Bolstering and You: A letter from the Combat team

[Badieh]

Bolster in open world? Really? People are just getting lazier and lazier. Bolster shouldn't even exist in the 55 bracket. I'd rather they just return the old way, where you buy/get a basic pvp gear just to hold your ground in normal warzones until you get PvP gear, which should take you about a week.

[JediMasterSLC]

Bolster in open world? Really? People are just getting lazier and lazier. Bolster shouldn't even exist in the 55 bracket. I'd rather they just return the old way, where you buy/get a basic pvp gear just to hold your ground in normal warzones until you get PvP gear, which should take you about a week.

 

I think most people would prefer it that way, but BW is too stubborn

[Herbzta]

what about the PVE Setboni?

for example: Operative 2er Bonus (Increases the healing done by Recuperative Nanotech and Kolto Cloud by 15% )

 

...recuperative nanotech is their strongest heal, of course all operatives want this, especially while they can mod the 2 pieces so they get no expertise/stat malus...

 

thus making bolstered, PVE wearing operatives stronger healers then full obroan...

Edited January 16, 2014 by Herbzta

[Phrase]

Please sticky this.

[Zoom_VI]

Bolster in open world? Really? People are just getting lazier and lazier. Bolster shouldn't even exist in the 55 bracket. I'd rather they just return the old way, where you buy/get a basic pvp gear just to hold your ground in normal warzones until you get PvP gear, which should take you about a week.

 

1) no bolster in 55 = Dread fordged mainhand and offhand = BiS for PvP

2) yeah open world bolster is lol. might as well get rid of lvls if your going that rout.

3) don't get me started the recruit system. That system wasn't good for anybody, PvP, PvE or otherwise. It existed basically as a hazing mechanism for endgame.

[Zoom_VI]

what about the PVE Setboni?

for example: Operative 2er Bonus (Increases the healing done by Recuperative Nanotech and Kolto Cloud by 15% )

 

...recuperative nanotech is their strongest heal, of course all operatives want this, especially while they can mod the 2 pieces so they get no expertise/stat malus...

 

thus making bolstered, PVE wearing operatives stronger healers then full obroan...

 

No the expertise loss for even arkanian is to high to justify it. You might get away with the arkanian armoring and 66 mods and enhancement, but you would be in trouble if you tried OW in that.

[Tankqull]

what about the PVE Setboni?

for example: Operative 2er Bonus (Increases the healing done by Recuperative Nanotech and Kolto Cloud by 15% )

 

...recuperative nanotech is their strongest heal, of course all operatives want this, especially while they can mod the 2 pieces so they get no expertise/stat malus...

 

thus making bolstered, PVE wearing operatives stronger healers then full obroan...

 

never understood that change anyway - as it was formerly the pvp setbonus, so pvelers breakout in tears changing it to a pve set bonus ^^

[L-RANDLE]

Tait,

Thanks for the response, but I think you have not gotten the crux of what problem bolster creates.

 

The floor is higher than the ceiling in some cases. The crafting tier system also throws a whammy in this equation because PvP gear doesn't have as many secondary stat allocations as PvE does, and bolster eliminates the gap in primary stats(Main/HP/EXP). Since this is the case, the relevance on most PvP gear is moot outside of set bonus considerations and relics for instanced PvP.

 

If you guys ate dead set on bolster, you guys should think about removing the EXP cap, and add a FULL SET(14pc.) bonus of 2%/4% EXP to make ALL PvP gear ultimately BiS...

[Herbzta]

No the expertise loss for even arkanian is to high to justify it. You might get away with the arkanian armoring and 66 mods and enhancement, but you would be in trouble if you tried OW in that.

 

my operative has the 2er PVE bonus and i have 2018 expertise and no stat loss...

 

you have to put in other mods tho, not the original

[Herbzta]

btw/ @TaitWatson:

 

i really appreciate your efforts here

 

thank you VERY much!

[Herbzta]

still needs sticky..

[vennian]

yet that is what has happened because of bolster.

 

That never happened. If anything bolster brought in more players.

