Patch Notes

[Mattemeo]

3, 4, GCD off and the timer set to point 12 font and tenths display at 1 second.

The countdown sticks on occassion but otherwise, this has been a considerable relief from the paparazzi flash photography issue I'd been having till now.

[Sjofn]

I left it at whatever it is defaulting as now, which I think was how it was last patch. At some point I got used to it on my JK and it doesn't bug me at all, which was the only class it bothered me on in the first place, and I am too lazy to tweak it.  

More options are good, though, I look forward to when they let us MOVE SHIT AROUND. Of course now I'm finally used to the chat window being someplace stupid, so who knows if I'll move anything after all!

[ajax34i]

They need to round the numbers up, though.

As in, for a 5 second ability we should see  5   4   3   2   1  .9 .8 .7 .6 .5 .4 .3 .2 .1 (flash)  rather than   4   3   2   1   0    0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0 (flash).

If you slide the countdown duration to 0 you see   4  3  2  1  0  0.0 (flash).    It's rather stupid.    It should be 5 4 3 2 1 (flash).

[Nevermore]

As in, for a 5 second ability we should see  5   4   3   2   1  .9 .8 .7 .6 .5 .4 .3 .2 .1 (flash)

That's already how mine counts down.  Your character must be broken.

[Sky]

Because it still only works on your quickbars instead of everywhere else cooldowns are shown like inventory, character sheet, the Operations frame, or your unit frames.  (Not sure about the Abilities panel, didn't check there.)

Yeah, I'm also finding it difficult to adventure with my inventory and character sheet open. Glad you caught this game-breaker.

Anyway, I'm using 3 and 4 without GCD flash or numbers. Works awesome, even though I didn't have much of an issue with the other ways. I had gotten used to the zomg world-ending change within an hour.

I swear there are some really silica-laden female organs on some of you.

[caladein]

I play a Lethality Operative.  I don't have room to put all of my consumables (and forget about quest items) on my bars, so it would be nice if everything that used the same basic model followed the same settings.  Getting cooldowns on the unit frames is a whole other matter, but would still make playing all of my specs a lot easier.

[Nebu]

I play a Lethality Operative.  I don't have room to put all of my consumables (and forget about quest items) on my bars, so it would be nice if everything that used the same basic model followed the same settings.  Getting cooldowns on the unit frames is a whole other matter, but would still make playing all of my specs a lot easier.

How do you like lethality?  I hit 50 on my Op a week ago and find that while I can put up bigger dos numbers with lethality, that my killing ability (pvp) is much better with concealment.  I also find power to be more of an issue with lethality just as it is on my sniper. 

[caladein]

Yeah, it's not great in PvP I found, as you really can't just whittle people down from 10m as you have neither closers nor passive movement speed.  That's not based off a wealth of experience as I mostly just use it for Operations and do my PvPing on a low-level Assassin tank.

Power is kind of clunky as there are times when I feel like I can't get rid of the stuff and others where I get myself in a hole when the "keep dots up" part of my brain forgets what game I'm playing.  Still, unless it proved to be a lot worse than Concealment on a dummy, I love being able to still do good damage while dodging ground effects or using cover to block knockbacks.

[01101010]

Because it still only works on your quickbars instead of everywhere else cooldowns are shown like inventory, character sheet, the Operations frame, or your unit frames.  (Not sure about the Abilities panel, didn't check there.)

Yeah, I'm also finding it difficult to adventure with my inventory and character sheet open. Glad you caught this game-breaker.

Anyway, I'm using 3 and 4 without GCD flash or numbers. Works awesome, even though I didn't have much of an issue with the other ways. I had gotten used to the zomg world-ending change within an hour.

I swear there are some really silica-laden female organs on some of you.

F13. I thought this is how we roll? 

[Sky]

F13. I thought this is how we roll? 

Cal's response to me is how we roll. Thanks for clearing up something that made no sense, Cal.

[Fabricated]

Because it still only works on your quickbars instead of everywhere else cooldowns are shown like inventory, character sheet, the Operations frame, or your unit frames.  (Not sure about the Abilities panel, didn't check there.)

