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Question about broken professions in the early days of SWG
ArcAngel3
Member Posts: 2,931
When I first started the game, I was a musician 
I thought it was the coolest thing to play in a band at the cantina lol. Man how StarWarsy was that, for realz?
Anyways, I heard a lot about broken professions back in the day, but hey, I played the horn, and it worked fine. I also had faith in Sony back then, and figured they just had a few kinks to work out of their new game. After all, they made my beloved PS2 didn't they?
What were some of the professions that were really broken early on, and what was it that didn't work?
Comments
Off the top of my head, Commando was broken (couldnt get master?) and Smugglers couldnt slice things at release (like locked containers). Master Bounty Hunter was broken for a short while, and Squad Leader was broken. Bioengineers were broken as well IIRC.
When I was playing Bounty Hunter, shortly after launch I had a hell of a time killing bounties. All the marks I would get sent to kill would absolutely destroy me. I tried all kinds of weapons and nothing ever worked. I always had to run away and they came out of it with like 95% of their total HP. Eventually they fixed it, but after I became a doctor and left Bounty Hunter for the dogs.
[Here's a list of all the games I've played and/or my computer specs to show how much more seasoned or technologically advanced I am than you.]
I didn't do BH until probably a good year into the game and at the time, I had marks that were inside trees, inside walls or just weren't there at all! In fact, my fourth level investigator box was delayed times two because neither of the marks were at the waypoints I was given....
umm smugglers have been waiting to smuggle since day 1 .. err day 3.
still waiting ...
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
If memory serves, there were several skills in the Merchant tree that just flat-out didn't work. That was well and truly broke.
I didn't do BH until probably a good year into the game and at the time, I had marks that were inside trees, inside walls or just weren't there at all! In fact, my fourth level investigator box was delayed times two because neither of the marks were at the waypoints I was given....
Ah the old spawn in the tree trick. You know I did hear that bounty hunters had trouble with marks now that you mention it. In fact, when I was a Master Doctor some BH's mark attacked me lol. Wow that was a tough fight. I was a TKM as well, and that came in handy
. I had a really nice build come to think of it. Good loot off that guy too, but getting attacked by a BH mark was whack.
I also heard that squad leader was broke, but didn't know in what way.
I didn't do BH until probably a good year into the game and at the time, I had marks that were inside trees, inside walls or just weren't there at all! In fact, my fourth level investigator box was delayed times two because neither of the marks were at the waypoints I was given....
Ah the old spawn in the tree trick. You know I did hear that bounty hunters had trouble with marks now that you mention it. In fact, when I was a Master Doctor some BH's mark attacked me lol. Wow that was a tough fight. I was a TKM as well, and that came in handy
. I had a really nice build come to think of it. Good loot off that guy too, but getting attacked by a BH mark was whack.
I also heard that squad leader was broke, but didn't know in what way.
I remeber getting attacked by BH marks and with my mad Master Artisan skills at the time I made the coolest bird cage after it killed me :P I remberber a friend that was a pistoleer that said after one patch there second knockdown skill was made worse then there first one. I did not know commandos could not get master but I remeber there rocket launcher and maybe all there heavy weapons could not be made for awhile.
Then when they were able to get made I think they were nerfed(maybe they had to be they were so powerful everytime I tried to shot one I crashed to desktop lol) I could be wrong. I just remeber the only Master commando wookiee I ever knew left not long after or maybe they just rerolled.
I started SWG in January or February 2004.
My goal as a newbie was to become a Master Commando or Master Bounty Hunter. Eventually, after staring at the skilltrees forever and a day, I was determined to become a Master Commando with TKM.
Commando throughout SWG's history, was, to put it bluntly, *weak*.
PRE-CU
Our consumeable heavy weapons like the Rocket Launcher, Hvy Particle Beam Cannon, etc., were, if you looked at the stats, AWESOME. However, regardless of how the best crafters experimented, they were horrible, horrible, expensive waste of credits. They were woefully inaccurate. I recall during tests or in group PvP trying to make my Rocket Launcher work. It fires just fine, including a bad*ss firing animation, but you couldn't hit anything, even if the target was flopping around on their back with a +Dizzy+ effect on them.
