Companion Changes in 4.0.2

[Nommaz]

On Voss with my Sith Warrior.

When you do something hard come on back

[positronics]

How many of you guys saying the high level H2s are fine and dandy play tanks?

 

Because I can tell you it's not doing too hot on DPS specs. This is an awful patch.

[brutin]

Yes within their preset progression path. You completely ignored everything else I posted because it is inconvenient to your desire. People need to stop looking at just this bit or that bit of the game. The companion, the experience in a SF... These are just individual pieces of the entire puzzle.

 

When you look at the whole puzzle you see something may damn well be a hell of a challenge right now BUT get far less challenging later as you get the intended gear, faction and affection. This game is NOT a SP RPG. It is an MMO and we are only 9 of 16 chapters into a single expansion. It clearly has a progression path, most notably illustrated by the connection between Alliance faction and the Heroic Star Fortress buffs.

 

I get your anger and frustration. I appreciate it. What is killing me is that you are focusing it on the WRONG thing. In a game with progression you can NOT do absolutely everything with ease right out of the box, even when you hit max level. You have to get gear, faction, etc. Then you tackle the next step within that level. This is what you are angry with... The very design plan of the expansion. The Companion simply let you ignore that plan. Now that plan with 48 hours notice was dropped on your head like a ton of bricks.

 

Once you realize this you see the companion will NOT be reverted by just attacking the companion because that is not the problem. It is a necessary change for them to properly implement the plan for the expac. You should instead be asking BW why they wanted such progression and grind in the story world in the first place. That is the actual "problem".

 

Sorry but but I just ran some missions with my level 30 toon and my healer companion was USELESS and I was basically alone for the fight with the elite and got creamed. This isn't just a max level thing but a progression thing.

[Albertwang]

Companions are nerfed too much. Not very pleased by the changes. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.............

[Zaeha]

How many of you guys saying the high level H2s are fine and dandy play tanks?

 

Because I can tell you it's not doing too hot on DPS specs. This is an awful patch.

 

I'd like to know this as well.

[Dalethfc]

I did not ignore the rest of your novel because it didn't suit me.

 

And this game right now has no progression at least in the common MMO style you cannot call 2H we did 4 years ago progression, we had a similar discussion yesterday from memory, and I am not going to have it with you again.

I only quoted a bit of what you said because you were flat out wrong, regardless of how many flowery words you try and disguise it with, you mis quoted what the man said plain and simple, it has nothing to do with the big picture.

 

I am not angry at companions, well, I am but that's just the tip, I am angry that I have wasted years playing to get my characters to max, to have that trivialised by the level sync, that I paid money for treek, and she was destroyed, that I cannot customise MY companions, That I can no longer supply my companions with better gear to boost performance, and now on top of all of that not only can we not do anything about how our companions performed, they reduce them to a shell of themselves, and force us to grind out old content we should have no issues with doing.

And you know what, Monday I did not have an issue with that, because although the above was all still there I still felt powerful, now I may as well stay on hutta and re-run those 2h over and over again, there is no end game, no progression no reason to level, we are being shunted through dailies at a reduced power level to compensate for the lack of content and lazy design.

 

This is not FUN.

Very Well put.

I was already miffed but you reminded me of everything else lol.

 

So now I am angry haha

 

And Now I need to go to bed as it's 5.30am and taking my daughter to work in 4 hours,, oops

Edited November 19, 2015 by Dalethfc

[Zanriel]

You guys wanted it to be nerfed, you wanted a challenge, now you got it and yet you are complaining about it. lol

 

I think if you look at the names and put them in an Excel spreadsheet you'll notice a discrepancy between the two groups. Just sayin.

[Ghisallo]

Ok, so what are you saying?

 

Influence levels are possibly going to go far beyond 50? Specialist Rankings will go beyond 20 with access to more powerful abilities? Maybe even much higher level gear?

 

Maybe in 6 months my 500 ranked companion will heal like it did 2 days ago?

 

That would be some extremely bad bad testing they did before launching this xpac,

 

No... I have yet to see someone say (as an example) "with an affection 50 companion, all 216 gear and faction buffs I still could not complete a single Heroic SF period".

 

Some people are saying "I am having issues with 208 gear" when that is essentially the base purchased gear for this expac. I have seen people say " with my affection 12 companion" sometimes with that 208 gear etc. Based on the fact that we only need faction 10 and it goes to 20 I would say 50 is the max for companions. Others simply complain that they or their companion died. This happened more than a few times to me soloing right up until 4.0 if I did something where either I, my companion or both were under geared. Why should this expac be a sudden exception?

