Allow for 2nd Combat spec reset

[KShafe]

right now, once you choose your second combat style, it's done and never able to be reset.   1) this should be allowed to be reset at least one time, at no cost.   Make it free for subscribers... a cost on Cartel Market for non-subscribers.    

[kgaydos]

Why do you want to reset it?

Did you pick the wrong one?  Not like what you picked?

No longer META??

It would be nice to have a CC option to 'reset' your 2nd combat style.  I would not suggest a free one for subs, maybe a reduced cost.  You do get the "Are you sure" warnings several times.  

I would suggest not picking a 2nd style unless you are familiar with it.

[SteveTheCynic]

It should not be "rechoose second style", but "rechoose one - either one - of the styles".  I have an pre-7 Commando who should really be using dual pistols, but I'd like her to be able to alternate between Merc and Gunslinger.  But she has this pesky "Commando" thing in the way, which is not her second style.

[Traceguy]

Would pay 5,000cc for this

[Traceguy]

On 2/4/2024 at 3:55 PM, kgaydos said:

Why do you want to reset it?

When the feature first dropped, I made my favorite sorcerer double as a sentinel. Well it turns out I absolutely hate the sentinel class more than any other in the game after sitting down and learning endgame rotations for each of them. Would absolutely love to switch out that sentinel spot for assassin.

I got tired of waiting for the devs to give us a reset, and rerolled a brand new sorc-assassin. I don't even touch this "broken" sorc anymore

Edited February 6 by Traceguy

[DeannaVoyager]

On 2/6/2024 at 4:12 PM, Traceguy said:

Would pay 5,000cc for this

I would also pay something, but 5000cc is way too much. Reroll + master's datacron does the same thing and it's a lot cheaper. Should be the other way around. 

 

I imagine combat style reset tokens on CM would sell pretty well, if the price is reasonable. 🤔

[Traceguy]

6 hours ago, DeannaVoyager said:

I would also pay something, but 5000cc is way too much. Reroll + master's datacron does the same thing and it's a lot cheaper. Should be the other way around.

I ended up just making a new toon to emulate having the reset, just minus using the Maser's datacron. You end up losing bound (non-legacy) items, titles,  character development, and story progress. So it's not as perfect as it could be. On the note of the bound items, there are armor sets in this game that don't dop any more. So any armor sets you might have picked up 10 years ago are not going to be available to find for toons today.

5,000cc might be overprice, as are 90% of CM items, but I'd like Broadsword to understand there is  business opportunity here waiting for them to take advantage of.

Edited February 8 by Traceguy

[SteveTheCynic]

22 hours ago, Traceguy said:

but I'd like Broadsword to understand there is  business opportunity here waiting for them to take advantage of.

I'm quite sure they are aware of that.  People have been complaining about what happens when they choose a thing they then decide was the wrong thing (despite a big warning that it's a permanent decision) ever since 7.0 released.

And I repeat that the reason for it being not available is almost certainly the same collection of anonymous "technical issues" that prevented them from letting our existing created-before-7.0 characters choose a *first* combat style that was not the same as the pre-7.0 Advanced Class.

[Kryptonomic]

The main rationale here is not technical but rather they didn't want players just sticking to one character and changing styles all the time. They wanted an impetus for players to have to make a choice and then stick with that for that character. And if said players wanted to try another choice, they needed to create another character. In a "game of alts", keeping alts useful is of at least some importance.

This is a balance between flexibility (choose between two combat styles) but without discouraging the creation of new characters to try out new things. It's a general perception in game design that "alt friendliness," for lack of a better term, encourages more social play in more varying conditions. There are plenty of studies in game science journals that at least seem to back up the idea that long-term engagement with an MMO is correlated strongly with how "alt-friendly" it is.

[SteveTheCynic]

3 minutes ago, Kryptonomic said:

The main rationale here is not technical but rather they didn't want players just sticking to one character and changing styles all the time.

That could be achieved by having a long-ish cooldown per character on changes.  Something like 90 days would probably suffice to prevent a rash of FOTM-driven changes.  (And a sufficiently high price in CC for the token would also strongly reduce FOTMism.)

But they *did* say that the inability of an existing pre-7.0 character to choose a *first* combat style that wasn't the character's existing Advanced Class was due to unspecified "technical issues".

