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Thyron

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Everything posted by Thyron

  1. Chris, as a long time raider in this game. Who has played cleared nearly all the content many times, I find the choice to nerf concealment perplexing. In operations concealment has been one of the least represented combat styles for many years. Even when its single target damage is among the very best. It simply lacks any competitive AOE at all, has very little utility, and often struggles to survive without further sacrificing its often limited damage and uptime on defensive abilities that are tied to the GCD. There is a reason why so very few concealment operatives have cleared Gods, Dxxun, and why not a single one to my knowledge has cleared all of R4 HM (according to parsley.io). And even when they do, their is a multitude of vastly superior PVE combat styles to choose from. Overall i am glad to see the addition of aoe damage reduction for operative. And I think a nerf to Kolto Burst was absolutely the right move. But I am concerned for the PVE Viability of concealment operatives going forward, with a nerf to single target, and no further adjustments to mitigate their many weaknesses I put a lot of thought into ways concealment could be improved of the years. At the core of it in my opinion its two greatest weaknesses in PVE, are its atrocious AOE dps, and at times its sub par survability from Off GCD cooldowns. With the addition of AOE damage reduction on evasion i would say it will be in a solid spot in regards to the second. As for its low AOE dps, i think addressing its resource management in AOE situations would go a long way. Simply removing the energy cost of Noxious Knives or Fragmentation grenade for instance would help it to sustain itself for a decent period of time. Then its just a matter of playing with the numbers to get them to reach the target DPS that the team is currently aiming for
  2. First off is the reduction of the total number of abilities a result of this being an early test build, or is the plan going forward to reduce the overall number of abilities you have access to at one time? I have concern regarding that this will result in gameplay feeling superficial. As some of the depth that I love is removed from the classes. I personally would love to see class general abilities continue to be available to all loadouts for that class. Like saber reflect and saber throw for instance. Furthermore i feel as though having a choice between a defensive benefit and an offensive benefit will rarely in practice actually be up to personal choice. As dps will generally want to choose what does more damage, and tanks will general want to choose something defensive. For this reason i feel as though that defensive and offensive choice should be separated in order to promote more player choice. For instance, having a choice between enure and blade blitz/saber reflect such as the lvl 70 talents, it would almost never be better to choose enure as a dps. in summary, reducing the number of abilities you have access to at a given time may result in gameplay that feels less rewarding and engaging. And to ensure players can customize without feeling as though they are making the wrong choice, offensive and defensive benefits should be separated into different choices
  3. In light of the most recent nerf that assassins and operatives faced it seems like we are not going in the right direction for balance. (As a note i know that a .25 sec gcd is a small nerf but it reflects the fact that the issue is not being adressed) The issue im talking about is concealment. For simplicity's sake i am going to split this into 2 parts. first pve second pvp. PVE: First off i will address the inevitable argument that concealment parses high on dummies. To clarify, when it is said they parse "high" it actually means that they parse 8th out of 18 total dps specs in the game. Now you may think that this is fine, but looking this deep is not enough. So lets talk about real situations. first off we will look at numbers. All the fights i am going to refrence will be either nightmare(master mode) or "Hardmare" (HM gods, master blaster, cora, revan) Of these total 36 fights only 17 of them even have parses uploaded ( i will get into this more in a momment) 17 out of 36 means that only 47% of the fights have been killed by operatives who upload. Out of these 17 fights were concealment has uploaded parses NOT ONE has a parse in the top 50 slots on the leaderboard, not one. In every single instance they are consistently at the back of the pack. Now you may say the issue is that not enough people play concealment. But why is that? All of the well competing classes have a high number of players. I know for a fact im not alone when i say the only reason i dont play concealment anymore is because it simply is never the right choice. There is always a huge number of better specs for every situation, and they are better by a long shot. So why is this? Why is concealment average on dummy but trash in real scenarios? This problem sadly i dont think is even