 

The thing is in a game that has three paths like this, at least in my experience in other MMOs, it is not enough to focus just on one. You can have all of one, sometimes even 2, but if the remaining components are behind you will have a very hard time. The problem is that companions being OP allowed people for a time to ignore this dynamic.

 

As for your last, I have said since day one of this expac that testing and QA had issues. It's not just the companions BUT quests where you had to log to progress, until Tuesday you had to log to reset utilities when field respecing. Naked companions in the opening story, loosing gear that had to be refunded via the mail. I could go on but you last comment is dead on. Now that the companions have been adjusted they now likely have to do some passes on content, a couple of the early planet heroics may be a bit over tuned so it cascades.

 

So I am not defending BW in the least. All I am saying is that people are complaining about what amounts to a symptom, not the actual problem.

Edited November 19, 2015 by Ghisallo

[Beachdudeca]

We knew they were removing gear, so many of us spent many hours, days. Weeks , to get our passive buffs maxed

 

For the 1st, few weeks it looked like the time in game made sense , but when they nerfed companion heals to a fraction of the 3.0 levels , it was proof of how out if touch the producers of the game are with the bulk of the community

 

At this point most of us should just consider cutting our loses and moving on

[Ramalina]

So first impressions of the companion changes. DPS companions seem ok. They do damage, but are pretty squishy, not too different from 3.x.

 

Healers still heal, not too poorly, except when they get buggy and decide to just stand there and do nothing. They might be weaker than they were in 3.2, but it's hard to tell. They certainly don't feel stronger than they did in 3.2.

 

Tanks are ok for content that is already trivially easy. With low peak and low sustained incoming damage they are tough enough that you can toss a HOT on them and then AFK to go microwave some pizza. Their threat has also improved from being almost useless, to being barely adequate if the player is careful. In encounters with large spike damage though, tank companions fail pretty hard. A player with a DCD will eventually learn to use it to reduce the most dangerous damage spikes, the companion AI triggers it on perhaps a timer, and typically eats the giant nasty attacks straight to an unprotected health pool. The measly steady state defenses are sorely lacking, and so for non-trivial PvE encounters tank companions range from unimpressive to horrid.

 

Overall, my impression is that some of the problem is from level sync and tuning of individual PvE encounters. I was doing some testing on Oricon with a lvl 58 Guardian in a mix of 156 and 180 purple gear, and some of Heroic mission bosses were absurdly easy, but some of the groups of trash mobs were barely killable even playing with the sort of tanking skill level that's required for HM Ops.

 

Companion tuning might be able to stand mild buffs from where things currently stand, but isn't in too bad of a shape.

 

PvE encounter tuning needs work. It's very inconsistent. Having one H2 boss be about as hard a farming a materials node, and 300 meters away running into some weak NPCs hanging out with one elite that make you feel like running HM Dread Palace might be easier, well that's not going to make a lot of people happy I think. SWTOR with the Heroic/story and weak/strong/elite/champion classifications gives an expectation that a player should be able to roughly gauge the likely difficulty of a PvE encounter before starting it, and right now that system of signaling expected difficulty to players seems to be very unreliable.

 

For long time players, it's not as bad, we get a lot of mechanical advantages in terms of things like datacrons and perks, and since we mostly know the encounters we have a somewhat reasonable chance of anticipating which fights will be exercises in frustration. New players on the other hand, will be in for some nasty and unpleasant adventures when they run into these sorts of things.

 

Note, on the whole it seems like the old Endgame PvE missions and heroic missions is the stuff most likely to be off. In some cases it feels harder to do now with overgeared and overleveled characters than it did at appropriate level and with lousy gear.

 

Edit: Also seems like certain advanced classes/roles are much more functional with the companions than others are, depending on how well the class and role tools compensate for the deficiencies of companions. I haven't got around to working out all the details of that though.

Edited November 19, 2015 by Ramalina

[shawn_the_geek]

When you do something hard come on back

Last night I soloed the Starfortress heroics on my Bounty Hunter. Point is comps aren't useless like everyone is saying they are. Just because you suck at soloing doesn't mean everyone does.

[positronics]

The people for the patch and saying 'its so easy L2P n00b' are the same 6 people on this entire forum. lel

[Ghisallo]

Sorry but but I just ran some missions with my level 30 toon and my healer companion was USELESS and I was basically alone for the fight with the elite and got creamed. This isn't just a max level thing but a progression thing.

 

Umm I am not talking about Max level I am talking progression from soup to nuts. From level 1 right up on up. Before this change you had to make sure that you kept your companion decently geared. This often led to characters making their "main" companion one that worse the same gear they did so they could feed the companions handme downs. Barring that we would buy the presence drinks at the bar to increase their effectiveness... Make sure u used heroic moment and unity. It has always been like this when leveling right up to 4.0.

