[Patch 1.0.0.132: Sejuani] General Discussion - Page 18

On January 18 2012 04:22 Takkara wrote:
I've been playing some SWTOR PvP lately with buddies of mine, and while we rant about the state of their release balance, we have been talking about anti-fun with respect to the classes and figuring out what should and should not be nerfed.

Two examples on different sides of the anti-fun spectrum are the Mercenary and the Operative.

The Mercenary is mentioned quite a bit in "who is most OP" because of a single spammable ability they have that does high damage from range and has a high critical percentage. If a Mercenary gets a good vantage point and catches someone in the open, they can shread pretty much any class in the game. However, despite this the Mercenary should not be considered OP nor should the Tracer Missile be considered anti-fun. An opponent who is being spammed has the opportunity to find line-of-sight to escape being spammed, they could gap-close to interrupt the missile spam, or they avoid the Mercenary altogether and not be caught in the open in the first place. As an opposing player, I can make mistakes, and be punished for them, but I should always be able to say to myself that there was a way to avoid my fate that is roughly on par in terms of difficulty (relative to what I would do normally) with what the Mercenary player must do to cause me to make that mistake.

The Operative comes at this from another angle. The Operative has stealth, some long-length stuns, and incredible burst. (As a point of comparison, the Operative can open from stealth with a 4k single hit against people with an average of 12-16k life, and the full burst goes about 8-12k from stealth during stun). If an Operative catches you from stealth, you will be at roughly 25% or less of your total life before you regain control of your character to respond. Even if you immediately counter their stun, they can generally still run the rest of their burst combo at slightly reduced effectiveness. But, sheer lethality is not why the class is anti-fun. If you happen to have a healer that heals you through the initial burst, then the Operative almost auto-loses because of their low-level of survivability and generally low non-burst damage output. So, an entire fight revolves around this odd binary (can the Operative open on you/kill you in his opener). If yes, he wins. If no, you win. There's no compelling gameplay, not much in the way of mitigation play on either side, and opening on someone from stealth generally takes a low-level of skill relative to the skill and level of preparation required to prevent it. It's also not well-designed or fun for the Operative, because if he fails to kill someone with his burst, then he dies or is forced to run with little opportunity to make a winning play.

These are generalities, so if you are familiar with SWTOR and think this is too high-level or too-sweeping, then I apologize. However, I think it's interesting because in both cases people call the two things "OP", but the power-levels of the two classes/abilities are not what make them fun/anti-fun. OP/UP is, in many ways, distinct from fun/anti-fun. Things can be OP and fun or UP and anti-fun. Most of the times when I consider the "fun" or "anti-fun" of things, I think about two things:

1) The amount of effort I, as the person employing the scrutinized class/character/ability, have to expend (relative to what you normally do) to put myself into a reasonable situation to succeed.
2) The amount of effort you, as the person against which the scrutinized class/character/ability is employed, have to expend (relative to what you normally do) to avoid having yourself be in a situation where you will not succeed.

In the end it's still subjective, but I like to think of it in these terms.