We’re going to be starting a weekly response summary of BioWare’s community Q&A sessions, where we’ll take a couple interesting questions and corresponding answers every week, and provide some of the feedback straight from the community regarding those answers. Make sure and check out the full Q&A posts for all of the questions, because we’re only going to be covering some of the highlights.
During last week’s community Q&A a few interesting questions were selected. Some answers were repeats of information already received, but there were a couple new bits of information. Here is the community response thread on the official forums, where the community responses are taken from.
Here’s our first question and answer:
GarrickBlackSun: “I understand he is a long way off, but could you please possibly give us any sort of clearer or better insight to the unlocking of HK-51?”
Daniel Erickson (Lead Game Designer): “The only thing we’re saying today is its going to take a serious amount of work, involves a galaxy-wide mission, introduces some different ways of playing the game and most people will need to have a 50 of one faction and at least a mid-level character from the other faction. Get working on those Legacy characters!”
I talked about HK-51 and this alluded requirement for multi-faction characters in a Buzz article in the past, and yep, players worried about this requirement were right– we will need characters on both factions to obtain HK-51.
It’s an odd requirement for sure, but seeing as HK-51 is entirely optional and purposely difficult-to-obtain, I suppose it might make sense. For many players, having multiple characters across factions isn’t an issue, but for others, it is. Some players simply have no interest in alt characters. Others have no interest in experiencing the opposing end of the faction spectrum. Others have opposing-faction characters spread across servers. For others still, it’s an issue of character slots:
“The real problem is the case of those with their eight character slots already filled by character from a single faction. They’re denied the pet due to its designed implementation, and there’s nothing they can do to change that other than delete a character and roll something else. That’s fairly messed up.
Additional character slots need to be added at the time the new companion is pushed live in order to avoid such situations.”
That’s a good point. Many players have character slot issues already, myself included. We may very well see additional character slots before HK-51 is added to the game, and hopefully– we will.
Next up, smart tank AoE abilities:
Theworldends: “With the implementation of “smart” aoe attacks for tanks, why are there still no smart aoe heals that only target the lowest health group members?”
Austin: “So far, this hasn’t fallen into the category of gameplay we want to change. All AOEs prioritize targets closer to the center of that AOE, so a better aimed Revivification or Kolto Bomb will yield better results. It’s not hard to imagine a world with “smart” AOE heals though, so I’ll end with saying that it’s certainly something we’re still considering.”
Good question, and interesting answer. Here’s a very good community response to it:
“Regarding the Smart Healing response, Saying that “smarter placement” is required to maximize efficiency on Revivification and Kolto Missile is a mistake at best. Revivification hits 8 people which is more than sufficient in an 8-man operational setting, but Kolto Missile only hits 4 targets, as does Recuperative Nanotech. Neither of those abilities place a priority on lowest health, they just randomly pick 4 people and that’s it. There does need to be a smart function component to these 2 heals in order to make them more effective in operations.”
Excellent point. With the differences between the various AoE heals, some sort of smart healing ability would even out raid healing drastically.
It’s great to see AoE threat getting some love, because tanks have been needing it for a while now, but a system like this would work extremely well for healers, as well.
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