Some abilities are super strong in certain types of content while being practically useless in others.
Ability Trees were created in part to fix (and enable) uneven ability and combat style performance caused by the unique traits of the type of enemy you’re fighting, whether it be trash mobs, bosses, or other players.
Uneven abilities and effects are a type of game balance issue in SWTOR, unified by their inconsistent behavior across different situations, causing a combat style or discipline to feel balanced in some situations and either too strong or too weak in others.
Ability Trees offer some player choice while allowing for overpowered effects in specific situations (so, when fighting certain types of enemies) without needing to balance the entire spec around them existing all the time.
That being said, the system has limits, and it’s clear that the devs weren’t able to fix everything with the insufficient resources they had to follow through on their promises for 7.0.
We’ll be taking a close look at 3 examples of uneven abilities and effects that exist in the game today, and how Broadsword could fix them.
Three examples we’ll examine today are Enraged Defense | Focused Defense, stealthing out, and Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil.
Enraged Defense | Focused Defense
Many players find Juggernauts and Guardians nigh immortal in PvP, and this is largely thanks to Enraged Defense | Focused Defense, which has the following effect:
Cannot be activated while above 70% HP. Grants 12 charges of Enraged Defense | Focused Defense for up to 15s. Each time you take damage, you are healed for ~23k (up to ~276k total). Can be used while stunned. 120s cooldown.
In essence, Enraged Defense | Focused Defense can give you roughly 60% of your health back every 1.5-2 minutes. Kolto Overload with Kolto Surge | Adrenaline Rush with Adrenal Surge has a very similar, but more straightforward, effect on a 3 minute cooldown.
Many players regard Mercenaries | Commandos to be fairly indestructible in PvP in part thanks to Kolto Overload | Adrenaline Rush, though they aren’t held in quite as high regard as Juggernauts | Guardians because there’s a 50-100% disparity in cooldown duration.
In a Warzone setting, you probably aren’t getting actively focused unless you’re alone against multiple enemies, so you’re able to get that full 60% heal as often as it’s available.
Skilled players know to completely switch off of you for 15s so you don’t get the healing, but that’s still quite a long time to be effectively immune to damage. Force Barrier only lasts 8s, and reflects last 6s max.
Simply put, Enraged Defense | Focused Defense is beyond overpowered in Warzones.
The story is quite different in Arenas because it’s ideal to focus down whichever player will die first. It doesn’t take long for 3-4 players to deal 12 ticks of damage. A single Virulence Sniper | Dirty Fighting Gunslinger can do exactly that over the course of a single Cull | Wounding Shots channel.
All that HP from Enraged Defense | Focused Defense evaporates before the faint activation animation VFX finishes, buying you another 1-2 GCDs of life, at most.
Simply put, Enraged Defense | Focused Defense is practically worthless in Arenas.
The story is similar in PvE content, which tends to barely tickle or smack you so hard that an extra 23k HP isn’t gonna do you much good. Tanks are the only ones who can get more consistent use out of Enraged Defense | Focused Defense, with burn phases or tank mistakes being the only consistent places where the ability is usable at all.
Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil
Concealment Operatives | Scrapper Scoundrels get a buff to their roll ability, Exfiltrate | Scamper, which gives them complete damage immunity while rolling.
That’s not insanely busted on its own. Juggernauts, Marauders, and Snipers | Guardians, Sentinels, and Gunslingers can do the exact same thing.
The key difference is that Exfiltrate | Scamper has 2 charges and an 8s cooldown whereas Mad Dash | Blade Blitz and Covered Escape | Hightail It have 1 charge and can only be used once every 35/20s.
The idea is to incorporate the ability to dodge roll like you can in games with more visceral combat.
Being immune for a GCD every 8s means you can make yourself immune to the spike damage GCD, like Thundering Blast | Turbulence or Raging Burst | Focused Burst, every single time.
Of course, it does cost a GCD, but that’s nothing if you manage to get your spike off while your opponent flushes theirs down the toilet, at least in PvP where sustained DPS doesn’t matter.
Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil is one of the only sources of Concealment | Scrapper’s survivability, alongside Shield Probe | Defense Screen, which does little; Evasion | Dodge, which can be OP to the same degree, though far less consistent; and Cloaking Screen | Disappearing Act, which is strong but won’t keep you alive for 2 minutes.
Outside of PvP, where sustained DPS ranges from being valuable to essential, the roll immunity is only really useful as a cheese. You can’t afford to give up so many GCDs to mitigate regular damage, especially considering how demanding Concealment | Scrapper’s rotation is.
Stealthing Out
Just so we’re all on the same page, when I say stealthing out, I’m referring to vanishes, like Force Cloak and Cloaking Screen | Disappearing Act, not something like Force Camouflage or Phase Walk. Stealthing out means becoming invisible, exiting combat, and now, purging all hostile effects.
If you’re the only one in combat with NPCs, they’ll exit combat when you do, reset their HP, and their positions. It’s no different from when they Evade if you get too far away from them.
