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wavyhill

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Everything posted by wavyhill

  1. Gotta go with KotOR 3. Maybe if Bioware had stuck to modestly budgeted single player games they wouldn't have had to sign the deal with the EA devil that'll be acomin' for their souls all too soon. Yeah, maybe they wouldn't have stuck the Exile with that awful, cringe inducing name or butchered the plot of KotOR2 they way they did. It's pretty good. Although since the combat in the KotOR games is so tedious and dull I sometimes prefer rereading Scorchy's KotOR2 LP over replaying it.
  2. There are lots of reasons to be disappointed with SWTOR beyond the abuse of the patented Bioware "nothing you do matters beyond the next line of dialogue" method of 'player choice.' Poor pacing, lack of scope, short length, uneven writing, annoying characters, and other things abound. Personally, I find that the most consistently disappointing aspect to be how at odds the plot is with the game mechanics. What I mean by that is that the structure of the leveling game, i.e. quest hubs sprinkled around with bread crumbs leading the player from one hub to the next, is not especially conductive to telling a strong story. What happens is that it gets muddled with all the other little stories that you have to pick up at these hubs so that you can advance properly. It's very easy to lose interest in a story if you keep having to dip in and out of it all the bloody time and can almost never really immerse yourself within it for any real length of time. I mean, look at all the crap you have to keep straight when you're leveling: the class story, the planet story, a story for each of your pets, a story for every dungeon, and a story for damn near all of the incidental quests you have to pick up along the way. Having to pick up and drop stories so damn often is a lot to ask of someone in any medium, but even more so in a video game because you already have to drop in and out of the story a lot since video game stories are almost entirely told via cut scenes anymore. The part where you run around killing everything in sight rarely helps to move the plot along. All this track switching all the bloody time is not a task many people excel at. For a good example go watch the ending of Ep. 1, which has 4 bloody concurrent plot threads for the audience to keep track of. As a result they don't ever get to spend too much time on any one thread and the audience never really gets to be immersed in any one part of the story. It's always switching back and forth between crap that should[/i, in theory,] be interesting, but isn't because they can never become engrossed in any one segment long enough to form any sort of emotional connection to it. So we have that crap going on almost the entire length of the leveling game in SWTOR. It's one of the major reasons that the non-planet quests you typically get near the end of the chapters tend to feel so much better than the ones you get on the planets as part of your allotment of xp grinding. There are certainly other issues with the game, but I feel that this is probably the biggest one. Most of the others can be mostly forgiven due to how infrequently they appear or excused as personal taste, but I don't believe this issue can be hand waved with such excuses. Yes. Expectation management, both for the developers and the players, has obviously been way out of whack for a long, long time with this game. I mean, even with ~6 years and their hundreds of millions of dollars they still had to cut a lot of crap and scramble to launch when they did with what they had. The sort of rampant, runaway hype that their marketing people cultivated years back is absolutely toxic to both developing and playing games and I have trouble fathoming why the industry still encourages it. How predictably pedantic. The illusion of choice is still important, especially when it's one of the major taglines used to sell the bloody game. You do realize that most people don't actually expect that every facet of a story be absolutely and utterly original, right? There are good reasons for things like genres and tropes to exist. Mostly people just want an engaging tale. Part of being engaging is not being too predictable because that's boring as hell. Unfortunately, not being predictable isn't something Bioware is very good at. They're typically much better at making interesting characters than interesting plots and the writing is uneven at best (ref. the 'payment in kisses' issue.) And people think I'm insulting. Has it occurred to you that maybe, just maybe some of us have done all that jazz and still found the whole vaunted 'Fourth Pillar' to be, shall we say, underwhelming? Maybe, but that doesn't explain why there is so very little carryover from one instanced area to another. There are a couple of nice touches here and there, but by and large it feels unimpressive and exceedingly minor to me.
