SWTOR’s PvP is Burning to the Ground

Come sit down by the bonfire while I explain how SWTOR’s PvP is going up in smoke in a blaze fueled by the well-intentioned efforts of its developers struggling to support a massive game with insufficient resources. We’ll also be exploring what Broadsword can do to douse these flames on a budget.

Before we go any further, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page about the cause. The removal of ranked PvP has played a small part, but I don’t think things would be too different even if we somehow still had Ranked alongside the revamped PvP Seasons system.

The folks working on this game aren’t lazy; they’re just underfunded. Some of that has to do with those greedy moneymen at EA that everyone loves to hate, but much of it has to do with the simple economics that accompany the limited appeal of SWTOR.

SWTOR is an MMORPG, so PvP is only a single facet of the experience. The devs at Broadsword also have to contend with completely separate types of content, like solo story and other types of group content, many of which have gameplay demands that are in direct opposition to those of PvP. The lack of sufficient resources means that the developers can’t spend as much time as they need to develop something good.

For reference, based on my own counting of the names in the Legacy of the Sith credits, there are only about 80 people directly working on SWTOR “in-house”. That number does not include voice actors, quality assurance, or outsourcing.

Given that the amount of content released before and after the move to Broadsword hasn’t changed much, I think it’s safe to say the count hasn’t changed much either.

This problem is hardly unique to SWTOR. Many games, including those that are better funded and offer Ranked modes, have major, ongoing problems with the PvP experience they offer, to the extent that PvPers complaining about PvP is a meme. They are more likely to die off though because they often don’t offer other types of content that keep people playing.

When it comes to SWTOR PvP, don’t forget that there have always been problems, and there always will be. However, the current state of PvP is unprecedented. Never in the history of Empire has the number of players in the main queue dropped so low, and there are clear reasons that this is happening.

Unbalanced roles, coupled with an inconsiderate matchmaker, often define the outcome of matches while exacerbating smaller issues that would otherwise be more tolerable. These unbalanced roles are caused by the dev’s overreliance on the Guard ability as the only real piece of unique tank gameplay.

At the same time, inescapable premades eliminate any semblance of little “c” competition from PvP, driving the masses out of the queue. Muddy effect communication, the complete lack of an interdisciplinary visual language for VFX, and a massive disconnect between PvP and PvE make an already complex and challenging game far less accessible to new players than it can afford to be.

Role Imbalance, Matchmaking, and Exacerbation

Roles are too unbalanced, to the extent that some roles have a far greater impact on the outcome of a match than others. This would still be frustrating, but not as problematic if it weren’t for the fact that the matchmaker does not consider or subsequently equalize the number of each role on each team. For example, the Frogdogs could have 2 healers and 6 DPS on their team while the Rotworms have 2 tanks and 6 DPS.

Both of these issues are infuriating on their own, but they work together to make other problems even worse. Warzone maps are objectives-based, and many of them are heavily reliant on one team wiping out the defense for just long enough to cap the objective and then hold it.

Right now, tanks can reliably survive long enough after the rest of their team has been wiped out that the teammates can respawn and make it back to the objective to defend before the tank kicks the bucket, even without a healer. I’m not sure why this is such a common occurrence after 7.0.

The only thing that stands out to me is that tanks get free access to an extra DCD that DPS and healers would otherwise have to give something up for at level 68. PT/VG tanks didn’t, but they got a huge buff to Power Yield, so they still moved up survivability-wise relative to DPS.

Regardless, tank survivability allows a single tank, especially Assassins and Shadows, to reliably stall an entire team from getting an objective indefinitely, even without a healer.

Yes, tanks have a much harder time taking objectives on their own since they can’t deal nearly as much damage as a DPS (unless they are a skank tank). However, stopping the enemy from capping is typically more valuable than being more able to cap something faster yourself because the latter ends up as more of a numbers game.

At the same time, healer survivability is now heavily reliant on Guard as they have fewer DCDs to mitigate the more concentrated burst that is far more ubiquitous now. This was a deliberate change with 7.0, likely because guarded healers were so unstoppable.

Unfortunately, tanks aren’t always present in the match, which hurts a healer’s ability to be effective. This reliance on Guard causes problems in PvE too because their survivability is sometimes insufficient or requires special measures to be taken because Guard is barely impactful in PvE.

Reversion and Redesign

Solving these issues is extremely complicated and won’t get done in a single patch. It will probably take time, just as it has with the economy, but that’s all the more reason that change needs to begin happening now.

