Friday Update April 8st

And it's a blog on Advanced Classes...again

I haven't checked the forum yet, but I expect raging for some of the changes...

Wow, Shadow can now tank? Yeah, my advanced class choice is now completely up in the air. Maybe even my class choice.

Of course adding more roles to advanced classes does make it any more likely that people will play those roles instead of DPS, but that is the topic for another thread.

Kinda weird Consulars and Inquisitors can now tank... Seems almost like they are trying too hard to give every class as many roles as possible.

Grome wrote:

Kinda weird Consulars and Inquisitors can now tank... Seems almost like they are trying too hard to give every class as many roles as possible.

I'm not really surprised about that one, actually I expect them to have tankish spec and not a stealth spec when we first learned of the AC.

Although, Consular and Inquisitors are now the best classes: they have CC, stealth, heal, DPS at any range and tanking abilities. In fact, they should remove all the other classes, we only need that one.


The change mostly show that they never had gameplay reason to have 2 force users by sides and that people mostly role DPS, so they are hybridizing everything to try to force people into having a trinity-able build.

[quote="azarhalThe change mostly show that they never had gameplay reason to have 2 force users by sides and that people mostly role DPS, so they are hybridizing everything to try to force people into having a trinity-able build.[/quote]

The gameplay reason (and the had stated this several times) for having multiple force users per side was that they knew greater than half of the players they were targeting wanted to be a force user and they didn't want one class to be so much more played then all the rest so they decided to split up the class. Also this allowed them to have more force user stories and to split up the stories thematically.

Godric_Barbarosa wrote:

The gameplay reason (and the had stated this several times) for having multiple force users per side was that they knew greater than half of the players they were targeting wanted to be a force user and they didn't want one class to be so much more played then all the rest so they decided to split up the class. Also this allowed them to have more force user stories and to split up the stories thematically.

These two thing aren't gameplay Godric.

Gameplay is role, abilities and playstyle...

Let's not take things out of context, its unlikely that the Shadow/Assassin will be as effective tank as a Trooper, most likely both classes will depend on different gameplay mechanics like a Jedi Shadow way of tanking is mostly dependent on damage mitigation or CC, whereas other tanking classes could depend on high HP (meat shields)

Quote :

The Sentinel Advanced Class remains targeted at players that prefer damage dealing gameplay over other roles. The variety between Sentinel skill trees has been increased, allowing players to specialize in several very different ways of dealing damage.

Just like the update states that the Sentinel AC has several different ways of dealing damage, I infer Bioware will take that path considering that doing otherwise (making every tank AC a meat shield) implies, in some cases, making you stay out of character, after all it would be really silly seeing a Jedi in a dress taking all those hits from that nasty rancor while that well armored trooper with a gatling gun is at a safe distance.

Remember the DodgeCap Rogue Tank video...?
That is all.

The point of spreading the roles to more classes is to have more people playing those roles. That's because, despite the lightsabers and cool armor, people didn't role Guardian, Sage healer, Scoundrel Healers or Trooper Vanguard in the focus testing and there was lack of tank and healers for group play.

Making the Shadow/Assassin less effective tanks doesn't solve that problem, in fact, that would just make players who rolled these spec useless past level 20.

ghey....

azarhal wrote:

The point of spreading the roles to more classes is to have more people playing those roles. That's because, despite the lightsabers and cool armor, people didn't role Guardian, Sage healer, Scoundrel Healers or Trooper Vanguard in the focus testing and there was lack of tank and healers for group play.

Making the Shadow/Assassin less effective tanks doesn't solve that problem, in fact, that would just make players who rolled these spec useless past level 20.

Blizzard tried that already, the whole "making more classes playable as tanks".
Didn't work for them, either.
What they ended up having to do was dumb down the encounters so that outside of 25man raids, more than 1 tank needed was rare, and more than 2 for 25 was unheard of.

So with tOR we've got more classes that can be a tank, but less people per group than WoW.
How do they figure that's going to work?
Objectively speaking, the numbers indicate that ~10% of players want to / are capable of playing a tank.

This whole movement by BW is a disturbance in the force...

azarhal wrote:

Making the Shadow/Assassin less effective tanks doesn't solve that problem, in fact, that would just make players who rolled these spec useless past level 20.

I agree, just like they have said Scoundrels will be as effective as Sages at healing it would make no sense to have Assassins/Shadows weaker at tanking than other tanks. Basically making one spec completely an invalid choice.

The one opportunity with spreading the roles around is to have a role filled by different playstyles. May be I want to tank by moving and drawing the BBEG into a hit and run fight instead of just standing there trading blows with it. Both styles should be equally viable even if one is more challenging then another. Other games are trying this. Why not TOR? (other than they would need to completely redesign their combat and encounter designs).