being asked by the devs. The current philosophy of balance is not to balance each spec according to its unique circumstances. its to balance specs based off of grouping them by type i.e. ranged / melee, burst / sustained, and to try to keep their theoretical number ceilings similar in a standardized setting. (the standardized setting being dummy parses) And there in lies the issue. Concealment is plagued by a large number of problems in how it plays. It is consistently the worst melee burst spec when it comes to many of the most important factors such as: Target swapping, Aoe, Positional requirements, Dps loss as a result of downtime, movement capabilities, defensive capabilities, and more. Now before i continue i want to elaborate on movement and defensive there to make sure we are on the same page. When we talk about movement and defensive capabilities in regards to concealment we see that concealment is always terrible unless they use active global cooldowns to help with these things and lower their dps even further. (Holotraverse is a rotational ability used to maintain dps on cooldown so its doesent count, but hey its on gcd now anyway so point proven) (roll takes a gcd) (both these things lower the already low dps even further) A prime example of how all these things combine to make concealment terrible in comparison to other specs is the nightmare brontes burn. Concealment has extremely little defensive capabilities as they are required to maintain full dps uptime to meet the dps check, furthermore their postional requirements make keeping up with brontes as she runs around a absolute pain. This rant could go on forever, perhaps ill elaborate more another time, for now lets continue to pvp PVP: A large number of the things i stated in the pve section also apply to pvp. The only major distinction that must be made is the fact that in some situations concealment can afford to loose large ammounts of dps in order to gain high survivability. This advantage does provide concealment with a hell of alot of survivability, however this is often limited in a large number of pvp scenarios. The reason it is limited is that fundamentally an concealment operative trades dps for survivability. So while this makes him highly usefull in defensive situations like protecting a node, or running the huttball. When it comes time for him to fight it out and try to kill the enemy team before they kill his team he starts to really lack. This is due to his low average overall dps, terrible aoe dps, and the need for him to stop attacking just to stay alive, meanwhile other classes can maintain extremely high survivability without sacrificing dps. What this all boils down to is that in an event where a concealment operative is forced to fight another team numbers wise (like arenas or large fights at mid in objective warzones) he simply is very rarely a better choice than any other class. The only place where concealment truly excels in pvp is 1v1. In this regard he is perhaps even the best spec in the game depending on who you ask. However 1v1 is only a small part of the pvp experience. To excel in one area and be well below average in every other is NOT balanced.
  4. Your attitude toward balance may work on a casual level. However if you had any experience in the doing the hardest content in the game, much less leading it for years as i have and doing it on most classes and specs, then you would know that there is no such thing as "hybrid" if you think for one second that a dps class will stop to heal during a apex master mode boss your a moron. The dps checks are too high. Especially when we have classes that arent even pulling the numbers required to meet the dps check (concealment). People have attempted to explain this too you nicely but ima just put it bluntly. You have no clue what your talking about because your not skilled or experienced enough to know. If you were you wouldnt have the ignorant views on dps like you do. ALL DPS CLASSES CAN NOT AFFORD TO DO ANYTHING BUT DPS IN APEX RAID SCENARIOS. FURTHERMORE IN RANKED DOING SO IS ONLY REALLY VIABLE WHEN YOU HAVE A DPS ADVANTAGE OVER THE ENEMY (like when you have more people alive or if their group is inferior). end of story
  5. Your logic makes no sense. Of course i want operatives to do as much damage as marauders at least. why? because operatives rotation is HIGHLY inferior to marauders in every way. Target swapping, aoe, resource management, penalties for downtime, capability to avoid downtime, positional requirement, the list goes on. The sad thing is that even if an operative was capable of sustaining MORE dps there would still be no reason to choose it over a marauder in a operation. Because 100% uptime dps capability does not = real world dps. Furthermore if you think that an operative has better survivability than a marauder, without the operative sacrificing OVER HALF of its dps time doing active mitigation then you dont know the classes. but heres the thing.... you CANT afford to sacrifice dps like that. If you think you can then you should seek to inform yourself better on the reality of master mode operations and ranked pvp.