The fact that DoTs, HoTs, and your companion can prevent you from actually exiting combat make it even further problematic.
In PvP, vanishing allows you to disengage from combat and recover on-demand, then reengage at your leisure with ~6s of autocrits on a 1.5-2 minute cooldown. It’s strong enough that you can prevent or single-handedly cap the enemy’s point for a majority of the game.
BioWare appreciated this power when they first designed stealth classes by forcing players to use one of their few DCDs, Force Shroud or Evasion | Resilience or Dodge, to purge their DoTs manually before stealthing out, and required players to use an extra ability (Blackout or Sneak) to make themselves invisible to nearby enemies for a short time.
Over the years, BioWare buffed stealth by building in a DoT purge (first as a utility point, then as a baseline effect), and eliminating Blackout and Sneak entirely. Stealthers were overpowered for much of SWTOR’s history as a result, and only got reined in when the devs gutted them to the extent possible with ability trees.
In boss fights, vanishing only had value as a way to stealth rez other players and later as a secondary, more challenging, unbalanced cheese mainly for tanks with Shroud of Madness | Cloak of Resilience.
Given that it resets NPC enemy HP and positioning, stealthing out is nothing more than an emergency button in solo content. I’m sure some of you manage to get more use out of it, but I personally find it far more boring to walk past content at 85% movement speed than just killing stuff like you’re supposed to.
The debuff purge was built into vanishes as part of 7.0 because the ability would be effectively useless for practically all PvE content because the devs wanted to get rid of stealth rezzing after ten years of it existing (fine) and ruining battle rez in the process (not fine).
Since stealthing out is so powerful, stealth classes were initially given fewer tools in their toolboxes, severely hampering their survivability in any type of content where stealth is not busted. This disparity widened over time as other classes were rebalanced to account for the supremacy of stealth.
Solutions
One of the main benefits of ability trees is that they enable the devs to lock away these sorts of unevenly balanced abilities, thereby allowing you to take them in situations where they’re powerful and giving you something completely different when they don’t work as well.
Still, they don’t always work, particularly if a DCD is what’s causing the uneven performance. Sometimes, a full rework or multi-pronged approach is necessary to even things out.
Rebalancing Enraged Defense | Focused Defense
Enraged Defense | Focused Defense ought to be locked away in the ability tree OR completely reworked.
If it were to be locked away, the only places it could fit would be I can think of to put it would be by swapping it with Mad Dash | Blade Blitz at level 68, or Sweeping Slash | Cyclone Slash at level 27.
The problem with the former is that you lock away too much PvP effectiveness at level 68 and don’t do much of anything at level 27 because the alternatives are too weak.
If it were to be completely reworked instead, there are a ton of different directions one could go in, but here’s how I’d do it and make other tweaks to Juggernaut | Guardian Survivability to compensate:
- Enraged Defense | Focused Defense has been redesigned and now has the following effect:
- Activating Enraged Defense | Focused Defense converts and consumes all ability charges and grants the same number as buff. Each charge increases your damage reduction by 3%. You lose 1 charge every 1.5s and are healed for 3% of your max HP each time you lose a charge.
- Enraged Defense | Focused Defense can have up to 10 charges and each charge has a 12s cooldown.
- Through Passion | Through Peace has been redesigned to have the following effect:
- Enraged Defense | Focused Defense can now build up to 2 additional charges and the cooldown per charge is reduced by 2s.
- Endure Pain | Enure now grants +30% Endurance instead of increasing your HP by 30% so that only the extra health is lost if it remains, instead of making everyone take a 30% hit at the end.
Rebalancing Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil
Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil can be locked away in the tree and made accessible to all specs alongside Revitalizers | Surprise Comeback as an alternative. The main challenge is making room in the tree for what amounts to an additional choice.
Tactical Overdrive | Stack the Deck is underpowered and disconnected from the combat style while Stim Boost | Pugnacity has unique functions and dependencies for each discipline. I think it makes more sense to redesign Tactical Overdrive | Pugnacity to be our vehicle for Revitalizers | Surprise Comeback.
It’s also a great spot for the new choice because one of them will be Tactical Overdrive | Stack the Deck, you can swap one of them with Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil, and the alternatives everywhere else are underdeveloped.
Stim Boost | Pugnacity will need a new effect for Lethality | Ruffian, and I think a buff to mobility and range would fit perfectly.
Suggested General Operative | Scoundrel Changes
- Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil is now a choice opposite Tactical Overdrive | Stack the Deck at level 43 for all Operative | Scoundrel disciplines. The third choice at level 43 for DPS is Advanced Stealth and Stim Burst | In the Zone for healers.
- Tactcal Overdrive | Stack the Deck has been redesigned and now has the following effect:
- Increases your Endurance and Damage Reduction by 15% and heals you for 5% of your max HP every 3s for 15s.