  3. Uh, WoW? Rift? Any other game that has multiple skill trees per class? FFXI? DAoC? CoH? WoW and Rift again. I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Are you saying that we're lucky to have PvP rewards because they could have launched without them? 'Cause under that line of thought we're lucky to have bloody keybindings and lucky to not have a $30 subscription fee too. Don't see many people counting their stars over those things do ya? Well they would have to be better in this game wouldn't they? Considering I can't think of any other game that has them and all. Though I think they could have been far better had they left the ability to switch their combat role around intact. I'd much rather use the pet I like for story reasons than the one that is mechanically best suited to kill crap with me. Yes. An event where the easiest way to participate and obtain the rewards is to sit in front of the daily terminal and click the rez button every 15 mins is a groundbreaking achievement. I think you've never played both sides. If you did you would understand that, apart from very few select areas, the Republic and Imperial questing areas are almost totally segregated on all planets. That is the main reason for the lack of World PvP, apart from not having any rewards for it of course.
  4. I can never understand why people like to gush about the Agent story as if it's some glittering opal of writing. Seeing posts like this make me flashback to bloody TVTropes and it's legions of far too emotionally invested fanboys. I'll agree that Ch1 is good, really it should be the poster child for all the other Chapters in the game. But that's only because the end is really head and shoulders anything and everything else the game has to offer. That last mission is wonderfully executed and makes up for stuff like Dromund Kaas and Alderann both being so boring that I can't remember what the story on those planets were or Watcher-X being so transparently shifty and backstabbing that there was never any tension or conflict for the entirety of Nar Shaddaa, just a plodding, interminable wait for the inevitable. Coming off the high that is the whole You Know Who encounter, even though it was horribly bugged, I had high hopes for Ch2. Especially since the lead up seemed so promising: a deep cover infiltration mission as a double agent. Finally! Real spy stuff instead of bloody terrorist hunting. Too that that anticipation got stuffed into a refrigerator part way through the first quest. From there on lots of words and phrases come to my mind when I think back to Ch2: disappointment, very silly, contrived plot device, poor attempts at trying to screw with perception like Philip K Dick, a BBEG that's just kind of a chump; even if he does have a glowbat, rakghouls are, and will remain, utterly stupid no matter what anyone tries to do with them, Doc Lokin is easily the best of the Agents pets, even with the rakghoul idiocy, Ensign Temple is mind bogglingly dull and uninteresting, the Chiss commander guy in Hoth makes a much, much better love interest for the chick Agent than bugboy and his ilk, despite that Hoth is still hands down the best zone in the game because it's completely opposite annoying crap like Voss and Nar Shaddaa, and did I mention the horrendous disappointment? Well after that I wasn't about to get excited for Ch3 and boy-howdy am I glad I didn't. If "very silly" is the descriptor for Ch2 then then for Ch3 it must be "extraordinarily silly." There is no pretense of subtly here, just vast collections of *** pulls that to attempt to ramp up the villain's threat level while also making them as uninteresting as possible. The kind of one-upmanship between protagonist and antagonist that you typically see in soap operas and animes that have run for far too long. Not to mention the unwanted and unneeded plot twist that added nothing but plot twisty-ness to the whole endevour. At least the ultimate conclusion was vaguely satisfying, and I'm glad that at least one class story has multiple endings that differ fairly significantly from each other and doesn't require a "CHOOSE YOUR DESTINY BUTTON" like Deus Ex: HR had. That being said, I do want to reiterate the points that I liked. Lest they get lost in the sea of sourness. 1) The ending of Ch1 is just great. All other stories in this game wish they got wrapped up with such care and attention. If you haven't done it yet then go do it now. Preferably as an Operative so you can skip the bullcrap parts like The Unending Corridors of Sameness and The Ugly Bug Ball. 2) I genuinely like Doctor Lokin and Kaliyo as characters. I thought they added to the story as a whole in an enjoyable way, unlike the other 3 chuckleheads you get saddled with. 3) The ability to get different endings, some of them very radically different from the others, was a very pleasant surprise and one that I welcomed wholeheartedly.