  6. Actually yes i have taken into account the self heal and survivability of operative, and if fact the evidence only serves to support my finding that their dps is much lower than it should be. let me explain Dps survivability in regards to balance can be looked at in a multitude of ways. for the purpose of concealment we will focus on two clear differences. Passive survivability: this includes passive stats like damage reduction and dodge chance while also including defensive cooldowns that are off the global cooldown and thus do not lower dps. I.E. evasion and shield probe Active survivability: this includes things that can be used to help you survive longer but require the use of global cooldowns. I.E. kolto probe and roll It is very important to make the distinction between these as one serves to severely lower your dps to gain survivability while the other allows you to maintain damage and survivablity. Now in regards to concealment operatives out of all the melee dps classes they boast the least passive survivability. With only evasion shield probe and stim boost to go on top of medium armor. Now i could go into detail for every melee dps class but a cursory knowledge of them shows that their passive survivability is miles ahead of the limited stuff that operative has. Now because they have such low passive survivability this means that they often times are forced to use global cooldowns to actively survive. Thankfully they boast the best capability to do this out of all the melee classes, but their is one MASSIVE downside to this. They loose dps. a hell of alot of dps. This fact is combined with the relization that in master mode operations you cant afford to sacrifice dps. Furthermore they are already the worst melee burst class in the game making it even more the case they cant afford to loose dps. Well some of you are probably saying what about pvp. Well the same issue exists in any group fight scenario. They simply lack the capability to pressure the enemy team while also surviving themselves. The only saving grace for concealment at all is 1v1 pvp. As in this against some classes you can strike a balance between using roll immunity to mitigate high damage enemy attacks and probes to heal yourself while attacking inbetween. However with the nerf to concealment's already poor dps in pvp they are simply outclassed by almost any good dps player simply due to the damage disparity. furthermore in general they simply lack the capability to kill a healer on their own. T.L.D.R. yes i took their survivability into account and in fact it only serves to show that they are worse than a simple comparison of dps of classes shows.
  7. To start off i would like to ask for help from all those who main concealment ( or are skilled enough to but chose not 2 cause its trash). The only explanation to the state of the spec is a lack of balance understanding by the team, and few are talking about it. We need to speak up. now to get to the thick of it. Concealment operatives currently are by far the lowest parsing melee burst class in the game, and by a massive margin. Below i will be show the rank and specific number of dps on a dummy at the time of this post. Furthermore i ask all the concealment operatives out there to upload your raid parses to add to the information. #1 deception / infiltration dps: 10589.22 player Der'ty #2 carnage / combat dps: 10397.38 player: Xi'niri #3 rage / focus dps: 10226.71 player: Kuro-sorrow #4 Advanced prototype / tactics dps: 10191.08 Harry's Powertech #5 concealment / scrapper dps: 9875.5 player Etchelon In a second post on this thread i will be putting a detailed explanation why in my belief this problem is much larger than even the numbers there show. This will detail things such as Aoe capability target swapping punishment positional requirements offensive cooldowns and defensive cooldowns that increase dps. (spoiler: operative is by far the worst off) One final note: As someone who has been a skilled operative for years and a Nightmare raid leader of two teams that have all bosses down. Currently there is only 1 spec in the game i consider to be non-viable without being heavily carried, and that is concealment operative. They are a liability in my opinion. -Iris
  8. The fact that over 3/4 of every match consists of only bombers and gunships is killing gsf on this server. The matches are just not fun when everyone is sitting back waiting for people to come to them. We need more skilled strike and scout pilots. Not only are some scouts OP as **** in the right hands but they make things more fun. If you haven't played one before take the time to learn it. you wont regret it My suggestion is a Sting with burst lasers and cluster missiles.
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