To bring more clarity of how SWTOR 7.0 Class Balance and Design will work, VULKK.com interviewed Chris Durel, a Gameplay Designer at BioWare!
I’ve designed a bunch of questions that we sent to BioWare in hopes for answers that will help us bring more light and clarity to how Class Design works and what are the SWTOR developers striving to achieve for the Legacy of the Sith Expansion.
VULKK.com: First, let’s start with a proper introduction
Chris Durel: Hi, my name is Chris Durel and I’m a Gameplay Designer at BioWare. I’ve been on SWTOR for almost 5 years now, mostly working on combat, class design, and balance. I designed a lot of the Tacticals from 6.0 and a large portion of the ability trees for 7.0. My favorite class is Deception Assassin, but I promise I don’t play favorites.
VULKK.com: What are your highest balance priorities in 7.0?
Chris Durel: Our priority for 7.0 as far as balance is concerned is retaining effectiveness for each class while highlighting what makes them unique. That usually translates to keeping as much functionality on the classes as we can, paring down what we no longer consider integral, and adding or modifying functionality that highlights the class fantasy.
Our goal is to strive to keep a pretty level playing field with classes in SWTOR. So if we take one thing away from a class we try to make up for it somewhere else. We also looked a lot at bringing up classes that are underutilized or were underperforming by making adjustments to how they play. A lot of this became possible with the new approach to Combat Styles and the new ability tree system.
A more fine-tuned focus as far as balance goes for 7.0 was Defensive Cooldowns across classes and additional utility “buttons”. Over the past few expansions, multiple classes got multiple Defensive Cooldowns (DCDs) and Offensive Cooldowns (OCDs) to compete with DCDs and OCDs other classes had. This led to bloat, so this was a good time to do something of a refresh.
VULKK.com: Can you explain your objectives and philosophy behind balancing burst, Damage Over Time (DoT), and Area of Effect (AoE) damage capabilities? In the past, the idea was that sustained was meant to deal more damage in the long run than burst and recently, sustained Damage Per Second (DPS) specs have tended to have much stronger AoE capabilities as well, but it hasn’t always been consistent, especially with Tactical Items.
Chris Durel: Our philosophy for burst and DoT damage has always been as you say: burst should win out in a short period of time but DoT damage is better over the long run. As far as AoE is concerned, we do consider that a type of damage along with burst and DoT. Some classes have better AoE than others, this is absolutely true. However, we don’t consider AoE a type of discipline like we do for Sustain or Burst disciplines, it’s more of a subtype.
Tactical items throw a bit of a wrench in this, but we always view these three things as a trade-off. If you want better AoE damage you have to sacrifice a little DoT or burst. That doesn’t necessarily mean your AoE tactical makes your DoTs worse, it just means you are using something in place of a tactical that could get you better single-target burst or sustain. I think this is highlighted even more in the ability tree choices.
That being said, AoE is a bit of a wildcard. If you have good AoE, you can absolutely outperform other classes in certain content because of how much damage you are putting out. We are always looking to tweak and balance these things, and sometimes the way players use things surprise even us.
VULKK.com: Operation utility was once a big push. Now a lot of it is getting outright removed (DPS battle rez, guard, etc.) or locked away behind choices (Operation buffs). What caused this shift?
Note: when we mention “Operation Buffs”, we refer to the following: Unlimited Power / Force Empowerment, Supercharged Celerity, Ballistic Shield / Scrambling Field, Infiltrate / Smuggle, Predation / Transcendence
Chris Durel: When 7.0 started we thought about moving away from Operation utility completely, but we didn’t go all the way so we ended up with what I consider a decent compromise. The problem we had with Operation utility (which was originally the problem it was solving) is that it made certain classes objectively better in certain content and forced groups to take a very specific grouping of classes to cover all Operation utility. In the past, this worked well because it promoted group diversity.
As we move forward with a more robust way of customizing combat styles or character types (while retaining class identity) it was important to start to move away from the idea of Operation utility. It isn’t going away completely, but rather from 7.0 going forward it’s going to manifest a little differently.
VULKK.com: DPS and HPS increases are quite small with the existing utilities system, but the new ability tree system sometimes makes players choose between major offensive and defensive options. How is PvE content going to be balanced when players sometimes have to choose between such impactful choices? How are you going to avoid pitting DPS and healers against each other?
Chris Durel: Very carefully. We know this is a tough balancing act, but we are constantly tweaking and making adjustments to this to ensure there isn’t an obvious winner or that you have to take a certain modification. It’s our goal to present to players impactful choices to make, not force them down a specific path.
As far as PVE content is concerned, we’re already making balance changes to that as we speak. Most of this comes from listening to player feedback and reading their posts which is why PTS has been so useful.
