Pilot Archive
Thread: How to balance all the ships in the game without driectly 'nerfing' any?
Raptor2k1 wrote:
A-Wing - Catagory: Interceptor; same YPR, acceleration values, and chassis slots
Interceptor Chassis restrictions:
Engine: Level 10
Armor: Level 2
Shields: Level 4
Reactor: level 6
Weapons: Level 8
Ordinance: Level 8
Countermeasures: Level 6
So let's compare the hypothetical interceptor restrictions to the hypothetical bomber setup.
Bomber Chassis restrictions:
Engine: Level 4
Armor: Level 9
Shields: Level 9
Reactor: level 8
Weapons: Level 8
Ordinance: Level 10
Countermeasures: Level 10
Obviously there's going to need to be some work done tweaking existing item value ranges on stuff like shields (I still can't see why level 10 crafted shields suck so much) and perhaps engines (since restriction to lower engines will kill your YPR too) but I definately think it'd be a much more workable system than the current one. There would still be a lot of ship differentiation and sacrificing that need to be made, but overall an interceptor would fill the role of an interceptor, a superiority fighter a jack of all trades but master of none, a bomber a flying death brick, etc.
The only thing that'd need to be tweaked in this case would be the YPR of the Heavy X-Wing,(what the hell for?? an additional 80k mass was a bit much but why touch the PYR?)and maybe the ARC-170 as well (though to offset the ARC changes you could easily swap the lower rear turret to frontal nose guns... *hint, hint*)(it also needs no PYR changes please stop asking for a nerf in disguise this is the only part of game I still love)
understatement of the day award think through stats on lvl 4 and under engines they'd NEVER be flown again and it has nothing to do with PYR you try flying a .8-.85 spd mod ship with a 60-70 spd engine TOPS
that's just one point that jumped out, please current system works it's the ROTW fighters that messed it up not the system itself
please there are players that ONLY play jtl anymore because it is so unique in how the system is set up, ROTW was the problem not the system
Message Edited by IL-Vec on 08-17-2005 01:09 AM
For example you can take a 65K mass chassis, either an A wing or T/A. Generally speaking, if your good, you can work in one level 8 part, and not give up *too* much in other systems. Now what exactly that level 8 part maybe, is up to the pilot. Shield? Gun? or Engine?
Conversley, if you were fitting a 150K mass Y wing, your obviously not going to deal with the same decicions, you got room to play with.
On paper this mass system works. In PvE it works (sorta), In PvP it doesnt. And that seems to be the juggling act here. In most of the balance discussions the root of it all, is PvP. (well, what else is there to do unless you want to master pilot umpteen times?).
Of course parts themselves are a problem. For example is it right that a slow Y wing and a fast Tie/A can both fit in the best shield avaiable? (granted taht the T/A pilot did have to make a decision however)
Now to touch on ROTW fighters again, we take the same pilot working with a 65K mass chassis, toss it out the window, and give him a smaller, more reponsive ship with 90K mass, is the pilot faced with the same decisions as before? Obviously not.
Edited cause i forgot a couple points.
Message Edited by Ducimus on 08-17-2005 12:08 AM
llTwitchll wrote:i want to be able to use all ships at beginning. i just got rebel pilot and i want to pilot Xwing.. comon you never (barely) see the z95 ywing in the movies
This is what we call "incentive for advancement". It's a concept that has worked well in MMOs pretty much since their creation. Getting up to your X-wing is easy if you just go out and work on it.
silverlady wrote:
Heavy ships - we can all agree which ones should go in this category. Some percentage boost to weapon damage, and shields/armor, engine at face values.
Fighters - Some percentage loss of weapon damage, shields/armor, some sort of engine boost, preferrably in the speed category, since we are already about as nimble as the servers can handle.
What this does: It brings all snub fighters down both in terms of firepower, and defensive capabilities, and gives them a larger margin of speed advantage than they currently have. Heavy ships will become the frightening platforms of destruction that they should be, and be able to take more punishment than they currently do. Chassis modifiers still allow you to mount whatever you can fit, so the tinkering aspect is still there...in fact, you could say that it would be enhanced, because who out there that primarily flies a snub fighter is not going to try to get as close to what they used to be as possible?