[Kryptonomic]

1 minute ago, SteveTheCynic said:

That could be achieved by having a long-ish cooldown per character on changes.  Something like 90 days would probably suffice to prevent a rash of FOTM-driven changes.

Definitely! But in that case it would probably be easier to just level up a new character with the spec you want. If you really want to try it, waiting ninety days versus creating a new character right now doesn't seem enticing. Granted, if you really want that particular character, then yeah, the wait idea could certainly be tenable. I agree that if they could monetize it a bit, it would potentially be more attractive to them.

The question is the audience: established players already know -- or at least should know -- what most of the disciplines play like. So they (should?) generally know what choice they want to make based on that experience. Newer players, however, do not have that experience. This is another example of something we were all chatting about in General Discussion regarding catering to new players but also providing for established players.

3 minutes ago, SteveTheCynic said:

But they *did* say that the inability of an existing pre-7.0 character to choose a *first* combat style that wasn't the character's existing Advanced Class was due to unspecified "technical issues".

Yep, entirely true. That was entirely due to how conditional flags about advanced discipline were coupled with other points of data about the character. Regression surface for that kind of thing is a nightmare from a testing perspective. Think: fundamental schema change along with nullability changes along with some new foreign key introductions along with some trigger and event association changes. (I think I read somewhere that you worked in software development, as I do. That's why I risked going down the rabbit hole a bit there!)

[Rohndogg]

I think the biggest issue is as the last reply said. The vast majority of players that have played longer than a year have probably already played most of the classes they want to and if not, creating a new character is a perfectly viable and sensible way to try a class. If you're really that worried about choosing a second class, don't. Play the other specs first on another character THEN decide when you already know what you like.

 

But ultimately this would be EXTREMELY difficult to implement without breaking. Look at all the restrictions on switching mid operation as well for example. You have to leave instance, swap, then enter. Changing spec is no prob but changing subclass requires a lot of hooks in the programming and there's a ton that can go wrong.

 

I don't think this is a viable request. And even if it was, I'm not sure they'd want to invest the effort to implement this for the sake of a small subset of gamers.

 

If it is doable reasonably I'd have no problem with it. I don't think I'll ever use it, but it doesn't hurt me if it exists. But yeah, I doubt you'll be getting this one unfortunately and if you do, it's gonna be down the line because there's so many bigger things that need fixed right now.

[Traceguy]

1 hour ago, SteveTheCynic said:

That could be achieved by having a long-ish cooldown per character on changes.  Something like 90 days would probably suffice to prevent a rash of FOTM-driven changes.  (And a sufficiently high price in CC for the token would also strongly reduce FOTMism.)

But they *did* say that the inability of an existing pre-7.0 character to choose a *first* combat style that wasn't the character's existing Advanced Class was due to unspecified "technical issues".

The problem is that the first class is sort of baked into your character. Your character cannot exist without it. It's there before you even start your character customization.

The second class however can and cannot exist. I find it hard to imagine there would be  technical problem with reverting your character back to the way they were before you selected a second option.

 

[Traceguy]

46 minutes ago, Rohndogg said:

Look at all the restrictions on switching mid operation as well for example. You have to leave instance, swap, then enter.

That's by intentional design. They didn't want people everyone switching to stealth and then back.

Also, this only works in manual groups. If  you enter a group with group finder, or even just sitting in group finder, you are not allowed to respect. Even if you leave the phase.

[Rohndogg]

Correct on the groupfinder part. That's to keep you from queuing tank or heals then switching after.

But if they wanted to restrict the stealth thing, then why can you leave, swap, enter, stealth, leave, swap, resume from checkpoint. Considering that's what we do in some of our groups.

The system doesn't handle changing spec well inside an instance. It's better to just disallow it to prevent unintended consequences or issues.

 

Regardless, the minutia of that argument aren't really important to the point.

I'm gonna be honest here. Ultimately what it boils down to is two things. There are plenty of other ways to test or try specs before locking yourself in and if you didn't do that, that's not really the dev's fault.

While I can understand the frustration, and I'll admit, I have two characters that I wish I did something differently on, but it's really not a big deal and I can make other characters.

