@Devs- brief things for 2.8

[Verain]

(edit4)

Section: unquestionably a bug

1- For some reason, the stock options for guns (green on empire and red on republic) appear twice: ex, I have two green gun options under cosmetic -> primary weapons.

 

Section: maybe a bug

 

1- From some distances you can't see the buffs on an enemy, but this doesn't seem consistent. If this is intended, no prob- we'll figure it out eventually. But if it isn't, then I'll say that some times enemies can be using cooldowns and you just don't see it appear, even though you have them targeted.

 

2- If you strafe into an object, it can sometimes decide to like just perform some Killer Instinct multi-hit combo on you. While strafing into an object in a starfighter is probably not wise, what happens seems odd and can sometimes just explodify you instantly for tapping an object at like 5 mph. I would think if a sports car could survive the impact, a Rampart could! (on the other hand, I'm not aware of a sports car that can strafe)

 

3- Some folks on the forums are of the belief that mine explosions shouldn't aoe through objects. I'm pretty sure this isn't a bug, but if it IS a bug, it's a pretty game altering one.

Extra: Many other things, such as crew abilities, ignore LOS. I suspect this is intended, but just in case.

 

4- There was some discussion about damage overcharge. It appears to be triple damage, but I believe the descriptions say double. I don't know if the bug is the damage or the description- my bet would be the description- but I think this was mentioned as being looked into in a podcast.

 

5- I'm still unsure if a bomber exploding results in mines that explode and are able to deal damage. I think that they still explode and deal damage, and this was highlighted as maybe needing to be looked into in an interview. On the other hand, the few times I think this has damaged me I could have been tricked by something else damaging me instead.

 

6- You guys confirmed matchmaking as working in an interview, but when we were queuing premades against each other it was entirely possible that both premades would get a fleet of randoms to farm instead of fighting each other, and once we got a wargame on one side and the other got to farm randoms. Maybe it's working fine, and we screwed up in the way we queued or something, but it definitely didn't seem easy to get the experienced players versus each other.

 

7(edit1)- If you reload your UI in game, it often comes back kind of confused, sometimes not drawing in the ship triangles on the UI, usually using a default ship icon for the hull (I think the operative ship), and sometimes missing the targeting circles completely. Dying fixes this, but that's no workaround!

 

8(edit3)- The EMP missile seems to deal 180 damage most or all of the time. Is this intended? A display glitch? A tooltip bug?

 

(edit1)

Section: apparently still a bug

 

1- There's apparently a sound issue in Windows XP still?

 

Section: just more of the same

 

Most of the forum topics are people concerned about the effective components, and whether they are too good. But there's some components that see relatively little play. Some seem to be flat out traps, which is likely not the design. Since you guys are clearly looking at balance, is there a chance these "dead" components could see buffs? The thermite torpedo attention took this weapon from almost useless to super cool support, and the variable engine cooldowns created a lot of depth in engine component choice whereas before the only things worth discussing at all were barrel roll and retros. But there's still several choices that seem to not really be ok to fly out of the hanger with in components, as well as a few copilot abilities that seem useless, and even some crew secondaries that seem really mandatory and narrow (ex, engineering crewmember passives).

 

We can't change components or ships while queued. This can actually create a frantic rush to upgrade between queues, as you often want to requeue right away so that you get in the next game. The exploits I can imagine seem pretty minor- hop around matchmaking or change ship layout based on the map that pops. The first seems pretty negligible, and the second could involve just locking the ships on bar, instead of everything but crewmembers and cosmetics.

 

(edit2)

A side effect of not having much 3D art to swap around on the cartel ships is that the icons themselves, each presumably tied to a 3D model, don't change. The K-52 Gunships don't normally have too much of an issue here, as they can usually use the presence or absence of a missile target, and the TZ-24s similarly have a primary weapon ring that changes size. But the Redeemer/Mailoc is pretty much hosed here, having no way to know which railgun is active except by actually firing. Diffirent color backgrounds (with different luminosities) would probably address this.

 

 

 

 

Thanks again for a great game guys!

Edited May 15, 2014 by Verain

[Drakkolich]

Love everything in there, the only thing id add is for the not being able to upgrade while q'ed, maybe just lock everything once the q actually pops instead of while in q, would stop most of the changing loadouts based on the map that poped stuff.

[Kalphitis]

Everything in this post seems too reasonable.

[Sidenti]

Pretty sure most Bugattis can strafe.

