amonre
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Posts posted by amonre
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So let me get this straight bioware:
Lockboxes are literally negative in gain for long AND short run, and the augments are easily obtained elsewhere.
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Now the question is why have the option to pick lockboxes?
Its not profitable. Long and short run you will make no profit. In fact you LOSE the money you put in.
It would be "somewhat" profitable if you had the crew member always come back with something.
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Then again why is it not profitable if they do?
I send my crew members on a 2k mission, i get back 1600. Why?
I get a 3-4k mission, and he turns back empty. Thats minus 3-4k!
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Bioware, why is slicing still around? Its not profitable at ALL>
Slicing is still profitable. After the new I collected over 200 data points of Rank 5 and 6 missions. The average was around 35% profit. So, if the average mission cost is 1700, you would, on average, receive ~600 credits every half an hour per companion. At 2 missions per hour, 4 companions, you'd net around 4,800 credits an hour.
Problem? I can run one, 6 minute space mission at level 50 and get over 4,000 credits. So, I dropped Slicing the other day. Given that crafted items get out done pretty quickly (RE'ing level 49 blues into purples is challenging at best. Over 400 blues armor RE'd in total for about 3 purple recipes, none of which what I was looking for), Augments are questionably useful.
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It's very, VERY simple.
Player A is level 25, and has 0 expertise.
Player B is level 50 and has 300 expertise.
They both pop their stacking buffs.
Player A still has 0 expertise.
Player B now has ~400 expertise.
The buff stacking problem is completely independent of bracketing issues and has absolutely nothing to do with whether there should be bracketing or not.
With brackets, Players A and B would both either have 0 expertise or both have (e.g.) 300 expertise (or 250/300, 125/234 etc..).
Again - buff stacking is a completely separate problem that is completely unrelated to the need for brackets. If anything it only reinforces the need for a 50/non-50 bracket separation.
Very, VERY simple.
100% Incorrect. Player A is level 50 with 0 Expertise. Player B is level 50 with 300 Expertise. Now continue your train of thought.
Bracketing doesn't fix the issue. Player B is still going to dominate Player A, regardless of skill. Expertise is broke. Bracketing may be necessary, but the first change should be fixing expertise. Until then, bracketing is only a knee-jerk reaction which isn't solving the underlying problem.
Also, you were right, the gap is the problem. The gap that expertise creates. The gap that winning, because your team is stacked in expertise, and being awarded more, completing dailies and gearing up faster, will continue to expand on. Mind you, I'm not saying the winning team *shouldn't* get more, but when expertise and buff stacking can have SUCH a significant impact that you can stunt the ability for the losing team to ever catch up, it's a bad system.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOvx28ikYWI&feature=channel_video_title
no you're wrong
i have so many other videos of me just killing low levels like they're nothing too
you're ridiculous
And what is your gear like? More importantly, what is your expertise rating?
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Any reason why brackets should NOT be implemented ? No matter how you spin it, non lvl 50 is in disadvantage vs lvl 50. No brackets is actually hurting a game because players bellow 50 stop joining warzones due to being roflstomped by 50's of opposing side and being blamed for loses by 50's of their own side. Lose/lose situation unless you are a loser getting a kick out of of facerolling players in their teens on your geared lvl 50.
Which, again, the roflstomp is due to expertise. Are the lower levels disadvantaged? Yes, if they are drastically lower (i.e. sub 20). Beyond that, they have the majority of their final abilities and hence the majority of their survivability. The issue is people clump all 50s together when they are drastic difference between fresh and lightly geared 50s and 50s stacked in Expertise gear. I believe they need to first solve the expertise issue and see how things go. If there is still a clear "roflstomp" then yes, bracket it. But as is, the most underlying issue is expertise and just how powerful it makes a geared player over everyone else, including other 50s.
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RNG sucks. And is completly unnecessary.
PvE has it? Yes, to some degree, most of the time the loot drops aren't all that random.
There's limitted loot tables for bosses, firstly. Secondly, if you run a raid/hardmode etc, you get (on average) 4 chances for a piece of loot, in a rather minimal timeframe.
Hardmodes with a suitable group can be done only a tad less fast than their normal counterpart, and as gear increases, speed will increase too.