And the second factor is it warns you literally 4 different are you sure, you can't change this boxes. At one point it's basically, no, I'm serious, are you really sure because this is PERMANENT

 

At some point we as players need a little bit of responsibility for our actions. I just don't see an investment of manpower to change this as being necessary when there are SO MANY other more important issues.

 

I think this is something that I might view differently if there weren't so many other more impactful issues I'd want the devs working on first. Maybe that's just me.

So it's not a meritless idea, but at the end of the day, I don't really think it's worth the investment to change the current functionality at this time. That's just my opinion anyway, but I feel like it's a solid point nonetheless.

[Traceguy]

10 minutes ago, Rohndogg said:

But if they wanted to restrict the stealth thing, then why can you leave, swap, enter, stealth, leave, swap, resume from checkpoint. Considering that's what we do in some of our groups.

You could stealth to the boss, leave phase, switch to juggernaut or sorcerer, re-enter phase. Now you're no longer at the boss. You're back to where to started before switching to stealth.

  

10 minutes ago, Rohndogg said:

At some point we as players need a little bit of responsibility for our actions. I just don't see an investment of manpower to change this as being necessary when there are SO MANY other more important issues.

 

This is where CC costs come in to play. A player locks in their server, appearance, name, and legacy name, yet they can pay a CC fee to change these later. Besides, increase in CC sales is an increase in profit, which in turn allows the devs to continue supporting the game on more important issues

Edited February 9 by Traceguy

[Rohndogg]

Just now, Traceguy said:

You could stealth to the boss, leave phase, switch to juggernaut or sorcerer, renter phase. Now you're no longer at the boss. You're back to where to started before switching to stealth.

I'm not gonna argue with you on the stealth specific issue. It literally works in multiple places where it's very effective. No, it's not useful for skipping every single add group, but it works more often for me than it doesn't. There's no merit in discussing that point because I know my opinion isn't going to change on that and I doubt yours will either so we'd be wasting both our time.

For a couple examples where it works in my experience, we mostly do this in EV to skip to garj. It triggers a speeder bike. We're talking group content here. If you're only skipping one group then yeah, it won't further the checkpoint, but when you clear a section it usually does. EC is another perfect example. Stealth to Zorn and Toth, die, leave phase, swap, take speeder. Whether you consider this "working" or not is again, separate from the core issue so I want to get back on track of the original post.

I appreciate your opinions, and appreciate the passion/energy that seems to be behind them. Passionate players are good for the game, because it means you care.

But at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter in these sorts of situations. I think the big issue here is the vast majority of players are completely unaffected or do not care enough to worry about this and the amount of effort put in compared to the return on that investment is not high enough.

The devs could prove me wrong, but I've been playing over a decade and the past has given me no reason to think I've missed the mark here.

So, I really don't want to get into nitty gritty about specific instances where it does and does not work. And where people do and do not have various minor issues with specific implementation because that is a quagmire of opinions with varying degrees of support behind them and you'll never make everyone happy.

 

Personally, I'm actually pretty happy with the spec setup itself. Gear on the other hand... Yeah, they could definitely improve the actual Loadout swapping process. Clunky is already a VERY generous word for how it's handled, but it's still better than we had before loadouts, dual specs, and outfitter. Things are rarely perfect on the first go around. Time will tell

[Traceguy]

4 minutes ago, Rohndogg said:

There's no merit in discussing that point because I know my opinion isn't going to change on that and I doubt yours will either so we'd be wasting both our time.

It's not an opinion. Just stated a fact. I'm glad you don't want to argue, because it's like arguing whether or not the sun light hurts your eyes, even though it's perfectly fine at night.

Edited February 9 by Traceguy

[Traceguy]

7 minutes ago, Rohndogg said:

For a couple examples where it works in my experience, we mostly do this in EV to skip to garj.

Yeah, now try this with KP, DF, DP, ToS, Rav, SnV, etc

Also, even EV try stealthing past the cats to the puzzles. Switch to non stealth. Get back to the puzzle past the cats again. There's no speeder.

Edited February 9 by Traceguy

[Rohndogg]

Again, I really don't want to argue this point. We never skipped those sections because there's not a consistent viable way to get all 8 players there unless EVERYONE is stealth.