Grenades. Again, their stats make you believe they were AWESOME, but in reality, they were HORRIBLE. I'll leave it with this example:
Commando targets an NPC or opposing player at 20m (max throw range). Commando tosses his Proton Grenade at the target, but the target begins to rush the Commando. The Proton Gren. +misses+ the target, but the blast radius stays centered on the target which is now rushing you. The end effect? The Commando usually gets hit by his own grenade since the target is no on top of him. It results in an incapped / DB'd Commando. Grenades were more dangerous for the using Commando than they were to the enemy.
The only reliable weapon we had was the Flamethrower. It's awesome in PvE with the damage, but in PvP, the AP0 rating made it weak. The only worry players had with the Flamethrower was the DOTS.
The Heavy Acid Rifle was weak and useless. It *worked* but it was pathetic.
The Launcher Pistol was weak. In PvP, it was more for lagging someone out, hence the nickname of "Lag Pistol."
"Stop... using... lag... pstl... plz"
So, Commandos had only ONE usable weapon that had some issues. We were one trick ponies.
CU
Before the CU came out, the devs put out the CU docs with what they intended to do with the different professions. Commandos were among the "damage dealer" professions, and us die-hard Commandos were looking forward to being something useful. However, the CU implemented Commandos horribly.
Commandos in the CU were not damage dealers. On the contrary, we were mediocre on damage dealing. What they DID make Commandos were good for landing states over a large area. Good enough to piss off practically every nearby NPC.
Commandos got such a bad rep because of the massive cones and poor damage. It got to a point when groups were being formed and the leader specifically /shouts, "No Commandos plz."
Talk about insult, but it was hard not to question why Commandos weren't liked in the CU days.
NGE
Commandos finally became a powerhouse class in this poor excuse of a system. Unfortunately, this is where I called it quits.
It was hilarious to hear from my Sister who still plays that Commandos were FOTM.
That alone had me LOL'ing hard. FOTM Commandos... GTF outta here!
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
The only broken class I ever ran into were Combat medics( I thinkt hats them), the mind disease was fucking stupid. That was one of the things Sony was supposed to be fixing with the combat upgrade, little did everyone know they were gonna butt fuck the game and put levels in it
Mess with the best, Die like the rest
True - the only Commandos I knew all used flamethrowers and nothing else.
The Flamethrower had AWESOME stats....too bad just about every monster in the game was fire resistant.
I had a friend who went Rancor hunting on Dath and was doing okay UNTIL they ran in to a bunch of Nightsisters. Then all he could do was pretty much stand there and watch...
SWg had broken or very inective professions since the start. commando and squad leader were the most obvious ones, but smugglers had their fair share of problems.
Pistoleers while not "really" broken suffered a lot due to the lack of AP in most of their weapons and weird/bugged/non infective specials like disarming shot that didnt disarmed anything or inflicted any state (tho was a handy skill to trash out lairs since in all it's buggyness it did like 2.5 more dmg when tried to either disarm/infict some state or , well, i dont know, just remember i could blow a rancor lair with disarming shot before the rancors get to me).
carbineers also had some problems at start, and while some we ironed out, it never become viable and, like pistoleers, basicly end up driving the player to stacking with BH.
BH was a mess at first. Tho on the first times, if one just cared about eyeshot (that for the first 3 months of the game was THE SKILL) it was eyeshot BH > all with exception of combat medics. In a time without mounts & bikes or player cities and 10 minute shuttles waits , trying to master BH was in a way harder than the jedi grind ever was. Walking till the target in a setting where any single red dot on the radar actually meant death and had to be avoided, many times crossing distances of 4 or 5 thousand meters (what took like 40 to 60 minutes due to shuttling, the distance and/or avoiding red dots) to get the mark and either be 3 shotted by it or find it had spawned in the water, inside the ground, inside a tree or rock or just sitting in the air was.... heart breaking.
It took me almost 4 months to master BH (Started in first days of july 2003), and i played almost everyday in average 3 to 5 hours.... with luck i was able to pull of a mission with sucess.with player cities, med buffs, bikes, animal mounts etc, it become faster tho, even when i left the game (february 2005) it was still usual to have bugged npc marks ,
There were more broken professions but those are the ones i remember more about.
also in the early days, with med buffs and armors not being what they ended up becoming, anything red or yellow, and even white could incap a player in seconds. leveling was done in groups with creature handlers or by farming factions to buy a couple of factional npc's (on my case stormtroopers) to use in missions, I have funny-and yet also depressive- memories of me and 2 friends doing some canyon corsair terminal missions in LOK with 9 stormtrooper npcs and despite that sometimes still not be able to complete the mission or getting incaped.
