PVP - What do you know? - What do you want?

Hopefully there will be customizable houses, buildings, and ships like in SWG where you could place items anywhere you want and design you're own stuff. I remmember the huge number of items like couches and chairs and posters and stuff, I used to spend hours putting together building interiors in my old SWG clan.


EDIT: WOW just watched the newest holocron and im very glad they made Revan out to be a complete badass, it will be so cool if you run into him or his ghost somewhere down the road.

Found the feed: http://de.justin.tv/spack_e32010/b/265324784

seek to the 40 min mark then watch as your jaw does not interfear with your brain drooling out your mouth ^.^

Thanks for that Illian, awesome to see.

Bioware says that the trooper will be (depending on the specialization chosen) a ranged dps class that can work together with a melee class if wanted to do some extra damage. He has heavy armor and a hard weapon too so if things get up close he can bash them out of the way. By the looks of it though he can also be a tank/center of attention.

I like the little details too that Bioware is putting into the game, like smooth transitioned instances and so on.

One thing I loved about SW Galaxies was the space PvP areas. Now if TOR has something like that in it and we can have multi players onboard a ship and each player using a different turret, I would be oh so happy

Also if the ground PvP had vehicles that you could use to your advantage or something that could give you the upper hand in a large battle, I think that would be good as well, and of course score keeping so we know who devistated the most. Maybe some team battles or guild vs guild? I think that would be pretty fun, yeah?

I earlier saw a breakdown of the classes, and there seem to be a few corrections that needed to be made.

Republic Trooper/Bounty Hunter: Ranged DPS or Ranged Tank (See G4's E3 videos for a trooper acting as a ranged tank.

Smuggler/Imperial Agent: Ranged "rogueish" dps (stealth attacks, pinpoint accuracy for massive damage) and crowd control.

Jedi Knight/Sith Warrior: Melee DPS or Melee Tank.

Jedi Consular/Sith Inquisitor: Force-based DPS or healing, with some buffs probably added into the mixture for good measure.

These seem to be how things are breaking down so far from all the information on the website.

As far as how they enter into PvP, they should be fairly obvious, with the exception of the Knight Tank/Trooper Tank. I'm really hoping they give some sort of offensive PvP abilities to these classes. I remember the days of BC WoW when my prot paladin had to respec to holy just to be able to be viable in PvP content.

Well, if you browse their information on Sith Warrior, which is the "Dark Side" version of the Knight, you see that all characters will essentially have three "talent trees," to use WoW terminology. However, two will be specialized, and the third is shared. These are where all your "spells/abilities" come from. What we will have to do is pick which of the secondary trees we would like to specialize in.

Example: I am a Jedi Knight. My friend is also a Jedi Knight. However, I play the tank spec, whereas he plays the DPS spec. We both have all of the same shared Jedi Knight abilities that every Jedi Knight has, but I have special tanking abilities, and he has special DPS abilities. I will never have access to any of his special dps abilities, and he will never have access to my tank abilities.

This seems to be a fairly common sense interpretation of the information which they have posted.

If you watch the gameplay video, they tell you that smugglers will be able to heal some. I'm assuming that this is part of the CC build of the smuggler. I'm also assuming that Jedi Knights will have a limited - in comparison to the consular - ability to cast a few heals in clutch situations.

As far as the "holy trinity" of MMO party dynamics are concerned, if you played through DA:O (Dragon Age: Origins), you might remember that the mage had three possible roles: heal (spirit healer spec), dps (blood mage) and what I call "flavor" (arcane warrior spec with detrimental spells like weakness hex, etc). It seems like they are trying to engineer SWTOR parties along those lines. For example, it seems like an ideal party mixture would be something like this: Jedi Knight Tank, Jedi Consular Healer, Republic Trooper Ranged DPS, Smuggler as CC/Flavor/Off healer. Of course, it seems that there will be several different ways to construct the group. That's just one paradigm. You could easily shift the Knight to melee DPS and the trooper to a ranged tank, according to the information released. Or you could use the smuggler as a primary healer if their abilities allow, and use your consular as ranged DPS/Buff & Stuff.

However, in the end, if you're doing a party-based combat-oriented RPG, it's next to impossible to avoid the archetypal paradigms unless you make everyone able to do everything at the same time, or eliminate mob AI and threat tables, and that's just unacceptable.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. But, in the end, I think what BioWare discovered was that it was pretty much impossible to avoid the trinity/quadratic system. The reason that every MMO is built along pretty much these lines is that it's the only thing that we've found that actually works. All sorts of other systems have been tried by all sorts of development companies in all sorts of games and projects, but nothing else has the coherence and synergy that this system does. Everything else just doesn't work, or is too sloppy.

If studying the history of civilizations and cultures in this world has taught me anything, it's that people who always want to do something "new" usually end up doing things in somewhat the same way as those who came before them...because that's what works. Idealism about revolution is all nice and good...but at some point, we all have to be pragmatists, here.