[MoonlitDNC]

Still waiting on a fix for the Starfighter audio issues. It's near-impossible for me to fly around without getting shot to death when I cant hear any of the audio cues, and I'm sure I'm not the only one having this problem......or completely holding off on buying any Cartel items related to Starfighter because of it.

[Verain]

Still waiting on a fix for the Starfighter audio issues. It's near-impossible for me to fly around without getting shot to death when I cant hear any of the audio cues, and I'm sure I'm not the only one having this problem......or completely holding off on buying any Cartel items related to Starfighter because of it.

 

Can you please give more details? I haven't heard of anyone with this problem.

 

EDIT:

 

Are you running Windows XP?

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=7042844

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=708024

 

 

I don't see a fix for it besides installing Windows 7 or getting tricked into allowing Windows 8.1 to roost upon your noble PC.

Edited May 8, 2014 by Verain

[SammyGStatus]

Pretty sure most Bugattis can strafe.

 

 

FACT - Bugattis CAN strafe

 

 

In regards to the thread (), all are great points that should be addressed

Edited May 8, 2014 by SammyGStatus

[Kuciwalker]

Regarding game balance and dead components, the most important thing I'd like to see addressed is the meta on armor and armor penetration. I've posted extensively about this before but I'll restate my proposed adjustments here:

 

 

1. Reduce the following components from 100% armor pen to 50% armor pen:
   
   1. 
      
   2. Heavy Laser Cannon
      
   3. Slug Railgun
      
   4. Concussion Missiles
      

 

[*]Replace Burst Laser Cannon tier 4 armor pen with +10% range. If you don't want to make this big a revision, just reduce the armor pen to 50%.

[*]Reduce the duration on charged plating to 6s, talented to 10s.

 

 

 

The rationale for this is that currently, armor penetration is a completely binary choice with the one strange exception of plasma railgun. We've had two metas on this, split by the introduction of bombers (which roughly coincided with the buff to charged plating):

 

Before Bombers

 

Before bombers, many of the very best weapons (with the notable exceptions of cluster missiles and quad lasers) had 100% armor penetration available. Slug railgun is particularly notable here, because it meant almost all gunships had armor pen on demand. This sharply devalued damage reduction as a defensive stat, to the point that very few people took it (and those that did ended up regretting it). The net effect was that armor pen represented +5% hull damage versus strikes/gunships.

 

Normally this would make armor pen not that valuable and lead a lot of people to switch out of it as an optional choice. The Nash equilibrium would settle with damage reduction being somewhat viable. But turrets don't react to meta, turrets have something like 70% damage reduction, so armor pen was still really, really good.

 

(The enormous bleedthrough on charged plating didn't help.)

 

After Bombers

 

With the introduction of bombers, there were now several very dangerous weapons with no armor pen - mines. Several of these mines also completely ignore shields. Simultaneously, charged plating was buffed so that the bleedthrough wasn't quite as lethal. (I seem to recall that it was actually buffed twice, and the 2.6 patch notes don't match the stats on live, but I can't find the second buff in the subsequent patch notes. Odd.) Now there are some very good reasons to take damage reduction - but doing so is a big gamble, leaving you deeply vulnerable to everything else. And if you are building for damage reduction, there's good reason to go all the way and run charged plating, which for Type 2/3 strikes and Type 1/2 bombers gives >95% damage reduction for 19 seconds out of 30.

 

This is really poisonous - it means that if you don't have an armor-piercing weapon, there are some players that are nearly invulnerable to you the majority of the time.

 

If we just changed armor penetration, reducing it on the most popular/common weapon, suddenly charged plating would become incredibly overpowered. Even against the weapons that are supposed to be good versus armor, like Heavy Laser Cannon, charged plating would be one of the best defensive options available.

 

So we have to correspondingly reduce the power of charged plating, and I think the easiest place to do that is in the uptime. It will still be a very good choice, but it won't completely lock out builds without armor pen, and it will still be a weaker-than-average choice against builds with armor pen.

 

What about Burst Laser Cannon?

 

Burst lasers are one of the best dogfighting weapons in the game. They are also, with armor pen, one of the fastest ways to clear turrets. This can be done fast enough that the scout faces minimal risk (especially with distortion field). In generaly, it would be a good buff to strikes if they had more advantages over scouts in the "attacking hard targets" role.

 

Of course, removing the armor pen entirely means you have to replace it with something. The other option at Tier 4 is 8% shield piercing. The shield piercing is a very solid option that is currently ignored because of how important armor pen is. 10% range (I hesitate to say 5% because on a BLC that's only 200 meters) is a very solid buff of commensurate value, and I would genuinely have to think about which to choose.