How about the fact that everybody was a Rifleman because rifles were the only weapon that could heavily pierce armor at a long range?
And wasn't chef useless for the first six months of the game?
Stuff like the stun grenade doing more harm to the user really sounds busted. The mass aggro attacks remind me of the medic group heal in the NGE. Hit the button, and everything is aggroed on you, then you die. Should have called it the "unfun button."
I see other people were also frustrated by marks spawning in trees, or by getting killed by someone else's mark. Yup, that's just plain broke.
I loved how carbines would incap you -- from use.
fishermage.blogspot.com
For realz? Like you'd use a carbine, and your own weapon would incap you?
Actually carbines wasnt that bad, it all was about how you built one.
Carbines were the weapon that demanded you to get a custom built one.
Instead of having the crafter go all out damage, you had to compromise and lose some damage in favor of less HAM usage.
In the Pre-Buff era, I could shoot my carbine all day long without incapping myself, tho I was unable to wear armor because of the HAM use.
It wasn't that bad, just needed some adjustment... But when buffs became the "end be all" ham usage of anything became moot point.. No more deciding how you wanted your weapon built, how to balance HAM versus armor usage... all full damage weapon and MAX composite armor... Now that was a big flaw in the system..
Not a bug but more from my stupity I killed myself once doing power boost from TKA. I think that was the name of it was fighting sharnaffs and had been incapped 2 times so I said I will show you. Hit the skill and got the all familer wookiee grunt as I went down for the 3rd time. They seemed to have a habit of hitting my mind bar more then any other.
I guess the kicker for me was a couple days later that did a patch that would not let you use power boost with your mind below half. I think it was more to do with some people stacking them to get a huge buff. Again I may be rember the reason wrong but I will never forget killing myself trying to use that skill.
Sadly yes I was and to some point still that dumb :P
Some stuff to add:
Commandos & Flamethrowers: Yes, the stats looked GREAT on it. It's very useful for alot of PvE uses. However, in higher end locales / NPCs, and in PvP, it has problems, all due to one very critical stat: AP (Armor Piercing) 0. Tougher NPCs have AP1 protection at least, in addition to respectable Fire Resists. In PvP, almost everyone had armor, so they were at AP1 protection. In these situations, the Flamethrower was crap. In PvP, the only worry was from the DOT + Wounds. In PvE, the DOTs + Wounds weren't too big a factor unless you were in a big group fight that will take long. The DOT + Wounds would then come into play as being valuable, but these were uncommon occasions.
Carbineers: I only started playing Carbineer in the very last month just before the CU hit, because I wanted to use an Elite Carbine. I concur about the HAM costs of specials if you did not get a custom made Carbine. But the class, had a variety of uses at respectable ranges. IMO, Carbineer really came into its own in the CU era, where Carbines were finally considered as a weapon many would consider as a primary means of fighting.
In the CU, my final build before the NGE sneak attack was something like:
Master Marksman / Master Rifleman / Master Carbineer / a bit of Pistoleer for defenses / tiny bit of Scout for Terrain Negotiation.
I loved the build since I felt like a true Ranged Specialist. Single target DPS, AoE, CC, I had it, and I could do it with ranged weapons. Melee'ers would wipe me out if they got to me, but I could punish like there was no tomorrow at ranged.
The other thing I liked for Carbineer from the CU was the E11 Mk II Carbine. FINALLY, we had a proper, very nice looking weapon that was iconic to the Empire. The E11 carbine / rifle from before were just "meh."
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Chef was badly broken at launch. There were no real reasons to use chef buffs. I'd say chef came full circle by the time of the NGE....there was a time that being a master chef was rewarding in both the financial sense and the sense that you were very useful to your fellow players. First the CU, then the NGE did real numbers on the chefs.
Squad Leader had ridiculous "buffs" that nonSLs loathed. Like the "rally" buff that prevented you from harvesting creature resources. As a master scout I sure loved that one.