I’m not a huge advocate for reverting changes, but some of the changes from 7.0 cannot stick around. Since those changes were attempted to fix other issues, we will need some sort of alternative solution as well.

Considering Team Compositions

It’s appalling that the matchmaker still doesn’t require matches to have the same team composition in terms of equal numbers of each role on each team. It’s so absurdly obvious that there’s a problem in Arenas when you have one team with 2 tanks, 1 DPS, and 1 healer while the other team is just 4 DPS, to the extent that it feels like one of the devs is trolling us.

If the devs are worried about tanks and healers waiting longer for this equalization process, they can just add some Role-In-Need rewards and call it a day, as they have done for PvE Group Finder.

Reverting the Role Survivability Differences

We need to roll back a decent chunk of the disparity in survivability between roles that was introduced in 7.0. I would love to spend my days writing out the patch notes to make this happen, but that’s a bit too much of a digression. Rest assured, it is a story I am excited to tell on another day.

To be clear, I think it’s important for there to be some disparity between tanks and non-tanks in terms of survivability. It should absolutely be possible for a tank to hold off multiple DPS for an extended period, but what we have right now is far too much.

It should take skilled usage of everything they’ve got to barely hold an objective on their own against more than half an equally skilled enemy team for long enough for help to arrive if that help leaves immediately. They cannot continue to hold objectives indefinitely while their allies respawn and run back, even with a healer. It’s too much stalling power for a single player.

If tanks still have too much survivability in PvP that matches don’t feel fun, even if they aren’t unbalanced by uneven team compositions, I think the devs gotta look at changing the Warzones themselves or adjusting the durations of DCDs as part of Trauma.

Rework or Remove Healing Terminals

The devs should seriously consider altering how the built-in healing terminals work. Tanks are far more likely to make use of them in this meta because they’re alive for a greater proportion of the match. The terminals take time to respawn, which they can more proficiently wait out. Tanks also all have access to some form of damage and CC immunity, so they can more reliably reach them than other roles.

Healing terminals also diminish the value of healers and make killing one less consequential because they provide such a massive amount of healing. This is problematic when such exact timing is required to capture some objectives, like those in Voidstar.

The healing terminals could be moved further away from objectives (like they are for Alderaan Civil War), have longer respawn times, heal for less or over time, apply some sort of individual lockout on use, or be removed altogether.

Nerfing healing terminals would also nerf stealth classes, which get their name from the fact that stealth is another of the strongest abilities in PvP, alongside Guard. It’s odd that picking one up (or the red variant) doesn’t pull you out of stealth as most abilities do, including using your own Warzone Medpacs and Adrenals.

Guard is Game-Breaking

The sheer power of the Guard is likely one of the main causes of the seemingly deliberate role imbalance we have in the first place, and it’s almost certainly only stuck around because it’s one of the only unique pieces of tank gameplay.

In a skilled and knowledgeable player’s hands, Guarding is a powerful tool that can result in near-unkillable tank-healer duos and often decide the outcome of a match. It’s a frustrating experience in general, but it’s particularly excruciating for healers when the other team is the only one that has a tank that knows how to Guard at all.

However, due to its inconsistent effects and disparate impacts in PvE and PvP, Guarding remains unused by a clear majority of the playerbase. In PvE, Guarding offers almost no benefit. Its most useful effect is functioning as a band-aid for bad threat generation balancing and mitigating spike damage to healers.

Part of what makes Guard so strong is that the damage redirected by Guard is mitigated by all of that extra survivability that tanks have, including the Personal Shield Generator. The tank offhand and its stats have their own problems, though it would be too much to get into the why and how right now since it isn’t strictly relevant to PvP.

When used correctly, Guard mitigates far too much damage and requires far more coordination from the enemy team than is required to use it, both of which are beyond the capabilities of your average player.

Redesigning Guard and the Personal Shield Generator

The solution to fixing Guard is to redesign it, along with the Personal Shield Generator. The main idea is to have the shield work like Star Wars shields where you have a fixed amount of health that can regenerate. At the same time, rework Guard to interfere with some targeting and transfer the tank’s shield to their current (friendly) target instead of redirecting damage.

