Don't Tell Me About Class Changes

While I'm anxious to hear more about the mechanical changes that are coming with Knights of the Fallen Empire, there's one aspect of this I haven't got much interest in, and that's class changes. Of course that's the one thing Bioware has been talking about. /sigh

The reason I don't care much about class changes in patches or even expansions is that most of the time, they are way too abstract to make much sense to me. When you tell me that companion power will now simply scale with level instead of gear, I can immediately picture a lot of practical consequences this will have on my gameplay. When you tell me that ability X will be buffed by Y percent, that sounds nice, but it doesn't really tell me what that will mean in an everyday context.

Not even hearing about entirely new abilities tends to excite me much anymore, simply because they never seem to work out as I imagined either. Apparently Commandos will get a disengage ability / backwards jump in 4.0. My first thought was that this will probably cause me to jump myself off a cliff or into an extra trash pull in no time. But in reality, I just don't know. I remember when Electro Net was introduced in 2.0, I read the tooltip and thought that being able to prevent warriors and knights from leaping at me would be amazing. In practice I never seem to get much use out of that however - instead I mostly use it to help kill Sages and Sorcs by preventing them from bubbling at the crucial moment. However, I had to actually go through many PvP matches to see the ability in action to realise how things were working out. So I figure there isn't too much point in getting excited about any of this new stuff yet either way.

If anything, I'm a little worried about what seems to be an ongoing "mobility arms race". I saw this happen in World of Warcraft when I used to play that. At first, melee was limited in range but mobile, while casters had the advantage of range but had to stand still for the vast majority of attacks. I don't know what came first anymore, but melee said they needed more gap closers, and ranged said that they needed more mobility, and more and more of such abilities were patched in until ranged was running around spamming instants and melee was leaping or teleporting all over the place. It became increasingly silly and Blizzard has been struggling to dial it back ever since.

It's not just a PvP issue either, but also leads to PvE encounters that feature a ridiculous amount of running around and twitch because there is no other way of challenging those increasingly powerful characters anymore. I fear that I'm seeing a similar thing happening in SWTOR, with ever more leaps and even more escapes, with no end in sight. I don't think that this will lead to a better game in the long run.

I also don't really like class changes all that much anyway, even though I may be in the minority here. I'd like to think that I'd be happy to play an MMO for years with my class only receiving minimal updates, as long as they kept adding new features and content to play around with. Maybe I'm wrong and I would get bored eventually. I do know however that changes to my class almost always feel like they are coming too fast. I know that many will disagree with this - I've seen complaints that Bioware takes way too long to make class changes, what with the same classes remaining overpowered in PvP for months, and I can't exactly disagree with that, but I wish those kinds of changes were achieved with more subtle number tweaking instead of sweeping class overhauls.

The point is that I like knowing how my class works and being good at it. I was not happy when I realised during my first ops after Shadow of Revan's release that I was doing it all wrong, since the latest set of class changes had made it so that I needed to use certain abilities in the opposite order in which I had used them before. And that's just on my main! I have alts of all advanced classes, and there the changes tend to feel even worse. If I could barely remember how to play a character in the first place, the next patch turning everything on its head only makes it even harder and more frustrating.

I liked how Vayne Verso put it on Twitter:

Too lazy to read about #SWTOR class changes. I'll just wait until they happen and then complain about not understanding what I'm doing.

— Vayne Verso (@vayne_verso) September 4, 2015