Smuggler Archive

No that I've played yet more and reflected on things, I've developed a few more thoughts on our crowd control and special abilities. I present them here for all to mull over and discuss, and maybe we can get something from them.

First, Crowd control. I don't mind the lack of AOE, and really, we're good for controlling... creatures. Snare, Root, State resist reduction, some attack-slowing... pretty good for creature PvE, especially at upper end content.

NPC crowd control(or anything ranged), however... it's not pretty. Let's review: Most NPCs have guns. That means:

Roots and snares: Ineffective. They just stand an shoot anyway. that leave, predominately, attack rate slowing and state resist reduction. Which isn't bad. LB and PS stacked will slow them to a crawl, though it doesn't last nearly long enough-- and they still fire during this period. Still, the reduced damage on your tank is a good thing.

PROBLEM: NPCs usually travel in groups. Tanks don't really hold group aggro so well. But you need to CC the whole group, which you can do one at a time with a fast pistol, or use a commando weapon for the AOE. Issue: You do this, they no longer shoot the tank. They shoot YOU. I don't know about you, but most smugglers aren't good at tanking, and even with /TKM in my template, I can't do it while I'm using a pistol. In the old days, this wouldn't be a big deal, since panic and Lowblow would take them completely out of action for a good 12 seconds or so, which gives a lot of time to do stuff. But that isn't the case anymore.

So the problem mostly becomes we can't CC groups without getting aggroed, and in the case of NPCs, we can't so much about it except take a lot of damage. Now, i see two solutions to this... Either the devs do something to make it more viable, or I need to take some Commando AOE, pop the CC, and then Feign before I die.

Now, for specials... Panic shot and Low Blow do the same thing, in differing detail. Panic shot reduces speed by a paltry 15 for something like 30seconds, and LB does the same by an excellent 40 points for a very short period(I think, 10 seconds). In short, Panic shot doesn't seem to reduce the speed enough to be all that useful, and LB doesn't last long enough. On top of that, we have two specials that do the exact same thing, which seems at odds with the CU's stated goals. And NEITHER of them do it particularly well.

So, there's my thoughts, after an afternoon spent hunting NPCs on tatooine. It didn't go so well, as one can probably conclude. I'd be interested to hear other thoughts, and maybe if it's a real probablem and not jsut me, Wes can do some talking for us.

I'll usually use a droid to pull a single enemy from a group - be them NPCs or creatures. Make sure that you start far enough away so that the droid pulls the NPC a good distance from his buddies before you start attacking.