Force powers, bugs and some thoughts.

[Lazarous]

Hi,

I've been playing multi jedi a lot for the past few days, and a few things have started to stand out for me in terms of play balance.

(note, i will use mana and force power interchangably).

 

 

However, first the bugs that i think i've encountered. Most of them deal with the dark side force powers - specifically grip, drain and lightning. The problem i'm noticing is that they don't use your full force power reserve. Example - grip uses rougly 25% of your force power, but you can only engage it when you have over 75% force power charged. Drain and lightning use smaller amounts (takes like 1 force bar to start either) but you can't engage them when you're at less than 4 force bars. Anyone else noticing these?

 

 

Next, playbalance and the force. Most of my time has been spent on duel servers, so the conclusions might not be optimal for, say, a ctf server, but in general i think they make some sense. There are two skills that everyone has maxed if it is at all possible with force points - heal for light side and drain for dark side. These skills are great...heal uses 4 force bars to regenerate 50 hp, so you can do almost 3 full heals from a full force bar. Drain is even more powerful, healing you based on the amount of force you've drained. Its a two for one deal - your opponent loses their force abilities and you get health back. Now, the main problem with these skills is that they're so fast.

Heal happens instantaneously - if you're fighting a light side jedi you HAVE to kill them in the first 3 hits or they'll run away, heal and come back at you at full strength.

Drain, again, is worse. Coupled with other darkside abilities like lightning or grip this nearly takes on cheese status. Not only do you completely drain the opponents force bar (unless they have absorb on, but i'll deal with counters in a bit) in maybe a second and a half, you use almost none of your force to accomplish this plus you get healing. this leaves the other guy completely helpless if you decide to grip him or flambe him with lightning. They can't run, they can't throw sabres, they can't do a whole lot of things. if your timing is just right and you drain them to no force right before you grip, even light jedi with absorb can't turn it on in time to stop the massive damage that you can get for the last hit of grip.

 

Now, many of you will say that there are counters to both these skills. Drain basically counters heal, absorb counters drain and absorb uses mana to function so the dark side fighter can just wait it out. There are a few problems with this - first, not all fights are light vs. dark. a light vs light duel takes a LONG time to finish since any glancing blows are basically ignored as they are healed quite easily. This leads to somewhat dull looking fights completely revolving around heavy stance movements. It IS possible to knock out a light jedi with medium stance and force throw (at least in my experience) but it takes extremely good timing and control. I have had no success against heal with light stance. For drain, if its a dark vs dark battle it becomes a crapshoot. Whoever can drain first generally wins as they have a larger mana reserve to work with, can keep the enemy out of mana and slowly build up enough power to do devestating grips or lightning. In a light vs. dark battle the light jedi is force into going berserk offence as his absorb will only last so long, and once its gone the fight is as good as over.

 

Suggestions for these two skills - heal needs to take time to function. The single player implementation of it was very good in my opinion, though it can use less mana for the effect it has. (For those unfamiliar with the single player heal it works by draining mana over time and healing based on that, though it only heals 25 for a full force power bar).

For drain, again make it take more time. Drains happen WAY too fast. Make it function more like lightning where it takes a fairly long exposure to drain your mana noticably.

 

About other force skills - speed is near useless for its cost in mp. In single player this skill absolutely ruled, and was well worth its 50% force power hit. In multi it simply does not justify such a huge expenditure of energy. your attacks are not faster (that i've noticed) and running faster is easily offset by dodging and jumping (making it not useful save for ctf flag runs).

 

Suggestion - lower force cost for speed.

 

 

Also, a question for anyone who knows - what exactly are the requirements to knock someone down when you use push or pull? Me and a friend tried to figure this out but nothing we did seemed to work.

 

Comments welcome,

Laz

[OPP]

I have to agree with drain being too easy to use. I use it all the time

 

I can drain, then grip someone nearly to death, as they fall swipe them once and they're gone ........ they have no defence and if I do it right, they're dead.

