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Antediluvian

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Everything posted by Antediluvian

  1. I've been out of touch with this game for a good few months and had no idea about this but it sounds amazing! Looking forward to starting the expansion now!
  2. I just started playing again and for the next month atleast I'm on the the other side of the Atlantic, which means frantically trying to do all the group content before everyone goes to sleep. I would be interested in this.
  3. Ahh ok it's been a while since I did the SW story. It's exactly for reasons like this a "replay cutscenes" feature would be great. Still I should have picked up on that. Well, was he? His agents were doing all the work and they weren't exactly ritual-like. Maybe the Voss one was, but the others were "trigger massive explosion and kill lots of people". Maybe you're right and the preparation phase, which required all these deaths, took it all out of him, I still think they could have elaborated on that more. For example I think it would have been quite cool if you burst into the room just as he was starting his ritual, then you could have some sort of fight mechanic where he would drain prisoner/jedi/sith to become more powerful. And it's /facepalm moments like this which show you shouldn't take me seriously
  4. This would be my first guess: First start the replay function. This could be triggered by a legacy tab, talking to your ship droid, activating the holo-terminal, whatever... At this point store all current values of companion affections, LS/DS alignment and any flags indicating NPC deaths. These flags must be stored somewhere on your character for consistency in later cutscenes. Use your current characters appearance and itemization. It is highly unlikely they stored what your character looked like, apart from the first cutscene. Replay the desired cutscene (not sure how easy it would to "simply play" cutscene number x). Do not interfere with the cutscene in any way. Let the player make all the choices he/she wants, even major decisions like killing people. When the cutscene finishes reset all affections, LS/DS points and kill flags to their previous values (you stored them before running the cutscene). This is obviously still a massive over simplification but you should be able to take care of all the "consequences" without digging into each and every cutscene. Normally if you press Esc after you loose some affection, the cutscene ends and your affection is unchanged. From this we can see that these types of changes happen after the cutscene finishes (sometimes not even until the questline finishes). The possibilities for all these affection and LS/DS are so great I would expect them to have some sort generic "apply all changes at the end" function. I could be wrong though. However to enforce your kill decisions (remove the player choice) you probably will have to dig into each and every cutscene. This can easily be explained lore wise by calling these replays "Force Visions". The future is always in motion, the force is merely showing how your past could have been different etc etc. One major pitfall I can think of is how the kill flags are stored. If they are stored in a way which is impossible to modify, that could screw up all the above.
  5. Just finished the class story last night and I have to say I was a little disappointed, so rant incoming. (I know there's a similar thread but that's focused more on the fight mechanics). Potential spoilers follow. This is my 3rd character after SI and SW so on some level the entire game builds up to this fight with the emperor. First you have him described in those Jedi Archive videos that were released around launch time. He also appeared in the Revan book which I thought did quite a good job of building up his back story. For the majority of the game you don't actually get to see him and he is only talked about in revered / fearful tones, which I think it's great as it emphasizes his power and adds a mysterious vibe to it. Then during the JK story the veil is slowly unraveled, as it should be. First you hear his voice (which is quite good) through Kira, then you have the moment on his fortress taking on the Jedi Masters but he's still hidden behind his mask. I thought this scene was pretty cool. Considering all this I thought the final confrontation was a little disappointing. I just didn't feel the character had much presence. For starters considering he's such an important character I think they could have put a bit more effort into the character model. You can tell for example much more work was put into Malgus and Satele, heck even the trooper with a scar on his face in the republic intro video looked better than the emperor. Maybe this is justified as they get much more screen time and if this was just any other NPC I would agree. But he isn't just another NPC, the entire game revolves around him. When you finally walk up to him to have the climatic battle you need to be in awe of him. This guy just destroyed the minds of several Jedi Masters. I just wasn't feeling it. Just an ordinary NPC which you could probably make in the character creator, simple robes, no grand displays of power. Just a brief amount of dialog explaining his plans, you fight him, next thing you know he's on the floor and crushed beneath the roof. It didn't feel like I just had a titanic battle with possibly the most powerful being in existence. It just felt like I tripped up an old man and stabbed him in the back. Yeah the bit when you throw him was cool, and having him in the Dark Temple was a good idea but that was about it. Consider, for example, the last chapters of the SI and SW story lines. In the SI case you fight the main villain about 3 or 4 times, each time steadily becoming more powerful. In the SW case you systematically kill his supporters until you know he has no backup. Because you're interacting with the main villains for a much larger portion of the story you really get an "Ok let's finish this!" feeling when you walk through the final door. In addition the dialog and extra characters in the final scene are superb. Yeah the character models aren't anything special but that doesn't matter too much as these villains aren't as significant as the emperor and you know well in advance who you're going to be facing. The SI duel in particular does a great job of showing you the power you worked so hard to build up and unleashing it on the villain is quite satisfying. Comparing this to the JK ending and it all happened rather suddenly. After defeating Tol Broga he says something like: "The Emperor is on Dromund Kaas. Go to him. He is in a weakened state." Did I miss something here? He annihilated us last time. Why is he all of a sudden "weakened"? Sure I killed some of his followers and stopped some of his plans but nothing to affect him directly. It felt a bit "Oh yeah, you need to fight him now...". Overall his fall from power happened too suddenly. Also T3-M4. I was hoping to take Scourge / Kira with me and see what they had to say to each other. While the explanation for taking T3 made sense, some earlier warning might have been better. When I realized I had to take T3 he was only in level 20 gear. Having to leave Dromund Kaas to gear him up and come back broke the rhythm. Oh and last point, which applies to the game as a whole really: facial animations are a bit off
  6. I would find it nice just recap story elements that you've already done. For example I have a 35 consular that I haven't been on in a while and I have no idea what's happening with the class story. Something like Legacy Force Visions where you could replay some of the major moments any in any of your characters stories.
