PTS Adventures in PvP and UI Customization

                Starting about two weeks ago I have been braving the crash heavy Public Test Server (PTS).  Originally I was doing this to see patch 1.2 and, I confess, to get the title for getting a character to level 10 on the PTS.  There is also a title for getting a character to the end of chapter one as well, but let’s face it I am still not quite 50, so probably won’t be getting that title. Source: PTS 1.2Patch notes under general > second bullet point down. 

Novare Coast

Novare Coast Scorekeeper

               Once I hit level 10 I started PvPing (player v player) so I could get a look at the new warzone.  Novare Coast is the new PvP Warzone.  The game is described as “Majority 3-point Domination.”  The goal of the game is to hold at least 2 points.  How is this different from the current Alderaan Civil War Warzone?  In Alderaan Civil War you are taking the opposing team’s ship shield/health down as long as your team controls a turret.  In Novare Coast your team needs to hold 2 points to start taking down the enemies’ bunker.  The points represent artillery posts.  One point is needed to knock the shield protecting the bunker down and a second point is needed to damage the bunker when that shield is down.   Capturing (or capping)  the points also works different such that the more people capping the point the faster your team can cap.  Also note that disrupting the person/people capping does not reset the cap.  Capping of the points works more like a tug-of-war type match.  The map is fairly open but with rugged, hilly terrain.

A look at the terrain

New PvP Queue Interface

Another shot of the PvP queue but scrolled down

              

Charging up the hill to take the bunker. 

 

                

               Being a low level character I didn’t check out much else on the PTS, which coupled with the fact that my game crashed every ten minutes if I was lucky.  After logging in for the fifth or six time I was done with the PTS for the day. 

                However I did get to mess around quite a bit with the new User Interface (UI) customization.  I have some screenshots of the various default plates.  Click them to enlarge. 

To customize your interface

Default Layout

Default in Interface Editor

Extended Bars Layout

Extended Bars in Interface Editor

Retro Layout

Retro in Interface Editor

My Custom Layout

Custom in Interface Editor

Then the last screen is of my new custom setup which is a hybrid of retro and extended bar.  I actually like, or maybe I am just used to, the way extended bar is set up.  I haven’t used an Interface like retro in years and with it I find myself looking at the wrong part of the screen and hunting for the information I need.  I do like my new hybrid of the two interfaces.  I like my chat box down at the bottom better.  In PvP and open world combat elevation changes, i.e. the target being on higher ground, has me often clicking in my chat box and trying to kill enemy by shouting binary mixed with some w’s at them.  SIDE NOTE: Binary does not seem to be an effective way of killing others.   I am still tweaking my custom UI as I go though.

                Here are some more screenshots of my interface with party and operation frames. 

Party Frames.  Unfortunately I only have one person in my group.

Operation frames from a PvP match

Tips for new UI Customization

Moving secondary windows

•  As mentioned before to show additional bars it is under the UI Editor and not under user interface options anymore.
•   To move the secondary menus, i.e. inventory, character sheet, etc., toggle on moveable secondary menus in the UI Editor.
• To enable target on target select the target on target frame in the UI Editor and toggle the enable option.



Adding health information



Target of Target

• To show health text on health bars select the frame/frames you want to show health text on and toggle on show information text.

Multiple secondary windows open and moved around

These are just some questions people have asked while I was on PTS and I thought others might want to know.  If anyone else has any questions about the UI feel free to ask below in the comments and I will try to get back to you with an answer. 

Light Side v Dark Side v Neutral

                As announced at the guild summit there will be legacy bonuses for Light Side V and Dark Side V characters.  At some unknown date Neutral alignment characters are also supposed to get some love.  The legacy bonuses for alignment will be in the form of abilities for all legacy characters.  Also some of these abilities will be combat abilities while others will not. 

Dark Side IV on a Cyborg

                So I am assuming that some social abilities will be available as well.  I guess at some pt I will need to work on a Neutral character.  The best approach for this is to have a set of standards like companions and turn off the show Light Side/Dark Side choices and just play “grey”.   But right now there isn’t much benefit to being neutral.

                The animation of Sith corruption on your character is pretty sweet.  I still think it looks best on Human and Cyborg models, since it pales the skin, darkens the eyes and sprawls the head with spider veins.   I miss the bright red of my Zabrak’s skin as he gets more evil ala goes to the Dark Side.

Light Side IV

                The animation for Light Side is a sweet nothing on the character models.  I would like to see my light characters have a soft white/yellow glow coming off them or something cool.  I have heard arguments that while there is fluff in Star Wars for the Sith Corruption on characters there is no precedence for any hard line Light Side characters.  I will argue that we haven’t really seen any hard line Light Side Jedi in the movies, expect for maybe on the Jedi Council but their characters aren’t deeply wrought in the movies to know if they are truly Light Side V.  But alas I shall have to wait and see what comes with legacy for Light Side V. 

