Pikeman Archive

This is taken from ArthurDentOnBria's Fanfest Report from the BE Boards. He's covered all the topics he could, and I wanted to show you all the info he picked up on the Combat Rebalance and how it will effect combat classes... Including Pikeman. ArthurDent's one hell of a reporter, and all credit is his. As they say over the pond... 'He da man'. So if you get a chance, run by the original thread and 5 star him

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=bio-engineer&message.id=71660

Till then, check this out. It fits 100% with what LordSerevoksaid earlier.

Chaalan

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Hi folks,

Just got back from fanfest. I had a blast, I met some nice people, met a few familiar "in game" faces, as well as some I knew from these forums (wohoo!).

I attended all the sessions I could, which were mainly Q&A sessions with various members of the SWG development team. I just wanted to dump a lot of this info down asap while it's still relatively fresh in my mind (and in my notes).

First off, the serssions started off in the morning with real high level questions for the various project leads (i.e. the decision-makers) in a massive ballroom, then smaller breakout sessions happened throughout the rest of the day, with more targeted questions. These sessions were run by some of the developers who were mainly responsible for implementing the content being discussed. The developers we heard from the most were Green Marine (GM) who seems to have written numerous professions (Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, Tailor, and Chef to name a few) and who is presently working on JTL, Keldarin (K) who did the BE revamp and who seems to be working on the combat revamp, and one other fellow (doh! didn't get his name) that did the current combat system.

I found these guys (from hereon out referred to collectively as "the devs") to be real intelligent, very dedicated folks who obviously take all this stuff a lot more seriously than we do (which I and others often tend to forget). And they all were real open to discussing pretty much all aspects of the game, aside of course from the "when is X going to go into the live version of the game" /chuckle.

Ok, a real quick disclaimer about this stuff. Remember, this came from discussions with individual developers for the most part and represents their take on things. This is not some kind of blanket policy statement by SOE. Also, since the ink isn't dry, or even begun on a lot of this stuff, nor do we even know if the person giving these answers will be the person implementing it, we need to take all this stuff with a big heaping spoon of salt.

Combat Revamp

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A huge topic of discussion as you can imagine. I don't consider myself a primarily combat-oriented guy, and I chose to attend mainly the crafting sessions (in such times as they happened at the same time with combat ones), so I'll let others report on this for the most part. But here were a few of the eye openers as far as I was concerned:

Combat abilities are going down across the board. They feel that combat abilities in general have escalated out of control, and also there are a lot of balance issues. Heavy nerfage on speed in particular, and probably damage too. Also one of the things repeated over and over was how armor was too overpowered, so armor protection is coming way down. Oh, and all this is retroactive, so don't bother stockpiling "pre-nerf" items. And then of course as part of this, the combat professions individually will be balanced. Changes to weapon certs, specials, types of damage done, skill mods, skill mod stacking, skill tapes yadda yadda. Pretty much all that is being affected. One thing though, according to K, pets are expected to come out of this pretty much (if not entirely) exempt from the nerfs. Therefore, expect pets to make a "comeback" of sorts.

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"Speed kills, style is everything..."

A quick summary of some random things that Devs stated at Fan Fest.

The Lead Programmer, Andy Sommers, gave a really nice forum on technical questions about the game engine. Each server has 35 computers dedicated to it. These boxes are split up between planets based on how many people are on each planet (for example, Andy used Tatooine as an example, which used 10 computers at launch). Each planet is split up into a number of zones based on how many computers are allocated to it, and each computer is responsible for controlling one zone. Each computer is designed to track only 125 players. This is why we get problems with large gatherings of people. Also, each computer runs Red Hat Linux version 7 point something, though they'll be upgrading soon to 8. Jump to lightspeed will add 10 computers to each server, but they'll only be for the 10 space sectors.

The Devs have slightly tweaked how HAM is going to work in the combat revamp. It's not what's previously been discussed, with special moves taking away from your max HAM values instead of damaging you. Instead, your Health, Action, and Mind pools will be mirrored to create three more pools. These pools do not take damage; instead, when you use special attacks, you will draw points from these pools instead of your primaries. When you run out of an "action" pool (not Action), you aren't incapped, you just can't use any more special moves. I like this a lot.

Also with the revamp comes the REMOVAL of pool-specific special attacks. Instead, things will work like this. Rifleman will still have a Head Shot, but the design of the skill will revolve around this scenario: when you use Head Shot, you are literally aiming for the target's head. This gives you a higher than normal chance of hitting their head and thus their mind pool, but also lowers your overall accuracy because it's a lot harder to specifically hit someone's head as opposed to hitting them at all. Also, you'll have a slightly higher chance of hitting their Body than their Legs, resulting in more Health damage than Action. So pool-specific shots will likely see a drop in accuracy and some amount of spread across pools. More good stuff.

All the forumulas for accuracy, speed, and def ense will change with the combat rebalance. I quote: "Slow guns will stay slow, fast guns will stay fast." I take this to mean no more 7.0 speed rifles hitting the speed cap.

The main combat developer, Dave White, is also very much into designing lots of tactical options into combat. His one example involved knockdowns... he'd like to see a "get up instantly" move that you can use when knocked down that uses some of your action points to get back up immediately. His overall vision is having players choose to either go all out and use all their action points to kill the other person quickly, or save a few in reserve in case they have to bust out a defensive special to get out of a sticky situation.

Every Friday, all the programmers take the first four hours of their day and spend it playing the game themselves. While they play, they take note of little things that bother them that can be fixed in a short period of time, and spend the next four hours fixing those issues. This policy was recently put into effect, and resulted in some of the little changes we recently saw to group mission waypoints and group member directional arrows.

There was a surprising amount of Combat Medic support from the Devs throughout the weekend. They repeatedly stated that the "problems" with Combat Medics are merely symptoms of a poor combat system in the first place. They stood their ground against the CM haters (which somehow found their way to every discussion, from the Hybrids to General Discussion to Medical Professions). They even went so far as to adamantly tell whiners that they needed better tactics. Interesting indeed.

That's all I can remember for now.