Yeah, I'm also finding it difficult to adventure with my inventory and character sheet open. Glad you caught this game-breaker.

Anyway, I'm using 3 and 4 without GCD flash or numbers. Works awesome, even though I didn't have much of an issue with the other ways. I had gotten used to the zomg world-ending change within an hour.

I swear there are some really silica-laden female organs on some of you.

F13. I thought this is how we roll? 

I thought how F13 usually rolled was like almost all of us buying the box, forming a guild, making a bunch of effort posts about the game then quitting a month later to return to whatever MMO first grabbed us while grumbling about how bad the industry is until we get frothed up about some beta or another and repeat the process. :P

[Lantyssa]

SWG is dead, twice over, so I can't ever return to the game that first grabbed me.  Long live GW2!

[Nebu]

New patch today... and I'm VERY happy about it.  Particularly...

PvP

General
Players can now build credit towards the Battle for Ilum daily and weekly missions by playing Warzones.

Warzones

General
Healers in Warzones now receive kill credit when a healed player kills an enemy.
Players affected by a Damage Over Time ability are no longer interrupted when interacting with objectives.
Battlemaster and Champion Commendations are now available on the PvP Vendor for
Warzone and Mercenary Commendations. Champion Gear Bags are still available.
Valor gained from Warzones has been increased.
Medals are now worth 500 Valor and 10 Commendations. Players only earn Valor and Commendations for the first 4 medals earned each match.
Increased the Warzone AFK timeout from 60 seconds to 90 seconds.

Alderaan Civil War
The speeder bikes that transport players back to the battle now have a three-second activation time to increase the likelihood that an organized attacking team can successfully take the side turrets.

No more valor farming.  More valor for healers.  Less valor for tanks.  More fun fighting over side turrets. 

[Sky]

Alternately, a completely useless patch.

[Nebu]

Alternately, a completely useless patch.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

[Sky]

It's true, banana peels are awesome for pvp.

[Ingmar]

Alternately, a completely useless patch.

He didn't quote the whole list of notes.

[Fordel]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=3150977#edit3150977

Notes.

[Falconeer]

Oh. When?

[Fordel]

No idea, but can't be too far off I'd imagine.

Week or two?

[Evildrider]

Probably next maint.  Those patch notes are all awesome though.

[Sky]

Alternately, a completely useless patch.

He didn't quote the whole list of notes.

I had read them before commenting.

[Threash]

So just giving up on ilum rather than fixing it, lovely.

[Ingmar]

Yes, obviously, a x.x.x hotfix patch is indicative of their final strategy.

[Shatter]

So just giving up on ilum rather than fixing it, lovely.

F Ilum as it is right now.  They need to gut it and turn it into a cross server 40 vs 40 warzone or something.  Not really what I want but there arent going to be many ways to make a world pvp zone faction balanced in this game so they might as well instance the sucker. 

[Falconeer]

Yeah, I just realized that their solution to the open world PvP imbalance is to erase open world PvP. Taking away dailies and not putting in any incentive means that there's  not a single reason anymore to go to Ilum.

You can all chime on about how open PvP is not that important in western MMORPGs and that's why they didn't put resources into it, but that's not even the case since they did put enough resources into it to come up with the worst implementation of open PvP I can remember - nothing more than a cut and paste of previous failed games - and eventually scrap it when people were getting too vocal about it.

From a designer standpoint, shouldn't whoever was in charge of that portion of the game, no matter how small was the budget, feel like he/she totally failed as a professional?


EDIT: About the x.x.x patch comment, it's their job to tell us what the plans for the future of open PvP are, instead of just showing with each patch that they don't really care/know what to do about it. Boosting Warzones is a fact, and I can comment on it. Saying "we are working on pvp stuff for some point in the future" is fluff I read too many times in too many games before and which cannot be commented.

[Bunk]

Alternately, a completely useless patch.

He didn't quote the whole list of notes.

I had read them before commenting.

I'll back you up man. An entire set of patch notes that will have exactly zero effect on me.

