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Ohoni

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  1. They've been doing it all week, posting videos and stuff that trick people into thinking that they should be playing a Smuggler, rather than actually making the class worth playing .
  2. . . .if they actually gave Smugglers some improvements (especially Scrapper Scoundrels). Instead, they have Smuggler weak right after nerfing what was already a hobbled class. Talk about rubbing it in. I really wish that they would have announced some plan to give Scrappers more Upper Hand procs (or a way to spend less of them), and a way to activate stealth during combat without resetting the enemy's health bars. What would you have liked to see out of Smuggler Week?
  3. This is the main problem. Gunslingers can fight from cover, which is pretty much the strongest defense in the game. Commandos have Heavy Armor, and defense buffs. Sages get Force Armor. And all of them get their healing pets WAY before Smugglers do. Since Smugglers have to do their fighting toe to toe with the enemy, without cover, without heavy armor, without Force Armor, without shields, they need to have some form of reliable defense that allows them to survive for the same amount of time in melee range of the enemy as a Gunslinger would from behind cover. My own belief is that they should greatly lower the cooldown and up the uptime and strength of the "Dodge" ability, such that it's like a dodging equivalent to Force Armor, so that as long as the Scoundrel keeps applying it every twenty seconds or so, he can be permanently enshrouded in a defensive buff that makes him very hard to damage. I also think they need to change the way Disappearing Act works in solo, so that instead of breaking combat and instantly healing any enemies you were fighting, it just makes you undetectable for a few seconds, enough time to either A: run away out of combat range, which would break combat, or B: sneak behind enemies to activate positional or stealth-only abilities. As it stands it's only useful for running away from a failed encounter, it should be able to be used to increase your offensive potential by setting up new attack options. After those few seconds that this buff is active, you would drop into normal stealth and could be detected again.
  4. Thank you, I find this a much more fair way to distribute it. I hope in future you guys give more consideration to the idea that this is not as much an "endgame" game as others on the market, and that plenty of your players are dedicated to the "leveling" portion of the game, and that this segment needs to be as fully supported as the 50+ game is (ie classes and content need to be just as well balanced and equal at level 30 as they are at level 50).
  5. What the HELL?! So even though I've been playing almost daily since launch, because I've been playing alts rather than ramming one through to 50 I don't get 30 days free? That is bull####! I wasn't even considering cancelling my account any time soon, but I have to say if you guys continue to favor level 50s like this then I've seriously got to rethink things.
  6. If you don't reach 50 you aren't likely to have 1.5m credits either. . .
  7. Yes, and again I'll try him at some point, but from what I've heard he doesn't hold a candle to actual official healer companions, so he might not be an improvement over even my current weak-sauce tank companions. A Sawbones/Seer/Combat Medic is a healer. A Scrapper/Balanced/Artillery is a DPS. If I'm playing the latter, and not the former, then I should not have to spend any time healing, and I don't have to spend any time healing with my Sage or Commando, because neither they nor their companions die on me. All I'm asking is that my Scrapper have an equal chance of surviving the fight as my Sage and Commando do. If I wanted to stand on the sidelines healing up my pet, I'd be a Sawbones. I picked the Scrapper because I wanted to mix it up, bopping enemies on the head. Really if I didn't want to mix it up in melee I just would have gone Gunslinger. And even the healing thing wouldn't be a huge issue if we had more insta-cast heals. I mean, I have several "healer class" characters in DCUO, but in that game plenty of heals are instacast, so if you're in DPS mode you can just "punch, punch, punch, heal, punch, punch," barely breaking stride. You won't heal nearly as well as you would in Healer role, and it isn't as energy efficient as using the longer timer moves, but it does heal more HP than you're taking in most situations. That one boss is particularly hard, but that one case is just an example, the straw that broke the camel's back for me, it goes across the board. If there's a pack of four enemies that my Sage can ROFLstomp with 90% HP left and 50%+ Force, all fully recovered in seconds and with no damage to Theron at all, then my Smuggler will come out of it half dead and with his companion on the ground (or near to it if I'm very lucky). If there's a standard "blue diamond" or "gold badge" enemy in a mission that puts up a slight challenge to my Sage, it would kill my Smuggler at least 2-3 times before I managed to eak out a win, and I'd probably have to use all my tricks, like the Heroic moment or a stim or something to give me that edge, or maybe kill some of the small fry, die, and then come back and take out the boss himself, when my Sage could have just Force Lifted all of them. They have one, it puts them into stealth. The only problem is, unlike pretty much any other game that allows in-combat stealth, this ability also resets the fight, restoring the enemy to full health (although luckily enough, does not restore you to full health or your dead companion to life).It's basically like dying, just with less armor damage and downtime. Yay. If Disappearing Act worked like Smoke Bomb in Amalur it would be a far more useful ability, just throwing you into stealth without resetting anyone's combat status, allowing you to either leave the battle, OR to sneak back in and use your "stealth only" and positional attacks. And have a much shorter cooldown. Sages are ostensibly a "paper mage" class, and yet you can keep Force Armor up indefinitely, and it works even better than Dodge, all you need to do is keep an eye on its availability so you remember to refresh it ASAP. and of course my Commando is a fully ranged class, and yet has Heavy armor instead of medium, and solid +def buffs on her Grav Rounds attack. I was actually able to take a Tatooine 4-man mission (with some solid healers working on me). I don't think an entire raid group of all healers could keep my smuggler alive against a 4-man mission.