This way, they can still protect a target, preserving the current functionality, but it comes at a clearer cost and increased vulnerability to the tank. Here is my idea in patch note form:

• The Personal Shield Generator and its associated stats, Shield Chance and Absorb, have been redesigned in order to facilitate a better gameplay experience, improve usability, and be more faithful to Star Wars lore. It is now called the Personal Shield Projector.
  • The Personal Shield Projector now provides a pool of shield health that regenerates over time and absorbs all incoming direct damage to you before HP is lowered. All periodic damage bypasses the shield.
  • Shield Chance is now Shield Regeneration Rate and governs how quickly the shield regenerates its health.
  • Absorb is now called Shield Strength and governs the maximum health of the shield.
• Guard has been redesigned and now has the following effect.
  • Assigns your Personal Shield Projector to project its shield to your currently targeted ally for as long as they remain within 30m of you. Enemies NPCs no longer target the Guarded player, and enemy players will longer auto-target Guarded players, though Tab and Manual targeting still work.
  • All boss mechanics that previously did not target players based on their role will now do so unless they are Guarded. In phases that contain such mechanics, bosses gain a buff called Overwhelming Blows that makes the boss’ basic attacks deal 200% more damage to shields.

I suggest and support numerous other gameplay changes, including many that pertain to aggro, taunting, and stats, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion.

Premades Crush the Queue into Dust

Queues for Warzones and Arenas are routinely decimated by large premades, especially those filled with exceptional PvPers and/or unbalanced compositions.

Somehow, the devs thought it was a good idea to let up to 8 players queue up together. Thus far, the devs have only made it take longer for larger groups to be matched up against smaller groups or, shockingly, individuals, but that is worthless when the unchallenged premade makes up a quarter of the queue.

Update: Players from different servers have added additional context in the comments. Some of the issues are not as severe on servers with higher populations because the matchmaker isn’t forced to create such bad matches as often. An 8m premade would be fine if it was only ever matched up against another 8m premade.

If you spend a second to think about it, theoretically, another premade should come in to take the throne, or if the game were in a better state, there should be enough premades that those players get matched against each other separately. Sadly, that isn’t happening right now.

Most people just stop queueing because they don’t enjoy repeatedly diving into a blender of lightsabers for 10 minutes while making effectively no progress in the PvP Season, which was literally designed to reward players for playing.

These sorts of groups can ruin queues for an entire evening, so if they decide to queue on one of the few days you can reliably dedicate to playing the game during the week because of RL commitments, you effectively get locked out of progressing through the seasons.

As more and more players decide to stop queueing, the overall queue population drops, so you are effectively guaranteed to get matched up against the huge premade, AND you have to wait a longer amount of time in between these absurd rematches as the matchmaker deliberately delays matching up large groups against small groups.

For those of you who think the solution is to just git gud, you’re flat-out wrong. There is no valid counterplay here. It is literally impossible for your average player to get invited to a premade with skilled PvPers because those who are exceptional are, by definition, far above average, and carrying some random drainer isn’t high on their list of priorities.

Even for those scant few who have enough spare time and interest to dedicate climbing their way to competitiveness, it still takes time. Good PvPers have literal years of experience under their belts and choose it as the main type of content they play.

Skill affects the number of people required to steamroll. However, this problem remains even with premades full of less exceptional players because they’re still coordinating to a greater degree than the general population.

I shouldn’t have to put together my own group just to stand a chance against the only other players in the queue. The entire point of the queue is so that I don’t have to do the matchmaking myself, not that there’s any guarantee I could be able to cobble together a large enough and sufficiently capable group of players on a moment’s notice anyway.

At the same time, eliminating premades altogether is not a viable solution. This is an MMO, so players must always have the opportunity to play with their buddies in group content, and that can’t be relegated to the existing PvP Challenge system. People playing with their buddies deserve access to the matchmaker too.

The Solution is Temperance

The devs need to redefine what you’re guaranteed to get when you queue as a group in PvP. Grouping up for PvP should only be a guarantee that you and your buddies will get to be in the same match, but not necessarily on the same team.

Restrictions on premades are essential, but they should still be minimized to promote positive social interaction between like-minded individuals. It is reasonable in PvP for the line to be drawn at duo queueing since that’s what other games do. Within groups larger than 2, players should have the option to set 1 other person in their group as either their partner or adversary, where the single designated buddy will be on the same team or opposing team, respectively.

Yes, this sort of functionality does technically make win-trading and other anti-competitive practices more accessible, but I don’t think these sorts of concerns should prevent the solution from being implemented because:

• The current oppression of premades is a much bigger problem.
• Most players aren’t interested in being anti-competitive in the first place.
• Queues are already routinely dead enough that the few anti-competitive players can practice such things if they want, to the extent that this change might reduce those opportunities if enough people queue for PvP because the game is healthier.
• If there ever happens to be more than 1 full 8-player premade in queue at the same time, those groups can absolutely get matched up directly without mixing up the players.
• The devs can always just remove the problematic components if they cause a bigger problem than they solve or try out a solution like this for a single PvP season.