One question I might ask, where do you draw the line exactly? I think there's enough room for a sort of middle catagory (your DuneLizards, X-Wings, etc) that might be a sort of neutral ground, myself. With that said, this is more or less what I'm hoping they do actually, though there are some complexities that make this a bit harder than it'd seem at first (which I think Tomo's pointed out in the past). Basically, how much do you buff the heavy ships for PvP without trivializing the PvE game?
If they didn't want to use modifiers, another way to resolve this would be to significantly (and retroactively) bump up mass differentiation for the different tiers of certain component types (such as shields), so they're less likely to find their way into smaller ships - along with their stats, so the heavier components scale appropriately for the less manuverable ships they're intended to fit in.
Some other food for thought that I've been mulling over: How many of these imbalances have been brought on by droid commands? Should you be able to run all 4 overloads at once off a standard reactor? In the X-WIng series you could overcharge certain components, but you HAD to de-charge some others to work it. Ie. you can do engine overchage, but you're going to need to divert some of the charging power from your shield or capacitors so there's enough power for it to work. You could charge your capacitors up a lot as well, but then you'll have to drain from either your shields or engines.
Basically, you have to juggle your stats within your ship depending on how you want to fly. Do you want to be a slow tank that's diverting all engine power to shields and guns? Do you want to be a hard-hitting paper mache speed demon? Do you want to put all power to engines and get out of dodge? These are the sorts of choices you should have to be making when your doing overloads, and that doesn't happen right now. Because of reactor overload, these are all trivial right now, since you can afford to overload them all at once to a significant degree. If your going to overcharge something, unless you have a massive reactor, you should be dumping power from one thing to another. Of course, the game doesn't help this since even simple commands like these have ridiculous droid timers associated with them, not to mention that toggling power around is a tad messy if you plan on reducing/buffing anything and equalizing later.
Hmm, perhaps the overloads are candidate for a balance pass too, heh - maybe even moreso than the RotW ships (though I'd argue both are in need of it), if not a complete revamp in how they're applied to piloting (not changing the command system necessarily, just how they're implemented).
Where to draw the line? Obviously, mass cannot, and should not be the determining factor in deciding which goes where.
Vaksai - fighter
Kimo - heavy
ARC - heavy
X-wing - fighter
I don't think I missed any in the 100k - 150k range that might be questionable
And yes...SOE really, really dropped the ball when they took this part of SWG that is twitch, and tried to *MMO* it...I cannot truly tell you how disappointed I was to see that the E/W/S system from the X-wing games was not present. They had a system that was already balanced pretty well, and did not use it...brilliant. An example: The A-wing in classified as an interceptor class starfighter. By definition, an interceptor must be fast, and should be maneuverable as well. The A-wing, if I remember correctly, is the fastest starfighter in the galaxy, just ahead of the Tie Interceptor. Anyone in an A-wing want to race? I didn't think so...if SOE had used the E/W/S, they could have balanced the ships behind the scenes far better than have done up to this point...the chassis modifiers I am talking about would have already been in place, they would just need to observe, and tweak if necessary. I mean, who here would not love to be able to change your power/shield configurations on the fly? They never should have put in anything to *MMO* (aka, slow down) the JTL experience.
Seriously, it is far from truly broken... and I have no real confidence in them to actually make it better.
Kalia wrote:
My 2 cents: In light of the devs most recent effort to "balance" something, I say to them "please stay the hell AWAY from my JTL".
Given sony's track record, normally i'd agree with you. If there was a real end game, something with substance to keep the game fun and engaging after you've mastered pilot id most definatly agree with you. But i feel that something must be done. After a point in the game there is simply very little to nothing left to do, and you'll reach that point sooner then you think. Remastering pilot again and again, or blowing each other to bits for no reason at all only carries the game so far. Personnaly, Its already gone stale to me.
Of course, I'm a total badgehor, so I'll keep going anyway, but I'm definately not as enthusiastic about the idea as I was when I started.
Kalia wrote:
Duci... I'm all for added content. I just don't want them trying anything remotely close to "balance". New quests, things to do, places to see, etc etc would be great.
