So we’ve seen what sorts of changes to combat the ‘Combat Upgrade’ has made to Star Wars: Galaxies, and been quite grumpy as a result, but what about everyone else? One of the key things that set SWG aside from The Rest, was the sheer diversity of play styles available to the new player.
Out of six starting professions, only two were explicitly combat-based; Brawler and Marksman. At last, I thought, a game that understands that I might not want to fight all the time.
Two of the other four, Medic and Scout, were certainly involved in combat by association, but had significant other aspects too; exploring and outdoorsmanship for the Scout, and the social aspect of hospital work and trade skills of medicine crafting for the Medic. Both could also be at home in the traditional ‘party’ structure, but could also find other ways to play.
The remaining two were hardly involved in combat at all; Artisan and Entertainer. Artisan was almost exclusively to do with trade skills, and although outdoor and fighting skills would be helpful for getting to the resources, on the whole they could be safely ignored. Entertainer was an unashamedly social profession, again, involved with combat only as an aside, if at all.
What we had there was revolutionary at the time, MMO classes that actually differed in gameplay, rather than all being just warriors, with different hoykey icons and armour choices. All these six professions further branched into Elite specialisations, Scouts could pick Ranger or Creature Handler, or combine some of those skills with fighting to become Bounty Hunters, or with Medic skills to become Bio Engineers. Your choice of class was not so much a matter of putting a pin in a list based on how near or far away from the mob you prefer to fight or whether you prefer robes or platemail, but an actual reflection of how you play games – a class list based on Bartle, rather than Tolkien.
But now? Well, the Combat Upgrade, or, let’s be frank, 'Everquestification', has not only affected Brawler and Marksman (and sub-professions), but everyone else too, but in different and generally unhelpful ways.
Medic (Doctor): Medics now no longer have the ability to heal wounds. Wounds are permanent hits to your maximum health, which if left to build up can totally cripple your character. Newbie medics used to be able to cure these in medical centers, and gain xp for doing so. Now the only way for a medic to gain xp, is to join a party and heal damage in combat, Cleric-style. Doctors can actually heal wounds, but are much rarer, and generally have better things to be doing with their time. Medics did gain a healing ‘spell’ however, which annoyed me. Pre-CU, Medics were just people. They could triage in an emergency, but to really function, they had to make and use medicines, just like in real life. I liked that idea, particularly in the Sci Fi setting. Only Jedi can do magic, surely?
Doctors had their buff business pulled out from under them. Due to the bizarre way armour encumbrance worked, it became essential to be pumped up to the eyeballs by a Doctor, before engaging in some of the end-game fighting. I’m glad that dependency is gone now, but it does rather leave the Doctor profession (i.e. The only people who can heal wounds), without any real incentive to play to the top, unless of course, you liked being a Cleric in Everquest. There are still buffs, but their potency, effect, and value, have all been drastically reduced.
Scouts (Creature Tamers, Rangers): Strangely, aside from the associated combat difficulty that everyone now has, Scouts seem to have been largely left alone, but then few people were Just Scouts, instead using it as a useful set of secondary skills to help with outdoor combat. How the EQifying has affected pet ownership and use though, I couldn’t say, and the Mask Scent ability, used to be invisible to hostile animals would be difficult to attach to the new level system in any elegant manner.
Artisan (Weaponsmith, Armoursmith, etc etc.): These poor bystanders seem to have been hit hard in two ways. Firstly, getting to the resources. As combat is now much more difficult, and more time consuming to get good at, the old way for artisans, of just learning Brawling Unarmed IV, and leaving it at that, is no longer is enough. Before, a single Novice IV combat skill would generally be enough to cope on about 75% of area on the main ‘newbie’ planets. Now to achieve that level of survivability takes a lot longer to train, and a lot more skill points to waste. Generally, crafters now have a much harder time getting to the harvesters. An artisan player generally doesn’t want to fight anything, they just want to make and sell stuff.
The second problem it that now, every gun, sword, helmet and chest plate is tied to a very rigid level system, which means that demand is no longer centred on top-end best sellers, but a multitude of intermediate items a player will expect not to pay a lot for, not really care about the quality of, and discard fairly quickly. I’d imagine it annoys most crafters to have to devote large amounts of time and resources to low-end junk items that they can’t charge much for, simply because a massive section of market demand for their best goods just vanished overnight. Low-end Artisans now have a greater demand for their goods, true, but there seems little incentive to keep going to the good stuff anymore. Architects and Tailors seem to have avoided much of this, as the majority of their output is primarily social, but Chefs, always a marginalised profession, have had much of their goods totally devalued, in the same way as Doctor buffs, above.
Entertainer (Musician, Dancer, Image Designer): While it is true that these professions exist mostly for the ‘chatty’ type of social player, they did previously have some quite potent mind pool buffs to sell, and a valuable contribution to wound healing in that they were the ones that healed mind wounding. There is no such thing anymore, and Entertainers now have one buff; a 10% xp buff. Handy, I guess, but hardly a substitute for the integral role in the larger ecosystem they used to have. Image Designers in particular, used to be able to alter the stats of players. Stats used to be fixed – you never gained more stats when you levelled, and instead used the services of an Image Designer to adjust their distribution as needed. Now they just do hair and makeup.
So all in all the Combat Upgrade is a nerf, but a massive nerf of such monumental proportions that everyone got hit. I wonder how I’d feel if I’d never played SWG before – if this new game was all I knew. Would it be anymore acceptable? Is this just Culture Shock? I don’t know, but am glad I had the opportunity to have played the previous game, in all its innovative and quirky glory, and I hope Post CU Newbies enjoy the new offering more than I do. Trouble is, I can’t help but feel that the only people interested in SWG at this stage, are the ones that were fine with the Old Ways…
All is not lost though! There is a seventh novice profession, one that escaped the Everquestification totally and utterly and is still every bit as good as I remember it; Freelance Starfighter Pilot. Thank god for Jump to Lightspeed, is all I can say…
Edit: I just realised I've totally ignored Jedi, but then again, why change the habit of a lifetime...