Teras Kasi Archive

Holocron wrote:

"Heh... go visit the rifleman forum right now, "


TAKEN FROM THE REFLEMAN FORUM:

"The "math" thread persuaded us that we were wrong; there's enough other factors that we didn't account for that we agree that we're not looking at all the variables.

We're currently looking at restoring the armor piercing, but not putting the damage back. How does that sound in terms of balance?

-Raph Koster, Creative Director "


Ok - so, what do we have to do get you to see that we aren't all raving lunatics and that our own observations might just be as accurate as these guys?

I don't know the answer to that, except that like I've said before, I don't think childish name calling for flaming helps us much at all. Maybe we should take a look at their "math" thread and see what we can learn about convincing these people that there are real (and not fake or watered down by other nerfs) changes to be made.

I 100% agree with Danalog's proposal. Ranged specials should only be able to be done while standing still.

what is the point of getting to master or getting kd 2 if the ham costs are so outrageous? ....what was the point of leveling to this point if it is pretty much useless...if the ham costs are going to stay the same for kd ..get rid of it altogether and give us dodge evade ect ect as defense .and give us armor some what like a eq monk ...i'm betting vast majority of tka masters are not wearing any armor at all ...we need more defense and protection since kd is useless now ..

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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)


• Yes to the action cost reduction- NO to the knockdown.


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


• YES!! show us dodging (like my smuggler does) and put messages in our Combat chat window to show the defensive manuever taking place: ie- you dodged (insert PC/NPC name)'s attack or you failed to dodge (insert PC/NPC name)'s attack so that we knowthat our defensive skills are being put to use when calculating combat.


• Vibroknucklers




• Increasing max range on vibroknucklers to 5 meters


• Why would the length of our arm reach DECREASE when we equip a weapon? make it our range with vibroknuckles equiped to be the SAME as unequipped.


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


• Yes - now you're listening - less IS better


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


• No - Isyour definition of differenta euphemism for "We lowered your health cost so we could increase your action and mind costs."? this is not my idea of balance - you should balance us to other classes, not to our own HAM


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


• you're kidding right?? What part of NO don't you understand - our mind pool is small enough as it is - this change may be different as you put it, but that doesn't make it acceptable


• 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.


• True - but we still can't 1) hit while moving - last time I was chasing a guy in a fight I was able to hit him as well as tackle him to the ground to stop him from running away which brings me to my next point - 2) we can't close the distance when a PC/NPC runs away from us while creatures have no problem performing a) melee attacks from distances like 30m and b) creatures canhit us when we try to run away and creatures often can outrun us (burst run excepted - but we can only do it ONCE while creature seem to be able to do it multiple times without resting) close the distance between them and us to incap us and depending on the creature deathblow us while incapped.

Thoughts?

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So while I agree with some of your thoughts Holocron, as you can see by my replies, I have to disagree with some of your other suggestions. Please take a moment and put yourself in the customer's shoes and consider the following - is Teras Kasi a viable profession in SWG? (Do not answer this question from the standpoint of the developer!) Take a long hard look at what we are writing here - we are not fools, we are the people putting the food on your dinner table. I hope you don't want to go on a diet any time soon...

Here is what I propose Holocron, come visit me ingame and you and I can go out into the wilds so you can see my Teras Kasi get his butt handed to him by fighting one single mob of whites. (I think that you would be able to get into the game as a GM character and spawn a mob of white con humanoid creatures right?) This is a down to earth HONEST to GOODNESS offer Holocron, please come see me so that you can see once and for all what we are complaining about. And if I'm playing my Teras Kasi wrong, you can be there to tell me HOW I should play Teras Kasi.

Thanks.

Krellian Kruge.

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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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I have not real all 9 pages of response so some of this will be redendant.

1. Across the board reduction in specials cost. Woot!

2. An improved chance of a defense move firing. Woot!

3. VK's:

• Increased range. Woot! I can kill snakes now.


• Reduced Health costs. Waste. I will still just swap out my VK's to dospecials


• Increased Action costs. Waste. See above.


• Increased Mind costs. Waste. See above.

