimson Scholar - Order of the Crimson Blade
Message Edited by CourtJester73 on 09-03-2005 01:25 AM
-o ;=-- - - - 
ElanMak wrote:
So, how about doing an overview of profesions and templates for beginners? I'm coming back to SWG after a long break, and have no idea what's considered a good template now, or if people still even use templates! Not trying to say that one profession/template is better than others, just what generally is offered by each profession. For instance, I know smuggler now has some useful specials for root and confuse, bounty hunter has good defense, etc. etc.
That is quite a task actually. The best place to get information about specific professions is in their forums. In the beginning, don't bother reading the random posts. Look for the things the Correspondent posts and what they have stickied. Some of the information is a little dated and not up to par with the current publish, but the overall picture of the profession post-CU is there. There's a reason they are Correspondents, they know their stuff and specialize in that profession.
Having said that, stay away from the jedi forums. The lumping together of all five of their professions into one forum is, in my opinion, one of the most detrimental things to actually finding good information. Not even a Correspondent can presume to know everything about all five of them as they can't play all five at once.
Good luck and welcome back!