 

Now I can see the perception that this is wrong for a starting character that will have a lower presence and the like. I can maybe even see that the value of presence may need to tweeked. However a lot of the complaints I am seeing about companions today has me saying "okay how is this much different than before?" The only real difference is "before" for some people is only going back to mid October of 2015 instead of say when you were trying to do Heroic 2 Oricon when it first dropped.

[shawn_the_geek]

The people for the patch and saying 'its so easy L2P n00b' are the same 6 people on this entire forum. lel

I'm not for the patch. I hate the patch. I loved feeling awesome. People are wrong about companions being worse than they have ever been and stuff isn't impossible. Even with the patch My Sith Warrior hasn't died once with Quinn or Vette healing me.

[Nommaz]

Last night I soloed the Starfortress heroics on my Bounty Hunter. Point is comps aren't useless like everyone is saying they are. Just because you suck at soloing doesn't mean everyone does.

 

LOL read what you just wrote...

[brutin]

Last night I soloed the Starfortress heroics on my Bounty Hunter. Point is comps aren't useless like everyone is saying they are. Just because you suck at soloing doesn't mean everyone does.

 

GUess I suck at soloing then and am unsubing...

 

I hope those of you who don't suck at soloing are enough to sustain the game.

[Ghisallo]

Edit: Also seems like certain advanced classes/roles are much more functional with the companions than others are, depending on how well the class and role tools compensate for the deficiencies of companions. I haven't got around to working out all the details of that though.

 

I agree this maybe a factor but it can be hard to figure out. As an example one person spoke about beating the Exarch when his tank got destroyed seconds in solo. How did he do it? He kited and spot healed himself on his operative. Now that kind of play can be counter intuitive. I also have an operative and it is very much, at least the subspec I play, a melee spec. So I may have had a very different experience because it may not dawn on me to kite when playing melee.

 

When you get new content and changes like the ones we just had there is always a learning curve. You have two choices...adjust or risk banging you head against the wall. Example before the change i did the heroics on my shadow in dps spec (Serenity). Before 4.0, when soloing I would run tank spec with dps gear. With the change I had to go back to soloing the way I did before 4.0. So did my play style really change? It depends on what window in time you are looking through.

[Halinalle]

Last night I soloed the Starfortress heroics on my Bounty Hunter. Point is comps aren't useless like everyone is saying they are. Just because you suck at soloing doesn't mean everyone does.

 

Yes, SF heroic mode is easy if:

- You're using OP kiting class and more importantly class that was designed for survival

- You have 220/224 gear

Edited November 19, 2015 by Halinalle

[Ghisallo]

Yes, SF heroic mode is easy if:

- You're using OP kiting class and more importantly class that was designed for survival

- You have 220/224 gear

 

And it is doable if you do it as intended. Get the alliance factions to get the buffs inside. Make sure you have good companion affection. Actually interrupt, CC... Use all the tools when leveling before etc. If you look at the mechanics pretty much few if any were supposed to be able to do the H2 SF as soon as eligible. Proof?

 

1. Weekly quest gives twice the reward for completing 2 H2s vs solos

2. H2's have buffs inside. Said buffs require 10 in rep with the appropriate Alliance faction.

3. You get this faction by grinding other weeklies, which also provide currency for better gear and gifts for better companion faction.

 

So if we ask "why would these mechanics exist" it is rather obvious. You do the weeklies and solo SF to familiarize yourself with the mechanics and get the stuff needed for alliance faction and companion affection. Once you get enough of that THEN you do the H2. Eventually after doing that enough you have the gear/companion power that allows doing it without the alliance based buffs getting the final achievements.

 

The problem is the companions being overpowered allowed people to completely bypass progression, or grind to some players, and now that players may have to participate in this grind there is displeasure.

 

The encounters may need tweeking, maybe even the companions BUT make no mistake BW is not going to take that grind away because it is the very foundation of this expac.

[valkyriewiz]

~Snip~.

 

the lot of us for many reasons don't like the change learning curve may be one. i for one don't need another MMO game that is a chore/second job. i sub and play to have fun. the companions were honestly op and needed to be tweaked down no blown into oblivion like they did. the companions are less powerful than comp 3.0 i myself found 2H SF to be challenging enough but doable now i wont even look at it because of the grinding needed to bring it up to something that is still below comp 3.0. we want a game that is fun to play through the journey not a game that becomes a daily grind fest that is absolutely no fun. they didnt test it and the result is unhappy customers case and point.

