>STAR WARS™: The Old Republic™ : Powertech Bounty Hunter Feedback – | 07/30/2011 |

First of all I would like to thank Bioware for giving me the possibility to test SWTOR and also to thank all of the fellow testers who have done a magnificent job in identifying the areas in this game which could still be improved before the launch.

In this post, I will be solely concentrating on the specific character and my impressions, positives and negatives concerning it.

The rest of the actual gameplay mechanics and the feedback regarding those have been so well pointed out in other threads that I will not be listing them again but rather concentrating on the Powertech advanced class of the Bounty Hunter which I played up till level 42. The post will be advancing from BH in general to Powertech advanced class and then the Shieldtech (tanking) tree since it is the talent tree which I used during the game.

This will be a quite long read for those who actually manage to read it through but since we cannot play the game anymore, might as well write and read something about it

The more detailed information can be found at the end under the “Shieldtech” section but I also felt that I would touch a few general points about Bounty Hunter and Powertech first.

Personally I think that the Bounty Hunter story and main quest was quite fun and interesting, though at times I would also say rather predictive. Around the fourth time that you go through the same like quest chain it starts to beg for some variation.
I’m not talking about same quests but the same quest chain feel. You know when you are stalking your current bounty on a planet for the first time that you will need to confront and chase them at least three of four times before you can actually kill / capture them.
I know that this is done essentially so that you have pretty much one bounty hunter quest chain stage for each map area on a planet but it still becomes rather unsurprising the further you do this.

Well, what to really say here? Personally from what I’ve read it seems that the bounty hunters are getting their third companion quite much later than the rest of the classes which seemed personally like eternity.
Otherwise the companions are kind of ok but it still feels that something like an assasination droid or something else could fit in more nicely. It seems that the developers are planning on being able to switch the “types” of the companions from dps to tank etc. and I think this will be one really great change.
Also I’m not sure whether these are the companions that will be in the launch but the more variety and options even regarding the crew members is a great plus! Also, I think that the BH gets one of the best and most interesting companion in the game (Blizz)

Please, please allow us more options regarding the bounty hunter ship! I’m not asking millions of different alternatives but the current shoe box is just so.. shoe box! Even being allowed to choose from two or three alternatives would be great if it is possible.

I personally liked the idea of “taking advantage of the most recent and most powerful technological equipment”. However, to certain extent this doesn’t seem really as such that it is advertised.
I don’t know whether it would be possible or even wise to create one more armor type to further emphasize this but at the moment I do not feel that the advanced class fully lives up to it’s name. From the sound of the description and my personal expectations, this advanced class should be really gear / item dependant but in truth it is the same as with any other class.
I guess the technology aspect applies more to the few talents that you get out of choosing the advanced class over the other but it still feels rather weird that you have essentially all of the heavy armor classes wearing the same equipment as you do even though you are supposed to be the most equipment reliant class.

This is not a huge problem and seeing this is only one advanced class, the time warranted to doing something like this might not be the best course of action but it is something that could be considered. Also one of the reasons I did pick up Powertech was that I sort of knew that major part of the Bounty Hunters would pick up mercenary (dual wielding blasters anyone? ) and such I didn’t really run into many other Powertechs which in itself felt rather good. We all want to be unique.

By looking at the different talent trees, it does become quite obvious what it’s role is in the grand scheme of things. Mid-range to close range damage dealing with a lot of AoE possibliites relying on techonological attacks.
I think the firebug tree is shared between Powertech and Mercenary but not knowing the abilities that the mercenaries get, quickly thinking the firebug tree would be more suitable for powertechs rather than mercenaries.
The Shieldtech, the tanking talen tree, is the interesting part and I will poke at it more closely since that is what I choose to play as.

Nothing too major to comment on these in general. As said up there in the powertech general opinion, the technological aspect of the class really comes from these few gadgets which are not available to the others.
It has one or two of the most interesting and fun abilities (Jet charge!!!!!) in any game but at the same time it feels like theres not too much or enough differentiation between the mercenary and powertech in regards to the abilities.
Most of the awesome / most useful abilities are in the Bounty Hunter general ability list rather than Powertech specific.

