Teras Kasi Archive

Holocron,

The fact that you have taken time to answer our questions, whether or not we like the answers, is a step in the right direction. I have two comments to make, and hopefully you can reflect on them.

1) The mindset among the devs seems to be that the majority of the player classes are too powerful for the creatures in the game. I would have hoped that this would have shown in beta, and that someone at SOE would have been smart enough to figure out that it is easier to start someone out with a lower level skill and give them a higher level skill down the road, than to give them a higher level skill and try to take it away. Any explanation for this?

2) Knockdown moves in general. These are powerful moves designed to render a player with no attack and little defense. I understand that you guys have to walk the line between balance and reality, butany reasonable personcan see that bonking someone on the head with your fist shouldn't take half your life away. This samereasonable personshould be able to determine that it is more likely for someone to knock a player on his back from 0-5m than it is to shoot someone in the leg at 30m. Doesn't it make more sense to reflect the chance of a successful knockdown accordingly,have the move use lessHAM and only make it usable every 30 seconds? I know that 30 seconds may seem high to you TKA's, but if you use it and it keeps them down for 5 and they aren't able to attack for another 10, then you really only have a wait time of 15 seconds. Plus with knockdown 2, they should be dizzy and have the chance to fall down again if they posture change. This stops the spamming and the stacking all in one easy fix. This could be implemented for all classes with a knockdown move, not just TKA.

Thanks again.

Dear Holo ...

You are still missing the point.

At the end of the day if you give us FREE knockdowns and 100,000 point damage hits we are still broken.

There is not a TKA around that complains about taking on even "con" creatures in combat. We are FINE there. However the issue is RANGED combat and you have managed to dance past every single post on this thread about that.

RANGED ISSUES

1) A newbie dancer with a CDEF fresh off the psace station will still kill any TKA. We can never close. Therefore even if we have one shot kills or free specials it MAKES NO DIFFERENCE.

2) In order to balance the fact that the design team KNEW that ranged combatants would use "kite" tactics against every mob the mobs HAM and damage were boosted in a near expnential fashion so that if they ever DID catch a range person they could kill them inone or two shots andthey had so much HAM they would last long enough to have a CHANCE to catch them. If you play melee though due to this game design you are simply smeared on the pavement in mid or higher PvE.

3) PvP ... again see point one. We have to start next to a player and get lucky or we auto loose. We have burst run ... they have burst run. We can never close up onthem. And this Lunge you speak of? Perhaps we can get a fix to it so it works. However if you go out and allow lunge a range of what ... 60M? I thinkyou will draw even more flak.

4) In order to "compete" with ranged folks who can slice weapons and add enhancement tape you gave us knuckles in Beta. However we now pay HAM for the VKs AND the unarmed which is what is cuasign this double to triple HAM costs we have that one shot kill us if we do special moves. If you have yo make a VK tweak simply make themdo NO DAMAGE BOOST and leave them as the game tools they are for us to slice speed, efficientcy, and add tape too and focus on altering our core HAM on unarmed costs.


So please Holo ... yes the HAM is whacked becuase of the VK doubling but no matter what you do to fix that you will not fix the fact that if melee cannot break the "kite cycle" then whole skill sets gets worthless.

GIVE US STATIC MINOR SPEED BOOSTS SO WE CAN CLOSE IN if you dont want to upset the "balance" by fixing us the way you fixed mobs by jacking up their HAM at higher levels.

Giving action cost reduction across the board is nice for Trandoshan TKA's. But there are other species that would like to play Teras Kasi. For a Rodian character this is no help. I think the reductions needs to be balanced with the idea in mind that this is need to be usefull for ALL SPECIES, not only the ones that are will be most likely chosen for this profession (i.e. Trandoshan)

Kin

It sounds to me like you realize that the pistoleers got WAY too much to start off with and are going to deal with this. The real question is then, WHY DID YOU WASTE YOUR TIME NERFING US AND DOING NOTHING TO THEM, IN EFFECT MAKING THEM EVEN MORE POWERFUL. (heh, almost couldn't find a way to stress that word after stressing the whole sentance). Please, we told you how overpowered they were pre-nerf and you did nothing but nerf us instead. Balance this.

"Don't think in terms of encounters within the game; we're talking about baseline combat ability here."

Isn't it the whole point to think of in game encounters? If we have a 50/50 shot of taking down these monsters 1 on 1 and they never appear in that setting, what is the point? The whole thing is, in the situations we will encounter, we will rarely be able to get more than 200 xp out of a challenging mob because ALL MOBS APPEAR IN GROUPS.

And what is the fun if there's a 50/50 shot of us dieing and having to run 1k meters back out to where we were before and eventually having to do corpse recoveries? Most games move away from down time but with every change you are implimenting, you seem to be increasing it. Less downtime = more fun. We don't need any more time sinks than we already have in this game.

The next thing is, if you plan to throw nerf after nerf at us, shouldn't you hit the most overpowered things first in order for the comparisons to be better all around? Right now, BH's can dizzy with fire knockdown and then throw off underhand shots forpennies while best case scenario is for us to drop our vk and hopeto not incap ourselves (back to the downtime).