  5. Personally I feel that the first group has a pretty valid point since Bioware seems to believe it's perfectly ok for marauders, hybrid sorcs, and tank assassins to have their cake an eat it too. Denying the huge advantage those classes and specs have thanks to the gross discrepancy in survivability and utility they can leverage in addition to their damage is just sour grapes. A couple of things: 1) Current game conditions are never moot. Poor experiences are what make people quit and reroll; or just plain quit of course. 2) Waiting for a miracle patch is, essentially, never the intelligent response. Because, unless you're very lucky, they never come quick enough and you just end up torturing yourself for little to no gain. You can feel noble about rolling with the punches if you want, but most people are just going to go find something that isn't frustrating to do instead.
  6. Some day I'll learn to stop making posts at the end of the week when I'm going to be busy all weekend. From http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-march-23rd-2012 Note how he talks about 'role' and only mentions Commandos offhandedly. Also note how he specifically mentions that endgame content was the focal point of the nerf. So we either accept that rational as the method behind their madness or we believe in wild speculation and conjecture instead. I know which I prefer, however pigheaded it may seem. Depends on what your definition of "on their own" is. 1v1 tanks are ok but, as I've stated, 1v1 doesn't matter in a team game. I define "on their own" to mean queuing solo, where tanks are very marginalized. Guard is a death sentence without a healer around and without autobalancing and the like it can be very easy to get tossed around between both extremes if you're actually trying to be a tank instead of a dps class with better armor. Do try to pay attention, I wasn't trying to say that the magnitude of the nerf was justified. Merely that the comparison that was put forth was flawed and not relevant to the issue at hand. Not all throughput is as valuable as the damage/time or heal/time numbers would imply. A 10k damage ability on a 20s cd is far more valuable than a 20s dot that tics for 1500 damage every 3s on the same 20s cd. This is plain and obvious for everyone to see, despite both hypothetical abilities delivering the same damage over time. What you call simplification I call hyperbole for the sake of drama, something that has no bloody place in such a discussion. Personally the only adjustment I'd like to see to resolve is for breakable CC like mez to not generate it's full amount of resolve all at once. Instead I'd like to see resolve tic upwards after application so that you only gain an amount of resolve commensurate to the length of time you were CC'd before some idiot broke it with a careless AoE. Sigh, another false comparison. Comparing gear sets from totally different tiers with completely different stat budgets is a vaguely amusing mistake at the very best. Pre-1.2 it was utterly trivial to put up largely similar numbers in Champion/Battlemaster (or more likely, Champion/Rakata) gear. Adjusting is different to wholesale nerfing that would only serve to devalue an entire combat role. The thing you're advocating for tanks is the exact same kind of sledgehammer that healers just got clobbered with in 1.2. There are better ways to adjust the extremes of balance without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and making PvP even more of a deathmatch than it already is. For example, they could nerf the base value of Taunt and Guard and then make both of their effects scale with tanking stats like defense, absorb, and shield. They could make it so that you have to be in the tanking stance to use Taunt. They could give Assassins/Shadows and PTs/Vanguards more ally support abilities like Intercede. They could increase the damage split from Guard to something like 50/70 but also allow Guard damage to be mitigated by defensive stats. And on and on. I feel that ideal composition for a PvP team should be to have an even balance between dps classes and support classes, with a tank being support on par with a healer. I believe the best way to achieve this is to roll back many of the healing nerfs from 1.2, nerf the bleeding edge of the outlier dps classes, and adjust tanking mechanics so that there is incentive to spec and play a team damage reduction role instead of the heavy armor dps role they find themselves in now. As an aside, apart from huttball, the current WZs favor defense far too much. They really should be adjusted so that either A) defense isn't so damn easy or B) so that offense plays more of a role in the objectives. Civil War especially could benefit from a mechanic where the team that has the fewest number of turrets gets a temp buff one or two of them can pick up that drastically increases their damage so long as they remain the underdog. Warhammer called them Murderballs, and they could be quite effective at breaking objective stalemates. It would also be nice to have at least one WZ where the entire objective was to kick the ever-loving hell out of each other It would also be