As noted earlier in the post, I played with the Shieldtech talent tree throughout the levels when advanced class was accessed up till level 42.
I knew that the tanking tree in general doesn’t really equate to fast leveling process and I accepted that also knowing that the talent spec would help out with the group quests since I think we all know that there is never really a shortage of dps but rather that of tanks and healers.
I won’t go into the details of actually finding groups to do the quests since this obviously still needs some work and has been pointed out in other threads.

In general I really like the tanking experience and leving with this spec. I dropped it for a few levels somewhere around 32-34 to try out another talent tree which significantly increased the time with killing mobs but also increased how fast my health was going down I think that it is still a good spec for leveling and not really offset by the lack of dps as long as you can keep your companion up to date and dealing damage while soloing.

This is of course the most important thing and which makes shieldtech the shieldtech. Quickly looking at the tree, it offers a couple of different abilities which significantly distinguishes you from the other talent trees and advanced classes.
However I still feel that some of the passive talents could use some more edge to them and a couple more actual abilities would further enhance the experience. I will touch upon the specific talents and combat mechanics in the following sections.

Since I already touched upon the solo play and there really isn’t much to discuss there, I would like to point out how this actually plays out in group combat. As a tank spec, you are expected to be taking majority of the damage while not dealing that much yourself.

The one major point about tanking is the abilty to effectively keep your group members from taking damage by directing the enemy’s attacks to you and having most of the attacks being mitigated by your defenses.

Personally I found keeping aggro with the shieldtech rather hard. There is supposed to be a passived modifier to your threat generation while the Interceptor screen is up (neccessary to get the damage mitigation from shield) but for it doesn’t seem to be that high.
Mainly the problem arises when there are multiple ranged mobs which are really scattered around enough so that your AoE attacks cannot reach them all (or probably couldn’t anyway since they only affect up to three enemies) and trying to keep a track of which enemy is attacking and who is rather hard.

This actually brings a certain level of attention / challenge which most of the time actually makes the spec fun to play. You are not making too much damage and holding aggro through damage alone seems to be rather moot. The main key to holding aggro are the few taunt abilities which are at your disposal.
They have a rather short cooldowns and they do not share so essentially you are able to cycle the single target and AoE target taunts to keep a group of mobs or a single mob attacking you pretty much all the time. This means that you are not really making much damage outside of the “auto-attack” since you have to have the heat available to cycle through the taunt attacks and temporary stuns to keep the others from taking damage.

I think that the threat modifier of the Interceptor screen could use a short of review to see whether it could be increased since the passive threat generation through attacks seem to result only in temporary aggro for the tank and taunting is actually your bread and butter while tanking with this spec.
I personally have to say that it was much fun even with the aggro dropping every now and then but seeing how it actually requires attention and actions is really nice.

I found the lack of defensive cooldowns rather disturbing while doign some group quests. I’m not saying that there should be a bucket load of these at your disposal and you do get couple of these from the talent tree but around level 30 you don’t really have any defensive cooldowns for boss fights while at the same time other classes and advanced skill trees seem to have at least one or two based on the conversations I had in few group situations.
This seems rather weird that the tank spec is one of the specs without any real defensive cooldowns for those difficult situations where one might be warranted.

On the matter of the few defensive cooldowns that you do get from the talent tree:

The Kolto Overload which increases your health by 30% for 20 seconds seems like a nice talent and can be a sort of a life saver when your health is ticking down close to death. This however could warrant for a more visible graphic indication that the ability has been activated.
Currently the character sort of flashes red or is pulsating red color to indicate that this has been activated. Take a healer who doesn’t know the spec and talent tree, it might come as rather big suprise when the talen wears off and suddenly you have 30% less health.
I think something more visible to alert the healers that this has been activated would be a good thing.

The carbonite shield is the last talent that you can pick up from the talent tree. As such it negates 30% of all incoming damage for a while (can’t remember the exact figures so please don’t flame me since I cannot hop in game to check them out anyway ).
This again suffers from the same problem as with the kolto overload that how is it conveyd to the healer that you have activated this if it is not clearly conveyed to them? I mean if that big portion of damage is negated for a time, when the talent suddenly wears off you are taking so much more damage that the healers really need to be on their feet at that time.

