'Hi, Mr. Zoeller? Hey, buddy. What's my best course of action here?'
BioWare’s Lead Combat overlord, Georg Zoeller, recently supplied a few infobitz on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic forums. In a thread entitled “How will the sage fair against up close melee characters?” Zoeller responded:
“You’ll die.
To elaborate on this: If you try to outdamage any of the melee DPS classes at close range. 2 lightsabers > 1 lightsaber; Heavy Armor > light armor; Tons of powerful melee moves > small number of melee moves.
Sure, most of your abilities will still work close range, but you have a distinct advantage when they are at range, so you’re going to have to make sure these guys don’t make it into melee range or, if they make it, don’t make it with enough health or stay there long enough to get their really powerful attacks off.”
So, yeah, Consular Sages. Keep your opponents at range.
Regarding the Imperial Agent – in the thread “Sniper Range 30-35m?” Zoeller stated:
“Snipers (and Gunslingers) have a range of 35 meters for most of their abilities, which is the longest range class for player abilities available. Troopers for examples have a maximum range of 30 meters on their long range abilities.”
Lastly, in response to forum poster, “SamoRn” who said
“From what I’ve read and i can’t remember the source off the top of my head the sniper’s cover is a counter for force leap, as it cannot be used on us in cover. As far as dancing in and out of the range of the sniper’s abilities it’s a double edge sword because if in cover i believe snipers take little or no damage from ranged attacks. Eventually your healers going to run out of mana/energy/force points etc, leaving you the opportunity to burn them down. Also remember were going to have at least 1 stun or cc ability to help keep whoever were fighting within range for a bit longer.
Remember snipers crit a lot and do huge burst damage!”
Zoeller replied:
“Correct. Cover protects from Force Leap, being pulled via grapple, etc.
Using Entrench (An ability increasing the effectiveness of cover temporarily) will also make the Agent immune to any other kind of control (CC),. They become an unmovable object that cannot be charged, pushed, lifted, frozen, Force choked or in any other way incapacitated.”
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That’s some truly great captioning work there!
Hah! Thanks. =)
Interesting….
I like how blunt he was XD. But I wanna know more about the Shadow tank and what-not XD
i previously thought that agents/smugglers were able to be “knocked out” of cover. good to c thats not the case. cover classes are probably the most unique gameplay mechanic that differs TOR from other mmos so im very hopeful that they find a way to make it work in as much of a balanced way possible.
Can’t beat a bit of georg, best forum poster ever.
I did hear that the sage, while quite weak on their own, became a force to be reckoned with when staying with one or two other people.
In my opinion there can only be benefits to taking pages from the Mythic PvP book. Rather than trying to balance every class against every other class, which will get the devs nothing but a thank you letter from aspirin retailers, they appear to be looking at overall strengths and weaknesses in cooperative play.
@Grinstone
Since NDA is on i can only talk hypothetically.
Hypothetically you are quite right and hypothetically one sage with 2 troopers are a real wall of impassable death. Hypothetically of course.
But not hypothetically (meaning for sure) folks will not want to play sage because it would seem weak solo wise and they will complain about it non-hypothically and MMO are about playing solo right?
Some people are like that, sure. And they can be quite vocal. But, for example, priests in WoW still get played by a heck of a lot of people despite their lack of solo-friendliness.
And, if Bioware does their jobs right in balancing companions, Sages will be a lot more soloable (just not in PVP) than WoW priests.
Depending on how squishy your tank companion is, and how much agro it can actually hold, I bet healer type characters are going to have a really easy time “solo”. In my experience in wow, and other mmos, the only thing keeping a healer from soloing most anything is lack of staying power when taking damage. Put the damage on just about anything else, and its smooth sailing all the way. Granted I haven’t played wow in a couple years, but it was quite funny playing a resto druid, DoTing up a batch of mobs, and HoTing myself up until they all died. having someone else take the damage would have just made it go faster.
[...] past Monday, BioWare’s Lead Combat Designer, Georg Zoeller, commented on the Sniper’s Cover ability. Well Mr. Zoeller is back on the official Star Wars: The Old [...]