  7. A laughable presumption considering we were explicitly told that the healing nerfs were done in response to raids being too easy. Ah, good old "complaining about tanks" posts. I haven't seen any since Warhammer. How I've missed the inflated sense of self worth and unspoken condescension. Being good at 1v1 is not a viable role for any class in a team based PvP environment and advocating such pigeonholing makes you an utter pillock. Furthermore your knowledge of the tools the different tanking specs have is pathetically inadequate. I challenge you to name these 3 damage reduction CDs you think all tanks get. Easily. DPS and HPS are effectively meaningless terms in PvP. So referencing them in this context is flawed. What matters is burst, for both damage and healing. Pre-1.2 healers had a large advantage in that department since they have very little to no ramp up on their burst heals, and what little they do can trivially be triggered before the fight, whereas many dps specs need several seconds to ramp up to their burst. That is a significant advantage. Or was until they decided that burst healing shouldn't exist, which was stupid as all hell. The complete castration of burst healing is the main issue for healers in 1.2, not HPS. You obviously have no idea how resolve works. Go read Taugrims guide or something. What needs to be fixed are the display issues surrounding other forums of CC immunity like Force Shroud, Unstoppable, and Entrench. No. Apart from the soft cap issues Expertise was fine pre-1.2. If anything it should return that that model. No, no, and no. Without Trauma heals are too powerful for their opportunity cost when compared to damage, see what I said about ramp up time earlier. Nerfing Guard and Taunt does nothing but dilute the already weak differences between tanks and dps specs. I can almost agree with you here. Healers still have an important part to play in PvP. But post-1.2 I don't consider a solitary healer viable. You need the support of a dedicated tank and/or another healer to prosper, and even then it can be an iffy proposition. Basically, 1.1.5 PvP was largely balanced with a few outliers. They should return to that instead of following the hamfisted nerfs and buffs of 1.2 with even more hamfisted, reactionary adjustments like you're proposing
  8. That's a very logical train of thought that is almost entirely tangential to the issue at hand and all too capable of upsetting your customers more than they already are. Well done. You're an engineer aren't you? Between your posts and GZ's posts I'm willing to bet that the only reason the entirety of the SWTOR Community Management team hasn't already died of blood alcohol poisoning must either be A) an inability to comprehend written English, B) gross incompetence, or C) unusually high alcohol tolerance, or D) some combination of the above. A slightly less logical idea, that doesn't aggravate customers whom you've already irritated, might be to recognize that a certain significant fraction of customers will be annoyed by any tweaks to their class and give free respecs to all players affected by any change to their class at all. I cannot imagine it costing your guys too much in the way of effort and, while it might not gain you any good will, it certainly wouldn't increase your net ill will at all either. Something to think about.
  9. Leathality's pros lie with its lesser dependance on cover and in being less apt to getting totally screwed over by armor and defense chance. Not necessarily higher burst, but more flexible, easily usable, and consistent burst. (As as aside, note that just using grenade/dart immediately followed by Cull isn't burst, it's your bread and butter damage.) That being said, I do see 2 things wrong with your actual burst rotation: you don't mention using Ambush or Interrogation Probe. Both of those are important components of your max burst damage. Ambush because it hits like a freight train and can be timed to hit in the same global as Explosive Probe. Just because you have to hardcast it doesn't make it taboo to use as Lethality. I also like to use it to try to scare people who are trying to get open to catch a ball pass. Typically they either see the mark on them and try to run for LoS, or they take an unexpected 4k hit and run off try to heal up. Interrogation Probe is important because, even though it doesn't interact with Cull, it is still a hard hitting and cheap DoT if you take 2/2 Efficient Engineering and it also has the bonus of possibly masking your more important DoT effects so the healer you're trying to dismantle doesn't totally neuter your followup Cull. Your best burst damage is going to be Corrosive Grenade/Dart, Interrogation Probe, relic/adrenal, Ambush, Explosive Probe, and Cull, with Takedown either being used ASAP or whenever it's most likely to kill the target outright. If you really, really need some extra damage on top of that then Series of Shots or Frag Grenade. The whole rotation is often overkill, but when you really need someone to die it's worth it. (Technically, I suppose true max burst would be to do the above with Orbital Strike going while you Ambush/Ex.Probe/Cull, but I don't think it'll work out very well too often.) That reminds me, you are using a Power relic and a Power adrenal right? They're the only ones worth using.