Operations, like raids in any game, are nothing but a farmfest after the initial wipe through to learn stuff.
For the pvp bags, you litterally need to put in hours of play to get 1 loot chance (disregarding daily and weekly - those can take longer if you end up with **** teams).
And if that loot chance has a 90% added chance to spit you in the face, then yes, frustrations are completly normal.
If you want to compare pve and pvp then do it properly:
Every hardmode instance you finish gives you right to 3 commendations (no loot from bosses at all)
When you gathered 30 commendations, you may change it for a purple bag. Interesting, yes? Whooo hoo come to daddy my precious!
Open bag, find 3 columni shards and some petty cash.
Oh, but here's the really fun part: there was a chance you'd actually get something! Haha!
Allright, let's do that entire thing again for another bag..
I'm pretty sure after the 50th run through those instances, with 30+ bags gathered and only a useless relic and pair of bracers to show for it (and some crappy 2nd graded item you can buy with the shards).. well, fun will rather translate into F(rustrati)UN.
Why RNG is annoying:
1. Randomness ruins direct character building, you can't plan for how you want to gear up/develop your char.
2. Reward gratification. Sure, you can climb on your high horse and say 'I'm above that'. Fair enough, have a cookie and feel good about yourself.
Fact is, that for alot of (paying) customers, it's a drive. A goal to work towards.
And if you're motivated and you put in time and effort, and see time and time again that it's not getting rewarded properly, but instead some little snubby (high horsed) scrub comes by carrying all rewards for probably a fraction of that effort.. that's pouring in your wide open eyes. It burns.
One could argue like this:
- Put in more effort and hope that eventually it'll pay off (for a change)
- Screw the whole thing, quit with some dignity instead of suffering through (random) disappointment over and over again.
3. It doesn't allow for competition. It ruins the competitive feel.
Sharpen your pitchforks and light your torches, because I'm going to drag an age old myth in here..
In wow you could see at a glance who was putting time into pvp (and based on that can be suspected of some fundamental pvp skills) through gear. Plain and simple, it took time and some dedication to earn the proper gear.
Same for pve, when you invited folks for a raid, you could tell rather easily if they had previous experiences through their gear.
In SWTOR.. Gear, atleast in pvp, is a null-factor. It doesn't tell me much about my opponent, just that he was lucky. Valor rank does say something, but when you meet players with Valor rank 48-50 and only 3 champ pieces to show for it, my heart bleeds for them.
So to finish the rant - Randomness is not 'Fun'.
Telling folks to quit because they were on the flipside of the lucky coin and came here to share their immense (and understandable) frustrations is not 'kewl'.
Saying the system is fine the way it is - is wrong.
Saying that the people on the forums complaining about said issues are a vocal minority of crybabies (pointed out with the assorted 'wah wah wah' responses made by folks with a rather shortsighted and ridiculously childish attitude) - is again not true.
Talk to people on the server, hell start a discussion in general chat if you wish, this is something that bugs alot of people. Way too many to be generalized as a minority.
/end rant
/goes to play tetris - a game that made sense (or not?)
Well said.
And Tetris is an amazing game.
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the other issue with this is..
I spent merc commendations on a chest piece just to get the next champ bag with the champ chest piece..
wasted time and commendations on gear.
This is why you put all the centurion items and cost in a spreadsheet. At the bottom of the cost field you do a sum(B:B). Every time you get a Champion piece, cross out the centurion piece for that category along with the price (deleting it is fine). When the sum(B:B) field equals the number of Centurion Commendations you have, you buy the rest of the set. It takes a while, but the best way to not "waste" commendations.
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Ultima Online. It was literally skill. People fought with armorless robes and quarterstaffs.
After that, DAoC, because of the three-faction and open-world capture points. Balance wise, the game was questionable, especially early on.
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All great suggestions. I would agree that buff stacking needs to be re-evaluated ASAP (even before bracketing).
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I don't have a problem with facing a 50 in a warzone. What I do have a problem with, and why i think the brackets are needed, is because of the warzones where one side is nothing but 50's. That makes it unplayable, and on Rakata, during prime time there's two imp guilds that like to field large groups of level 50 premades which makes pvp lame for a good three to four hours.