 

Right now, burst lasers are the weapon of choice to take on bombers, because the scout's best strategy for dealing with them is to get in very close and try to kill the bomber before the mines come off of cooldown. With this change, quad lasers would be a better choice (combined with range capacitor and ideally the targeting telementry range buff), and scouts would try to hang back a little bit and hit the bomber from range.

[Zharik]

Pretty sure most Bugattis can strafe.

 

It's called drifting...

[Zharik]

Regarding game balance and dead components, the most important thing I'd like to see addressed is the meta on armor and armor penetration. I've posted extensively about this before but I'll restate my proposed adjustments here:

 

1. Reduce the following components from 100% armor pen to 50% armor pen:
   
   1. 
      
   2. Heavy Laser Cannon
      
   3. Slug Railgun
      
   4. Concussion Missiles
      

[*]Replace Burst Laser Cannon tier 4 armor pen with +10% range. If you don't want to make this big a revision, just reduce the armor pen to 50%.

[*]Reduce the duration on charged plating to 6s, talented to 10s.

 

I'm actually a little more of the mindset that different weapons should have different levels of armor pen. Slug Railguns -75% of the target's DR, Heavy Lasers and most missiles that get armor pen about -50%, maybe -25% for BLCs, though I never understood why they got it at all...

 

Doing this (or what you suggested) would also have a side benefit of buffing plasma railguns and thermite torps as DR builds would be more viable.

[TrinityLyre]

Good stuff all around. I'd be wary of armor penetration changes (though I would love to see some) without testing.

[tommmsunb]

Section: maybe a bug

 

 

 

4- There was some discussion about damage overcharge. It appears to be triple damage, but I believe the descriptions say double. I don't know if the bug is the damage or the description- my bet would be the description- but I think this was mentioned as being looked into in a podcast.

 

 

The DO has a modifier of exactly 2.25. This can be verified easily by using the cluster missile DoT, which regularly before armor does 20 dmg, but 45 dmg with DO, I've never seen it do anything differently (Except when charged plating is on). However, it would appear that the modifier gets applied to all of the ranged-based dmgs, creating the illusion that it's doing more than it should.

For instance, the maximum damage I've seen my quads do was 12xx-13xx before crit with DO and blaster overcharge active. Normally with BO active its about 550 occasionally 600, with dmg cap and power to weapons. And damage to shield bonus as well. (Keep in mind as well all of these numbers are against shields.)

Edited May 8, 2014 by tommmsunb

[Verain]

Added the lack of icon distinction for the Redeemer/Mailoc, and mentioned it for the others as well (only the T1 gunship clone is routinely hurt by this, but it's an issue for three of them).

[MoonlitDNC]

Can you please give more details? I haven't heard of anyone with this problem.

 

EDIT:

 

Are you running Windows XP?

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=7042844

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=708024

 

 

I don't see a fix for it besides installing Windows 7 or getting tricked into allowing Windows 8.1 to roost upon your noble PC.

 

Yes, I'm aware it is an XP issue (32bit, SP3 btw). There is no way in hell I'm putting Windows 8 on my machine, and it is a complete "cop out" for Bioware to only be able to suggest "stop playing Starfighter" to get sound back. At the very least, they could say "Hey, GSF uses some kind of programming based around a Windows function you lack, and we are too inexperienced as programmers here to fix it".

 

Seeing as a large portion of recent Cartel releases have been oriented towards GSF gameplay, I've obviously not been buying/spending CC since I have no use for items that function in a section of the game I am unable to enjoy while the rest of the mostly-free game functions just fine.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

I don't know whether the current PTS addresses this in it's tooltip revisions but since 2.7 tooltips have been bugged so that they don't change to reflect upgrades. I've particularly noticed this with engine components (on all ships) where the tooltip doesn't change to reflect CD reduction upgrades. On Type 3 strikers (haven't checked other ships) the system component tooltip likewise doesn't change to reflect upgrades (so the CD reduction, and increase to amount of heal done on repair probes aren't reflected in the tooltip).

 

I haven't been able to confirm whether the upgrades are actually applied and just not reflected in the tooltip or whether the upgrades are also bugged and not applied.

[Verain]

Yes, I'm aware it is an XP issue (32bit, SP3 btw). There is no way in hell I'm putting Windows 8 on my machine, and it is a complete "cop out" for Bioware to only be able to suggest "stop playing Starfighter" to get sound back. At the very least, they could say "Hey, GSF uses some kind of programming based around a Windows function you lack, and we are too inexperienced as programmers here to fix it".

