Squad Leader Archive

I like many of the suggestions for new squad leader commands. I like the idea of giving us a cool weapon to use at the higher levels. But the one singular thing that would make us extraordinarily desirable to a group are passive combat bonuses.

GENERAL TOUGHNESS - 5% at Novice, a tree which increased this number to 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, and then culminating at 30% for Master Squad Leader would greatly reduce the damage taken by members of your squad. The implications of this are obvious (as anyone who was witnessed the effects of Unarmed Toughness knows) and this can be easily justified by the greater morale of a group with a strong leader. Teams who have great trust and faith in your leadership would feel the effects of battle and damage less and fight with more heart and dedication.

DAMAGE BONUS - same increments - 5% at Novice, then in 5% groups up to 30%. This again can be justified by the focus and determination provided by a strong leader as well as motivation and morale. Perhaps including an accuracy bonus as well would be nice but it isn't totally necessary. The damage bonus would suffice.

GENERAL MOVE SPEED BONUS - again, same as above, but maybe in smaller increments so that everyone in a MSL group isn't burst running all the time. So maybe a 2% bonus at Novice, 2% for each mobility box after that, and 5% at Master bringing us to 15%. Again, morale and determination.

The code is already in the game to provide ranged defense, melee defense, and terrain negotiation for the group, so it stands to reason that these would be rather easy to implement. There is no reason we should not ask for this, and it would make us far more effective as a group leader than painting targets or whatnot. I'm not saying that we shouldn't ask for those skills and abilities as well, I just think that our passive bonuses are either being overlooked or added in the form of commands. We should be able to give commands that give combat bonuses, but it should be IN ADDITION TO this set of passive bonuses.

I'm bumping this because it is important.

With Damage Mitigation comming soon, this will be completely overhauled.

"This" as in what I stated above? The same general principles will apply. The word "toughness" only applies to a general idea of Damage Reduction.

Right, but the mitigation is going to go something like this:

At damage mitigation +1 you will reduce the amount of dmg by 20%

At +2 it will reduce by 40%

at +3 it will reduce by 60%.

If you add on to that Grouped Damage Mitigation of +3 the amount of damage done would actually be 40% of 40%. If this is how it gets implimented, we're about to get a good boost for grouping. Characters that group with a Master SL could potentially be looking at taking less than 20% of the initial damage delt to them.

Actually mitigation reduces the range of damage. For easy math purposes lets assume a weapon with 100-200 dmg. Mitigation 3 would reduce the range by 60% so it would be considered 100-140 dmg. Once damage is applied Center of Being (for the melee types) reduces the total damage done. So basically mitigation reduces the potential max damage while CoB reduces actual damage done. It would be fantastic if SL had a group ability similar to CoB.

Not quite right, DarthLithic. Damage mitigation only reduces the RANGE of damage that can be done, effectively reducing the "max" damage dealt by a weapon but doing nothing about the minimum. If a weapon does 1-100 dmg, with Mitigation 3 it will only do 1-40, reducing the overall damage by 60%. However, if a weapon does 90-100, which is more like reality with lower-level content, Mitigation 3 would only reduce this to 90-94--a 6% drop.

That is why this comes as something of a "package deal" with the creature rebalance. Take for example the level 125 AT-ST. Previously the damage range was something like 1100-1200. After the rebalance, it will become closer to 700-1300, meaning that damage mitigation will actually play a role in your overall toughness against them. After the rebalance, only the most challenging creatures in the game will have a large range of damage for mitigation to work against. Players with Mitigation fighting lower end content will hardly see any noticable difference.

Well then, in the case of damage mitigation and / or damage reduction, we should be rallying hard to give a passive bonus to damage mitigation. On top of that, we shouldask for a command similar in effect to center of balance but for the entire group and perhaps to a lesser degree than TKA's get it. And we should be hollering about things like this now, while change is imminent but perhaps not every single element of said change has been set in stone.

No, in fact, I change my mind.

Everyone is going to get damage mitigation to some extent, so we should have a passive bonus to actual damage reduction. Call it 'toughness' or 'that thing like center of balance that squad leaders can do', whatever. We should have a passive defense bonus that increases with levels of SL mastery and reduces the amount of actual damage taken by our squad in combat. If we wanted to have a command that either increased this ability for a short time or gavea temporary bonus to damage mitigation, fine, but it is imperative that we have this (as well as the other things I mentioned) as passive, automatic group bonuses.

In fact,it is THE imperative.

Gordon, while I really like the idea of additional and improved passive bonuses, I prefer new and improved active abilities for one simple reason: Passives are boring.

Looking at this from an extreme viewpoint, imagine for a moment that we got all of the passives we requested and no actives.... Squad Leaders are now walking buffs. (<sarcasm> yay. </sarcasm> Sure, everyone wants to make friends with a Squad Leader so they can get these bonuses, but as SL's we'll continue to get the job of tending the mounts at the gate of Fort Tusken and gathering SL xpwhile leaving all the "real" fighting to people who haven't used 54% of their total skillpoints becoming squad leaders.

On the other hand, if all we got were active bonuses and no passives, our "draw" might be reduced a bit from an all passive SL template, but at least when we managed to make groups, we'd actually have something to DO on the missions.

Squad Leaders uniqueness is derived from our ability to enhance a group, but as much as anything else...We should be striving to ensure that we actually have a profession that's FUN to play. In the end, we will hopefully see improvements and additions to BOTH active and passiveSL abilities.But ourcurrent passives, weak as they may be, are already our most valuable asset so it seems clear to methat it's the active abilities that are in the most dire need of repair.

Oh, I'm not saying we should get a big giant gun and commands aren't wanted or needed. And never ever think I'm saying we should get these INSTEAD of commands.

These are the base, where we start from, the automatics. They made a hamfisted attempt at giving us something sorta kinda like this and it didn't (also doesn't)work. We should have had these things from the beginning. A TKA with toughness always has toughness, but then he has specials. As a master pistoleer I'm always superfast with a pistol, regardless of whether I'm using specials or not. None of these constant things interfere with or preclude these classes from having / getting specials.

I WANT cool commands, I WANT to knock all my enemies down, and I WANT most of what everyone else thinks of as a good idea. But this is what I demand. It makes sense, there's no reason we shouldn't have them, and they would only opendoors for specials and commands to be even cooler. There may be one that I haven't thought of yet, but there is no command or ability that we've thought up yet that will make us nearly as desirable as group leaders as these.

This, as far as I'm concerned, is issue #1. Not issue #1-#5, end all be all, or anything. But we need this. The devs knew it or they wouldn't have made the attempt at similar things from the getgo. It seemed to have been more or less forgotten in favor of buttons to push and guns to whip out, and while I'm all in favor fo those things, I know even more that these passivesare where we have to start from.

The necessity that goes /bump in the night.

I think a cool gun which could do decent damage, AND have a ranged knock down ability would be great. You get one guy charging you from 40m away, you fire a shot that knocks him down. Then, as he is getting up, you're still nailing him with regular damge. It would have to be balanced with other weapons and hopefully not suck much HAM as the SL profession itself sucks too much as it is.