A classic example of this is the early Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates of my own country, the USA. When we first rebelled against Great Britain, many people wanted a government that was so small it practically didn't exist, if for no other reason than that it was the exact opposite of the 18th century British monarchy & Parliamentary system. This became the Anti-Federalist movement. However, as time went on, what the founders and early representatives noticed was that all this led to was complete and utter anarchy. That's the true story behind the writing of our constitution. The Articles of Confederation that we had before ended in disaster and chaos. So, at the end of the day, we ended up with a fairly strong central government with fairly broad powers, which have grown steadily over the years since our nation's birth.

The point is...sometimes our desires for "new" and "revolutionary" just end up in us doing things the way our fathers did them...because that's what works.

Just a note too, if they overcomplicate things then people will just rely on strategy guides or cheap tricks and then things could get totally unbalanced and take out all the skill involved.

If they try to stray away from the trinity system then they will most likely just make a really shoddy not very well disguised version of a normal MMO's trinity system.

YES! I forgot all about the companions. The variety which these supplemental "pets" should also be remembered in both group play and PvP. I'm looking forward to that aspect of the game.

Absolutely!...nice find Kev, I hadn't seen that interview before but I had heard about the companion aspect to the group dynamic.

This is shaping up to be a very interesting situation with class builds indeed. I can hardly wait to start working the mechanics out and theroy crafting some great builds. As they discussed full customization within the specilizaiton trees for each character I often wonder if they are referring to a transitional structure allowing fluid control of the allocated 'points' for a hot-swappable tree to tree or within the tree, or what not. The idea is actually quite interesting, if they allow you to move points around say pre-battle start as if you modified your gear pre-battle to focous on your build/role that would truely be an awsome addition.

Hoth has been identified as the newest War Zone, in addition to Alderaan, which was revealed in this year's E3.

Eokurios wrote:Hoth has been identified as the newest War Zone, in addition to Alderaan, which was revealed in this year's E3.

ahh...I have a feeling that certain planets, aka Hoth and Alderaan, will be both a hub for world pvp and instanced pvp...both happening in the same location depending on your preferences.

All I can say is wow, I never thought too much into the PvP aspect as I just assumed it to be along the same track as WoW but this brings to light a whole new perspective . . . I'm hoping that there will whole planets just dedicated to PvP, were there is a constant battle for power.

I can't wait!!!!

As things are shaping up I am beginning to wonder what I should main as my first character...
I really like the Jedi Knight yet my heart also goes out to the Trouper. I was thinking Jedi for Utility/DPS but the idea of being a ranged tank is very appealing to me as well.
So I was wondering if we were going to form a Guild raid/pvp team roster for our respective time zones... I believe those of us who can dedicate the time, but don’t want this as a second job, would appreciate the chance to fill roles open or support rolls filled. As we gain more people we could effectively form divisions and work to hold control of areas and strike fear into the hearts of our enemies
I was thinking of this because of my time on War hammer Online while I was a member of the Iron Wolves. We had general formations for each time zone, noting hard and fast, just that if we lost DPS or Heals one would have an alt to fill it till someone who wanted to fill that spot came along. The benefit of having overlapping roles was that we were able to hold the enemies cities for long periods of times, often times in battle our enemies would seek us out as they knew us to be a challenge and it was awesome I can see this game turning out some epic battles and it would be fantastic to be in the heat of that war.

Read my post about the classes on page 3. Jedi Knights aren't a "utility" class. They are either DPS or tank. The two "utility" classes for the light side are smuggler and Jedi Consular.

However....I'm thinking it would be beneficial to have a certain number of certain specs, minimum, depending on how the endgame content pans out and what raid party mechanics will be. It would be nice to have probably 2 JK tanks, and 1 or 2 trooper tanks, 3-5 JC healers, 2 smuggler CC/"flavor", 1-2 JC buff & stuffs/off healer, and the rest a mix of trooper, smuggler, and JK dps.

But then again, that's just my opinion. A lot of this will depend on how the fight mechanics play out and what the raid party size will be. It seems like the regular group size is 4 members from the vids they've released so far. Hence my earlier analysis of ideal group mechanics and what could be involved.

The companion characters sound a lot like the "soldiers" in LOTRO skirmishes. The perform one basic role. eg Herbalist heals, giving everyone a HOT and then letting off single heals as mana/time allows. You can build up this characters but they never make up for a proper healer. But as the guy says if several people brought one and some toons had some minor healing abilities you would be fine.
I doubt they will let you bring them to pvp but I may be wrong. I want a wookie and a droid.

I have a feeling there will be lots of nonstandard roles that allow sone utility in all classes. If I can I would also like an astro mech as my companion or even a protocol droid. If these npc companions are allowed in PvP I doubt they would be truely viable so I think they will not be allowed in general arena style combat but maby the mass battle areas.
Since we are dealing with a next-gen MMO I do wonder if they will incoporate some kind of VoIP within the game itself. Some game utilize this feature where there is alot of PvP content, yet it would be nice.