[Zoom_VI]

i changed you text slightly to match pvpers side...[red parts] so im all up for openworld bolstering if it is as well applied for pvp items in OPs/FPs...

 

The new kuat flashpoint will be bolstered.

[CommanderJitis]

So are you fixing bolster or not?

[duigha]

Yeah, they will and it's gonna be... wait for it! ... waaait for it! ... waaait ...

[Sideblaze]

Please remove bolster because I worked hard for my gear and have a huge ego about being outplayed by someone with less gear but is better than me.

 

Fix the bolster bugs instead? Ha, impossible in my mind. I know how to game design because my uncle told me he was one a few years ago.

[sithBracer]

Please remove bolster because I worked hard for my gear and have a huge ego about being outplayed by someone with less gear but is better than me.

 

Fix the bolster bugs instead? Ha, impossible in my mind. I know how to game design because my uncle told me he was one a few years ago.

 

lol, that made me laugh.

[idnewton]

Please remove bolster because I worked hard for my gear and have a huge ego about being outplayed by someone with less gear but is better than me.

 

Fix the bolster bugs instead? Ha, impossible in my mind. I know how to game design because my uncle told me he was one a few years ago.

 

That is the best post I have read in a long time.

[Technohic]

Hey everyone!

 

One of the first things I wanted to do when I joined the Community team was something that I have seen requested over and over in the past few months: get the Combat team to write an in-depth explanation of the Bolster system. I'm happy to be able to bring you that explanation today!

 

Hey gang! I know a number of people have been waiting on a post about some more specifics on how bolster works and interacts with items and the regular stat system, so I thought I would try to bring a little light to what is one of the more complicated systems we have in ToR. I think it is easiest to go through (a slightly simplified version of) the process the bolster system goes through when you enter a warzone and become bolstered. Note: Along with all of the item specific stuff that I’m going to explain, Bolster also increases a character’s level, granting some base stats and increasing the rank of player’s abilities to be competitive. For the sake of trying to keep the post to a readable size (and because I think people mostly just care about the item portion of the system) I’m going to skip talking about the specifics of that process. The short version of that process is: if you aren’t 55, we make you 55 and give you all of the baseline stats that you would have gotten between the level you are and the 55, and then we throw some extra generic bonuses at you to make up for the fact that you don’t have all your abilities and skill points.

To start, some quick notes on terminology here:

 

• Power: When I say power in the rest of the post, I am referring to a generic concept of total item power, and *not* the specific character stat power

• PvE Stats: Stats that are used in PvE combat. Effectively, every stat in the game except Expertise.

 

The Basics:

Bolster relies on the idea that we are trying to boost players up to a certain item power level, abstracted to a number we call item rating. This item rating effectively determines how much stat, armor value, weapon damage value, etc., is given to a particular item. At the most generic level, the bolster system looks through each individual item slot a character has equipped, and if that slot is below the target item rating it gives the character enough of PvE stats to make up the difference along with a full complement of expertise (assuming the item doesn’t have any expertise to begin with). Any item that has a higher rating than the target item rating receives no PvE stat and a smaller block of expertise.

 

The Specifics:

For each particular item slot, the Bolster needs to figure out what the rating of that slot is. To do this, it takes the weighted average of the ratings for each mod that exists on the item (if it is a modded item), or the actual rating of the item (if it isn’t a modded item). The weight given to each mod is directly relative to the amount of power each mod is given in the item system, which for all of the non-crystals is identical in ToR. Crystals have a significantly smaller power budget, and so don’t have as much of impact on the rating average as a “normal” mod. Once the system has the item rating for that slot it combines that data with how a character has spent his or her skill points (to help determine what kind of roll a character wants to play), and generates a baseline set of stats that it assumes the character has on that particular item and a set of bolstered stats it should have at the target bolstered item rating. The system then simply gives the character the difference between the assumed baseline set and the bolstered set of stats. For specifically the expertise stat, there is an extra step: if the item already had any value of expertise, then we totally ignore any amount of expertise that we should add regardless of any rating difference.

