Official Q&A Thread for April 20th, 2012 Q&A Blog Post

[Spritle]

Are you working on server mergers of any sort? There are far too many servers, and many of them are light-very light population. What can be done about this (if anything) to make servers more highly populated? ETA?

 

 

Side note: server transfers would be nice, but I have a solid group of people I play with, and not everyone may be able to afford server transfers, if you need to pay for them.

Edited April 8, 2012 by Spritle

[Nimossa]

I'm unable to equip certain "orange" armor pieces on my companions. My toon is a Trooper and , as you know, all my companions wear heavy/trooper gear. These pieces say they are Trooper Only, it is the only difference I see from other orange gear. I suppose my question is, if this is intended, will it be changed for 1.2 to give players the increased appearance options and if it isn't shall it be fixed?

[PaLiDrAm]

Is Quesh Pronounced like Kwesh or Kesh?

 

My friend also thinks it is pronounced Quiche, but he's a bit special in the head so feel free to ignore that.

[OniHouse]

Question: Are there any more changes planned for the sorc/sage(healingwise, never played the DPS specs) class in 1.2? For example I think Dark mending reducing the cast time of Dark infusion by 1 second instead of 0.5 wouldn't be a bad change. If not could we get a justification for the changes currently on the PTR?

 

Background information:

At the moment I find the way you adjusted sorcs/sages to be more balanced quite weird:

 

Force Bending no longer unintentionally allows its buff to be applied to more than one healing ability. Its effects have been slightly redesigned. It now increases the critical chance of Dark Heal by 60% and reduces the Force cost of Dark Infusion by 30%.

 

The first part of this is perfectly fine it wasn't fair that we could use this proc twice instead of once and lead to way too high numbers.

 

The second part however would make our "burst" heal a 2.5 second cast(talented but unmodified by alacrity) while the other healers have a 2 second cast(talented, unmodified by alacrity)

 

This creates several problems:

 

PVE: You cast it and especially on tanks the person can quite easily die within those 2.5 seconds because it's quite a long time. I can already see this on foreman crusher 16man nightmare if I try to do a dark infusion without a force bending proc the tank can easily spike down to nearly no health/death.

 

PVP: Everyone that is at least semi competent will be able to interrupt/knock back/stun a sorcerer trying to cast a 2.5 heal. Especially with ranked Warzones coming out, imaginable leading to better/organized groups this heal will almost never go off successfully.

 

This all wouldn't be so bad if dark heal would be remotely useful but even a crit dark heal heals for less then a non crit dark infusion + costs a lot of force for the low amount of healing. In theory you could reduce the cast time of dark infusion with alacrity but I don't think the diminishing returns allow for a decent reduction and you would end up with a faster heal but it will heal for a lot less due to stacking alacrity instead of other stats.

 

Force Surge no longer removes the health cost from Consumption.

 

PVP: In my pvp gear(champ/bit of BM) I got 16.5k hp(BH buff) and consumption will tap for 8%(talented/3% was healed back by the set bonus) this equals 1320 hp, not that bad resurgence will nearly/fully heal that back up.

PVE: In my pve gear(full rakata) I got 18660 hp(BH buffed+replaced High Endurance enhancements for low Endurance ones) and consumption will tap for 11%(talented) this equals 2053 hp, not that bad resurgence will nearly/fully heal that back up(assuming it crits properly).

 

But using resurgence on this will cost 28 force and I will only get 48/52(PVE set bonus makes it 52) force back from the consumption, so for these 2 GCD's+getting a force surge proc I get about half a abilities force cost back: 20/24, not even enough for the cheapest heal we have. Feels a bit silly that I spend 2 global cooldowns healing for 0 and my gain from this is a bit a force but not even enough to cast one heal. On top if this the health spent on this will go up faster then my healing will so the better the gear the more damage I will take. Which leads me to believe this can not possible be a permanent solution for our "endless" force as eventually we need to spend more force then we get from it to heal the damage back up or rely on other healers to heal us up, which would raise the question: why are we even in the ops group?

 

On top of this, especially with random spike damage that sometimes happens in PVE encounters, losing 11% of your hp at the wrong time can prove lethal.