 

I had to massively dink around just to get the game to not break windows graphical modes. I don't think their system guys are very good at supporting diverse stuff- they probably have a smallish test lab compared to what I would expect out of an EA shop. But almost assuredly the GSF devs here would just pass that along to some other SWTOR systems team- they might sympathize, but I doubt it's up to them.

 

What service pack are you running under?

 

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/ht/servicepackxp.htm

 

 

 

I'd personally suggest you go get Windows 7, which is IMO the best Windows OS without exception. Once they cave and give me a UI that isn't garbage I'll probably buy that, or maybe by then we can all run SteamOS or something- it's super annoying to have to run Windows at all IMO. XP is a security nightmare, with a bunch of unpatched stuff that won't be fixed as Microsoft stopped supporting it. I mean, the OS is from 2001. Console gaming was reeling with the launch of the Gamecube about that same time. You can stand by the old unsupported OS, and it would be nice if Bioware would fix this bug (if I was on XP, I wouldn't play GSF either), but 7 is completely worth it for almost all Windows users.

Edited May 9, 2014 by Verain

[MoonlitDNC]

What service pack are you running under?

 

SP3 32-bit

 

I sent a support email with my Diag and a Bug Report in-game, but I imagine I'm just a faceless voice among hundreds that have already done just that while waiting for months now with no success.

 

There's a few things that Windows 7 seems to have issues with that XP certainly doesn't (running older games like KotOR for example). My PC is in such a position that if I move to buy Windows 7, I probably should update my PC components to take advantage of the 64-bit stuff that W7 supports, and that would cost a good few hundred dollars that I'm not willing to pay at this moment ~just~ to hear my ship go "pew pew" on a game where it should already be working anyways.

[Verain]

If you buy Windows 7 there's some number of installs you can get before you have to call Microsoft up- I think three? It's at least two. By this, I mean installs on different machines. So if you install it on your older box, and then move the copy to your newer box (by which I mean just install on the newer box- they aren't going to check to make sure you are no longer using the older box) you will be totally ok.

 

 

That being said, I do get that- the website says they support Windows XP SP3, and you have that, and no sound is clearly not supported.

[Verain]

Added the oddity with the 180 damage or whatever with EMP missile.

[Verain]

Added the odd bug under cosmetics where you can see the same color twice (green option for empire gun under green option for empire gun).

[Zharik]

Added the oddity with the 180 damage or whatever with EMP missile.

 

You know that the actual damage dealt is never more than the exact amount needed to kill something, right?

 

Mines iirc have 150 HP, so EMPs always kill those. Drones have more so it takes more than 1 EMP Missile to kill them (shoot them after the missile hits while they're disabled). Not sure what has 180, but maybe that's what was left on said target to kill it.

[tunewalker]

You know that the actual damage dealt is never more than the exact amount needed to kill something, right?

 

Mines iirc have 150 HP, so EMPs always kill those. Drones have more so it takes more than 1 EMP Missile to kill them (shoot them after the missile hits while they're disabled). Not sure what has 180, but maybe that's what was left on said target to kill it.

 

no the 180 is an intended amount of damage. It reads on the pts that it does full damage to the main target but half to all others. Half of the damage of the standard missiles is 180. So no EMP missiles were designed to that 180.... aka the EMP missile was designed to be garbage.

[Kalphitis]

the EMP missile was designed to be garbage.

 

Dev 1: We've been struggling for literally minutes to decide on a new missile type, do we really want to spend over an hour on coming up with unique components?

 

Dev 2: Yea this is a total waste of time. We already have come up with several missile types that are useful, let's just add in some worthless missiles that nobody will ever use, so we don't have to worry about them being overpowered, and call it a day. You know, like we did with shield components yesterday.

 

Dev 3: I agree! And hey Dev 1, that feedback shield idea was genius btw. You got any missile ideas....?

 

Dev 1: Well I had this idea about an EMP missile....

 

Dev 4: Whoa whoa, stop right there. That just sounds awesome. Let me put some random stats on it, and we'll all go home early.

 

Dev 2: Nailed it!

 

*high fives*

[Zharik]

no the 180 is an intended amount of damage. It reads on the pts that it does full damage to the main target but half to all others. Half of the damage of the standard missiles is 180. So no EMP missiles were designed to that 180.... aka the EMP missile was designed to be garbage.

 

Oh you are talking about tier 3 upgraded damage vs ships...

 

The missile was not designed to target ships, it is a mine/turret/drone clearing mechanism.

Edited May 15, 2014 by Zharik