 

The amount of stat we define at each item rating level follows the exact same item creation formulas that our item guys do, and we do our best to assign out those stats to what we think an average player of that particular class/advanced class/skill tree would like in a ratio. In a perfect world, you could take a full set of item rating 100 gear and a bolster effect to 100, and you have totally identical stats if you modded the items in the same we selected stats for bolster.

 

This is all well and good for items that have ratings below our targets, but what about items that are above our target! Any item that results in an averaged item rating above the bolster target rating gets absolutely no PvE stats added, but it can still get expertise. See the next section for Expertise info!

 

Expertise (Does a Body Good):

Expertise is a multiplicative stat that only applies when you are in PvP combat. It has 3 systemic effects: it increases damage done by a %, it decreases damage taken by a %, and it increases healing by a %. Because this is a multiplicative stat, it means that in PvP, a player with much lower PvE stats but with a higher multiplier can result in a more powerful character in PvP versus someone with higher PvE stats but worse (or no) multiplier. A simple and extreme example of this would be a player who hits for 50 damage with a x6 multiplier (for 300 total damage) versus a guy who hits for 100 damage but with only a 2x multiplier (for 200 total damage). Even though Player A’s base damage is significantly lower than Player B’s base damage, in PvP he is way better off. This allows us to set an overall power level range for PvP (with the floor being a full bolstered character and the ceiling being the best augmented PvP gear) and we can insert PvE gear inside this range wherever we want simply by modifying how much expertise that gear receives. As your PvE gear gets more and more PvE stats compared to the PvP gear set, we remove expertise to keep the power of that gear in check. The result is that we can ensure that PvP gear is always better than PvE gear (in PvP), regardless of the purely PvE stat differentials.

 

I hope this brings some light on just how the bolster system actually works, and I imagine it will spawn a number of follow up questions. We will try to answer what we can.

 

If anyone has questions, just post them here and I will compile them and take them back to the team!

 

Thanks everyone!

 

Are there no questions you can answer?

[JediMasterSLC]

2 weeks since last BW post here, and still no response to the now well established fact that the following statement from the OP is not true: "PvP gear is always better than PvE gear (in PvP), regardless of the purely PvE stat differentials". Are they this blissfully ignorant, or do they just not care?

[Technohic]

2 weeks since last BW post here, and still no response to the now well established fact that the following statement from the OP is not true: "PvP gear is always better than PvE gear (in PvP), regardless of the purely PvE stat differentials". Are they this blissfully ignorant, or do they just not care?

 

I always hope they are sitting there reading and going "Oh. Look what this guy just found out. Didn't know that was there." and they then start going through their long process on addressing it and depending on the priority and resources they have available, just take a while to get around to it. From there they seem to want to come up with how they want to address it entirely different than anything we may have suggested. Once they decide, then they seem to have some red tape to where they have to get a post signed off on to even begin to tell us, if they even intend to tell us.

 

At least I hope that's the process. Would be nice though, to have some sort of acknowledgment. If things are not to be addressed, I have at least one toon where I feel you almost have to go get 2 2-piece pve set mods to have BIS since you can eliminate any expertise hit penalty. Would hate to not have it if its going to be the norm but dont want to go through all that PvE just for them to flip it on its ear either.

[Joesixxpack]

still needs sticky..

 

A genuinely informative thread already has been.

Edited January 28, 2014 by Joesixxpack

[varietasplus]

2 weeks since last BW post here, and still no response to the now well established fact that the following statement from the OP is not true: "PvP gear is always better than PvE gear (in PvP), regardless of the purely PvE stat differentials". Are they this blissfully ignorant, or do they just not care?

 

Just think it over what situation they have got into and you are going to realize we may not get a response any time soon. Have some emphaty for them.

Edited January 28, 2014 by varietasplus

[JediMasterSLC]

Just think it over what situation they have got into and you are going to realize we may not get a response any time soon. Have some emphaty for them.

 

Lol empathy? The only reason to feel sorry for them is that they have to work for EA- not an excuse for BW f***ing up bolster as royally as they have.

[AdmiralParmesan]

Just think it over what situation they have got into and you are going to realize we may not get a response any time soon. Have some emphaty for them.

 

empathy? Their solution is to keep deleting threads that mention the problem instead of actually fixing it.