 

Dark Resilience now reduces the health spent by Consumption by 2% per point (up from 1% per point). *UPDATED 3/29*

 

Makes the other nerf hit a BIT less hard but all in all doesn't justify the rest in my opinion.

 

Q&A from feb 17th:

 

Finally, the perception of a specific class being not desirable can also be affected by the desirability of other classes. For example, Sage/Inquisitor healers are currently able to exceed our intended healing performance at times by affecting multiple heals with the same Conveyance/Force Bending buff. Game Update 1.2 will remove the ability to do so.

 

Makes it seem we are exceeding your numbers only because of the force bending proc abuse yet we get quite largely nerfed in 2 different areas on top of this bug being fixed.

 

Q&A March 27th:

 

The hard but simple truth is that Sorcerers and Sages had better Force management than we intended (e.g. a well-played Sage was almost incapable of running out of Force) and Mercenaries and Commandos were significantly over target in their healing performance.

 

Fine, people can change their mind I suppose. So we got too much force regeneration. Why did it have to be "fixed" in this manner? Instead of reducing the amount of force we get from consumption/increasing the amount of force our abilities cost we get some weird mechanic in which we have to proc an ability, stab ourselves for a bit of force, throw a hot on ourselves that consumes more then half that force to heal up the damage all to eventually gain so little force that it isn't even enough to cast ONE heal? Sounds a bit long and complicated for so little reward?

 

To compensate we get a reduced force cost on our main ability(with force bending up) but the ability also gets made near useless in pvp and not amazing in pve either due to the longer cast time this created(2.5 sec talented). While other healers have their big heal on a 2 sec cast timer(talented).

 

In an attempt to make dark heal useful you changed force bending to make it crit nearly always depending on your chance to crit but it still heals for less then a non crit dark infusion and costs more force(both force bending up). Making it the most ineffective heal ever, which we might have been able to live with if consumption didn't give use such a tiny amount of force(after healing up the dmg).

 

So why make these changes while sorc/sage healing output/force regen could have easily been balanced by reducing the amount our heals heal for/reducing the amount of force we get from using consumption?

 

I think I and a lot of other sorcs/sages would love to either see additional changes to the sorc/sage class to compensate for the nerfs or a proper explanation from BW about why you think we deserved these changes and how you still see us as viable healer compared to the other classes in PVE AND PVP. Because at the moment most of the sorcs/sages on the PTR forum appear to be losing faith in their class post 1.2. As made apparent by the "1.2 Sorc Nerfs" topic that "has exceeded our normal threshold for thread length" about 6 times now? Without any response/acknowledgement from BW.

Edited April 8, 2012 by OniHouse

[CelCawdro]

Will we eventually see the Legacy system expanded upon to include new playable species? Edited April 8, 2012 by CelCawdro

[Eowyran]

This may have been answered either in this thread or another already but I'll ask anyway I suppose. Are we going to be able to send items over to our opposite faction characters? I.e. my 50 BH is a cybertech and was wondering if I'd be able to make armor mods and send them over to my new Jedi Sentinel? Again, sorry if this has been asked already but I'm very curious.

[NineInchNinja]

What is the reasoning behind packaging frequently encountered and "game-breaking" bugs, like the HK-47 Foundry encounter and the LOS issues in the Agent storyline, into 1.2 instead of releasing them separately in weekly patches?

[JediMasterTEP]

Is there at any point going to be in game customization of your characters appearance? It's just there have been times where I have felt like taking away my characters beard for a while or making his hair longer etc...

[DalrisThane]

What character progression past L50 is planned? Meaning…

 

1-Will you go the EQ / WoW route? i.e. add L51-60. Then L61-70. And so on…

2-Will you go the CoH route? i.e. we are permanently at L50. No added levels. But we get sidegrade progression i.e. new powers and abilities unlocked by the new content?

 

Not asking about ETA. Just asking about which path.

 

Thank you.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

With armors is there any intention of adding orange armors that players can access without requiring to do PVP or have Social Ranks?

 

I'd like to customize my Jedi Shadow more (namely have pants not lower robes) but it seems most/all of the orange armor you can buy requires you to do PVP or have a high social rank. I'm not against working with other players but it seems unfair to those of us who aren't able to team up with other players regularly (and thus gain social points very slowly) are penalized in their customization options.

