Bioware dropped a new weekly Q&A for Star Wars The Old Republic. This time bringing in System Designer David Hunt, Senior Designer Austin Peckenpaug, and Senior Game Balance Designer Jason Attard.
Major highlights include:
- Players will not see a change in resetting the cooldowns for PvP after death
- Smaller more frequent class balances will eventually occur over the course of the game
- There are currently no plans to change the way PvE relics work for PvP
As with any Q&A, there were things missed or not answered the way the community had hoped, so I am curious to hear what you thought needed to be addressed. Leave a comment down below.
Originally Posted by Bioware We’re back with a selection of answers to your community questions! Please note that in some cases we’ve combined multiple questions into one, and we that have edited some questions for clarity.As a reminder, we previously suggested a shift in focus in your questions. As development plans are always subject to change, questions about future features will often get vague answers which can be repetitive and sometimes annoying. With that in mind, the development team is more interested in questions about current in-game features or systems, or questions about why development decisions were made. You’re still welcome to ask questions about future features and we’ll continue to answer them where appropriate – just expect the occasional ‘soon.’We have now opened an official threadfor next week’s Q&A, which will stay open until 2pm CDT on July 25th, 2012 (12pm PDT/3pm EDT/8pm BST/9pm CEST/5am AEST). We welcome your questions in that thread and hope you enjoy the answers below.If you want to discuss any of the answers given, please use this Forum thread!
Chimerashot: The way Campaign gear is set up, some DPS classes have the Armoring with more Endurance instead of their main stat. Can we expect this to change /what was the reasoning behind this?
David Hunt (Systems Designer): It’s an undesired interaction between the distribution of the mods and the move to set bonuses on the armoring. Future gear provides set mods will use the primary stat over Endurance for all DPS classes.
Achyllis: Why don’t cool downs all reset on death in PvP?
Austin Peckenpaugh (Senior Designer): Doing this would encourage a couple of things that, so far, we don’t necessarily want to encourage. When you take a position from another player or group of players in a Warzone, holding that position is harder when your group’s abilities are still cooling down and that isn’t the case for the incoming wave of attackers. We entertain this idea every now and then, but we keep arriving at the notion that it would create too much turnover and death zerging, which have historically proven to not be fun.
We also like the tension in the decision of blowing everything to finish someone off in a clutch moment versus acknowledging defeat and coming back in full force. The decision of “going all out” should be a strategic and tactical one rather than a no-brainer that you squeeze in before each death.
Sang: Several months ago class balance changes were made at a smaller and more frequent rate, however, since 1.2 all class balance changes have been made within or around the major game updates (1.2 and 1.3). Will this pattern of class balance changes occurring every few months within the major game updates continue or will we see a return to some more frequent, albeit smaller, changes?
Austin: In the weeks immediately following launch, we had planned and scheduled for as much bug fixing and emergent balancing as possible, and faster class/balance updates were more feasible as a result. Smaller, more frequent class changes proved to have an overall positive impact on the game, so yes, we hope to get back into that kind of rhythm soon.
Esendis: Can we expect some kind of change to the current pve relics? As it stands now the BIS pve relics for many advanced classes are the pvp ones.
Jason Attard (Senior Game Balance Designer): In the long run our intent is to make sure PvP gear is never competitive in end-game PvE situations. Unfortunately, it’s still too early in the design process for us to give an ETA or release any details on what we’re planning for PvP gear.
We currently have no plans to change the PvE relics. In theory the active abilities on the PvE relics do not provide quite as much sustained damage-per-second as a passive relic at the same item level. In practice, when used at the correct time they can deliver a huge amount of damage when you actually need it, and can make you much more effective overall. This is especially true when the relic is paired with powerful cooldowns or burst damage attacks. This is the primary reason we changed the PvP relics into passive relics, as skilled players could wipe out their opponents much more quickly than intended, and nobody likes to be killed before they get a chance to fight back. On the PvE side we decided to keep that extra bit of gameplay, since it helps break up rotations and adds a extra little optimization element to damage dealing in boss fights.
Dyronis: Are there any plans on making Purple, Cyan, White crystals craftable by Artifice?
Jason: We don’t currently have any plans to make those colors craft-able. This might change in the future, but even if we introduce crafting schematics for them we intend for those lightsaber colors (especially White) to remain relatively rare.