Finally, I want to address the inevitable concern that some players might not be interested in fighting their friends. I strongly believe that the vast majority of PvPers would relish the opportunity to trounce their buddies. But even if there aren’t quite as many players who want this sort of experience as I think there are, MMO society isn’t gonna collapse just because you aren’t allowed to group up with 500 of your closest friends to curb-stomp the public matchmaker.

Poor Visual Clarity

A huge part of being good at PvP in SWTOR relies on your ability to immediately recognize and correctly respond to other players’ abilities. Unfortunately, there is no coherent visual language that expresses what sorts of effects are active, nor a consistent link between the impactfulness of a given buff or debuff and its associated visual effects (VFX).

You cannot rely on the VFX you see surrounding the other player to get a sense of their current survivability or threat level. Only some offensive and defensive abilities have VFX that prominently conveys whether an effect is active at all, and some don’t last the full duration of the effect.

For example, the 3 combat styles with a tank discipline have access to taunt abilities, which make affected enemies deal less damage to everyone but the taunter. The animations and associated VFX for these abilities are almost invisible, so unless you saw the tiny hand gesture as the ability was activated, you literally have no way of knowing who you should be attacking to remain maximally effective.

Since there isn’t a coherent language for ability animations and their visual effects (VFX), you must memorize what hundreds of tiny icons mean and constantly play I Spy on your target’s buff bar and your own debuff bar to identify the few that you need to do something about.

Without a guide, you won’t have a comprehensive understanding of what to pay attention to unless you learn how to play every combat style and its mirror, though the good folks at VULKK.com are still happy to provide you with one. In other words, you cannot get even a basic, sufficiently accurate understanding of the game state based on animations and VFX alone in SWTOR.

The most prominent achievement in this game, the only one displayed on the character select screen, is your progress toward Legendary Status. It will likely only expose you to roughly 8 out of the 24 specs (or 48 animation sets) in content with NPCs that use attacks that, at best, bear a passing resemblance to player abilities.

It’s no wonder that new players have a hard time getting into PvP, especially when they get spawn-killed in a couple of GCDs by a premade of skilled players with years of experience for the entire match, no matter what they do.

This isn’t an easy problem to tackle, as visual clarity is often at odds with making something that looks cool, accurate, or immersive. However, the devs have almost entirely ignored this problem. Obviously, something like redoing all the player VFX to conform to a coherent visual language in the game is off the table. Still, there are smaller solutions that should make PvP a lot more accessible.

Color-Coded Icons and Visual Effects

Almost everyone knows that healing abilities are usually green. That color-coding enables players to quickly recognize if another player is a healer, and it needs to be expanded to include other types of abilities and effects. PvP would be significantly more accessible if each category of ability is strongly associated with a color.

Of course, not every single heal ability in the game is green. Sage and Sorcerer healer VFX tend to represent light and darkness with gold and purple. However, the colors of the icons still almost always include a ton of green, and that’s enough consistency to strike a reasonable balance between clarity and immersion.

Let’s briefly explore how this could look in practice with abilities that improve survivability, AKA defensive cooldowns. Since tanks are already associated with a dark blue color, I think it would make sense for all defensive cooldowns to have VFX elements that feature dark blue, or at least a midpoint between dark blue and the combat style’s signature color.

Similarly, and exclusively, all DCDs would retain their current icons, but now feature dark blue instead of their current main color. This allows players to group it together with other DCDs when selecting a layout on their bar and lets everyone else see at a glance if a DCD is active on an enemy player.

To be clear, I am not advocating that we need to drench these VFX and icons in their associated color. We need to retain enough variety that each class looks unique so their abilities fit well together and are at least canonically plausible, so we cannot completely abandon the existing colors. Each one only needs to have enough of the coded color that players can tell at a glance.

The Fire Rises

Despite BioWare’s best efforts with the PvP revamp last year, SWTOR’s PvP is burning down. Unbalanced roles, an uncaring matchmaker, overpowered Guard, anti-competitive premades, and incoherent visual communication come together to create an experience that fewer and fewer are willing to tolerate each day. Even being able to earn some of the most coveted gear pieces in the game, like the Furious armor and weapons, isn’t enough to convince people to queue.

It’s abundantly clear that unless Broadsword puts a lid on this inferno, PvP will continue to burn until all that’s left is a smoldering pile of ash where players win-trade for PvP Season rewards. I want to have hope that PvP will once again be an enjoyable experience, but they already let the same thing happen to Group Ranked.