I'm totally aware that making more classes Tank doesn't work to increase their population much, it just spread the players. I was just saying that making them useless Tank wasn't that they were trying to do, it's actually worst then spreading the players.

BioWare mistake was believing that the Trinity worked as a "group building tool". It doesn't once you put "people" into the equation, because a minority of the players play 2/3 of the required assets and a smaller part of that 2/3 is actually competent at it and competence get worst the older the game is, because people start to roll these classes to find a spot in groups. It's actually scary on the official forum to see people say things like "DPS deserve being left behind, they should have rolled a tank". Such a great community in the making...

BioWare true solution is to drop the trinity design encounters and let players find the strategy that fit their group composition. Although, they are doomed if they do, doomed if they don't at this point.

Also, I was wondering something yesterday about their Combat Designer: Georg Zoeller. I'm pretty sure that the original combat/class designer wasn't him. So I looked at Georg's bio, the guy is from Edmonton, BioWare corp. He signed up on the TOR forum in 2010. Georg wasn't working on TOR before 2010, because he was the class designer for DA:O and worked on the Stone Prisoner (which was produced in 2009). He also worked on Mass Effect and Jade Empire.

The implication of his "arrival" is extremely interesting...

I'd certainly like it better if it was "play you role and find your way to defeat the encounter" but that provides endless balancing and coding issues.

I'll just wait and see. It's good for nothing anyway, rambling on about something, half-speculating - in the end you have to see how it pans out for yourself. Though I understand the concern and the past has proven that Bioware listens to the community (though they would probably not in this case).

azarhal wrote:

...
BioWare true solution is to drop the trinity design encounters and let players find the strategy that fit their group composition. Although, they are doomed if they do, doomed if they don't at this point.
...

DISCLAIMER: Please bear in mind as I right this that I love hybrid classes and mechanics. I love having to be alert and pinch-hit between tasks. I honestly believe I would love learning to play in a non-Trinity design. What follows is my attempt to look at this from a population-wide perspective.

One thing worries me about this sort of design. In every encounter I've seen the higher complexity of the encounter increases demand on all players by narrowing the margin for player error. This happens because players gravitate towards a simpler strategy unless unless encounter mechanics force them to do otherwise. The only force a player recognizes is wiping therefore to increase strategy complexity every player has to be capable of wiping the group.

Again I come back to Flamewreath as a simple and classic example. It was a stupid easy mechanic to deal with, but because ANYONE could wipe the raid on it, there was always someone screwing up. Let's puts some numbers on this. If everyone in the group is scoring a scholastic "A" (or "5" depending on where you're from") then they are doing 90% perfect. This means that in a group of 10 people, on average 1 person will screw up every Flamewreath. Because there is no margin for error (1 screw up = 0.99 wipes if nobody over-gears the encounter) this means you die on half of the Flamewreaths. He's going to cast half a dozen or so Flamewreaths in the encounter, so yeah... This rapidly leads to a "perfectionist" or "elitist" mindset.

I guess what I'm saying is that I fear the non-Trinity design would drive off large swaths of the casual player crowd in the long run, as well as generate negative beta-tester feedback in the short-term.

From my experience, the true problem of group play (trinity or not), is that people in a group don't talk or decide on a strategy first. Everybody is playing their own "single player" game. Everybody just move forward and when they see the enemies, they rush them. Once they die, they complain its too hard or that the others didn't know their "roles" or should have read the walkthrough to know what to do. When the truth is that they failed to play as a group.

Groups aren't about roles, groups are about synergy and how you come up with a strategy to make the most out of everyone abilities. Those synergy and strategy turn into roles in an encounter.

Also, lower level should teach you how to deal with different encounter designs.

What do I do when I'm outnumbered?
What do I do when I'm flanked?
What do I do if they are ranged attacked?
What do I do to deal with stealth?
What do I do to deal with charging enemies?
What do I do to deal with damage over time?
etc.

You need to learn how to react according to your class abilities. Most MMO are crap at this, levelling is usually devoid of any strategy beside: pull mob => kill.

azarhal wrote:

From my experience, the true problem of group play (trinity or not), is that people in a group don't talk or decide on a strategy first.
</snip>

Actually, I agree insofar as effect goes, but in my experience it's not that there isn't a strategy, more that the people not in key roles think "this has nothing to do with me" and stop listening so they have no clue what's going on.
And by "not in key roles" I mean dps, usually, and sometimes healers.

DPS is obvious; healers tend to think every fight's the same and they just need to heal, which is not always the case.