So bring on the brackets, imo.
I agree with the OP. Bracketing won't fix the underlying problem. While you feel it will, because facing a full group of 50s at sub-50 is a problem, it's a problem because of Expertise. At 30, or 40, if you faced a full group of fresh 50s (no expertise) you'd do fine. At 10 you'd lack the abilities, but by 30 or 40 you'd be fine.
Issue is, there are basically two brackets inside 50; those who are fresh or lightly pvp geared and those who are sitting in full pvp gear. Expertise is such an imbalanced stat it's not funny. In other games, the equivalent would just provide you improved defense. In this game, it provides improved defense, offense and support. So, it's 2-3x stronger than the character sheet alone would have you believe. Combine with with all the buff stacking the OP pointed out makes for a ridiculous scenario.
BioWare has a long way to go to solving this issue, but bracketing won't do it. All that will do is increase queue times for the people who are fresh 50s and under geared and cause for excessively frustrating situations where fully-stacked (with expertise gear) pre-mades steam roll you every time you queue.
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Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like the nonlinear RE crafting skills get the really short end of the stick?
To those who don't know what I'm talking about, there are two ways RE works in this game.
1. Linear. Buy a green item. RE it to get the one blue item. RE that to get the one purple item. Simple. Straight-forward. No "You already know that schematic!" nonsense. Predictable RE results, you can't get the wrong schematic.
2. Nonlinear. Buy a green item. RE it to one of three possible blue items. Each of those three blue items can be REd into one of five possible purple items. If you have 4 out of the 5 purple schematics of a particular blue, and really want the fifth, well, though luck. You're stuck REing a hundred of them at least because every time you "proc" a schematic, it's one of the four you already know.
Suggestion: Fix the crafting UI, add a field that lists the possible RE results of the item selected, and a tick-box that allows you to check what schematic you're trying to get from RE.
I do. I've gotten all of the purple level 49 Mods/Enchancements/Crystals I wanted on my Cyber/Artificer in about 10-15 greens and another 5 or so blues. On my Synthweaver, I am sitting at over 50 blues, per level 49 blue Heavy armor tanking item, with a total of 2 purple recipes, neither of which what I want. They need to up the RE rate or something. By time I can finally craft the purple tanking armor I want, I'll already have better (almost there, actually, given I can just rip better mods out of PvP armor and buy better armoring mods with Daily commendations).
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What criteria does the game use to Decide to divide loot from Operation bosses.
I recently did a Vault of Eternity as a commando Specced 31 Combat Medic / 8 Gunnery / 2 Assault Specialist and was awarded with Eliminator loot twice (a helm and a belt).
The helm included a accuracy enchanment is which kinda useless for a PvE healer so my question is whether the type of commando loot is random or if there is something wrong mith my spec / the system.
It's quite easy, actually. The game figures out what classes you have, and gives you loot for the classes you don't have. Or in the case of Normal EV, assigns loot to people for the opposing AC inside their class.
The exception to this seems to be Normal FP (not HM), as they were used to sucker us into thinking BioWare had well polished instances.
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We get suckered in with a well-paced, adequately written dungeon dive with lots of unique characters and tons of dialogue that displayed all of that wonderful voice acting and characterization, only to have it followed by a dozen bland corridor-filled loot pinatas.
I first noticed the huge gap when I wanted to farm social points with a friend in a higher level FP, only to find out that there were only about 3 dialogue sessions and 2 of them were with a console opening some door. Each FP was graced by a generic FP "kill or don't kill this group of scientists, doctors, or technicians" choice for light/dark points.
Even the enemies in these FPs are boring, and require less effort and coordination than your average H2-4. The bosses typically have no personality, and I have no idea who 95% of them are.
Even better; HM equivalents award no LS/DS points or Social points (partial lie, I did get a total of 8 Social points for doing HM Esseles, but zero LS/DS points). So, literally, to get up your LS/DS Rank and Social Rank you have to keep running the level 10 instances, over and over and over and over and...
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Ravage glitch is a known issue. Hopefully they'll fix that soon. It's happened to me on several different classes though. It may just be lag.
It's been a known bug since beta and hasn't been resolved, yet. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
Basically, OP, there are a lot of things that sometimes just don't work. Abilities are one of them.