VULKK.com: AoE DR is regarded as one of the most important utilities to take for PvE group content, but is not available for all DPS and Healer disciplines in 7.0. Operative / Scoundrel, Sorcerer / Sage, and Mercenary / Commando don’t appear to have access to it. Is this intentional? If so, why?
Chris Durel: Similar to the question above, adjustments needed to be made to the defensive capabilities for DPS classes. In many cases, we’ve replaced it with other defensive options for DPS and healers. Another big reason for this shift is that AoE DR was frequently something you had to take in PVE, making it not really a choice at all. Instead, we’ve tried to add some defensive ability tree choices that made up for this removal without the replacement being a required take. This also comes in the form of improving tank and healer effectiveness in PVE, so the AoE DR isn’t as integral as it once was.
We will be closely monitoring how this plays out, and it’s one of the areas we will be iterating on in future balance patches. Our goal is not to completely strip out defensives without accommodating for their removal elsewhere.
VULKK.com: Reactive damage (Lightning Barrier, Reflective Armor, Pyro Shield, etc.) remains one of the greatest causes of imbalance for DPS in PvE content, though it seems that the biggest offenders are locked away behind difficult ability tree choices. How are you approaching balancing reactive damage in 7.0?
Chris Durel: This is a hard one because of how reactive damage plays out in different content. As you said, it causes huge DPS spikes in certain content because of how the fight goes. We’ve locked a lot of these behind choices in 7.0. We don’t want to take reactive damage away, because for the classes that have it it’s a very unique thing they have access to. We’ve explored very minor tweaks to this such as lowering the output or adding rate limits while still retaining its usefulness.
We realize many players really love these abilities and it’s part of their class fantasy, so we absolutely don’t want to take them away, but we do want to make them more in line with other classes’ damage output. We want taking these reactive damage choices to be a difficult choice, sacrificing some other modifications that improve your character in other ways.
VULKK.com: With the release of the Emergency Power set bonus, 6.0 marked the first expansion where all 3 tanks were balanced at the same time (at least for PvE). Can you speak to the challenges of tank balance?
Chris Durel: Tank balance is one of the hardest things to do because it is very “feel” heavy and not as much dictated by math. With DPS and HPS, we have a way of running simulations and calculating damage and healing outputs in many different situations. It’s quite a bit of math followed by a lot of hand tweaking. With tanks, however, their effectiveness varies so much by type of content and player skill it requires lots of balance by hand. One overpowered utility or ability can completely make or break a tank and push them over the edge. If we don’t account for that properly, we get an overpowered tank class that completely outperforms other tanks, which is the opposite of what we want. Our goal with 7.0 is to keep tanks as balanced as we could from 6.0 while iterating on their class. We tried to give them new toys and unique abilities with the tree while ensuring balance across all tanks. In essence, we tried to take a holistic approach in 7.0, looking at the design of all tanks at the same time as opposed to separately. That being said, every tank is unique and has their strengths and weaknesses, which we try to retain as best we can.
VULKK.com: How do you feel about the current quality of rotations? Are current instabilities like those found in IO / AS and Annihilation / Watchman acceptable? What about cooldowns and activation times not aligning nicely in disciplines like Madness / Balance and sub-30% for Marksman / Sharpshooter?
Chris Durel: The nature of this expansion was one of change. We tried to keep the rotations as close as they used to be, but sometimes it couldn’t align perfectly with that. Overall, I think we did a pretty good job but there are outliers that we plan on adjusting in future patches. As noted earlier, we will be reading player feedback.
VULKK.com: The tactical items and set bonuses from 6.0 made a lot of rotations easier, often by making resource management less challenging or largely nonexistent. Can you explain your philosophy on how difficult rotations should be?
Chris Durel: We’ve always had the philosophy that certain disciplines should be more challenging than others. With 6.0, we introduced gear that made some of these easier. In addition to these, we tried to give alternative options that kept the rotation “challenging” but with more potential for greater damage, healing, tanking, survivability or general utility. We’ve done a similar thing in 7.0 with the ability tree, as it’s another way to modify certain disciplines and their rotations.
The key with discipline difficulty is we always seek to have a discipline for every type of player. If you want something that is easy and fun to play, we’ve got that. If you want something that is moderately challenging with some depth, we’ve got that too. If you want something that is pretty tough to play perfectly but extremely rewarding, we have that as well. The important thing, though, is even at “low level” play, each discipline can perform well in moderately difficult content. It’s when things get tougher in-game that the discipline difficulty becomes more pronounced.
We would like to thank Chris Durel for taking the time to answer our questions. SWTOR 7.0 Legacy of the Sith launches in just a few days – on February 15th, 2022. We are looking forward to what the game will bring us this year!
