Squad Leader Archive

Just thought I'd repost this out of holo's mailbag 9/4. Its his third post, talking about mind heal:

"Your idea is interesting, but t does make entertainers more bard-like, which I am not crazy about (but perhaps some entertainers are?). The Squad Leader alternative is also interesting.

Frankly, this situation is a bit of a loophole in the design. We did not catch the medic exploit until too late, so we removed the mind pool heal from them, without creating an alternative. Mind is not supposed to be the determining factor in a combat."

Yeah I saw that post, kinda interesting indeed. Not to be totally negative here but doesnt the mind damage loophole sound retarded?

What are they freaking morons? Seriously they actually proceeded with development and planning without seeing the HUGE exploit if medics could heal the little blue bar lol? I would have seen that right away. Stuff like this makes me wonder about the competence of the DEVs. Maybe they were just terribly rushed and disorganized but the end result was an unhealable health bar(mind Damage).

What they want to do with this situation is make mind( blue bar ) and add another bar Mind Health......blue bar wont kill you whengone, but the lets say pink bar would. Healers can heal the pink bar but not affect the blue one.

To keep things fair with mind shots, any mind shot would do equal damage toblue bar and pink bar....but only be fatal if there is no pink bar.....anyways sounds complicated maybe...but its the only way to get the game working as they intended.

Sooner or later they will have to adopt a similar idea.

BTW SOE hates bards with a passion...this I can tell you. I played bard for 2 yrs in Everquest and I got thefeeling if they ever had it to do over again they would have never made the bard class.

Bards are part of the reason we really dont get speed boosting skills.....alot of the reason are skill tree is so gimpy. SL is the closest class to the the group nature of all bard skills and the complicated cbard in this game. Sounds nutty but bards in EQ were true support classes, which were necessary for a group to survive without other alternatives. Only problem wasthegroup nature of the skills and the complicated coding made them full of exploits....they fixed most of them but it really was a challenege I m sure.

Bards were only for very skilled players who understood group dynamics extremely well. If any class translates to SL I would say bard does.....only downside is a fool could never play a bard, you had to be quick on your feet and also very good at pushing the same 4 buttons over and over lol....still I would love SL if it had the group support abilities of the EQ bard.

I dont know how to edit and somehow the above post got terrinbly screwed up..my apologies

Former Bard here!

/salute

Yes, Squad Leader needs some Bard-like abilities (hey Devs: if you are afraid of Bard-esque exploits, just give us passive group bonuses that WORK... how can you exploit that???)

Incidentally, I find this highly interesting since over a the Rifleman forums we've been told time and time again that our unique ability that is supposed to make up for the fact that we fire once every 7 seconds, have no chance in hell of hitting our target inside of 40 meters, get a 250% penalty when hit with melee damage, and have no way of keeping our targets inside our optimum range is that we do "mind damage" which, they are quick to point out, is unhealable.

I find it staggering and also disturbingly contradictory that Holo didn't mean the system to work this way.

On the flip side, I wish there WAS someone that could heal Mind pool. Since in PvP I usually hit the other guy's Mind pool for less than my own Mind pool HAM costs.

How about this one:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=481168#M481168

"I'll be honest and say that bard types were left out specifically because they were not very Star Warsy. Having musicians other than John Williams playing during a lightsaber battle just felt wrong for the setting. We tried instead to give the typical bardic role to Squad Leaders.

-Raph Koster,

Creative Director "

"

---

ESD wrote:
Is the typical bardic role in your mind (or the DEVs) to be useless? Have an entire profession filled with huge mind cost skills and passive abilities that do not show any kind of noticable benefit to the group. Just wondering, what is a bardic role? What should a Squad Leader add toa group?

---

Well, no. It's supposed to be group buffs and group coordination.

-Raph Koster,

Creative Director "

Ya, that wasn't quite the answer I was looking for... but oh well.

ESD: I, too, am getting frustrated with the "hush hush" approach that we (and now it seems only we) SLs are getting... it looks like it will be one of two things:

1. They have major plans that don't include "PC Handlers", but don't want to release it because the "PC Handlers" idea was REALLY only a "Hey, what do you guys think of this" sort of thing (and got major backlash)


2. They really dont care what we think, and will do what the hell they please whether it screws up the game or not

I really really hope it is #1, but I am getting doubtful...

As a Master Nerfoleer I can tell you with some experience that I have no faith in the Devs to fix something right on the first, second, third, fourth, tenth, 100th time...

It's both. They don't care what we think and they don't want any comments on their ideas so they are not telling us anymore. chances are we will end up as pc handlers regardless, or worse off than we are now.

Maybe I should concider being a ranger, bounty hunter or commando. They seem to be getting all the love while the other proffessions are getting screwed.