I play an Imperial Agent who loves the Empire but hates the Sith (because they're stupid and harmful to the Empire proper). It's a shaky topic! If she thought that she could work to topple the Sith without sacrificing Imperial sovereignty in its territories, she might defect.

http://www.torhead.com/class/748MmfD/powertech http://www.torhead.com/class/an2lnUU/mercenary Notice the list of 70 unique abilities for each of these classes? This is why the "It's just a role change!" argument doesn't hold up.

Substitute "I don't think the story is fun" for "I don't think levelling two characters is fun"; why are you getting in the way of my fun, forcing me to play two stories if I don't want to? So what? Shadow and Sage have drastically different 'mana' pools (100 vs 500), too, and different mana management approaches to deal with that. So should they be singled out, since their pools aren't identical, for being disallowed AC changes? But you have a whole host of new abilities that you've never seen before if you change from Powertech to Merc. It is entirely false to say that nothing but your role and your stat choices change. Like, this is literally a lie to say. Swapping classes doesn't destroy mechanical integrity. It just removes the grind of having to reroll in order to see everything that the game has to offer.

If you do Esseles with a 4-person group (ie, tank, healer, 2 dps) everything will die too quickly for you to tank anything.

Then what's the logical reason for not letting me respec my Consular into a Scoundrel? I mean, at the end of the day, it's just a game and it doesn't really matter, right? Mechanical integrity is what every design choice has to come down to, and that's what the core of the anti-class-change argument comes down to.

The semantic argument is a really silly argument to be making. It just says, "Look, I can't get past the definitions I'm used to and acknowledge that this is a new game that works differently from other games." Yes, this game uses two terms: Class and Advanced Class. No, that doesn't mean that the term "Class" should function identically to its use in other games. Come on.

Edit: Bah!

While you're welcome to play your character as a self-insert, it's not the way this MMO, or most others, work. Multiple characters are expected, and in this case, that's the way it should be. You can make your single the character the best he can be; that doesn't mean that he should have more options available to him.

This is not a single player game. Anything that other people does has potential to directly influence my gameplay. I am going to quote myself now. basically, the "keep your eyes on your own plate" argument does not hold water when you're discussing MMO games.

if they are so similar there's no reason to move between them anyway

Don't suck at the game and you will not suffer from this. That is to say, if you have nothing to hide, then a combat log or recount will not hurt you. You're essentially saying "I need censorship to protect me!" I'd rather know who to kick out of a group than have to cancel a group/flashpoint/op altogether because someone is dropping the ball and it's impossible to know who it is.

there are two classes in WoW that have three roles, therefore class-switching in TOR! wait...

Having fonts for all sorts of languages would probably be pretty cool.

It might not be a bug. Sell them on the Hutt market.

I'm pretty sure "nobody knows Ewoks are a thing until the Battle of Endor" is a lore fact.

12.21.2011 , 08:30 pm

I, too, hate information. Wait, that doesn't make any sense.

Clearly it lacked potential for profit. Edit: continued profit, anyway.

Also, people whose sole reason for denying class changes is "I want other people to suffer for making a decision they're unhappy with" are doing it wrong. There are good reasons for denying class changes. "DEAL WITH IT!" isn't one of them. I mean, it is annoying that you are essentially presented with a 2-3 hour character creation process before deciding your class. In most any other MMO, if I hate my class after two or three hours, it's because I've gotten at least some semblance of what my class will be like in practice; in The Old Republic, this isn't the case, and by the time I've had the chance to see what my class is like in practice, I'll be more like ~6-7 hours invested. Letting people just skip the first 10 levels of a class they've already played to the Fleet/class selection guy would be an easier way to handle this than allowing respecs.

Doubles the number of A and B class population on a server. If every level 50 Vanguard is also a level 50 Commando, the demand for both of them decreases as the supply doubles. Playing a less common class (say, Vanguard, or Guardian) is no longer a viable strategy for making yourself a commodity. Also, there's the fact that you'll have to put up with people who decided to change their class at level 50 and don't know how to play, did not have the regular, paced development that comes with leveling -- remember, for games with a focus on end-game content, the leveling process is the time during which you learn how to play your class (and some people can't even figure it out with 85 levels played to do so); by offering class respecs, you're going to increase the population of people who have no idea what they're doing causing problems in group situations. Instead of the gentle slope provided by the handful-of-powers-per-level approach, you'll be seeing people with a couple dozen (or whatever # of powers come from the advanced class) abilities that they don't know how to use, and a bunch of familiar powers that no longer function in the context in which they are familiar. tl;dr : class respecs would in fact directly affect other people in the game, unless those same people taking respecs never played in group situations.

People who enjoy playing the game, and aren't just here for the story. If the advanced classes are so startlingly similar that there's no meaningful distinction, homefry, then you don't really need a respec anyway, do you?

Levelling through WoW is pretty much identical every single time, but nobody ever argues that it discourages making alts!

No, he's really not. The advanced classes are distinct and function distinctly. The advanced classes fill the same role here that the standard classes fill in WoW. This is an 8-class game, not a 4-class game.

It's not a trap anymore than, to use the same example, forcing you to start over at 85 if you'd rather play a rogue than a warrior is a trap. It's very obvious, very up-front about this, and the fact is that the game is made to treat the eight advanced classes as the "classes" of the game. Some powers are shared, but they play differently and distinctly and fill different roles in different ways in a group environment.

For the same reason there's no way to respec from Warrior to Rogue.