Edited November 19, 2015 by valkyriewiz

[Ghisallo]

the lot of us for many reasons dont like the change learning curve maybe one i for one dont need another MMO game that is a chore/second job i sub and play to have fun. the companions were honestly op and needed to be tweaked down no blown into oblivion which they did. its less powerful than comp 3.0 i myself found 2H SF to be challenging enough but doable now i wont even look at it because of the grinding needed to bring it up to something that is still below comp 3.0. we want a game that is fun to play through the journey not a game that becomes a daily grind fest that is absolutely no fun. they didnt test it and the result is unhappy customers case and point.

 

I make no comment as to whether this was a good idea. Was it smart to reset companions to encourage new players while risking alienating existing players? I raised this issue back when KotFE companions were detailed for us and said a lot of people, especially the solo story fan would be upset but I was shouted down because everyone was focused on the comment "all about the story" and they were blind to the possible consequences of the mechanics changes announced. Now the frustration I predicted is here and at times it is outright anger, which I did not predict, because I could not guess that BW would screw up the companions and have to fix them the way they did.

 

Was it smart to have a solo instance progression akin to SM/HM of group flash points?

 

I don't say whether these things were/are smart, just that this is what we have in front of us but people are so focused on the companion puzzle piece they are not seeing the whole picture.

Edited November 19, 2015 by Ghisallo

[caronome]

It's not that making the game harder is wrong, merely that this has become something I don't want to play. What makes me sad and angry is that I feel blindsided. This is totally against the marketing messages I was reading for all the months of KotFE (e.g. soloing & story) . The changes are not completely horrible in an absolute sense, but wow what a surprise.

 

I don't want to try and plea-bargain the nerfs down; If the devs thought there were remotely a good idea, why would I want to stay?

 

To be clear, I could play this level of difficulty and forced grouping, But I shall play other games instead.

[Ippotamus]

I definitely fell in the camp that thought KotFE was ridiculously too easy.

To call it child's play would have been an insult children everywhere.

 

But the way they nerfed things was equally ridiculous.

Why that wasn't seen or tested before hand, I will simply never know.

I can only hope they give it another try.

Somewhere between these two would probably be just about right.

But really a lost opportunity to launch KotFE strong ... yet again.

What is it with SWTOR and launches?

 

Anywho, good luck.

[Khiriath]

Everyone saying it's now impossible or companions are worse than launch need to shut their mouths. Companions are still better than they were at launch. It royally sucks that they aren't OP anymore and hopefully Bioware will change that in the near future but it isn't impossible.

 

I fought against six golds at the same time in a story mission with Quinn healing and I owned them with neither Quinn or I falling below 80% health. it took 30 seconds to kill them all.

 

Do you have numbers to back that up? I do. In 3.x Treek or Mako(fillin generic healing comp) in the Yavin companion gear were doing 3k+ EHPS. Not great, not better than your average player, but enough to keep you on your feet through pretty much any encounter so long as you used your defensive cool downs and knew how to play your class well.

 

4.0- Well effective healing jumped up on most comps to around 9k EHPS on a rank 21 companion(my higher ranked comps were always doing more important things like crafting). You could do incredibly stupid things and your health wouldn't go below 90%, I know I tried. Even in the H2 Star Fortress so long as you had the buffs, you pretty much weren't dying, without the buffs the reactor phase required actual thinking and use of some defensive CDs.

 

4.0.2 At rank 21 EPHS 980(highest I have recored) At rank 31 EHPS 1120(Highest I have recorded). At rank 41 EHPS 1345(Highest I have recorded), at rank 50 1495 EHPS(Highets I have recorded). In short hard numbers show that in 4.0.2 a Rank 50 Lvl 65 comp is doing half the EHPS that a lvl 65 comp was doing in gear that frankly had a horrible stat spread.

 

The cure is frankly as bad as the disease.

 

By the way I was able to clear the Heroic SF with my AP PT in a mix of 216-224 gear, with a rank 21 Lana. However you will notice in the logs that at times I was doing half as much self healing as Lana was. You can't convince me that this is working as intended.

[Damask_Rose]

Took my level 16 telekinetic sage out for a test drive on H2s. Overleveled on Tython and Coruscant everything was easy peasy like before. Hit Taris at level and there was quite a noticeable jump in difficulty. Qyzen's heals couldn't keep up if we got groups of golds even when I was mezzing, bubbling and off-healing. I did better with Qyzen in tank mode. Now my damage was low since my main-hand is out of date (I've been gearing through heroics and the drop rate on weapons is lower that other items) so I wasn't burning them down as fast as I optimally could.

 

To sum it up, at level on a low level character, the heroics felt doable, but challenging for me. I'm at best an average player, but I have a pimped out legacy and most datacrons. I hit lvl 21 while on Taris (I do think heroics give too much xp at low levels) and Qyzen ended up at 12 influence from me working on underworld trading. If I wasn't masochistically trying to complete armor sets from the heroics I wouldn't bother with them as things currently stand.