  10. You're missing the point entirely. Having Revan in the game (and novel) AT ALL is mucking up KotOR. Same with having the Exile around screwing up KotOR 2. There's a very big problem with making games that purport to have meaningful choices in them, then you go back a few years later and say, "Right. This is what actually happened and if you didn't follow these steps to the letter then you're wrong and I'm right. To hell with your nostalgia and such." More than anything else, nostalgia is what Star Wars freaking runs on . Damaging that in any way is absolutely retarded. This game would never have come to pass were it not for people's love of KotOR, yet they went out of their way to make it so that anyone who didn't play a male, pure Light Side Revan and a female, pure Light Side Exile with a goofy name objectively wrong. That's like if Lucas made a new, Laserdisc only, Special Edition of the Original Trilogy where Luke dies when the Death Star explodes and he's replaced by Biggs for the rest of the movies, and then Lucas declared that only that one particular edition counts. It's just plain dumb. And like that above example, it's dumb for no reason other than to be dumb. There is zero need for it from a story standpoint. Obsidian went to great lengths to make sure that whenever KotOR 2 referenced Revan, and KotOR in general, that you could make it true to whatever choices you picked in KotOR. That's good writing and attention to detail. Obviously that exact method wouldn't work too very well here with the multiplayer conversations, but there are other ways to honor people's prior choices and still tell a good story. Here's one that's in the game right this second: the Revanite quest line on Dromand Kaas. One of the NPCs specifically states that they don't even know Revans gender and, while they talk about how Revan mastered both the Light and Dark Sides, they never make any mention of what alignment Revan was at the end of the war. Ambiguity allows the writer to call back to KotOR and still respect whatever choices the player made way back in 2003. That is much better writing and shows far greater concern for the feelings of loyal players than anything in the Foundry and the bloody tie-in novel.
  11. Undoubtedly the best plot twists were all the times I was betrayed in every bloody class story I've done. I mean who would expect that in a Bioware game of all things eh? I don't even think I could recount all of them. Good thing I didn't make a drinking game out of it. I was really surprised that the only good plot in the game is the one from the very tail end of the Agents Ch1. It takes balls to market a game so heavily on story and then utterly fail to deliver everywhere but one place. I was also heartily surprised to see them take such massive dumps all over KotOR and KotOR 2 just for the sake of a mid-level dungeon and a crappy tie-in novel. Especially when so much of the rest of the game almost feels like KotOR fanfiction at times. What hard drugs the development team was on. Especially the class & UI designers As a runner up, how big is the rod that's stuck up GZ's backside and who thought it would be a good idea to let him post on the forums when said rod drives him to be such a dick in the majority of his posts?
  12. The Skipray could be cool, I do love having the working s-foils on the X-Wing and the lack of retractable landing gear is why I've never gotten the Imperial Shuttle, but it seems like such a shame that something as iconic as the basic TIE Fighter has never had a UCS set. It's not like they're adverse to doing cheaper UCS sets either, the other two TIE sets and the Jedi Starfighter were both only $100 and the AT-ST was only $80. As for capital ship models, I have to vote for the Nebulon B Escort Frigate. Those things look so damn cool. It would be a real pain in the *** to keep it from collapsing though.