  8. Perhaps, but when your tank companion is the only one you have because they don't give you a healer until near level 40, then they can't have that be your only option. If they intend that if you have a tank companion then you have to keep him healed, then they need to give you non-tank companions by level 25 or so, like Mako, Elara, and Theron.
  9. Yes, but unless you're a Sawbones Scrapper, you shouldn't have to be healing your companion. You aren't built to do it well. Neither my Balance Sage nor my Artillery Commando have to heal their companions, they are all DPS characters, not healers. Again, it might be a sound strategy given the limitations of the class, but it's a patch that should not be necessary for a problem that shouldn't exist. I haven't tried the droid. I've always heard that he's underpowered compared to a standard companion, but considering that I can build my own droid parts, it might actually be worth giving it a try. But still, keep in mind, a Scrapper isn't half of a Gunslinger, they deal less damage without the ability to hide behind cover (without completely killing what little DPS they do have, at least). My Sniper was WAY more deadly in combat, I could do most content with him without even having the companion out, and still end the fight with solid HP left.
  10. Theoretically this may be true, but if so they need to do enough damage to compensate. If ti takes a Sage 45 seconds to clear a boss using their best attacks, then they only need enough defense to survive maybe 60 seconds (a little buffer). If they have enough defense to survive for 120 seconds, then they'd be overpowered. If it only takes the Scrapper 30 seconds to kill those same enemies, then they wouldn't need the 60 seconds of defense that a Sage would, they'd only need around 45 seconds. The problem is, in actual practice, the mid-level Scrapper takes 43 seconds to kill those same enemies, maybe very slightly faster than the Sage, but not by much (and are getting nerfed in the next patch, so they will be getting even worse), while their defenses allow them to survive only 40 seconds, way less than the Sage. The Scrapper's defenses can be lower than the Sage's, IF their offense is higher by a relatively equivalent amount, the problem is that this balance has not been achieved, and is looking to only get worse. But that would force you to use tank companions, which is fine for Sawbones-specced Scoundrels, but is lame for DPS-specced ones, because it means that you'd need to heal them up after every fight and couldn't bring a medic along. The only way I'd be fine with them just buffing our companions would be if they seriously overhauled the way that they worked, making it so that they all rapidly healed themselves out of combat (no need to manually heal them in any way), and making it so that even the tank-specced companions had plenty of healing abilities as well, so that they can heal the player up on the run once combat is over. Each tree should be balanced against the standard enemy. Every Smuggler has to fight Skavek, for example, at around level 32. Every single tree available for Smugglers should have a roughly equal experience fighting him, all else being equal. This should be true for the majority of enemies in the game. "The curve" should be a generic thing, a curve that every enemy is balanced against. Then, every skill tree should be balanced against this generic curve, if they are too strong or too weak against that generic curve then they need adjustment. Every single pure skill tee should be balanced to be equally as viable as any other at every level range. In world content they can have some enemies that are weaker or stronger depending on your class, so long as on average each class has the same number of encounters that favor them as they do encounters that they aren't suited for, but every story mission encounter should be equally suited to any variation within a given class. Now as for hybrids, hybrids are on their own, if a hybrid build is not viable then that is on the player, because he chose to mix and match and those choices are on him, but if Bioware provides a "set package" of abilities then it is on their shoulders to ensure that each "set package" is balanced against each other one.
  11. I definitely disagree. Space combat can overlevel you a little bit between levels 15 and 20, but that trend levels off rapidly. By mid-game you'd need to run the highest level space daily for a week or two in order to gain a single level.