Unless VK's special costs are reduced to 0, I will always swap them out during a fight. In fact, I spend most of my time swaping stuff in and out instead of watching the fight, which is kind of a pain, but I live longer. This also affects my mobility to as sometime I need to move around and fight and its hard to concentrate on moving targets, keyboard, mouse, etc... The whole VK concept for TK is kinda broken I think.

FYI i killed a dark jedi with nothing but level 3 rifle

mobs are not smart.

"What gives is that they are also way overpowered. That's why I keep saying "don't compare yourselves to pistoleer" (or whatever). As I mentioned in the "Open Discussion On Balancing" thread in SWG Discussion, everyone feels they are underpowered because they are comparing themselves to pistoleers. But they're missing the point that pistoleers are way OVERpowered, and so is most everyone else. If we balance everyone off of pistoleer, the game will be WAY easier, you'll run out of content in a trice, you'll say there's no high end game, etc etc. And the core of the issue isn't that there's no tough mobs, is that players are way way overpowered.

Over time, the natural progression is for this to get WORSE. In three yearsat this rate, I'd expect a rank newbie to solo kimogilas, because that's what happens in online games--players get smarter, mobs don't.

-Raph Koster, Creative Director "


hey holo,

this is what really bothers me or rather i dont understand.

at the mo you are telling us not to compare to the pistoleers b/c they are too are over powered... fair enough..so all the other profs prolly need to be re examined, and i dont feel like you are picking on the TKA's so long as the changes are meant to apply to the entire game accordingly...

how ever if we dont compare ourselves to the other classes then all we have left are the list of creatures you posted for TKM to match up against with a 50/50 chance of winning...


well for one, and this has been said already i am sure but agrro is what i am concerned about....

what is considered by the devs as a fair number of aggro whites that a TKM should be able to fight and still have that 50/50 chance? and what creatures ?

i am just trying to figure out what the dev baseline is....

I just want to make sure the dev's know how broken knockdown is, for TKA at least:

When a mob is knocked down, it jumps straight back up, without the proper animation. Then it proceeds to stand there for a certain amount of time useless, standing there doing nothing but being hammered. Is this intended? It kinda defeats the purpose of "knocking them down" if they just get back up and you get no bonus for them being on the ground.

Also the time it takes for them to recover stacks. In other words 5 knock downs strung together, although suicide right now, the mob will get back up, and stand there, uselessfor the length of 5 knockdowns. This means once you get a certain quota of sucessful knockdowns, you have nothing to fear from the mob you are attacking.

This is a real problem because if you at least had to wait until it stood up again to use it, the mob has a chance to hurt you, at the moment they have none. The reason I say this is not because I want knockdown back, but I think making the costs so high its useless (200 ham without knucklers, 450+ with) is a bad decision rather than fixing the style and effect itself.

Otherwise the rest of the fixes are ace.

Thank you Holocron, for adressing our concerns.

Holocron, PLEASE specify what you mean by "Across the board action cost reduction". Is this JUST for action or for H,A, and M. Please tell me its for all three.

Holo I know I posted this question 3 times and you ignored it 3 times. But please answe my questions in this thread which are on page 10, 12, and something around there.

Question is again:

To what ends are you trying to nerf us? Are you seeing TKA's in the future fighting several things worth the exp in a row, or one life on the line fight followed by a good amount of downtime? Do you see us getting anywhere at master? What do you see our role compared to other classes in pvp and pve?

And why are you increasing mind costs? We can't heal that and since we can't heal it we will have a lot more downtime and faster incaps. Is this feature meant to slow down our exp gain and change it from fast paced action into everquest one fight every several minutes type of action?

Personally I don't want a 50/50 chance of killing those things. As a TKA master I want a 50/50 chance of surviving a 2 or 3 on me when they BAF and I executefunctional KDs. As it is now, when 3 of anything gang up on us, we don't have enough HAM to execute very many knockdowns. I want the mobs to kill me - not me kill me. KD NEEDS TO BE REDUCED or some adequate equalizer.

I say this in the interest of what is fun and I don't think it will overpower us. And yes, this is still a game and it should be fun.

It really isn't any fun walking back from the clone centre.

Aurilius.Starsider.mTKA

Naruto, I would still complain while monsters can stand right back up and while monsters and players can slide away from me at near full speed while knocked down. It needs to work as intended before your suggestion could be made and it would still be too powerful because of it's abilities to render something useless.