Here's a few ideas that I think you should try implementing.

VK's provide armor piercing. I think unarmed damage at the master level should be in line with vk's only without the armor piercing. To go along with your reductions, I would like to see kd cost drop by 25% without vk's and about 50-60% with. We also need moreweapon attack typesto fight towards weaknesses.

I would like to see damage upped on all targeted hits like body hit, mind hit, and leg hit by about 50% and costs reduced by about 70-80% (currently does about20% increasedtargeted damage for 300 ham cost with vk's). Pistoleers do about 100% increased damage for about 30 ham cost.

I would like to see the combo moves equipped with the ability to either apply certain effects to replace those at lower levels or with the ability to close range posture change. A bleed attack or a root attack would be a nice addition. Stun/blind/intimidate/dizzy effects would be nice assuming the proposals I make on those. I would even take a reduction in damage if the bonuses were nice enough.

Stun should reduce attack speed by about 25% and increase damage taken by either just melee or all attacks by about 25%. Blind should greatly reduce accuracy (maybe a 50 point or 100 point penalty), reduce defense modifiers, and run speed. Both of these should apply to player and monster alike.

I would like to see unarmed hits brought up to 2X/2.5X/3X damage instead of the 1.5X/2X/(2.25?)X damage and come with decreased ham costs.

Power boost needs to do something.

Meditate needs to improve regeneration rates (lowers down time = more fun)

Force of will success rate needs to go from about 33% to about 50%.

Monsters that are knocked down need to stay down for the duration of the effect for your 50% increased damage while knocked down to do something.

You need to do something about monsters and players sliding away while knocked down, as well. This doesn't hurt other classes, it really only hurts melees and is one of our main reasons for spamming kd.

Increased vk range is good. I would like to see it upped 2 more meters on all forms of attack to allow us to hitlarge sized critters.

Decay rates on vk's need to be reduced to be in line with other classes weapon decay rates. Our weapons still decay much faster than anyone else's.

Can't think of much else right now but these are pretty important.

Holo,

A thread was recently started by thunder, our correspondant, about possible TKA weapons. Is there a legitimate option of expanding the TKA weapon arsenal outside of the single VK? If so, is this purely being researched or is there a possible implementation timeframe?

in consideration of my proposals to blind getting a run reduce, I think only melees should be able to apply the effect or if both are able to apply it, then only the melee's blind will apply the reduced run speed. Otherwise, it'll just make it worse for melees in PvP.

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Holocron wrote:

OK, let me start by saying that we are positive that these changes will need iteration, but that's also why we are posting them as proposals so you can sanity check them:

• Across the board action cost reduction (Not changing knockdowns)


• Improved chance of a defensive move firing (General Combat change)


• Vibroknucklers




• Increasing max range on vibroknucklers to 5 meters


• Changing Health Cost from 32..59 to 18..36 (better)


• Changing Action Cost from 29..46 to 30..54 (different)


• Changing Mind Cost from 15..29 to 18..36 (different)


• These values are modified to be slightly higher than the default unarmed move costs as this is a damage increasing weapon. Because the move costs are being decreased significantly, this should be a much smoother transition.

Thoughts?

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It looks real good... thanks!

for the unarmed combo, a disarming effect would be nice, as well.

Holocron wrote:

"Heh... go visit the rifleman forum right now, or the creature handler forum anytime, and so on, if you really think that we're singling you guys out for nerfing. We are not playing favorites. We simply cannot change everything in one day. "

Thanks for the clarification that the TK nerfs are just the beginning. Any chance you could provide use with a list of your "to be adjusted" professions so that we don't accidentally invest a lot of time in developing something in another profession that is going to suffer the same kind of devolution?

I think most folks agree that balancing all the professions is indeed fair, but most of us would like to avoid that sinking feeling that comesfrom spending a month or more developing a character to have him go through massivedowngrades in power and utility.

It would be a nice idea to have things like that added to "in development", "future plans" etc. so we know just what professions to steer clear of until they are balanced out.

By the way, a personal note to all of you trolls (fencers, pikemen, pistoleers) enjoying our plight - your day will come. Laugh while you can! The pikeman comments especially sickened me as they have a better knockdown than us now, whichI carefully avoided mentioning... until now. Please be sure to adjust *all* knockdowns to be in line with ours HAM-wise and I'll be quite happy to accept the change to our knockdown costs.

Thank you again for posting that this is just the first in a series of adjustments to be made. I think that makes all of us TK feel better and relieves us of the worry that we are being unfairly targetted by nerfs.

Dag, was hoping holo would comment on my wanted changes. Ah well.

Holo,

Just wondering, should we consider this a response to the latestTop 5 issues report or should we be looking for that in the future?

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Holocron wrote:

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Archon007 wrote:

"Blasters are a superior weapon at a distance" - I don't think anyone would or could argue this fact, but puting no abilty to close that DISTANCE was foolish and disturbing.

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That's what lunge is supposed to be.

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Lunge does 1 point of damage.