Problem therein (and you know this as well as i do
) that if they ADD anything, they'll add more bugs to go with it. They touch JTL in any way (hell they dont even need to target it directly), they're going to break something. So were damned either way 
The easiest and safest way is to rebalance the ROTW ships. The problem with those damn things is their making the same mistakes they did on the ground in space. They overpowered the players, the content became too trivial, and the CU was the result.
I would rather them tone down/ adjust/ rebalance/ nerf the ROTW fighters, then have the game turned upside down by a space CU. Granted it wont happen anytime in the next year, but it would happen. And its a good bet if we get a space CU, it will take like 3 to 5 people just to kill a stupid gunboat.
Message Edited by Ducimus on 08-19-2005 07:09 AM
Right now, if I so wish, I could craft a souped up MarkV Engine and toss that into an A-Wing and then use the remaining almost 16k to squeeze in just enough parts to make the ship just usable in combat. With your suggestion, that seems like that possibility would be taken away entirely.
There would also be no reason for Heavy Z-95s, which are an excellent starfighter platform for those of us who enjoy variety, in fact almost all the Rebel Pilots in my guild have and use Heavy Z-95s on a regular basis. Slapping arbitrary limits on the cert level these ships can handle will likely cause them to disappear from space almost entirely. (As I assume these "Tier 1" starfighters should have only allow up to Cert 4 equipment available for them.)
The way the system is now is more then perfect.
IL-Vec wrote:
Obviously there's going to need to be some work done tweaking existing item value ranges on stuff like shields (I still can't see why level 10 crafted shields suck so much) and perhaps engines (since restriction to lower engines will kill your YPR too) but I definately think it'd be a much more workable system than the current one. There would still be a lot of ship differentiation and sacrificing that need to be made, but overall an interceptor would fill the role of an interceptor, a superiority fighter a jack of all trades but master of none, a bomber a flying death brick, etc.
The only thing that'd need to be tweaked in this case would be the YPR of the Heavy X-Wing,(what the hell for?? an additional 80k mass was a bit much but why touch the PYR?)and maybe the ARC-170 as well (though to offset the ARC changes you could easily swap the lower rear turret to frontal nose guns... *hint, hint*)(it also needs no PYR changes please stop asking for a nerf in disguise this is the only part of game I still love)
understatement of the day award think through stats on lvl 4 and under engines they'd NEVER be flown again and it has nothing to do with PYR you try flying a .8-.85 spd mod ship with a 60-70 spd engine TOPS
that's just one point that jumped out, please current system works it's the ROTW fighters that messed it up not the system itself
please there are players that ONLY play jtl anymore because it is so unique in how the system is set up, ROTW was the problem not the system
Message Edited by IL-Vec on 08-17-2005 01:09 AM
rols_cerentz wrote:
Lame. Plain and simple. Your suggestion would nerf every ship, in one way or another.
Right now, if I so wish, I could craft a souped up MarkV Engine and toss that into an A-Wing and then use the remaining almost 16k to squeeze in just enough parts to make the ship just usable in combat. With your suggestion, that seems like that possibility would be taken away entirely.
There would also be no reason for Heavy Z-95s, which are an excellent starfighter platform for those of us who enjoy variety, in fact almost all the Rebel Pilots in my guild have and use Heavy Z-95s on a regular basis. Slapping arbitrary limits on the cert level these ships can handle will likely cause them to disappear from space almost entirely. (As I assume these "Tier 1" starfighters should have only allow up to Cert 4 equipment available for them.)
The way the system is now is more then perfect.
Err, my example of the A-Wing was using a level 10 engine. I think I see what point you're trying to make, but you used a really bad example, considering my very first stat listing certed the A-Wing for level 10 engines.
Your comments about the heavy Z-85 also help highlight the RotW fighter problem even more. Why the heck are most of the pilots in your guild flying a republic era starfighter? You also assume wrong in that I'd cap everything at tier 4 for tier one ships. Skillbox determines nothing but your options. At tier 1, you'd be able to fly light fighters (which have their own advantages and disadvantages), tier 2 you'd learn to fly standard bombers, tier 3 superiority fighters, etc. Your assuming I'm going into this with the standard MMO mantra of higher level = better, which is not the case. I'm assuming higher level = more options. If I were to do another arbitrary stat write-up for the Z-95, I'd give it slightly less speed than the A-Wing and more armor/firepower.