Here is this week’s Q&A Community Response, where we take some of last week’s questions and corresponding answers, and provide some of the feedback straight from the community. 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.
This week’s Q&A, which can be found here, consisted of five questions. A couple questions in particular generated some heavy player feedback. Keep reading to find out more, and make sure and check out the complete community thread where this feedback is taken from.
First up, BioWare’s stance on PvE relics:
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.
The answer sounds good in theory, except for the fact that in actual practice, many players, including raiders, are finding the passive PvP relics to still be better in PvE situations.
“I still agree with all the QQing over the change to the relics, it makes absolutely no sense. 90% of our guild has moved to using PvP relics while raiding, except for the tank relics, they are still better… even though they buffed the matrix cubes, they were made nonviable in raiding by they shift in the PvP relics, again, makes absolutely no sense.”
“First of all, in order to make full use of an on-use relic you need to remain rooted in place for its full duration, which was difficult enough when the durations were shorter and the bonuses more substantial, and is nearly impossible now that the opposite is true. In both PvE and PvP there are virtually no situations where players can stay in place for such a long period of time…”
The answer about rare crystal colors also confused quite a few players:
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.
Here are some players’ thoughts:
“Really? You want purple to be rare so that only some people can have it, yet more than half of the mobs/NPCs I see while leveling on the empire side have purple color crystals? Come on, I run into Sith Marauder NPCs half my level that run around with 2 purple crystals!”
“If you’re a fresh 50 artificer, you have a grand choice of FOUR different colors. Utterly insane. Colors like purple and orange should not only be available earlier, but they should be CRAFTABLE.”
Purple crystals, especially, were all over the early SWTOR promotion videos, and are indeed found on many, many mobs in the game. The decision also seems a little strange when such an emphasis is placed on the ability to fully customize our characters.
LET'S GET SOCIAL