SWTOR’s battle rez has been in a bad state ever since it was changed in 7.0 to compensate for the removal of stealth rezzing. It highlights other problems with cooldown abilities, but it can also be part of the solution.
The battle rez is the biggest pain point right now, but other long cooldowns clash with gameplay that new players are expecting and create a lot of unnecessary friction.
If Broadsword manages to do it in a way that’s sensitive to content difficulty, they could pave the way for more players to engage with more challenging group content by better utilizing popular existing reward systems, like Seasons and Conquest.
A Brief History of SWTOR’s Battle Rez
Before we get into the meat and potatoes, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Battle rezzes are abilities that let you revive a downed player, even while in combat.
Each version of the ability has a 1.5s cast and a 5-minute cooldown, so the abilities only vary in name and animation, not function. Revived players come back out of combat with very low HP and combat resources. Currently, only healer disciplines have access to a battle rez ability, and those abilities are:
Reanimation
(Sorcerer)
Revival
(Sage)
Onboard AED
(Mercenary)
Emergency Medical Probe
(Commando)
Resuscitation Probe
(Operative)
Heartrigger Patch
(Scoundrel)
Prior to 7.0, battle rezzes were available to the entire combat style, though each activation applied a 5-minute raidwide lockout to everyone else’s battle rez ability, meaning your entire raid group could only rez 1 player every 5 minutes.
Stealth classes, Assassin | Shadow and Operative | Scoundrel, could get around this restriction by stealth rezzing other players.
Stealth rezzing was done by stealthing out of combat and using your regular Revive ability to resurrect someone out of combat, though you could get pulled back into combat if you took raidwide damage.
Stealth rezzes were limited by the 90-120s cooldown on each discipline’s stealth out abilities and the 10-minute cooldown on the Revive ability that applies to non-healer combat styles.
Since Operative | Scoundrels are a healer combat style, they had the passive to remove the cooldown on Revive and could chain-rez players so long as they remained out of combat.
Stealth rezzed players could go on to Revive others as well so long as they remained out of combat. If a fight allowed for it, you could rez a bunch of players to salvage a pull that would otherwise be a wipe.
Stealth rezzing is difficult because entering and exiting combat don’t follow a perfectly clear and consistent set of rules, partly because they are sometimes reliant on boss mechanics. It’s effectively impossible to stealth rez in some fights and phases, but the reason is sometimes arbitrary or unclear without a deep understanding of the game.
Given that stealth rezzing could be so powerful, but learning how to do it was effectively the same as feeling around in the dark and memorizing the path each time, the devs opted to remove it with the release of 7.0, even though it had existed in the game for 10 years.
In order to compensate for the removal of stealth rez, they decided to remove the raidwide lockout on battle rezzing and preemptively restrict the battle rez to being a healer discipline-only ability to prevent groups from being able to stack tons of battle rezzes.
The Horrors of Raiding with 7.0 Battle Rez
Since then, progression raiding has become a lot more frustrating and likely more challenging. I personally hate the current state of battle rez so much that I would rather return to the way things were pre-7.0 and still give up stealth rez completely than continue with things as they are now. Most of the bad experiences stem from inconsistency and unreliability, but the battle rez is really just the tip of the iceberg in that regard.
Cooldowns don’t reset after a wipe in a raid environment. This has always been an issue, though time spent running back from spawn and discussing what went wrong have typically been enough that most abilities are back off cooldown, or you don’t have to wait too long.
The only exception has been raid buffs with their 5-minute cooldown and raidwide lockout, just like battle rezzes have. This was always a minor frustration, but there are only a few fights where you want to use raid buffs at the very beginning of a pull, and they’re typically used at a set time and aren’t nearly as impactful by design, so you can get through it without them.
I want to note that just waiting for all abilities to come off cooldown after every single pull is not a valid solution. That’s a colossal waste of time. It is occasionally tolerated if multiple players are missing something crucial, but no one waits 4 minutes for rezzes to come back.
Battle rezzes, on the other hand, are used on-demand in response to unplanned events where a player makes a mistake (or the fight bugs out). Most bosses in NiM, especially in newer raids, won’t tolerate a single player being down for more than a few seconds. Things can quickly spiral out of control, causing an immediate wipe, or the fight will become a lot harder, resulting in a wipe later on.
This is more pronounced in a progression setting because everyone is still learning how to deal with the mechanics, so the group isn’t equipped to compensate for things going sideways or know how to salvage a pull, let alone do it successfully.
Being able to battle rez people isn’t a surefire path to recovery either, especially during prog. Battle rezzes are often used at the very end of a pull because things went sufficiently wrong that the rez didn’t help, and they typically get used up on every single pull because player deaths are one of the main causes of wipes.
This causes the 5-minute cooldown to be even more punishing in the next pull compared to a raid buff because the latter is usually activated at a consistent time.
Of course, not every mistake happens at the prog point, so the issue gets compounded again as healers and raid leads do hesitate to use a battle rez immediately while they consider if a pull is salvageable enough to justify burning a battle rez.