- 2 minute cooldown (down from 3)
Suggested Concealment | Scrapper Changes
- Concealment Operatives | Scrapper Scoundrels now receive Tactical Critical | Upper Critical at level 68 in lieu of Shadow Operative Elite | Slippery Devil since it’s now a choice.
- Tactical Critical | Upper Critical now additionally increases your movement speed by 3% per stack.
Suggested Lethality | Ruffian Changes
- The Lethality | Ruffian-specific effects of Stim Boost | Pugnacity are now the following:
- Purges movement impairing effects, increases movement speed your by 35%, increases the max range of Corrosive Assault, Toxic Blast, and Overload Shot | Brutal Shots, Sanguinary Shot, and Quick Shot to 30m.
- Corrosive Return | Brutal Return now also grants +5% damage and critical chance for 10s whenever it regrants a TA | UH.
- Penetrating Strategies and Corrosive Impair | Brutal Impair now grant +20% (up from +10%) to their respective buffs.
Rebalancing Vanishes
Broadsword can’t justify locking away Force Cloak and Cloaking Screen | Disappearing Act. Stealthing out is too much a part of combat style identity for that, and a redesign can only go so far under such restrictions.
Instead of doing a (probably more expensive) redesign, the devs instead opted to lock away as much of their kit in the ability tree as possible. The problem with this approach is that the stealther trees are packed to the gills with PvP choices, leaving no room for anything else.
The way I see it, stealthing out ought to be modeled more like Force Camouflage where it grants significant protections while cloaked, creating better survivability parity between PvE and PvP.
I’d also weaken Stealth mode by making it drain your class resource each second it’s active and only make you invisible to enemies that are more than 10m away from you. Blackout/Sneak would counteract those drawbacks, making stealth more skill-intensive again.
Alongside these changes to Stealth, I’d buff out-of-combat health regeneration and the regen ability for everyone, which should help to close the survivability gap between stealth and non-stealth; eliminate the balance issue in arenas where classes without any self-heals are placed at a substantial disadvantage; and greatly improve quality of life (QoL) for everyone.
Suggested Global Changes
- Out of combat health regeneration now heals for 20% of your max health per second as soon as you exit combat.
- Regen abilities now last 10s, recover 10% of your max HP and resource per second, and are usable while in combat, but the ability has a has a 60s cooldown and taking single-target direct damage breaks the channel prematurely.
- Trauma now also reduces Out of Combat Health Regeneration by 100%
- Removed Healing and Adrenal terminals from Warzones
- Simplified the rules for exiting combat such that you will exit combat if:
- You have not dealt or received direct damage or healing to or from a target other than yourself in the past 10s
- You do not have direct line of sight on any enemy player within 15m
- No group member within 60m is engaged in combat with an NPC
- HoTs and DoTs have no bearing on your combat state
- Whenever a boss resets, the cooldowns on all player abilities resets as well
Suggested Stealth Changes
- Stealth has been redesigned and now has the following effect:
- Enters Stealth Mode, reducing your movement speed to 85%, making you invisible to enemies while you are at least 10m away from them. Remaining in Stealth consumes 15 of your class resource per second.
- Activating or deactivating Stealth no longer triggers the GCD.
- 3s cooldown (down from 6s)
- Reintroduced the ability Blackout/Sneak, which now has the following effect:
- Increases your Resource Regeneration Rate by 30, halves the cost of stealth mezzes, and increases your movement speed and damage reduction by 15% for 6s. Taking damage or triggering the GCD ends these effects prematurely. While in Stealth, Blackout/Sneak also makes you invisible to enemies while you are at least 1m away from them.
- 60s cooldown
- Redesigned Force Cloak and Cloaking Screen | Disappearing Act, which now has the following effect:
- Vanish from sight, purging all hostile removable effects, and removing all threat. For 10 seconds, you are invisible to enemies while you are at least 1m away from them, gain 50% damage reduction and movement speed, and heal for 5% of your maximum health each second. If you are out of combat when the effect ends, Stealth engages automatically.
- 3 minute cooldown (up from 2)
Suggested Assassin | Shadow Changes
- Two Cloaks has been removed from the game.
- Dark Stability and Ballast Point now apply their CC immunity effects for the full durations of Force Cloak and Blackout instead of Deflection.
- Inevitable Demise | Aching Mind (Hatred | Serenity only) now has the following additional effect:
- Activating Force Cloak finishes off your Creeping Terror | Sever Force and Discharge | Force Breach effects on all enemies afflicted by your Death Mark | Force Suppression within 30m, dealing their remaining damage immediately.
It’s important to consider how substantial all of these changes are. It’s not just little tweaks like what the devs have done to fix other balance issues in 7.0.
They were successful in sequestering much of the unevenness and inconsistency inside the ability trees and it has enabled them to offer new effects, especially ones that make trash mobs more engaging.
The stuff that remains available to all is that which is always useful. The stuff that was exclusively useful in a single type of content was pruned entirely.