  13. Pretty sure the UCS TIE Advanced was only $100. Just like the UCS TIE Interceptor was way back in 2000. Now the UCS Millennium Falcon was $500; and also amazingly cool. Wish I had one. It would look really good next to my X-Wing, Y-Wing, Tantive IV, TIE Interceptor, Star Destroyer, Death Star 2, and soon-to-be B-Wing. I hope they do an A-Wing and maybe a TIE Fighter or a TIE Bomber for 2013. I'm annoyed every time they waste a UCS set on something lame like the Darth Maul bust or other prequel induced crap.
  14. Yeah, I hate having to get to know a new character. It's so much easier to get used to the 19th vastly different version of the same character. Retreading old ground is just so damn comfortable. It's like you don't even have to think after a while. "Oh there's a new dire threat looming large over the galaxy? Jolly good! I wonder what combination of Luke, lightsabers, new Force shenanigans, X-Wings, and good old fashioned drama will be used to overcome this one in 3400 pages, $64, 9 books, 6 months, and 600,000 totally superfluous words." I can't until someone tries to push the History Eraser Button and reboots Star Wars like they did with Star Trek and the DCU. Then we can do this whole thing all over again. What fun.
  15. Couple of nitpicks. wat Are we talking about the same FFXI here? PS2 game that was ported over to the PC? Released in Japan back in 2002? 'Cause the only UI modification FFXI had by default was changing the background color of the chat log and the colors of the different chat messages. To do anything else required modding the game files. Likewise, any addons you might find for FFXI are ones that piggyback on a 3rd party app that was used for esoteric functions like: not crashing the game when you alt tabbed out. And used to cause a whole hell of a lot of drama to boot. So that's not really fair to SWTOR. At least FFXI had the option to turn off the damn smart camera at launch though. I assume you're talking about stuff like WoW's Dungeon Finder? 'Cause Warhammer never had that, but LotRO added one about a year ago.
  16. I have to admit that I enjoyed the Dark Empire trilogy. People always rail against the clone thing, but I always thought having a backup plan like that fit Palpys character pretty well. Then again I was a lot less discriminating when I was younger and I really don't remember a whole lot of the fine details. Plus I've been reading comic books all my life, so maybe I'm more thick skinned than other people. The World Devastators were just cool though. I loved that mission in Rogue Squadron. I'll agree here. NJO is what killed my interest in the EU. I think the last one I read was Star By Star and by the end of that book it became clear to me that all the authors involved in the entire mess were just spinning their wheels, that nothing was going to be resolved any bloody time soon, and that the people in charge were more interested in milking crap for as long as possible than telling a good story. Sure, the pre-NJO EU may have had some stupid crap, like The Crystal Star, Luke's Force ghost girlfriend, the soul stealing dinosaurs, and so forth. Hell, I can't even remember a damn thing about the entire Black Fleet Crisis trilogy. But at least those stupid things didn't really extend outside the one or two books they were in. The Vong however were a stupid thing that went on way too damn long and were all pervasive for several bloody years. Awful, terrible idea. And everything I've seen people talk about coming from the post-NJO EU just seems leagues more terrible than anything that came before. Jacen turning evil, mind-stealing bugs, Jaina being trained by Boba Fett to kill her brother, Mara Jade dying because Luke sold his marriage to Satan (or was that some other red head? Ah well, same difference), Mandalorians went from being crazy space vikings/huns/whatever to peaceful, honorable farmers? I dunno. I don't see any pluses here. I'm pretty sure that the yalsimiri or w/e predate that bit of fluff, so they get grandfathered in. Again I don't see your issue, but then the only thing I ever read that had Boba alive after being eaten were the short stories in Tales of the Bounty Hunters and Tales from Jabba's Palace. The worst crap to happen to Boba from my POV is being included in the terrible prequels. While I'll agree that his Dune books are just *%#$ing awful the worst I can say about his Star Wars books is that they're just boring. I liked his origin story for IG-88 though. Other than the aforementioned NJO nonsense my biggest beef with the EU is that nobody acknowledges the old Lando Calrissian Adventures and Han Solo Adventures stories. I still really like them to this day. The EU in general could do with having more pulp and fewer crazy galactic threats that take 3 books of overarching drama to resolve.
