Oh, I agree adding onto TSW would have been better, but only from the viewpoint of the player base. The relaunch made money, mostly in the short term, so it was a better strategy for the company. So really, it depends on which side you’re on. My original point in this discussion, is that if they really wanted to, and were willing to invest the time/resources, they could have actually made the game better and made more money. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and now we’re stuck with SWL.
I do agree with this for the most part, but I also think it’s important to look back at what went wrong in order to see how to fix it. Obviously, we’re never getting TSW back, so it would be more productive to have discussions about how to fix SWL. But I think a lot of the problem is that Funcom doesn’t seem to be listening to the players. For instance, combat balance has been an issue since beta and it still hasn’t really been addressed. If people don’t feel like they’re being listened to, they’re more likely to just complain to each other than to offer constructive feedback to the people in charge.
I got the impression at the time that if the TSW devs had had the option, they’d’ve kept TSW working. The previous game director, Tilty, seemed genuinely sad when he had to announce SWL on stream. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth from the community, of course, no matter how sincere he could be. Why alienate your customer base if you don’t have to, after all.
Back to the Skill Wheel, though, as a filthy casual I f’kin’ loved it for the Deck outfits; the path to which gave you abilities that were useful, if not the arguable utility of the decks themselves.
So play it your way becomes play it our way till we think you’re responsible enough? The best builds pulled passives from all over the wheel, which means that you’d be deliberately gimping people until they proved they were going to stick with boring combat - and inner circle builds were dull.
The synergies were a fantastic concept, but didn’t really live up to expectations. Frenzy was king of soloing, because it gave you leeching frenzy (which was OP). Otherwise the synergies were something which came up in some PVP builds, but otherwise were kinda meh.
For PVE, there wasn’t any synergy use in the top builds. That was one of the reasons the size of the wheel was a problem. It was lots of dead weight which would drop your damage unless used in very specific ways, in which case it would still drop your damage output, but might compensate in other ways. Most of those compensations were already provided by other, higher DPS builds.
That means that to get the wheel working properly, the whole thing would need to be overhauled, rebalanced and tested. And that’s just to make it competitive, let alone explaining to people why almost everyone still just uses the one which parses highest.
I think the solution lies somewhere in between TSW’s wheel and the SWL system. TSW’s wheel did have a lot of dead weight, but it also had enough variety to leave it up to the player to experiment. For straight dps, sure, everyone used the same 7 passives, but it doesn’t really matter how many options you put out there, once the ideal build is found people are going to use just that build for the most part. However, the larger wheel made hybrid builds, such as healtank and leecher, available for those who wanted to try new things. A friend and I did all the NM dungeons duo, and we had to come up with a lot of creative builds to get it done. SWL’s ability system is too limited for that kind of stuff. Not to mention the nuances of PvP.
SWL’s system is too watered down, and picking passives is almost entirely redundant, since each passive just pairs with a specific active ability. So, there might be more variety among the builds, but less choice, if that makes sense. And again, balance is the bigger issue. In TSW if you were using the wrong abilities, you could easily fix that by asking questions in-game, or reading guides online. In SWL, it’s more about having the right weapons. If you want to compete with high-end dps, you basically have to buy a KSR or a Pneumatic Maul and then level it up for months.
As for how to fix it moving forward, I’m not sure. I’d love to see more options in abilities and passives, but that’s probably a lot of work with no guarantee to fix anything. The best bet would be to tweak things so other weapons do more damage. Also, I’m not sure if I’ve brought it up on the forums but if they are going to nerf sustain tanking to make healing a thing again, I think a solution would be to create an Anima-Allocation-like system for glyphs and add a simple agitator passive, so the current tank supply doesn’t dry up overnight. I don’t think it would be completely fix all the issues with the combat in SWL, but those are some things they could do without a massive overhaul.
Weapon balance will never be addressed, because they choose to use weapon specific minis which are totally unbalanced in their mechanics (look at plain and simple hammer one, rng based pistols and totally screwed elementalism…).
Fair enough. I guess I didn’t really think of the weapon gimmicks because I’ve only ever used Pistols for clean slate and have yet to use Ele at all. So yeah, the 4 weapons I do use - AR, Blood, Hammer, and Fist - are all pretty straightforward. I do use Shotgun on an alt, and that system is a little clunky as well.
I’ve seen people do good dps with Pistols, but anyone trying to do Ele main-hand is usually at the bottom the ACT parse. Like I said, I’ve never used Ele, but from what I’ve heard of it, I think overheating can be tweaked to be more fair.
I’d be okay with a complete overhaul if that were an option and if I had faith that the same people who screwed up the system would be able to fix it. I’m just saying I think there are some smaller tweaks that could be done that would improve things a bit. Just because the combat system can’t be perfectly balanced, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to fix what they can at this point.
