SWG: State of the Game

[Leoghan]

Among the things we plan to improve: The Jedi Path. We don't like the "holo-grind" path any more than you do. We want becoming a Force-sensitive character to be fun, mysterious and engaging... everything it should be. We want the Jedi experience to be exciting, dangerous, and active. We don't want Jedi hiding away, but we don't want them dominating the game either. And we are aiming for a healthy balance. Finally, the GCW should and will be the veteran game for SWG. Runesabre (SWG Lead Live Designer) has a wonderful vision, and it will take a bit of time to implement, but there is a place for every type of player in his scenario. (more here (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/team_comments.jsp?id=61526&page=Team%20Comments))

It is nice to know they are at least aware of some of the problems, but it seems like to deal with them will require major rebuilds of game mechanics. That's a huge investment, but if they go through with it, it will be very impressive and be a lesson that EQ should have learned.

[Scarne]

SWG needs a whole bunch of complete system revamping, not just the Jedi. Pretty much the entire combat system and the workings of the HAM bars need to be overhauled.

[Snorii]

I'm certainly glad they didn't put this off for too long. They addressed this a while back and are in the process of getting it to test servers now.

Combat Balance: A major Combat Balance pass will be happening in Publish 8. The goal of the combat balance is to make combat challenging and equitable across the combat professions. The Combat Balance consists of several aspects.

The first aspect is the Weapon Balance. The Weapon Balance pass is intended to bring relative power of weapons between professions more in line with each other. This is not to say that they will all be the same. Different weapon types will still have various strengths and weakness providing different abilities in which they are ideally suited. Certain weapons classes will stay more or less powerful than the average but this is to reflect a balance paradigm of the profession that uses those weapons. Additionally weapon certifications will be rearranged to provide a better power progression and to better match up with when Weaponsmiths are granted the schematics to craft them. A major goal of the weapon balance pass is to provide players with a consistent and balanced power progression as they advance up their profession as well as providing interesting and varied weapon choices at all skill levels.

The second aspect of the Combat balance will be the HAM redesign. A very critical part of the overall combat rebalance is the change to the functionality of the HAM system. This change will allow a greater ease in balancing overall HAM costs for weapons and special moves. It will also allow Mind to be removed as a special damage type and place equal emphasis on Health, Action and Mind pools for both abilities and damage.

The third aspect is the Profession Balance. Once the underlying core systems for combat (weapons, damage & HAM) are balanced it will be possible to look at all combat professions and balance them in a way that emphasizes each of the professions roles in combat and to give purpose to each individual player as well as reasons for choosing various profession combinations in groups. This includes a skill mod balance, skill tree progression tweaks, combination stacking, special abilities (existing and some new) and overall difficulty.

Lastly is the follow up to many of the preliminary changes that have been made so far. This includes balancing armor, buffs and DoTs, bringing them in line with the combat balance overall.