News from BioWare – Mercenary and Shadow Top Three Answers

We’ve been in a bit of a slow phase when it comes to new news from Bioware about SWTOR but now we have some good stories coming from the devs as we rev up for 2.4. These are long, detailed and interesting posts to the official forums from the Bioware staff that help us know a little more about why they are doing some things that they are doing and what we can expect in the future.

Here are some threads you need to check out if you have not already.

STAR WARS: The Old Republic – Mercenary Top 3 Answers!

Here is a snippet of this post:

Overall, we feel that Mercenary/Commando DPS is in a fairly good place; however, we also feel that Mercenaries/Commandos could bring more to an operation as far as utility goes and that the classes pulling higher DPS than Mercenaries/Commandos are doing a bit more damage than we would like. Mercenaries/Commandos are not really underperforming in DPS as some sort of trade-off (unless the Mercenary/Commando actually is spending global cooldowns to cleanse, resurrect, or heal); it is more because we went too far to ensure that guilds would bring Marauders/Sentinels and Snipers/Gunslingers into operations. We did this because, while the other classes have an opportunity to fulfill one of two different roles in an operation, Marauders/Sentinels and Snipers/Gunslingers can only fulfill the damage dealing role in operations. So we made sure they dealt plenty of damage, and then we gave them utility to boot – probably too much damage, and probably too much utility, judging by the operation groups that some guilds put together.

STAR WARS: The Old Republic – Shadow Top Three Answers

Here is a snippet of this post:

We agree that Shadow/Assassin tanks require less healing from outside sources over the entire course of an encounter and that they also take the most spike damage from certain high-damage attacks. We have verified both of these points mathematically and in practice, and we will be making changes to Shadow/Assassin tanks. These changes are currently slated to come in the 2.5 update and are, of course, subject to change. But we will walk you through the changes as they currently stand and explain the reasoning behind the changes.

Watch the “PvP Arenas of Death” trailer from Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ and compete to the death as you fight against other players in exciting new PvP Warzone Arenas, now live with Game Update 2.4: The Dread War!