One of the reasons CH was so brutally, repeatedly nerfed in the first six months after release was that it was relatively unbroken compared to the other elite combat professions. So unbroken that it had to be nerfed to the same level of lameness as the others.
I'd have to agree with Warmaker that Commando was seriously broken early on. BH had its problems, it's true, especially with bugginess for BH content, that is, the entire bounty system. What with "white" marks, tracking droids that didnt' work, and the difficulty of keeping up on foot with them when they were working right.
Smuggler...say no more. The perpetually in need of a revamp profession.
Early on the melee professions really didn't have much of a role...a CH with his GSPs or Graul Maulers was a superior tank. Aganin, CH worked, melee did not. So instead of building up the melee profs, the solution was the nerf bat.
I won't even get into the silliness of doc buffs and armor encumbrances...things that sounded good on paper, but were never properly tested high end in beta to see what the consequences of near-perfect resources would be on either doc buffs or armor.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Beyond all the direct issues of professions in general, the one killer for me was everything was exploitable once you learned the system and if you stacked stuff right (things that were not ment to obviously happen could) and you would be unbeatable. That for me was the kill of the game, well beyond that and the fact we could just camp inside critter dens , not take damage and farm credits all day with no care in the world. That in the end is why today they are dealing in millions of credits compaired to thousands for buying and selling.
"The monster created isn't by the company that makes the game, it's by the fans that make it something it never was"
Tracking droids not working, sounds broke. Squad leader buffs that prevent others from harvesting resources, yup broke. Sit inside lairs and farm without getting touched? Wow, whole friggin game was broke right there if that's accurate 0_o. Makes me glad I was playin' the horn, and sheds some light on what other players were going on about. It's no wonder so many people were calling for bug fixes.
The entire issue of skill box buff stacking COULD have been addressed in a very simple way: don't allow a single branch of a profession tree to have all the buffs. That way there wasn't a low SP approach to building your character's template.
In other words, spread the particular advantages of a profession around so that a hybrid build was inferior. Make it so the stackable buffs required a build that included all the branches of a profession, to include the master box. Often the master box simply did not merit spending SP to get, because the rewards were not as great as a more jack-of-all-trades template build. Due to the way that abilities stacked neatly in a single branch row.
The preCU situation was such that you had people deliberately building hybrid templates that took one particular line from say fencer or pistoleer for the defensive stacking abilities. Making it so that to get the stacks required more SP to accomplishe would have created a much better tradeoff system for a template. But, like the armor system, the tradeoffs were undermined by poor playtesting of the elite profs.
The CU solution to this was to make it so the newly introduced combat level system did this for the devs. You couldn't reach level 80 unless you mastered two elite combat professions. The only problem was all the inherent artificiality of a level system...one in which someone who was say a MasterDancer/Master Pistoleer was severely penalized for spending SP on something other than combat.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Ah yeah I remember that. I also remember that investigation 1 was broken, so you had to get enough invest xp to train level 1 and 2 at once. I remember being so happy when creature mounts came out.
As far as eye shot--- it was pretty wicked. I remember the deluge of stun weapons that were great when there was no stun defense in the armor.
It was kind of ridiculous at one point, there were probably 10 guys trying to take our base, defending was me and a combat medic. HE used mind poison to get them all down to near zero. I ran out and in quick succession ... eyeshots left them all on the gound.
No Caribineer specials worked for a long time, no Pistoleer specials worked ever , no Smuggler specials worked except a short-range pistol knock-down. FOR TWO YEARS!
In hindsight now with the Pre-CU system:
I did enjoy Doctor Buffs, long lines and all. But later I realized that the powerful Doc Buffs were one of the main reasons why combat lost alot of dimensions.
How?
Simple.
It enabled the equipping of 90% Stun Composite Armor and still be able to spam costly HAM skills.
It enabled widespread access of armor that had only ONE damage type weakness, despite there being about a dozen damage types such as Blast. Stun weapons became kings.
In a game where there were so many damage types and so many weapons with those damage types, there really should not have been a single type of armor that could protect against EVERYTHING but 1 damage type.
As time passed, more people were grumbling about this, but the CU came about and changed the armor / damage type system drastically.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)