The alternative is knowing it won’t be up for the next one until the group reaches their prog point. This is frustrating on its own, but can also cause wipes that otherwise would have been salvageable as it wastes precious seconds.
In other words, the current system can force you into a cycle where you aren’t able to use battle rez until you get close to the point in the fight where you wiped last time. This demands that everyone execute mechanics perfectly more immediately, even if they might have only been able to do it successfully once or twice so far in order to progress through the fight.
When the devs announced that they were eliminating the stealth rez, they explained that removing the raidwide battle rez lockout was meant to compensate for the loss of additional revival capabilities. However, they needed to take it away from DPS specs to prevent groups from stacking healer combat styles for additional battle rezzes.
Removing battle rez from DPS specs created additional problems. When a player dies, healing almost always becomes significantly more challenging. Most or all of the group probably has low health, or a boss is now hitting somebody else that isn’t meant to have aggro, or there’s a punishment mechanic that goes out, or it happened to be a healer that died, so now you only have a single healer.
Spending a GCD to rez someone is extremely taxing when there are almost certainly no GCDs that healers can spare, but it’s more problematic to wait, so healers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. A significant piece of group utility that results from DPS being able to battle rez is that it eliminates this tax, making pulls easier to salvage.
Range is also a deliberate healing challenge in some fights, like the Dread Masters, IP-CPT, and the Terror from Beyond. DPS often have significantly more flexibility in where they can go mid-fight, so they can rez when a healer is out of range. This also further unbalanced group utility for affected combat styles.
All of this is compounded by the fact that the devs deliberately nerfed the survivability of healers. I believe they did this primarily because they wanted to nerf the immortality wrought by tanks guarding healers in PvP, though they also took away AoE DR from healer combat styles, so maybe there’s more to their bad decision than realize.
Regardless, in PvE, healers having more limited survivability means that they are quite a bit more likely to die than tanks or DPS, and they generate threat against new adds, so they are more vulnerable.
Tanks can help occasionally, but Guarding, Intercede | Guardian Leap, Friend of the Force (Guard Shroud | Guard Resilience), and friendly pulls often aren’t useful or viable. Some of this has to do with problems associated with those abilities, but more of it is just related to how threat generation, aggro, and taunts work in SWTOR, though that’s a separate topic for another day.
It’s hard to resist the urge to rip out one’s hair when you have a good pull, you’re making progress, and the healer with the only remaining battle rez is the one that happens to be the one that just got downed.
It’s even more infuriating because whether or not that happens is effectively up to chance (and combat style balance) since both healers typically try to battle rez the same player at the same time.
In 8-man raids, outside of those range-as-a-healer-mechanic boss fights, you’re supposed to assume you’re the only healer so that someone doesn’t die because both of you thought the other one was going to handle it. Even without that mentality, both healers still have a major incentive to rez them immediately to prevent the fight from spiraling even further out of control. You don’t have enough time to check if the other healer is in range or partway through a channel.
The Cooldown Iceberg
As I mentioned before, battle rez is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cooldown reset-related issues and friction. The devs seem to be somewhat aware of this issue, but it’s been 2 years since 7.0 was released and nothing has changed, so I’m not convinced things will improve unless they get a nudge.
I believe the devs are aware of this because we saw them implement cooldown resets and allow players to adjust their builds between rounds in PvP Arenas. More recently, many of the new talents introduced alongside ability trees in 7.0 facilitate builds that create a far more complete and enjoyable combat experience while fighting trash mobs.
Many of the new solo content-oriented talents have effects that reset ability cooldowns or grant massive buffs that only trigger when you defeat enemies or exit combat, to the extent that these triggers are one of their defining features. These underrated improvements are so significant that I went out of my way to create an entire catalog of Solo Builds for every DPS discipline. Don’t get me wrong. While it’s lightyears better than doing half of your sustained DPS rotation against a normal enemy, it’s still not perfect.
Burst combat styles, in particular (yes, burst is now based on combat style, not spec), tend to be less performant in solo content. They usually have far weaker talents that are subsequently less interesting and whose existence is potentially caused by the existence of burst cooldown abilities.
To this day, they have also neglected to implement cooldown resets and the ability to alter builds at the beginning of matches and when Attackers and Defenders swap in Voidstar. And, of course, as I’ve explained here today, the lack of cooldown resets remains a significant problem in progression raiding that has been a major contributor to the problems associated with their changes to battle rez.
Next Steps on the Infinite Staircase
Innovation and improvement are implemented through iteration, but as Voltaire says, “Better is the enemy of the good”. You can keep iterating until the cows come home, but it becomes a waste of time and resources once something becomes good enough.
I believe that another iteration on battle rez is worthwhile because it creates all this friction in progression raiding, directly relates to other issues with the cooldown system, and may provide an opportunity to open up raiding to more players.