[SNOperaghost]

I'd like to get an official annoucement of Legacy's release date. Can we get an offcial statement on that one?

[NRieh]

Why should ranged tank companions mechanics differ that much from their "prototype" classes(which are vanguard\powertech)? Yes, I'm talking about "leap in" vs "pull close". As it is now - tropper is the last class which still has all "set" of companions (ranged\melee tank, ranged\melee dps, healer). Smugler is being "fixed" in 1.2, other classes seem to be "fixed" even earlier.

 

What's the real point behind giving player 3 of 5 absolutely similiar working companions? What's the logic in giving a RANGED tanking unit opening ability to leap into pack without any other choices? Especially, considering, that all the classes have their melee tank option anyway (in case they love melee tanking for whatever reason)? All the (ex-)harpoon users are really hoping to get some kind of answer.

[NermalDetonator]

Why are the facial tatoos/paint options only available to human bounty hunters? Can you expand these to other classes? I'd love one of them on my sith warrior!

[j-ccops]

Any news on server merges or character transfers?

 

A lot of the servers are getting empty - 30people on fleet primetime.....

 

Jcoops out

[lathos]

Hello,

I am a lv 29 sentinel and i have noticed my companion Kira Carsen 90% of the time either never puts away her lightsaber or when she does put it away its on her belt still on,which looks kind of funny,is this a bug that you have heard about before?

[KurganNazzir]

Why was Crash removed instead of being put back into the skill tree as an option so those of us who use it can continue to use it? Frankly, I don't understand why it was made a passive in the first place, which then lead to whining about it's effects in PvP, which lead to its complete removal. I know balancing things is hard but I'm a firm believer that PvP should not affect PvE this way.

[Kreggor]

I'd heard that 1.2 will allow charactor transfer from server to server. Is this true? (been looking and can't find answer)

[Aluano]

Any plans to make valor rank account-wide?

[KindBudhArsh]

Why cant we Item Preview Lightsaber Hilts?

[GonzyHalcyon]

Aric Jorgan is getting new customization kits in 1.2. Will there be a way for Troopers who've leveled past the fleet arrival quest to get these kits?

[Rutrict]

I've been playing since launch and I have submitted over 50 tickets. One of my biggest gripes is the way Customer Service responds to my tickets. If I was on a Role-playing server this would be fine. I thought it was cute at first but now it's more annoying than not. Is there any way that Customer Service can just reply like a real human being? Edited April 8, 2012 by Rutrict

[Arnemetia]

Are we ever going to be able to change Legacy names? I'd like to be able to do that, even if I'm not changing servers, which at this point, we cannot do anyway. I would, however, like to change my Legacy name.

[gpwarner]

First off, love the game. having fun with it in both PvE and PvP, and have been with it since day 1.

 

That said, the glaring issue i see from lots of people is server population. In a nutshell, I'd like to know BW's stance on it.

 

The game was released with too few servers, then many more were added. All would have been well if the game could keep its subscriptions, but sadly it could not. The reasons for this are many, but I think the state of the product itself at lunch ( along with justifiably-high expectations) had a lot to do with it.

 

Now, we're in a position where there are 1.7-2m subscribers scattered across way too many servers, and it's not the players fault that they can't get FPs or Operations going.

 

So, not only am I asking when server merges or transfers are coming (since i know they are), but I'm wanting to know if BW is accepting at least some of the responsibility for the need of these transfers, and thus making them free for the first go-round. Or, at least for a small fee, not like the $25/toon fee in WoW.

 

Thank you for a great game. I hope it sticks around for many years.

[durvas]

You've changed certain mirror animation imbalances. Are there plans to even out the other animation differences and also address more important mirror issues like resources (ammo vs. heat)?

[Rutrict]

I have 39 Mounts, and I just got Valor 65 and bought the Korrealis Prince. Upon learning it the vehicle just disappeared. It wasn't under vehicles, in my bag and my comms were spent. I contacted Customer Service and they told me this is a known issue concerning people with over 30 mounts. Is this something that will be fixed with Patch 1.2?