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Hi Alexious,
Style is something that is very subjective and what some people love, others find unacceptable. The solution to that lies in allowing players to control their own style, a function that the core game currently provides via customizable (orange) gear.
Please see Emmanuel's post on extending orange gear viability into endgame to get an idea of our intentions. Obviously, new appearances will also be added to the game over time as well.
Regards
Georg
This is false. So far the only "choice of appearance" is the same appearance in varying colors and a couple added pieces of metal. JKs have exactly two looks, besides PvP gear; hooded robe or hooded cape. You then add some bits of extra metal around the shoulders to simulate "choice." And this is all of it. Don't include Social gear, because it's all Light Armor, meaning it is useless for anything other than JCs or Companions.
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I've canceled my subscription . PvP is the driving reason to play for me and while they've come very close to a great pvp system, what bioware has done poorly is game-breaking.
People are blaming the level disparity as the problem, but I don't thats a correct diagnosis, a lvl 50 in greens can be beaten by a well played lvl 30 - i know, I was doing as I'm sure many of you were.
The culprit is expertise + stims, they make for a terrify monster. But here's the catch that pains me the most. If you're not winning, your collection of commendations moves at a crawl so because you can't gear, the opposing faction's gain is accelerated. On my server, there's a hardcore pvp guild (repub, I'm empire) and since its a low pop server the chances for matching against them are pretty good, better than good, you get at least a couple of them nearly every game. They were early access players so as of now, most are fully champion geared and they steamroll my faction in their premade within minutes. Voidstar won in less than 2 minutes, huttball lost in less than 5. As they've geared, I've noticed skill becoming less important. Sages and troopers stand spamming 1 and hitting my powertech for 3k +. He's dead within seconds and their ability to play their class has nothing to do with the results because the numbers are doing all the work
Even the little expertise I have shows a significant boost to dmg done and a reduction to dmg taken. I have the boots and the lvl 46 pvp gun, those 2 items + a stim boost my pvp stats to 17%. So I ask myself, what the heck does a full set provide?
We never win. This is not hyperbole, I haven't been able to get my 3 wins for the daily in 3 days, currently 2 / 3. How am I ever to catch up with them ? The answer, I simply won't.
Expertise should obviously progress our characters, otherwise there would be no point to it, but should it make them virtually indestructible? I don't think so. I know the cats out of the bag, but expertise really should have been introduced a few weeks after the game's release.
The few games I get an equal team to play against, pvp is a blast so in this regard bioware nailed it. But the current gear progression system is asymmetrical to say the least, and it far too heavily favors the early access pvpers.
The entire implementation has been atrocious and myopic and as a result, I'm cancelling my account and discouraging anyone I know from purchasing the game. I'm not being petty, this is called voting with my wallet. And before you think that its too early to react in such a way, we're not talking about massive content updates like raids. We're talking about giving people slower to hit 50 a chance to compete in pvp.
With the 50's only bracket averagely geared players like myself will be even more disadvantaged because my chances of drawing someone other than the mega-geared dream team is lowered even more. My poor bounty hunter is effectively stunted without massive time investment and a little luck.
They'd have to make some big changes to win my faith back. If you're a pve player, good on you, I'm sure you're having a great time but if you're into pvp like myself, things ain't so good.
edit for clarification and typos
I agree, OP. I haven't quit, yet, as I was given Game Time for Christmas, but this really needs to be resolved. Ignore all the fanbois; they are scared that balancing the system might result in fair fights. I suggested making the Daily Win 3 Warzones -Or- Play 9 Warzones as a way to at least allow undergeared but dedicated people to complete their daily and was met with the same kind of crap the other's in this thread are tossing your way. Wish you the best and hope BioWare figures out *** they are doing soon.
As for PvE'ers enjoying the game (I am one), I wish. FPs and OPs are so borked it's easily as frustrating as being rolled by geared pre-mades in Warzones.
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Not only that, but the ratio of crystals to commendations is also out of whack. That'd be forgivable if there was something useful to buy with only crystals (like stims, or something), but as it is, after buying my first item I'm sitting at 6 commendations and 121 crystals. Er...ok.