 

as for how to push them down I'm not 100% sure, but if they're low on mana, they can't counter I think .... so thats one way, although I'm sure I've been knocked down with full mana a few times ...

[Orangina_Rouge]

All is about Shortcuts man .....

Personnally i got all my force powers near my movement controls and have no trouble against force powers launched against me coz i react to each situation fast

 

If i m light , i absorb as soon as something is draining me or damaging me ( and it takes really low force to activate absorb ...maybe one bar ) , turn off absorb the moment my opponent stop to use its powers, then heal if it was a damaging power ......as u can see i waste no force ( personnally i find light jedi to be a lot more easier to survive than dark coz it can counter everything fast )

If i m dark well usually what i have to do is to use my powers before my opponent does, if he push me i have to do it first , if Drain then i must drain first , etc ....the only 2 things is if he use lightning or grip then it is easier coz i have only to react , drain vs lightnin and force push vs grip ( personnally i find grip useless now coz everyone figures push disrupt it )

 

To conclude this i would say that the force powers are pretty ( if not perfectly ) balanced ......all that can tell u otherwise is because of poor keyboard config

[Sartis]

I believe Drain kills absorb, but your right the forces are unbalanced. Push is used way too much hell I was in a game last night where half the server just chased people down mass push/run to slice them before they get up, should be able to 'resist' push abit more.

 

Lightning isn't exactly balanced either, if you want kills all you have to do is load up lightning and wait for big groupings then charge in use it and boom 5 out of 8 people die because they were low on life. I think it should do less damage the more it hits, but stay the same damage if its only focused on one person.

 

Drain personally sucks force too fast.

 

Grip is perfectly fine the way it is now, everybody knows you push to get out of it.

 

Absorb if it isn't effected by Drain it should be.

 

Healing, I agree it heals too fast takes forever to kill a light Jedi(if you dont drain them), either need to cost more in force or add a heal over time duration on it.

 

Mind Trick I wish was more useful, right now I don't see very many people using it where it could be very useful, maybe have it so it summons a 'bot' type image of yourself while your invisible that mimic's your actions while mind trick is on or run's around at random to confuse people.

 

Protection is pretty good the way it is.

 

Well thats all that I can think of right now..(and it's not all about the keyboard config, I have all my forces a button away from activation, its the forces are unbalanced for real people playing, the unpredictability of them vs computer AI makes certain forces too exploitable)

 

but these are all for MP the forces in Single Player are fine the way they are, just need some balancing in MP.

[Lazarous]

As far as i can tell if someone tries to drain another when they have absorb on, nothing happens to the light jedi aside from normal mana loss for having absorb on.

 

 

Lightning I never found to be that bad, but i've been playing duels mostly. It is an excellent finishing move (like when their health is 20 or less) but considering it has to affect shields - i think - before it can damage someone, it doesn't seem too bad for any other game type.

 

 

Mind trick has some uses in my experience. Its good for getting people to drain mana by using force sight, but i'd personally like to see a change in it - make it so that it functions like the shadowtroopers cloak. To those unfamiliar, this means that you become invisible if your lightsabre is not ignited. This would allow it to be more than a single shot backstab type deal and spending the ridiculously high point cost to buy it might be justified.

 

 

Protection - thanks for reminding me. This skill sucks, imo. In duels with force power enabled, it is currently about managing your mana as much as it is swinging your saber. In that respect, protect seems useless for a light side jedi....sure you prevent damage, but at the cost of heals. Totally redundant in that respect. I'd always prefer more mana to taking less damage, but thats admittedly an opinion.

*edit*

forgot to offer a suggestion for this one. How about make it so that it takes a fair amount of power to engage but then stops a % of damage from hurting you for its duration? That way way it becomes an effective counter to the rage ability of dark jedi.

*/edit*

 

 

 

To the person suggesting that timing is the important aspect of countering drain...it helps, but even a momentary lapse in turning on absorb costs a lot of mana, and while you're using absorb you can't regenerate. Also remember that the converse is true - if you try to time it so that you turn on and off absorb, they'll try to drain you when absorb is off.

 

Laz