  7. So it seems to me that a lot of those problems you mention could go away if Alacrity was changed to affect cooldowns of all abilities instead of just GCD. Then you wouldn't have to worry about hitting the discrete points, instead just the total time of your rotation would shrink depending on your Alacrity value. Unless BW make such a change, you're right, Alacrity seems quite wasteful. What about Crit vs Surge though? Your dps gain by increasing Crit will be proportional to your Surge. Likewise, your dps gain by increasing your Surge will be proportional to your Crit. Therefore I would expect stacking Crit would be better, just because Surge ratings are naturally much larger.
  8. Ahh ok I didn't realise that, little bit counter-intuitive, but it makes things much more symmetric with crit and surge. Kind of undermines everything I wrote So the crit / surge / alacrity % I used above would include these effects from talents. So Lightening Strikes in this case would have a base surge of 100%, so I would've expected crit to scale as well as alacrity in this case. For DoT and Death Field that would be surge of 80% so so an increase in alacrity by 1% would be better than 1% crit.
  9. So after searching the forums I've noticed many people essentially saying alacrity is a wasteful stat and the reasons generally fall into two categories: 1) alacrity doesn't affect internal cool-downs so it messes with the dps rotation for certain classes, 2) a casting time reduction of 0.05s (or whatever it is for the relevant spell) doesn't seem like a lot. While the first reason seems like solid reasoning, if 1) is not a problem, alacrity to me seems like quite a good stat. Reasoning: Suppose we have a simple training dummy situation and you cast N spells, each doing damage D (assuming 100% hit rate because you maxed out accuracy). Then: Total damage dealt = N*D Some of these casts will critically hit, providing some additional damage N*D*c*s. c = crit % (atleast 5% + buffs, gear etc.) s = surge % (atleast 50% + buffs, gear, etc.). Then: Total damage = N*D*(1 + c*s). If the your spell normally takes t seconds (including GCD) to cast and you have alacrity % a, then its new cast time will be t* (1 - a). So for example if t = 1.5s and a = 10% = 0.1, then the new cast time will be 1.5*0.9s = 1.35s. The time it took to cast N spells is N*t*(1 - a). Your average dps is then: dps = (total damage) / (total time) = (D / t) * (1 + c*s) * / (1 - a). The quantity if a is small (which it is in most cases), 1 / (1 - a) is well approximated by (1 + a + a*a + a*a*a + ...). The dots represent an infinite number of terms which can be neglected. If a is small, a*a is very small, a*a*a is extremely small etc. So if you repeatedly spam the same spell at a training dummy you dps will be approximately given by dps = (D / t) * (1 + c*s) * (1 + a + a*a + ...). There's a couple of things to note about this formula. First of all, dps scales with crit % and surge % linearly where where it scales non-linearly with alacrity %. This means as your alacrity % gets larger and larger the extra terms in the series become more and more important so you get more bang for your buck. This is simply because as your cast time goes to zero your dps goes to zero as it is damage / time. This is why we have global cool-downs in the first place. Secondly, even neglecting this effect, your dps is still dps = (D / t) * (1 + c*s) * (1 + a) For example, assuming only a base surge of 50%, s = 0.5, then dps = ( D / t ) * ( 1 + 0.5*c ) * ( 1 + a ). It is easy to see that a 1% increase in alacrity is better than a 1% increase in crit, simply because crit is "handicapped" by surge. To bring crit on equal footing to alacrity, you will need 100% surge (difficult / impossible?). The exact same reasoning can be applied to surge instead crit. To bring surge on equal footing to alacrity you will need 100% crit! Even you succeed in either of these, you will still be fighting alacrity's non-linear scaling. Disclaimer: Obviously if your class has a complicated rotation relying on particular procs then all of the above goes straight out of the window. As none of the above depends on gear It also doesn't take into account diminishing returns or stat scaling. So gaining 10% alacrity in gear could be much harder than gaining 10% crit for example (I don't know these numbers). I also don't have the time / in-game funds to actually test any of this. However if it is a straight % choice between alacrity and crit / surge (for example in lowest level talents in sorc corruption tree) alacrity seems like a good choice to me?