I'm not sure why they didn't just set it to just one type of Tion commendation and make each boss/miniboss drop one. The crystals thing is pretty redundant, confusing, and pointless.
The entire HM system is borked. I made a post about this yesterday and had the fanbois shouting I was trying to "make things easy." What I want is to make it worth while.
As pointed out, the drop rates suck. Horribly. We've gotten more gear for classes not present than classes present (lots of Trooper gear when we didn't have any Troopers). What happened to the regular FP where they see what classes are available and tailor drops based on that?
Then you have the commendations, also as pointed out. I got either 1 or 2 commendations for finishing HM FPs. And about 12 Crystals. But, as pointed out, you can't buy anything with the extra crystals (gear is about a 1:2 Commendtion:Crystal ratio, not 1:6). IMO, they need to up the rate of Commendation drops (7-8 HM per piece of gear would be reasonable, requiring upwards of 100 HM FPs to be fully geared) and if they keep the same stupid ratio of Commendations/Crystals, a way to buy commendations with Crystals.
That, and well, fix all the borked encounters, bugs and loot boxes that don't open. How the hell did this stuff make it past QA? Did they even DO any testing on this content? I know public testers didn't, because BioWare didn't let them, but did their internal team do any? I remember someone posting, a dev, that the internal testers were what they really cared about, yet they either aren't doing their job or this stuff isn't being tested.
What scares me is they are already pushing new content (new OP bosses and a new FP) with the current OPs and FPs in such shambles. Apparently they think poorly finished content is as good as having "lots" of content.
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The current PvP Warzone daily is to win 3 Warzone matches. In an ideal world, this is reasonable. However, given how imbalanced expertise can make a match (even at 50), it's not hard to do a dozen matches and not even be able to win 3. I suggest making the PvP Daily something like:
Win 3 Warzone matches
- Or -
Play 9 Warzone matches
Keep track of both and once you reach either or you finish the daily. While I'm sure people would argue if you can't win you don't deserve anything, the issue is by giving the people already winning chances at Champion gear (which dominates Warzones) you are essentially making it easier for them to continue to win and the losers to never catch up to make the matches anything resembling fair. Also, by making it so you have to play at least 9, you force them to do noticeably more work by losing than winning, but at least provide a consolation prize and the hope that they can catch up, gear wise, to others.
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I have the same feeling. It's a disappointing feeling. Did get some Game Time for Christmas, though, so BioWare has until that ends to prove to me they should be in this market.
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Seriously is it possible to lvl without bonus quests because I am underleveled and I refuse to submit myself to kill X, activate X panel nonstop .
I dunno what you are talking about. This game doesn't have kill quests or fedex quests. That's what the fanbois told me, anyway.
On a serious note, it is possible to do without doing the bonus quests. However, it requires you do a lot of space missions, only play a few hours a day (to get lots of rested exp) and PvP a noticeable amount, and/or do all of the Heroics. Otherwise, yes, you do need to do them.
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before the game launched i remember reading something that said that the first difficulty of the raids was tuned so that it was doable with what you would be dinging 50 with from quest rewards and crafting gear.
therefore, you were not required to grind any flashpoints to attend the first raid.
the flashpoints were for gearing up for the harder difficulty levels of raids
dunno if that is true but might make what your saying make sence if thats how the progression goes
questing to 50 > first tier of raid > hard mode flashpoints > hard mode raid > nightmare raid
dunno perhaps someone else read something different would be good to know for sure
That seems a bit odd, though, if the progression is 50 -> Ops -> FPs. My guild doesn't really have 8 50s yet on regularly to raid. Four, though, is manageable. Definitely confusing if that is the intended progression path.
In regards to keep trying, we did. Easily 20+ wipes on some bosses until we just got lucky enough to kill the boss. That seems a bit excessive, though, to rely on such luck.
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Disclaimer: There may be spoilers in this, so read at your own risk.
I'm starting to understand what all the long-term testers meant at the end of beta when they were laughing and saying how bad the end-game content was due to lack of testing. I got the chance this weekend to attempt a few Hard Modes. First, there isn't a really clear PvE progression path (in past games you'd run high level normals and then their harder equivalents; however, in SW:TOR, the bosses on normal modes drop greens or blues that are worse than some of the green crafted stuff I can make, implying there is no progression or that I should be ready for hard modes). Second, well, that's the rest of the post.