However, for the benefit of anyone not aware, along with the skips mentioned before: EV cats can be skipped without stealth even after the repositioning, Most of the opening adds on KP can be skipped until the palace entrance with no stealth. The ones after the tunnel in KP can be skipped with no stealth and the first turret can be hacked. ToS you can skip after commanders to Revan, the TP takes you in the room after you pull Revan then you can safely respec outside and reenter.

But it's often not worth trying to skip. DF and DP, but ESPECIALLY DP it's often not worth skipping unless you can guarantee the PUGs will clear the fight in one pull which is not always guaranteed so we usually just clear the adds to be safe anyway. Many groups I've run with are the exact same way. And honestly our groups usually are capable of killing the adds about as fast as you can skip them so what's the point?

I'm not trying to create bad blood, I just really feel like it's the wrong hill to die on in a conversation about wanting to change the second spec.

As for S&V, I can't trust the average PUG to get through the night watch section without pulling droids. I don't trust most pugs to skip anything that doesn't have a speeder. EC from Minefield to Kephess is a great example, tons of skippable adds that we usually just end up killing because somebody goofs on skipping so we stopped trying and it's usually faster to just fight in the first place. And that's not even getting into all the flashpoint content that's skippable.

So again, I REALLY think you're picking the wrong hill to die on.

And frankly,

12 minutes ago, Traceguy said:

It's not an opinion. Just stated a fact. I'm glad you don't want to argue, because it's like arguing whether or not the sun light hurts your eyes, even though it's perfectly fine at night.

This just changed my entire view of you, I had a pretty high opinion of you prior to that actually. It's not a fact, it's how you view something and that my friend is the definition of an opinion. Were it a fact, there would be no provable instances in which you're wrong and I've literally provided multiple examples where you were incorrect.

More importantly, the tone of your statement is disrespectful and condescending.

It's also not the same as saying "of course the sun doesn't hurt, it's night." That's a false comparison. You're somewhere between the texas sharpshooter fallacy and the no true scottsman fallacy.  You just said, ok, but other than your specific examples you're wrong. That's not how you have a constructive conversation.

You can't decide to ignore someone's points because they contradict your point. You should acknowledge the point, present a disagreement with reasoning, and can present a counterpoint. Instead you're now pivoting from attacking the points and attempting to deflect the argument.

If you have a specific counter to my points, great. Just saying you're going to ignore those points is not a good argument and if anything hurts your argument.

So yeah, respond or don't at this point I see no benefit to continuing. I've made my points and unless we can avoid being disrespectful all that's gonna happen at that point is it will devolve into a flamewar that is inappropriate for this forum.

[Anhkriva]

I chose my second class as stealth just to avoid trash on FP, which is often not possible, so I consider it wasted and I would gladly change it for CC if it was possible.

1 hour ago, Rohndogg said:

At some point we as players need a little bit of responsibility for our actions. I just don't see an investment of manpower to change this as being necessary when there are SO MANY other more important issues.

But why at this point? We can change servers, character race, nickname, guild name and use companions we killed during the story, so why should this one choice (ok two - also the character's gender, but this is understandable, for example because of romances) have irreversible consequences?

[SteveTheCynic]

8 hours ago, Traceguy said:

The problem is that the first class is sort of baked into your character. Your character cannot exist without it. It's there before you even start your character customization.

That was undoubtedly ***part*** of the "technical issues" that they mentioned, but it was all the same annoying.

8 hours ago, Traceguy said:

The second class however can and cannot exist. I find it hard to imagine there would be  technical problem with reverting your character back to the way they were before you selected a second option.

Hard to *really* know one way or another without knowing the code, nor without distinguishing between "change the second(1) combat style" and "remove the second(1) combat style".

(1) Or the first, which is probably less baked-in than you think.

[Traceguy]

On 2/9/2024 at 9:42 AM, Rohndogg said:

Again, I really don't want to argue this point. We never skipped those sections because there's not a consistent viable way to get all 8 players there unless EVERYONE is stealth.

Ah, so the problem is you didn't understand what I said originally. That was my whole point. The entire team could switch to Stealth in the field, move to objective/boss and switch back to their primary class.

Edited February 12 by Traceguy