As an immediate, short-term solution (or long-term solution if they disagree with me), Broadsword should revert the compensatory changes to battle rez while keeping stealth-out as it is now in Operations and Flashpoints. This way, battle rez will work consistently, predictably, reliably, and fairly for progression raiding in the short term.
Also in the the near term, at least in my fantasy land, cooldowns on all abilities should reset each time a boss resets inside an Operation or Flashpoints. Hopefully, such an implementation would be naturally bug-free, but we all know that such a thing would probably delete everyone’s loadouts AND break the floor in Soa’s arena, so it will take a bit to iron out those kinks before it’s released. Voidstar also needs to be fixed so Attacking first doesn’t have an inherent advantage, and people can tailor their builds like they can everywhere else.
I highly recommend that Broadsword’s aviation experts examine the shuttle used by the Voidstar Attackers as well. The Alliance seems to be a long-time customer of Boeing-manufactured landing gear.
I can’t remember if Darth Nox originally put Theron, Koth, or Aygo in charge of that Alliance aviation, but since battle rez doesn’t work properly, I can’t ask Theron or Koth. I’ve tried to ask Aygo, but he retired to Copero and refuses to answer my holocalls. At least he had the decency to leave Commodore Pardax in charge, but she’s stuck at Influence 1, so I doubt she’ll be much help either…
In all seriousness, Broadsword could potentially re-revert the changes to battle rez once they’ve got the universal cooldown reset safely implemented inside Ops, FPs, and Voidstar, but there’s still more work to do in the longer term.
Trading DPS battle rez for a second healer battle rez will be a lateral move at best. We need a way for non-healers to offer battle rez. This could be done by locking it away in the ability tree for the DPS specs and doing some sort of selective lockout debuff, but that seems overcomplicated. SCORPIO says it’s also a dead end on the iteration front.
Rezzing Endgame Group Content
Given that it’s only relevant in PvE group content, I see a more significant transformation for battle rez on the horizon. I see battle rez as something that pops up on the temporary ability bar when someone dies. I see the ability as having multiple charges tracked and shared across the entire raid group, with the number of charges and cooldown defined by the difficulty setting.
SWTOR has long had a problem bridging the gap between justifying the dev time to making raids interesting for those who want a challenge and making them approachable enough to the solo story crowd. Expanding the availability and effectiveness of battle rez in easier difficulties, along with perhaps removing some CC immunity, could be a way to make introductory group content more challenging while remaining reliably one-shottable as Broadsword clearly wants it to be.
Death is already a pretty clear signal in SWTOR, one that players respect, even as healing terminals undermine it. Death conveys that the content is challenging, and without revival, that the content isn’t worth doing without an appropriate reward. Removing the limit on how many times you can be rezzed stops it from being a roadblock.
As we can see from behavior in world boss fights on high-level planets, players are more than willing to run headlong into a blender, respawn, and run back over and over again if there’s some sort of reward for doing so. Need more evidence? Look no further than all the players to Nefra and Dash’roode for hours on end just to get gear they objectively don’t need. In both cases, the less experienced end up experiencing more challenging content than they’re used to or would otherwise be willing to do in the absence of a reward.
To reiterate, I see the next proper iteration of battle rez being one that’s temporary ability bar-based, difficulty-dependent, alongside boss fights balanced as they have in something like 6.0 (without Veteran’s Edge or Level Sync) and require a standard group composition in the absence of battle rezzes.
I’d also unify player combat style and discipline skill requirements across the difficulties in different types of content and rename them in accordance with enemy difficulty tiers and iconography. For example, VM in Flashpoints would present the same difficulty as VM in Operations.
- Story Mode ▶ Solo Mode
- Veteran Mode ▶
Heroic Mode (new name for Strongs/Silvers):
Unlimited battle rezzes, no Enrage timer, removal of nonessential stun and interrupt immunity - Master Mode ▶
Elite Mode:
Reinstate stun immunity only, 4 or 8 battle rezzes (same as group size), reinstate enrage timers - Nightmare Mode ▶
Champion Mode:
2-3 rezzes per 8 players on a 5-minute cooldown, similar experience to 6.0 NiM post-Veteran’s Edge
Heroic Mode (new name for Strongs/Silvers):
Elite Mode:
Champion Mode:The idea is that outside of NiM/Champion mode, you make bosses more appropriately challenging within their prescribed difficulty and then base rewards on doing a good job that matches higher standards than mere clearance. For example, conquest, season, and event objectives might require you to survive the encounter or beat it within a certain amount of time (matching an Enrage timer) on top of just beating it.
This difficulty iconography could also be integrated into PvP as a Flair based on match stats from the previous Season. This would open the door for additional seasons and CQ objectives for defeating players of a higher rank too, with discounts or some other reward provided to Champions, and create another cool cosmetic for players to strive for each season.
Unless 8.0 is coming a lot sooner than expected, raids still need to be properly balanced too, so this is truly one of the best opportunities Broadsword will have for the foreseeable future to take a swing at solving some of SWTOR’s biggest problems with endgame group content.