  12. I was responding to the quote in which the other player indicated that certain bosses were nigh-impossible to defeat at an appropriate level unless you made correct use of very specific tactics. Assuming this is true, and intentional, then they are doing it wrong. You don't teach people by beating them mercilessly every time they answer a question wrong, without indicating what the correct answer might be. If there is just a generally difficult boss, but one which can be defeating using any number of different tactics, then that's fine. If, however, a very specific tactic is required, then it's up to the developers to indicate what that tactic might be, at least until players learn the "tells" for needing to use that sort of tactic. ME3 did this very well in the early levels, having several points in which you pretty much had to employ a new covering maneuver, or movement style, or group tactic, but in each case a pop-up would tell you how and when to use these moves. That is how you properly teach players new tricks. If you fail to do that, then you can't blame the player if they don't learn that trick and continue to try using what tricks they already know. Oh, I most certainly can. The ONLY game in the history of MMOs in which I can't blame the devs for only focusing on endgame balance is DCUO, in which you can get a character to endgame in a single day without a ridiculous amount of skill or effort. Given the many hours that players have to spend to get a single TOR character to endgame, and given how fun the experience can be if the characters are balanced, and given how unique the experience is for each class, I think this is a game that very much needs to worry about the play experience at all levels. I'd hazard to say that the number of players who are between levels 1 and 50 in this game, when compared to the number of level 50 characters, are considerably higher than in most MMOs. Other than choosing to make a Scrapper Scoundrel, I don't believe I made any especially "substandard" choices. I stuck to a single tree, I got perfectly decent gear for my level, I use my skills to the best of my ability, so if my failure comes from making "substandard choices" then it could only be the choice of choosing to use that tree in the first place, which indicates that the Scrapper tree is not balanced. You balance the curve. You balance it so that you're meant to take level 31 content using a level 31 character, with a collection of level 25-31 gear (because organically gear is dribbled out and is rarely at your level unless you're min-maxing). If you have a bit less than that, then the encounter should be very difficult, but doable. If you have more than that, then the encounter should be VERY easy. If you're looking for a challenge, then you shouldn't be looking at it from even leveled content while wearing maxed-out gear. I'm just saying, my level 31 Scrapper is geared considerably better than my level 31 Sage, his companion is considerably better gears as well, and yet my Sage was able to take out her Act 1 boss on the first try, fairly easily really, while my Scrapper has died more than a half-dozen times without getting him below 5-10% HP.
  13. Only in PvP, and only to a point. Operatives have different missions with different content balance, they have different companion loadouts. The biggest discrepancy for a while has been between Bounty Hunters and Troopers, the former having a considerably easier path (having played both myself). They are very similar, but not necessarily have the same experiences. Which, as I said, is a patch. It's an imperfect solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. If I'm level 31 I should be able to do level 31 missions easily enough, level 32/33 missions with some effort, level 29-30 missions fairly easily, level 27-28 missions effortlessly. As it stands, unless I'm a level or two above the content, it's a real challenge. I won't get my healer until Hoth, which is also part of the problem. And my gear is considerably better for my level than any previous character I've had, since this one is a Cybertech so I'm always rocking purple modded armors, and yet he performs worse. As I said, my problem is that I can't "figure this out," it's not that I can't figure out a way to make it tolerable enough, by, say, grinding space missions for a few levels from time to time. My point is that I shouldn't have to do this, that the class should be balanced entirely on it's own, so that I can have the same casual experience that I do with other characters and do just fine at it.
  14. I played a Sniper up to around that point and didn't have any issues either, the ranged Smugglers/Agents seem to be fine, cover makes them a better tank than tanks, but the Scrapper spec is just not working at mid-levels. You have to get in close and melee, no cover, but you can't absorb nearly enough damage for that, can't gain Upper Hand fast enough to use your Scrapper moves, and don't have a healing companion until practically Act 2. I've heard that some very late-game abilities make them much more playable, but they don't have those abilities earlier in the game, so what does that matter. I asked for some suggestions and got things like "overlevel the content," or "glitch the AI," or "buy all the best gear at all times," or "hybrid into a different tree," all useful suggestions, but they are patches to the problems, ways to take a broken class and muddle trough it. None of those suggestions would be necessary for many of the other non-broken classes in the game, and should not be necessary for Scrappers either. I should be able to just wander into the story content, at or even slightly below the level of it, wearing whatever gear I happen to have slapped together from quests, and be able to beat the boss in a straight, non-exploiting fight, using my core abilities. It can be a tricky fight, it can be close, and I might die once or twice, but I should still be able to do it. If I come in over leveled, in the best gear possible, and with the most tricky tactics then I shouldn't just have enough to squeak through, I should completely dominate the boss under those circumstances. "Constructive" means pointing out what's wrong and how to fix it. I did both. How is that not constructive?
  15. Well originally it was on the Smuggler boards, but I was told to move it to the suggesting board, so I did. It definitely is a suggestion though, but to boil it down: Choose one: a. Increase damage of Scrappers at mid-levels so that they can kill things faster. OR b. Increase defense capabilities of Scrappers at mid-levels so that they can survive battle longer. Also, If you want to teach players to use specific tactics, then you need to let them know what those specific tactics might be. and further: Classes should be balanced at ALL level ranges, not just at endgame, because there are plenty of players who don't care at all what goes on after hitting 50.
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