  10. So after returning from a 6 month break I realize all my skill points have been reimbursed so maybe it's time for a fresh start. I was previously specceed in a healing and liked doing the odd operation, although way before that I was experimenting with a lightening / madness hybrid spec which seemed quite fun, so I'm quite open to either healing or dps. Basically, would you recommend healing or dps for playing ops? With recent changes do sorcerers perform significantly better in one area or another? At the minute I'm tempted to go healing again because dps classes are more common so its traditionally more valuable.
  11. I know this would never happen but from the sounds of it, a certain "recently revealed controller using touchpads" would work quite well here
  12. This sounds really quite awesome. How is the UI though? In particular do you have a 3d radar? The last flight sims played extensively were the X-Wing series. They had 2 circles, 1 showing everything in front and 1 showing everything behind. Is it similar to that?
  13. Back before the game was released I remember the devs saying they would focus on making you feel heroic. In particular "several people hitting a big monster isn't heroic" as opposed to a few people fighting hordes of enemies. Now I appreciate some monsters need to be big so everyone can see what's going on but I still think the devs fell a bit short of what they were initially aiming for. Also, some people are not keen on the holy trinity and see it as an outdated mechanic which needs to be shaken up. I for one think the holy trinity is a natural and effective way to encourage team work. With these two things in mind I propose to introduce a new class role which focuses on crowd control (CC) to complement the usual tank/healer/dps role. I'll start just describing the basic concept, explain why I think it would well in SWTOR and then highlight some possible issues. Concept The following may sound overpowered but bear with me. So the bread and butter abilities for this class would a large varieties of stuns but as a consequence the class would not be able to do much damage (comparable to a healer/tank?) and would be fairly squishable. For example a high level CCer with a full abilities should be able to lock down 5 enemies which are too strong for AoE. They could start with an AoE ability which stuns all 5 for 6 seconds, during this time the player could cast 3 long stuns (say 20s/40s/60s) to lock down 3 enemies. For the final 2, the player could have a spammable 2sec cast ability which deals minor damage and stuns for 4 seconds. In addition the player could a low damage dot which stuns briefly every tick. Now this is just an example and all the numbers etc would be subject to balancing but the challenge for the class is clear: be able to juggle / occupy a group of enemies independently. Why this could work in SWTOR... First of all group play. For non-ops groups, in TOR they require 4 people (ignoring 2man heroics ofcourse). This gives the natural group decomposition: tank + healer + dps + cc. Right now what happens is that the tank dives in, collects all the aggro, and the dps pick the enemies off one by one and in an ideal scenario the tank should be receiving most of the healing. If necessary the group can CC some of the tough mobs and when the group gets swarmed by weaker mobs, the dps mow them down with AoE abilities. The alternative scenario would be for the group with a cc class to face roughly 10 elite mobs. The tank would dive in to get aggro and then the cc would lock down as many enemies as possible. The healer, tank and dps would then pick them off one by one as before. The are 2 key differences here: 1) the mobs would be too stong to be mowed down by AoE. 2) the healer would not be able to keep the tank alive without the cc class stunning half of the enemies (too much dmg done to the tank). Enemy HP would need to be adjusted as you only have 1 dps now. It also has the combined effect of "feeling more heroic" and shaking up the holy trinity. Leveling a class like this would be a headache in any other game but here we have companions. They already make leveling healers and tanks easier so I don't think this could be an issue. Presence could be tweaked so that in addition to improving your companion it could increase the effectiveness of all CC abilities. Increase duration / increase dmg taken before CC breaks etc. Presence gear could be easily added by mods so no problem there. A "critical stun" would last +50% longer, with crit and surge rating doing what you would expect. Alaracity would only affect cast time etc. Possible issues... My pvp experience is non-existence so I'm not even going to pretend I have any ideas on how to balance such a class in pvp. Please discuss. Actually implementing a new class is more difficult for TOR because of class stories. However, out of the 8 advanced classes available, 2 of these (sniper / maurader) offer only dps capabilities. The other 6 are heal/dps or tank/dps. Therefore a possible solution would be to convert one of the damage skill trees in marauder into a CC skill tree, same for sniper. This makes some sort of sense because I can easily see a marauder paralysing enemies with fear, or a sniper keeping enemies pinned down with suppressive fire / flashbangs etc. Ofcourse this would all involve a massive stat rebalance of the game, and I'm not sure how people would feel about their talent tree suddenly becoming rubbish at damage. TLDR: introduce a class role which specializes in stuns and CC while doing little damage. This could shake up the holy trinity (if it needs it?) and make combat feel more "heroic". Thanks for taking the time to read. Do you think this kind of thing could work?
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