Pikeman Archive

Sorry, dissagree here.

All 250 sp of mine are spent on combat professions (commando, pike, brawler)

I played against amin/maxer multiple times, and each time not one single person in the 10 man group I was with who used a weaponwas able to hit this person. Why? Stacked defenses. His defenses were so high that he told me "Not many people can hit me. You have to be lucky"

I agree with Gunman. You can have 250 skill points invested in combat and go up against a pistoleer/fencer/tka and lose hands-down. We as Pikemen currently need to stack defenses from other professions to be almost equivalent as other professions without stacking...but you feel something is wrong when you watch one unarmored player take out every NPC and overt player in the Imperial Outpost, and then fend off every attack against him from waves of overt imps and as you watch, you notice he only gets hit a few times total in about 25 minutes of fighting.

antares
master pikeman

The only way people can defend THAT many hits is with Dodge or Counterattack.

Remove THAT part and youll see what Im saying.

I know this to be true because Im a Pikeman. We still get hit. Remove their Dodge/Counterattack insanity, and theyre just like us.

Well, it is the same with very high melee/ranged defenses, too. The bad part about removing this stacking is that there are professions (Pikeman, Swordsman) that are very lacking on defenses. We can hope that during the combat passes, these inequities will be straightened out, and we'll have advantages even if we have low defenses

antares
master pikeman

I guess what Im trying to say is Im defending Ranged/melee and State defenses, since people seem to think THEY are the problem, when they arent.

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daymeeuhn wrote:

WHY is it someone with one combat profession should have the exact same combat skill as someone who has THREE.

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This is an excellent point, and I too see how it seems unreasonable to compare a tailor/pikeMan to a TKA/Fencer/Rifleman template. However there are some unbalancein all thisas Gunman21 states:

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Gunman21wrote:

Now, with templates like that running around, it doesn't matter how many sp you have spent into combat professions, the min/maxers are always going to have advantages that the regular players wont, and that is not the way to balance the game.

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The unbalance does, as Gunman21 states, separate a few chosen ones from the crowd to be viable in PvP

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antares_Kauriwrote:

We as Pikemen currently need to stack defenses from other professions to be almost equivalent as other professions without stacking

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...pikeMan is an excellent example of this unbalance, along with a bunch of others

at first i thought nothing but..

its very unbalanced and causes these ultimate templates to run around.

My template (when done) is going to be Master Pistoleer/Master Pikeman/4040 Smuggler/Novice Medic

now with the defs on pike/pistoleer thats 80 def vs kd!

i really hope pikeman gets some defense buffing soon though because we needed it badly

Basically it comes down to the following.

A skill system is cool if it is able to allow a very diverse spectrum of effective combinations of professions with various weaknesses and strengths. It's great that you can continue to spend points and gain greater ability. The end result should be a wide spectrum of player styles with players that end up being good at certain things and bad at others. That will make for an interesting game where characters bring truly unique but effective toolsets to bear.

But with uber templates we see that we move away from this. We see that instead of a wide array of player styles and balancing of strenghts and weaknesses, everyone is drawn to play the same templates. To not do so is to autmoatically lose because that one template is so much better than could be managed otherwise. These templates become points that everyone gets sucked into. Whereas the goal of the system was this wide open space of possible and viable playing styles, the result is a sparse landscape with everyone being sucked into the gravity wells of uber templatedom.

Stacking is not a problem.

What is a problem is that the utility of stacking is not tied well to the number of skill points spent. We see instances where far too much benefit can be taken from a profession simply by investing minimally in it.

With a lot of the bonuses we see that each point increase further increases the value of further points. Defense at the low levels is basically worthless and slowly becomes more and more useful per point until it becomes so uber that one is unhittable. Where it should probably have diminishing returns it actually has increasing returns.

So what we need is more attention to the ways in which stacking works.

I've written a lot about this, and have lots of ideas about how to create formulas for game mechanics that allow for much easier balancing of these bonuses. I think it can be done, although it is a very hard problem.

And from what i see as a correspondent I'm optimistic that things will play out well. I suspect that if we see stacking go completely away in certain fields then we will see a return or useful stacking later in the same or other fields with more attention put into guaranteeing that stacking does not create these "gravity well" dynamics.

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StGabriel wrote:

What is a problem is that the utility of stacking is not tied well to the number of skill points spent.

I suspect that if we see stacking go completely away in certain fields then we will see a return or useful stacking later in the same or other fields with more attention put into guaranteeing that stacking does not create these "gravity well" dynamics.

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/agree & /agree, wellspoken

to diable dodge min/maxers just use intimidate, stun, and or blind. you use that or anyone of them and you cripple the uber defenses. and i saw a post that 10 ppl got killed by one guy? if he was buffed and drugged, i still dont see it unless you were all novice marksman, in which case you shouldnt be fighting another player besides another novice marksman. taking away the stacking of abilities will cripple everyone. it will force everyone to be a something/doc. as it is now i see more buffed ppl than ever, which is fine. to have the skill system is so important to SWG, it makes this game unique in so many ways, and the ppl that min max do their homework and I applaud that. I am a single combat class and i can still take most of them 8 out of 10 times. but you have to fight smart, period.