After Tuesday’s strong reactions to the announced Resolve and PvP-centric class changes coming to Game Update 1.4, BioWare’s community team took the time to clarify some of the changes in two dev tracker replies. The first clarification we received was in this thread: 1.4 Nerfing classes for PVP reasons, impacts PVE:

Originally posted by AllisonBerryman (Source)

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I talked to Senior Designer Austin Peckenpaugh and Senior PvP Designer Rob Hinkle about the concerns that developers allow changes made that primarily affect either PvP or PvE to negatively affect the other part of the game.

While it’s true that some changes may be motivated by design requirements in one gameplay mode, we never make a change without confidence that it’s fun and appropriate in all gameplay modes. We think it’s natural for players to think of the game as two different sub-games and to dislike changes made for a sub-game they don’t participate in, but that mindset couldn’t be further from the case for us. We only ever look at the game as a complete package, and it’s always our goal to deliver one cohesive and coherent gameplay experience. If, during our playtesting, we find that one experience suffers at the cost of another, we revisit our design goals and our options and reassess our approach.

Overload and Force Wave, for example, now reach 15 meters in front of you. This is almost twice the previous range. The extra reach is quite a bit of fun and quite useful all around. Similarly, although stuns that now have a 10-meter range are irrefutably worse, we’ve taken measures to correct for this loss by adding a few new tools and skills to the affected classes. From our internal playtesting and feedback, we’re confident that the new experience is more fun. Ultimately, we want you guys to be able to tell us what is and isn’t fun, so we’re looking forward to players actually testing these changes in-game on the PTS and giving us good, constructive feedback that is based on playing with the changes.

It’s interesting to see BioWare’s stance on balancing changes for PvP and consequently affecting PvE as well. Unfortunately, many Inquisitor/Consular players weren’t looking for new abilities altogether, and instead, wanted to see their PvE utility remain consistent. Keep reading for the second dev tracker reply.

Yesterday, Austin Peckenpaugh, Senior Designer on Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, gave us a developer blog update with some important info regarding class changes and PvP mechanic changes that will be happening in Game Update 1.4.

We’ll be seeing some changes to Trooper/BH and Inquisitor/Consular crowd control abilities, a new interrupt for Mercenaries and Commandos, a new self-healing ability for Sorcerers and Sages, some adjustments to in-combat stealth abilities, and the following changes to the Resolve system:

We’ve also made adjustments to the Resolve system in Game Update 1.4. We’ve adjusted the gain logic of Resolve such that simultaneous and overlapping control effects no longer linearly add together their Resolve gain values. Instead, using a crowd control ability on an already controlled target now applies reasonable Resolve gain values by comparing the incoming control effect to the greatest of existing control effects.

As a result of these Resolve changes, unorganized teams will no longer pay huge penalties for overlapping control effects at critical moments. For example, it can frustrate players when pickup groups accidentally make a Marauder immune to Control because two or more teammates tried to stun him at once. The resulting unstoppable wrecking ball that the attacker transforms into made for a pretty poor experience for players trying to escape him. Additionally, we don’t like it when a Huttball ball carrier gets “fed” full Resolve by a disorganized pickup group trying to stop him from scoring by simultaneously landing multiple Control effects.

Check out the full Developer Blog for all the details. If you’re interesting in community opinions, also make sure and check out the feedback discussion thread on the official forums.

There has been a lot of confusion about the resolve system and we’re here to clear it up. First off, for people who are new to pvp, what is resolve and why do we have it?

With the amount of stuns and incapacitates flying around, a player could be unable to act for quite some time. To prevent this, Bioware gives us the Resolve system.

Each crowd control effect adds a predetermined amount of resolve to the player it targets. When a player’s bar reaches 1000, that player cannot be stunned, pushed, pulled, knocked down, or controlled for 12 seconds. Basically, after being targeted by around 2 control abilities, a player’s resolve bar is full and they are immune to control effects. Bioware set it up so that the maximum amount of time that you can be controlled is between 8-15 sec, depending on which effects are used.