Meters and Logs

                It seems that on the issue of combat meters everyone has an opinion.  Some people like them, and well some people don’t.  There are many reasons for this.

                Meters aside for a moment people like information.  In swtor, the information that the game provides to a player is very minimal to say the least with regards to combat.  When you get defeated you have no idea of whom hit you last, if you were hit by multiple foes or how hard they hit you for.  You are not given information on how much damage your armor reduced, or your passive damage reduction.  It also doesn’t tell you the damage your shield absorbed or the damage you dodged.  Nor for a PvPer does the game tell you the damage your expertise reduced.  That’s just on the defensive side of the game.  What about offensive moves.  There is no log on critical or how much surge is boosting them by; there is no telling damage boost from expertise.  Then the same goes for healing.  I will say that yes I do have all my fly text on but the fly text doesn’t break down the damage or defense or healing specifically like I am talking about.  Essentially the game does not even have a combat log.  You might be saying wait all this information you seek is in your character panel, and to some extent you are right but the character panel gives ranges and static values.  With a combat log you can see live data on all of these values not rather that just theorycrafting from the character panel.

                Combat logs are invaluable to players and would be a welcome addition.  There is no reason not to have combat logs, which can improve peoples’ personal games. Skipping over to meters, which tend to be lauded or seen with resentment. 

                The positives of meters are that on an individual basis you can see numerical data that shows how effective your healing, damage, or defense is.  From a healing stand point you can see your effective heals, overhealing, regeneration, downtime and criticals.  Some healing tends to be more situational than rotation based letting a healer see where they can use what heal to be more effective.  Granted as a healer you do not need to have meters.  Keeping people alive and in the fight is what gets the job done, however meters can help healers if they want to improve.  The same goes for dps (damage dealers) you do not need meters to do damage if the boss dies and you win all is fine.  On a personal level meters can help you improve your rotation to get more out of your character.  Or as a dps you could go look up a rotation that someone else has made.  They probably did this with meters and you won’t know if it’s working unless you see it on meters yourself.

                The negatives of meters result in each person being held to a standard.  If you are below this standard you are not good enough.  The problem with this is boss fights involve more than just straight damage; there are more times often than not, mechanics to overcome to defeat the boss.  If a player puts out amazing dps but dies 45 seconds into the fight then they aren’t really worth the spot compared to someone that puts out less dps but listens and survives until the boss is down.

From the guild summit they commented on meters and logs some.  From what I understood of what the Bioware team said there will be limited simply command so that you can see what defeated you and with what you defeated someone else with.  They also said that a detailed log showing everything your character does and everything affecting them will be out loaded so that it can be viewed but only out of game.  Also the detailed log is only on a personal level so you can only see your characters information not the entire groups.  Meaning some 3^rd party would have to make a program to collect and view this information for groups or in game.

So it sounds like swtor will be getting very accurate out of game logs.  They said they were going for the middle ground with this idea but I still don’t see why having very detailed logs out of game coupled with some less detailed logs in game would be bad.  Having them out of game could be nice for making charts and helping convey the data in a more meaningful way.  But in game I still would like a little analysis of my gameplay and not have to pop out of game to view my data. It will be a nice addition to see what defeated you but even this will probably be given with minimal data.

Meters and logs have their place and are useful.  Some people don’t like meters and aren’t looking to improve themselves and that’s okay.  But don’t go looking to set server firsts with an attitude like that.   So if you are a casual player that’s fine don’t get discouraged by meters just play the game you want to play.

Overuse of AoE

This post was meant to go with the post on crowd control, but as that post grew I broke it up into this second post.  I briefly touched on area of effect (AoE) usage at the end of the CC post. 

Death From Above

                The screenshot shows some Bounty Hunters using the Death From Above ability on me.  This AoE is quite powerful and BH’s get it pretty early on in the leveling process.  This AoE is also a notorious CC breaker as every BH seems to feel that urge to use Death From Above no every multi-mob pull regardless if there are only two mobs or six.

                I have found a growing trend in not only the increase in classes in MMORPG that have AoE abilities but also an increase in the number of AoE abilities.  It used to be that only certain classes and even then only certain specs were strong in AoE damage or healing or tanking.  This was at a point in gaming where CC was not only useful it was required for most pulls.  Only specific fights were set-up to require AoE.  Fast forward to more current MMORPG and expansions; the tank pulls everything and begins to AoE tank, if there was CC either the tank broke it trying to grab the other mobs or a dps jumped the gun to AoE (i.e. Death From Above) shortly after the pull started.  This generally leads to the tank tanking a few guys the dps tanking others and hopefully not, but commonly the healer having to tank mobs from his healing threat.  This common and chaotic pull results in nearly everyone in the group taking damage, which in turn results in a common practice of throwing more AoE heals to keep everyone up. 