  17. I really want to believe that SWTOR can have fun, meaningful, well populated Open World PvP, but I my experience in Warhammer has taught me that without a 3rd faction that plan is doomed to failure. Now, obviously, Bioware can't really make a 3rd fully fleshed out faction. But they can create a pseudo 3rd faction fairly easily. A faction that accepts both Republic and Imperial players and only exists for the purposes of Open World PvP. Probably the best way to implement this is to just have an NPC on the fleet that reports on approximately how many people for each side are actively participating in Open Wolrd PvP at that point in time and allows players to toggle between their normal faction alliance and this 3rd faction, again, only for the purposes of Open World PvP. This would allow people on servers that are totally dominated by either Empire or Republic players the chance to get some action beyond spawn camping and zerging their horribly undermanned opposites. The sort of stuff that was the eventual downfall and ruination of Warhammer Online. Really? You think people will do things just for the sake of fun? In an MMO? Your faith in your fellow man is touching, if unrealistic. Misanthropy wins the day when it comes to MMO design.
  18. Hmm. The only thing I can think of that the developers might spring for, because it would require relatively few resources, is to reassess and speak to the playerbase on the subject of tanks. On live right now a tank brings two major things to the table, guard and taunts. But only guard requires you to actually be running the tanking stance. So dps specs that belong to a tank hybrid class get a good amount of tank utility without having to be restricted by the lower dps of the tanking stance and tanking spec. I feel that this is patently unfair both to people who want to run in their tanking stance AND to the pure dps classes like the Sniper who lack such utility while having little to no intended damage advantage. Guard is also of somewhat suspect use without a pocket healer because it provides so very little mitigation. Mostly it just makes the tank die faster to unmitigatable damage. Unlike in Warhammer were you could mitigate guard damage with block and parry. Additionally, avoidance stats are of very limited use because of the wide assortment of tech and force attacks that classes have access to that utterly bypass them. To say nothing of the weak mechanics of shield stats the next to unmitigatable damage of internal and elemental attacks. I can think of some ideas to address these issues, like taunts only working when in the tanking stance, being able to avoid/shield guard damage, or baking some force/tech resistance into a high tier tanking talent that scales with avoidance/shield stats and only works against players. Regardless, I think the tanking role could use a good, comprehensive review in PvP. I would like for tank specced and tank geared tanks to truly provide a level of utility and group survivability that offsets their low burst capabilities (of course, that goes hand in hand with nerfing the burst that does exist currently, bloody Shadows). I hope I've provided at least some justification for it.
  19. No, but I also don't demand that from it because I realize that it is an impossible goal for a CRPG to meet. My problems with the single player side of the game stem more from the uneven writing, the patented Bioware method of making choice not extend beyond the next line of dialogue, the fact that the gameplay and the stories are at odds with each other and often sabotage one another, questionable design choices, and what I feel are some gross misallocations of resources on Biowares part.
  20. Sign me up. After they deal with The Ramen Noodle Planet and The Planet of Corridors That All Look the Same they can proceed to vaporize Coruscant (aka The Other Planet of Corridors), Voss (The Planet of Pointless Mysticism), and Planet Rakghoul. A lot of the planets are bad in some way, shape, or form. But these 5 stand poor textures and boring layouts above the rest. The only planet that I feel is perfectly alright the way it is is Hoth.
  21. So you mean they should do the exact same thing that they did with Mass Effect. Where, in a game that totes your ability to, "be the hero of your own Star Wars™ saga," as one of it's main selling points, nothing you do matters come the end of the game? Yeah that sounds like a recipe for a long and successful game. Maybe, but I would prefer that they not write about the Inquisitor at all because doing so would completely invalidate every single thing that I, or anyone else, has done with their Inquisitor. Telling people that their choices matter and then not providing many meaningful choices is one thing, but doing that and then saying that "No, this is what really happened! And you'll have to pay me to find out what it is!" is just rubbing your arsehole in your customers faces for kicks.