Mind you, the only thing really bothering me in the game right now is the periodic glitch I get where everyone's eyes disappear during cutscenes.

[Ingmar]

EDIT: About the x.x.x patch comment, it's their job to tell us what the plans for the future of open PvP are, instead of just showing with each patch that they don't really care/know what to do about it. Boosting Warzones is a fact, and I can comment on it. Saying "we are working on pvp stuff for some point in the future" is fluff I read too many times in too many games before and which cannot be commented.

If "we're working on it" isn't sufficient for you, that's fine, but it doesn't make it their job to communicate every detail of every upcoming change. Almost always these things take a few tries to get it right, developers who give lots of detail about upcoming shit always catch a huge load of shit when they can't deliver all of it or their plans change direction (where's my dance studio Blizzard), so I can't blame them for holding their cards close on this.

[Falconeer]

From what you write Ingmar, seems almost like you don't think it's literally ridiculous that they didn't see the unrepairable issues in the system they had in place at launch. I think it was their job to learn from the previous ten years of MMOs. Having failed, it's hard for me to think they will suddenly learn in a couple of months. The fact that they didn't present any idea doesn't help.

[Ingmar]

No MMO has ever launched with a truly functional PVP endgame, to my knowledge. Even the sainted DAOC took a while to fix their shit (and they still had awful population issues always). So I'm certainly not *surprised* that their system doesn't work as they intended. If there's one thing that is impossible to beta test properly, it's this. They can't simulate what will actually happen with player populations, they don't have people that are invested in their characters long term, etc. etc. etc.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Adding pvp functionality to a pve diku game is fundamentally flawed. As you yourself said there are too many variables to ever test properly. Even games whose sole focus is pvp are constantly tweaking their rulesets for perfect balance. swtor has diku pvp because "that's what everyone else did" no one has yet stopped to say "does this actually work?"

They'd have been much better off trying to design a new way to have player vs player content without it simply being a clone of wow battlegrounds where you simply use your pve abilities against people but like many developers before and many surely after, they were lazy.

[Ingmar]

The battlegrounds, such as they are, more or less work as-is. They aren't really the problem (yeah they need cross server queues but once they have those it should likely fix activity/pop balance issues for BGs). What Falc and others are complaining about, at least as I read it, is the "open world" PVP in Ilum. That's the thing you really can only guess at how it will work until players actually get their hands on it. There's almost certainly a balance somewhere of reward structure + objective design that will "work" for Ilum at least for balanced servers, the problem is finding it and there's really no way to do that without just constantly turning knobs until it comes in in tune. Which basically translates to "we're working on it".

I think people need to remember what previous MMOs have been like in this respect. WoW had *no* PVP end game at release. No honor system, no objectives, no battlegrounds, no anything. DAOC didn't even have the last 10 levels of their game itemized. SB.exe. City of Heroes didn't add PVP until years later. And so on. I think an argument could easily be made that SWTOR has the best at launch endgame PVP of any DIKU I've ever played, and at least so far they're being relatively quick to make adjustments.

EDIT: had to specify endgame, since level 11 PVP in WAR was great. 

[Sky]

I think an argument could easily be made that SWTOR has the best at launch PVP of any DIKU I've ever played, and at least so far they're being relatively quick to make adjustments.

You're having a discussion with people who hate this game.

[Nebu]

I think an argument could easily be made that SWTOR has the best at launch endgame PVP of any DIKU I've ever played, and at least so far they're being relatively quick to make adjustments.

EDIT: had to specify endgame, since level 11 PVP in WAR was great. 

I enjoyed endgame pvp far more in Rift and WAR (even with bright wizards).  I feel that SWTOR has done the best job of balancing endgame pvp, but the game is just missing something that I can't put my finger on.  The pvp feels so watered-down and homogenized.   There is also almost no reason to pvp in the open world.  The imbalances between classes was something that endeared me to DAoC.  We all knew which classes were overpowered solo.  That made beating the people playing them so much more fun. 

[Ingmar]

I never made it past level 10 in Rift, so I'll have to take your word for that one.

As for WAR: City sieges.