Well, as the talent tree says, the shieldtech is using shield generators to negate a certain portion of the incoming damage. That being said, it really wasn’t what I pictured shields to be like before actually playing the game. Now for those who are not using shields, essentially the shield has a certain % that an attack will hit the shield and will absorb a certain % of damage. From the top of my head this seems rather strange that an attack has a “chance” to hit a shield rather than every attack hitting a shield before it would be depleted.

The main issue which I have is that the shield is purely based on rng. The attack might or might not hit the shield which begs one to wonder that is this such a great ability to have? I think that most of the actual damage mitigation actually comes from the armor values since the talent which unlocks the personal shield increases armor values by 60% and this is flat out damage reduction, no chances or random numbers.

Also that the shield talent is actually unlocked by spending 11 talent points (I guess in order to avoid imbalances with being able to access multiple talent trees) it leaves the spec pretty much null and void up until you get the talent. This is not a major issues but the shieldtech doesn’t feel like a shield tech untill you unlock this talent.

The other question which I ponder upon is the relation of the defense stat and the shield absorption stat. By default the Shield itself has a 20% chance that an attack will hit it and this can be increased to 26% through talents.
Now, the defense stat actually gives a certain % of negating all the damage of an attack (dodge, parry or what ever it is). What I fear here is that will stacking defense stat outweigh the stacking of the shield absorption stat? I fear that we’ll end up with some excel sheets which people use to calculate the optimal defense and shield absorption values to get most damage mitigation out of the class.
Of course some might say that this is an issue with min / maxers but for myself I would rather have a clear indication of what I should be focusing on. This is totally an issue for theory crafting since I haven’t done any actual calculations regarding this but I bet someone will do that once the game is released

This is actually the biggest complain that I can think of this talent tree and spec in total. There are so little shieldgenerators currently in the game with ranged stats that I actually would have gone through levels 16-34 without any upgrade to my shield unless I hadn’t picked up one rare crafting recipe from the auction network.

You can find several shields throughout the game but an actual shield generator which enables your shield are really hard to come by. Granted, I didn’t do all the group quests on all the planets but I pretty much did all the solo quests I could find and not a single one had a shield generator with ranged stats as a reward. There are not shield generators for the class quest rewards which is the first place where these should be located since this is pretty much class specific item.

It is ince to see a rare shield drop during group quests only to find it is a shield, not a shield generator and getting laughed at by the other persons in the group about how you need to update your shield generator after they have inspected yours and asked whether I need it (Thank you Jeyne )

I’m not one to demand an upgared to an item every level but seeing as this is what makes the shieldtech a shieldtech, the lack of shield generators is just too much for me to take. This is the reason that I actually respecced around level 32 to another tree simply because I hadn’t found a new shield generator for the past 12 levels.

This also relates to the Cybertech crafting profession. I precisely picked up the Cybertech thinking that this allows you to craft shield generators (I think the description says generators, though now that I think about it, it might have been about Droid Generators for the companions since it was in the same sentence with the droid parts).
Now, it turns out that the Cybertech is the crafting skill for shield generators as well but with the downfall of not having any shield generators as base crafting recipes which you can train from the Cybertech trainer.
The only shield I managed to craft as a Cybertech came from a rare pattern which someone had acquired from somewhere and posted it on the galactic auction network. Mind you, this was level 20 shield and I didn’t see any other crafting recipes available for shields after that.

Please consider adding some baseline crafting recipes to the vendors for also shield generators. They do not have to be the best of the best and available every level but at it’s current state there really isn’t anything available.

After the ranting about the shields, we come back to the matter of area of effect attacks. This is also largely in conjunction with the threat and aggro issue but I felt this could also deserve it’s own section. The Powertech in general seems to be geared towards AoE damage which is rather valuable especially with group quests where the usual amount of mobs in a group comes close to five.

But for some reason the AoE attacks have been restricted to only attack three closest enemies which I’m having some trouble with. With the other classes crowd control skills, you really need to watch out where you are using the AoE attacks and that those mobs which are not affected by AoE’s (out of range, too many) will also concentrate their attacks on you. Tip of the day, grapple does not break the crowd control abilities so in several places I actually pulled the CC’d mob out of the pack in order to being able to use AoE safely on the others

I would consider lifting the restriction on the amount of mobs the AoE attacks can effect. Personally I doubt whether the dps with AoE is even high enough to take down groups of mobs at the same time so this could at least be thought about.