I agree perfect balance is an illusion. There will be always some differences, but current situation is for some weapons really messed up. I would be happy if they would adhere to simple design rule, that more difficult gimmicks/mechanism/rotation should player reward better outcome and easy one a little bit worse, because it is easier to maintain. But if you look at current situation it is for the most cases quite opposite.
So no, I don’t belive they are able to make any “fix”.
For start all melee weapons should do higher dps then all range. Perhaps have some innate weapon specific (without passive) mobility boost.
Not like now when AR has everything except cleaning. For ele… I don’t play one but judging from tsw casttime is the major annoyance.
I think someone said that their intent was that melee specials took less micromanagement than ranged. That way it was supposed to compensate for the players needing more awareness of their surroundings to avoid mechanics.
I think an interesting idea would be to add more passive pages for the weapons. Instead of having just one choice of how a passive changes the active, it’d give the opportunity to give different effects without needing to add new animations or reworking the main weapon skills.
I can understand the limited range of CQC, because it is Close Quarter Combat. Not sure how great it’d look if you’re smacking people in the face with your gunstock from 10m away.
No. I would buff other melee weapons to same level as hammer and nerf/buff range weapons to do less dps then melee. Or at least no more then melee. Marauder class in swtor does more damage then any other by design and that is accepted as normal because it is melee and hard to play.
I can understand that and all other limitations from animation/lore/physics points of view. But to have melee interrupt for range tank weapon is bad design.
There is other stuff in shotgun.
I think crimson talks about raging shots passiv of 3m, Bothbarrels 7m and Full Salvos 9m.
The least problem of those three being Full Salvo since it’S close enough. Both barrel can be annoying because of range on top of it being a cone and Raging shots passiv makes you effectively a melee 1.1 version weapon that mostly is melee range but can play a bit with range in favor of dps.
CQC is CQC…I think it’s fine. Maybe make it castable without target with the passive as else there are less clunky stuns around especially in the gadget section but it works.
Yes, about those. Except Raging shot passive. Though I think trade off of wasting passive slot for additional damage is enough already without putting range restriction. Also I am not sure about Bombardiment. Middle range is 12m? Normal abilities start work from that range but Bombardiment when I tried today worked only from 10 m range.
To be honest to me some passives look like FC just copied them from wheel just to fill space. And as result now we have lowcoster version of wheel.
CQC was fine when SG wasn’t tanking weapon. It is possible to find workaround with gadgets/offhand. Question is why no one thought about contradiction.
Maybe someone should start a new discussion thread about what exactly is wrong with the combat system and how to fix it. No, I’m not just complaining about the original topic being derailed, I just think even if the devs do read these forums, they’re probably not going to read all the way through a thread about how the game is already dead. I’d do it, but I already have a suggestion thread up that I’d like to see addressed first.
I can explain that. Your range is 10m BUT while the distance to the enemy is displayed from their center of the hit circle you only have to be in range of the edge of their target circle. Which “adds distance”, kinda, in a way…
Bombardment has it’S uses on static targets when your team slees on those juicy expose. You can keep exppose up with just this one skill.
I think this would be a great idea to bring forward. Perhaps a “global” passives page with one row each for tank, dps, and heals, with a little pvp sprinkled in. It might even break the hold of sustain-tanks on the game. Or maybe something completly different, who knows. But it seems like an easy thing to program and publish. My only concern is Funcom yelling “that makes it less grindy and make us lose money”. Frankly I think that would be silly but I trust Funcom as much as I trust Orochi agents staying alive.
This is the type of idea I would like Funcom to involve the community more with. Something from the very conception, not just for testing. Heck, maybe even start a channel in the official Discord to discuss. And reward AWOL if it’s taken up by the community and Funcom. If it fails, hey – at least a good number of the community was involved and we can all share the blame.
Just kidding; I’m on board with this. I like the idea of having two or more passives for each active, so you have to switch things up depending on the situation. But your idea of global passives is pretty good, too. There was a branch like that in TSW’s wheel. I’ve referenced the agitator passive from that branch many times.
Where I disagree here is making it a Discord discussion. Part of the problem with SWL is the echo chamber around the devs. It’s too easy for dissenting opinions to be silenced on Discord, or even the forums. I think a forum discussion would be better, but ideally, if Funcom actually wants to improve things in a way that the most amount of people can get behind, they need to actively seek out the opinion of the playerbase. How many people actually bother reading these forums? And how many of that subset bother posting? Same with the Discord.
I reiterate my suggestion of surveys being sent out to current and past players asking specific questions about what changes they’d like to see and/or what would bring them back. The survey could link to the forum discussion where they would be encouraged to voice their opinion in more detail. Honestly, the fact that something like that hasn’t been done already to combat the decline in player numbers since relaunch is pretty worrying.