Whose idea was it to use an enrage mechanic as a normal part of every HM boss encounter? And I don't mean, bring two tanks and two healers and try to just cheese him down enrage. There are bosses where even if you go all out and have the healer also trying to DPS they still enrage before you can kill them (2-3 minutes). This is ridiculous. I'm all for a DPS check here and there and an enrage to prevent exploitation, but there are so many bosses that we just got lucky on and during one of their enrages finally managed to kill them before I (tank) was able to Defend 1 or 2 attacks in a row.
I'd be interested in knowing just how much testing was done on the HM FPs. There are the occasional "boss" (in quotes because most "bosses" don't drop any loot except for crystals, which are borked and I'll explain later) that you don't even realize is a boss until the end. No mechanic, doesn't hit hard, if there is an enrage you don't ever realize it (third boss in Battle of Ilum, big robot with a gold robot add).
Many of them are just broken. The pair of bosses you kill in Battle of Ilum (second) is an example. One of them is a melee lightsaber wielder (Sith?) that jumps all over the place, constantly, and seems like he does an aggro dump every time. You can't tank him so he's routinely running up to the healer and two shotting them. How about the later phase where turrets spawn? If you don't destroy the first batch a second batch will spawn right on top of them. The last boss in Esseles drops a purple ring you have to move out of. Except that on multiple occasions I've seen a group member die seconds after they ran out of it by the lightning following them. Or him targeting the same person (i.e. healer) twice with his Double Light Saber Throw and instantly killing them.
I'm all for a little bit of luck in these encounters, but so far, they seem to be a lot of luck. They are far from enjoyable.
And then the broken currency system/loot. Out of the bosses that did drop loot (not many), more often than not we'd get loot no one in the group could use. We had two smugglers, a JK and a sage. And got almost all Trooper loot. You really should have something in place to figure out what classes are in the group and drop appropriate loot. Then you get Commendations and Crystals. In one run of Esseles I got ~12 crystals and 3 commendations, but I think 1 or 2 of those commendations were from completing the Daily quest. To buy any of the PvE gear, though, requires more like a 1:2 ratio of Commendation:Crystal, making most of the crystals you got useless. Oh, and there is no way to buy Commendations with your extra Crystals. So, after running about 20 HM FPs you can afford one piece of gear (the cost of a single piece of gear is 39 or so Commendations).
And then there are all the bugs in normal FPs (high level ones). But I'm done ranting for now.
TL;DR: BioWare needs to tune their Hard Mode FPs. Not make them "Easy," but doable without trying 20x and then being lucky enough to have the stars align. And they need to fix the loot/PvE progression path. Not all of us want to PvE in PvP gear, since that seems to have the only real progression path that is easily recognizable.
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Actually after playing SWTOR I realized that Rift wasn't as bad as I thought it was so I've gone back. It's pretty entertaining now.
This is actually how I am feeling, too. I haven't gone back, yet, as I will give BioWare a little time, but not much. I got my included 30 days + a 60 Day time card for Christmas. That's how much time they have.
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Wish I could give input, but Kira is still bugged for me.
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Only level 48 so far, so I haven't really gotten to see end-game, yet. I got a 60 day time card for Christmas, so I imagine BioWare has 90 days (60 + 30 included) to show me their game can be fun at end-game and that they are seriously trying to resolve the problems I feel need attention (Yes, I said the problems I feel need attention. If they don't fix what bothers me, why should I continue to pay them? Let the people who are happy with the changes they did make continue to fund their development.) I'll move on to another game, i.e. GW2.
Illum - Patch changes won't stop people from cooperating
in PvP
Posted
To add to this, the only real way to "force" competitive PvPing (open world) is to make something both sides can't have at once. I.e., in DAoC you had keeps that offered bonuses. Bonuses only lasted as long as you held the keep, so people fought to keep it. In WoW, you had that one open world place that like every 2 hours you fought for control to be able to do one of the raids. People fought because they wanted to do the content and realized they had to win if they wanted to.
Allowing both sides to complete their objectives simultaneously won't work.