                Game designers have tried to set up AoE abilities to cost more to use.  However this has not stopped the rampant use of AoE.  I find it takes less skill and strategy to use AoE all the time.  I personally enjoy coordination, strategy, teamwork, focus targeting and single target abilities.

                Side Note: I do not have a problem with tanks using or having a swipe/sweep move that hits three targets.  This is just a standard tanking ability.  I was a tank back in WoW when this was the only way to grab mobs.  There was a long cooldown oh crap AoE taunt but even that taunt was quite limited.  Now there are multiple AoE abilities that hit everything within 10 m.

                Honestly, what was wrong with single target dps?  I mean sure you had to pay attention and focus down targets, but how hard is that?  Is it that people don’t want to have to coordinate?  The last thing I would want to see happen to MMORPGs is that they start playing like First Person Shooters where you only talk to your friends and do your own thing independent of your objective and maybe this is the way PvP is going.  In swtor only four people can group together to queue for a warzone. 

                Maybe AoE is just the trendy abilities to put in the game or maybe I am coming from way out in left field.  What are your thoughts on CC and AoE use? And thanks to Tor'bac for helping me with the screen. 

Many Roads That All Lead to 50

               As previously mentioned I have been playing alts quite a bit.  Besides the first 10 levels or so before your toon gets to fleet the experiences are mostly similar and you don’t have sprint so you run and run and run and find yourself only half way to where you want to go.  Or maybe I have just been spoiled by the utility of sprint, which you get at level 14.

                The one aspect of swtor that I do like, since I have alts, is that leveling can be done in a variety of ways.  This can be a turn off to some people.  As when leveling there is just so much content that can be skipped, that is if you want to stay at level with content.  Leveling alts and leveling them differently can allow one to see more content.

                With my Bounty Hunter (BH) I have used all forms of leveling variety from normal quests, heroic quests, class quests, flashpoints (fp), space missions and PvP.  This lead me to doing about every other planet or so before I was just too over leveled and was just finishing class quest then moving to the next planet.

                On my Operative, who is now my main, I only run fp’s and do class quests with some PvP sprinkled in at slow server times.  As in when I can’t find a group to do a fp.

                On my Juggernaut, I am mostly questing and surprisingly enjoying it, as I don’t tend to like just questing that much.

                On my other BH, a Powertech this time I am just PvPing.  I am surprised at how beneficial PvPing can be for non fifty toons.  You get a fair amount of credits and experience in PvP.  My Powertech has been averaging about 6-7 medals a match since he got his Guard ability which allows one of my allies to take 5% less damage and 50% of their incoming damage to be transferred to me.  This ability improves one of my allies to survive longer.  See in swtor the PvP warzones split into two tiers levels 10-49 and level 50.  In the 10-49 warzone everyone gets a buff to make the players stats scale to a level 49 toon.  This puts everyone on a more or less equal playing field.  Really the only disadvantage to being low level in warzones is that your abilities are a bit limited.  PvP can be a real grind anyway so it doesn’t seem to matter that much. 

                Space Missions do offer a real change of pace and a solid amount of experience but they can become very repetitive.  I wish there was a little more variety.

                Class quests are definitely the meat and bones of leveling on all my characters.  They drive the story and guide the player on their journey to fifty.  The class quests are well thought out and fun.   These quests are what make me come back and start new alts.  

                I have enjoyed all the empire storylines so far granted I have only gotten through the first two planets on the Sith Warrior and Sith Inquisitor.  I am through chapter one on my Imperial Agent and up to planet Hoth which is somewhere in chapter 2 on my BH.  I will admit I have a Jedi Knight but he is only level 10 and just got to fleet.  I heard that story was good but until I finish my empire storylines or at least two of them my little Jedi won’t be seeing much action.  

Is This Too Orange

               In swtor orange gear is moddable gear that you get in flashpoints and through some quest chains.  Moddable gear means you can change the stats by changing out components in the gear itself while keeping the same look.   I like the idea of this because it gives flexibility of style without hurting your toon’s output whether it is tanking, damage, or healing.