Other AoE attack which could warrant it’s own mention are the cone attacks which attack a specific range in front of you. These are pretty good and can be used to hit as many mobs as you can muster in front of you. Though the cone attacks also suffer from few design issues such as elevation and the minimum range.
If you happen to be even few inches higher than the mobs, the attack will miss and this is really painful in elevated terrains since even the graphic shows that the attack would scorch their head but they are not taking any damage.
The same can be said about the minimum range of the cone attacks.. some of the melee mobs come so close to you straight in fron of you that they pretty much stick their mouth to the muzzle of the flamethrower but somehow are capable of not being hit by it.

In general the positional requirements and the need to gather up mobs and positioning them brings a nice change and level to the game in such fashion that you one again need to think about what you are doing. Still, the missing cone attacks and AoE restrictions can at times still make you grind your teeth though.

One other issue with the lack of shield generators which is a sort of a negative for myself is the lack of proper crowd control abilities. In terms of group combat this is not so much of an issue since the other classes seem to have some nice crowd control abilities and by coordinating with them is useful and fun.
This mainly affects the solo play and the general feel of the class / spec compared to others. As said, I have acknowledged that leveling as a tank profession has it’s down sides in terms of how fast you are advancing, but in terms of certain group quests / harder quests I sort of feel left out.

I played a sith sorceror to around level 20 as well and seeing how fast they are cutting down enemies while at the same time getting a really good crowd control ability makes me sort of unhappy about the shieldtech and soloing. The classes such as sith sorcerors can pretty much solo certain group quests to which I have absolutely no chance to do them alone because I do not possess any crowd control abilities to mitigate damage from multiple mobs.

Maybe I’m just crying about other classes having it easier but I sort of feel that a certain type of CC could also be warranted especially for the Powertech advanced class in order to help leveling and certain quests.

This is kind of also related to the fact that up untill level 42 I don’t have any healing abilities of myself at all which pretty much means that I need to dps the harder mobs down fast enough before my health runs out. I know that we have the companion with healing abilities but this significantly also cuts down the dps output so the fights will last even longer and still might not be enough to down certain mobs.

In terms of the Powertech and Shieldtech, I sort of feel that handling a single blaster seems rather silly. Mind you, I am not asking for double wielding for us as well but being this big hulk in advanced armor and wielding a single blaster seems rather comical

I don’t know why the certain weapon types have been so closely tied to the specific classes. I could easily see for example the Shieldtech being able to use a Scatter gun or a Melee weapon.

Then again, you are not really using the weapon for much else apart from the stats and the “auto attack” but the impression it leaves is still rather dull. You are spreading flames of death around you one second and next you are firing this small and puny blaster at someones face from point blank range for the next few minutes.
The fact that the “Shield” in itself doesn’t really show much anywhere on your character ( apart from occational animation of the shield when being hit) I just feel that there should be something different to set yourself apart from the others. Maybe if the shield would actually be a constant animation and not when it triggers might help to get the feeling of uniqueness and usefulness

Please consider allowing the Powertech also access to Scatter guns and melee weapons or develop something to allow us to clearly show what we are on about and feeling like the tank that we should be.

Conclusion

Personally I really liked the Bounty Hunter / Powertech / Shieldtech experience despite the few flaws / disappointments listed above. The fact that I didn’t see too many Powertechs around compared to mercenaries kind of gave me the feeling of being unique which is always a plus when playing games with other people.

There are certain issues that could be looked at mentioned above in terms of talents, items and combat mechanics but as a whole I think the advanced class and spec manages to differentiate itself from the others pretty well.

I picked up Shieldtech hoping to get something unique out of it and I did.

If you managed to read this whole wall of text through, kudos to you. Now to find something to do while waiting for the launch. If you have any questions regarding the Powertech / Shieldtech, please free to ask and I’ll try to comment to the best of my knowledge.

Thanks again Bioware and my fellow testers! I hope to see you once the game goes live!