  22. Pardon me, but to me "multiplayer" has very specific connotations that mean "playing the game at the same time as someone else in an intentionally formed group." Not "being able to have a lot of similar reference points when I'm talking to someone about the game." Additionally, I certainly wouldn't mind if I could have a discussion with another agent only to find out that both of our stories were radically different due to choices we made at pivotal points in the plot. It would provide a far deeper illusion of consequence than we currently have, and the downside of having fewer shared reference points would make it no different than trying to discuss the agent class story with say, a warrior. I don't even know what the hell you're talking about now. This game is innovative? Pray tell, where is all of it? I see a couple of things that might be called innovative were they not tainted and weighed down with the Largely Pointless Shackles of "Because WoW Said So." Are you talking about the story thing? 'Cause if you're going to call that innovative I'm going to laugh derisively at you. Like I said before, blindly sticking to the DIKU paradigm promoted by EQ, WoW, and now SWTOR is choking the life out of the entire genre for little reason other than to please empty suits who have a crippling fear of even the smallest iota of risk. Nobody else is served by this. If it were any more personalized it would be more like what was promised to us by Biowares hype and marketing blitz. Just because you cannot provide a wholly unique experience for every single player does not mean that everybody needs to have an identical experience. The illusion of choice is important to CRPGs and it's a department that this game comes up very short in. It's not terribly hard or expensive to produce the illusion of choice unless the developer mandates that each frame be made of a mix of gold dust, cocaine, and voice acting for filler "kill 10 womp rats" garbage.
  23. Personally, I find the idea of having certain approved storylines becoming canon to be offensive. In exactly the same way I find canonizing elements of KotOR offensive. If a developer is going to sell you a product based on the illusion that player choice matters, I believe they have an obligation to carry that promise over to things outside that specific game. It would have been trivially easy to leave the events of KotOR 1 & 2 shrouded in half truths and unknowns in regards to the canon outside those two games. Hell you can kinda see it in SWTOR, like when the Revanites on Dromand Kaas tell you that they don't know if Revan was a man or a woman. That way nobodies experiences with the earlier games gets shat on. But no, they had to ruin that to provide people with a mid-level dungeon and a horrible tie-in novel. It retroactively degrades KotOR 1 & 2 unless you specifically played the version of the story that was canonized. The same thing will happen when they decide to canonize certain paths in this game for yet more tie-in novels and probably for expansions too. $20 on all Republic classes being pure Light Side and all Imperial classes being pure Dark Side. Bah.
  24. The class quests (you know, one of the major selling points of the game that got hyped to hell and back) are already not multiplayer friendly since none of the people who aren't the mission holder have any say in what's going on. Also, it would be kinda nice if they ditched the "feel of an mmo," that persistent sense of "Man, I've done ALL of this before," is one of those things that really drags the game down. That belief has been largely responsible for the vast majority of the MMOs released after 2004 to be either very disappointing or flat out ruinously bad. It's sunk hundreds of millions of dollars of investment money and decades worth of labor. It's like saying that every car should be started with a hand crank just because the Model T was. As I said, you're largely describing an issue of scope. Which is entirely the writers fault. It would be easy to have more carry over between stories if the stories being told were of a much more personal nature than they currently are.
  25. No. I understood what you were getting at. But flat out removing two of the cornerstones of Star Wars lore (that the Jedi are near exclusively light side force users and have been the guardians of peace in the Republic since its inception) doesn't really provoke much meaningful conversation. It's the same as if I posed the question, "What would Star Wars be like if there was no FTL travel or communications?" About the only answer that can be given is, "Well it wouldn't be bloody Star Wars then would it?" A similar question, yet with more avenues for discussion would be something like, "What if Rajivari and his followers had escaped Tython and set up a competing dark side Jedi Order elsewhere?" This question doesn't so much remove the foundations of the story so much as shift them a bit to the left, which is what most good alternate universe stories do.
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