                However, me liking the idea does not necessarily translate into me utilizing orange gear to its full potential.  I find it just not practically cost effective to change out my mods/components as I am leveling.  This goes for all my orange gear pretty much if I like the look or not because I know that a short ways down the leveling road I will be getting a new piece of orange gear to replace the old one. The other downfall with the orange gear is that I don’t want to vendor it.  I just can’t bring myself to get rid of my orange pieces even thought they are clogging up my cargo (bank) space.

                Is anyone else having problems dumping their old orange gear?  Is your ship cargo closet full of old orange you don’t wear anymore? 

CC is a Dying Art

                CC stands for crowd control and it is when you disable a mob or another player for an amount of time which takes them out of the fight.  However this post will be mostly directed at PvE (Player vs Environment) content as people still use CC in PvP (Player vs Player) as they should to their advantage.  Thus CC is meant to ease the burden of the tank by granting him less targets to hold threat on.  Also it will ease the burden on the healer since fewer targets are hitting the tank thus taking less damage. Then finally CC allows the dps to better focus down mobs.

                Crowd control works well and can be very effective if used properly.  It can turn a difficult pull into a trivial one.  However, it can slow down the pace of a group.  I find that the time it takes to use CC is worth the extra time spent pre-pull compared to the time a chaotic pull takes, especially if there are deaths and revives.  Not to mention for smoother trash pulls, as in when using CC, there is less downtime between pulls with people healing up.  In swtor every class has a quick out of combat heal/regen ability which is awesome.  No more people not bringing food and water expecting the healers to waste their resources to heal up their unprepared comrade.  I have to say it is a pet peeve of mine that people, especially dps do not heal up in between pulls.  Particularly since Bioware made it so easy to heal/regen between pulls.  But that is a rant for a different time.

                Anyways, with a group on voice chat or even just a group that is well in sync (Side Note: this tends to be people that run together often) then there is no need to mark.  Each person knows who they have to CC and they do it EVERY pull that it is acceptable to use CC.  It is better to over utilize CC than to under utilize CC.

                The key to crowd control ultimately comes down to employing crowd control and then not breaking it accidentally.  In general, I am running mostly with pick-up groups (PUGs), where the tank is usually bad or they don’t trust dps/healers to CC mobs.  The bad tanks break CC with area of effect (AoE) abilities or the dps use AoE or dps intentionally break CC so they can dps/tank their own mob.  This all makes it harder on the healer.  I mean I like a challenge but when I am tanking three mobs via healer threat alone I do not find that fun or useful.  When this happens the tank usually is tanking one mob and the dps are each tanking their own.  There is no kill order, no strategy, just survival.  That is not how pulls should happen.  No one usually dies but still no one likes repairs bills when it does happen.  Side Note:  Being an operative healing is great because I have a great skill called cloaking screen.  So when Sith hits the fan I drop out of combat and save myself the repair bill.  Sorry group mates but you couldn’t have survived the onslaught.

                Tanks shouldn’t need to use AoE to grab three mobs and in the case of swtor most mobs in a pull aren’t all strong/elite so some don’t even really need to be tanked.  But that doesn’t mean tanks shouldn’t leave mobs to attack the healer either.  The healer shouldn’t be pulling agro on heal threat alone.  This is where CC alleviates the problem by breaking the fight down into smaller chunks of damage.

                I remember back in Burning Crusade, (and I know I hate to use to many WoW referances in my swtor blog) when I was mostly tanking in five man heroics while raiding as an off-tank/dps. In the heroics I was running with a hunter, a rogue and either a mage or a warrior for dps.  The mage could pretty easily CC anything.  The rogue would do a sixty second CC pre-pull.  The hunter would grab agro on a melee mob and trap it in an ice block.  The hunter I have to give props to because he could CC pretty much anything I told him to.  Which is impressive for a hunter given their abilities, but alas I digress.  The warrior brought little to the table for CC.  However, these guys made a five pull into a two or three pull providing easy to tank and easy to heal combat situations.

                The more I play MMORPGs the less I see players utilize CC.  In Rift I rarely remember the use of CC and when Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out CC pretty much died in WoW and AoE tanking reigned supreme.  It seems like AoE tank every pull and AoE everything down was the new way, easier, faster, less strategy, skill and planning.  I don’t buy into this though.

 Bioware gave pretty much everyone but tanks CC so obviously they intended people to use it in more than just PvP.  I mean I love to CC as a healer.  I think it is so awesome and it gives me another job to do.  CC is fun to use and as healer I feel I am doing more than just healing when I am also able to use my CC.  Yet people don’t or don’t want to or don’t know how to use CC.  This is why CC  is a dying art. A skill that only old MMO veterans know and few still practice.  As for the newer players it is a skill never learned and never requested.  Here’s to the death of CC may it not stay long buried.

Do you use CC or do you just find it a waste?  Give me your insight into this fine art.