Heroic Failure

SWTOR's combat is a machine comprised of many well crafted components, only it's been assembled by someone who didn't read the instructions, and after they were done they dropped it on the floor a couple of times.

I'd  taken a look at the map after completing a side mission on Balmorra to see if there was anything else that needed doing in the area I was in.  There was an open mission indicator nearby and I headed toward it, running solo - my companion being off doing crafting missions - as I often do to add some interest to the combat.

This time it certainly did that.  The resistance forces inside the structure were the same level as the ones I'd been fighting outside, but there were a lot more of them.  I got through the first group, then then second, but due to overconfidence and carelessness the third group downed me.  It was only as I rez'd and backed off to reconsider my approach that I took another look at the map and realised I'd unwittingly wandered into a Heroic area.

I'd actually picked this mission up from the terminal at the spaceport that hands out Heroic missions, but I'd then untracked it to tidy up my open mission list.  The mission that had led me into this place wasn't a Heroic, but my objective - a lone level 15 mob - was located at the back of the complex, making this an unusually hard target.  I called up my companion and finished the mission - both of them - with no further difficulty, but this experience and my explorations of two huge areas underneath the droid factory* elsewhere got me thinking about the combat in The Old Republic.

*These two areas - the Assembly Line and Research and Development - also show as Heroic areas on the map, but while they have somewhat tougher enemies, if only a few elites - the missions I ran there aren't listed as Heroics, and give only standard rewards.

There's no auto-attack in this game, which seems like a strange omission given how much the game draws upon World of Wacraft.  What SWTOR does instead sheds some light on its design philosophy.  Even when my Warrior isn't actively attacking she is still in motion - fencing with melee opponents and using her lightsaber to deflect enemy fire.  It's very well done - the animation is smooth and seamless and the sight of my Sith swinging her lightsaber behind her to deflect laser bolts from enemies she isn't even looking at is properly impressive.  The Old Republic has put a lot of work into delivering a cinematic combat experience, especially when wielding the signature weapon of the franchise, and it does look good.

So it looks good but does it play well?  It does and it doesn't.  The sheer number of combat abilities that a character accrues can feel excessive but it does at least allow for some customisation of combat style - something that's otherwise somewhat lacking once a spec has been selected.  On Dromund Kaas I had the classic levelling-a-tank problem of subpar damage output, but still felt rather squishy.  Now, a few levels on and with the blue gear I picked up from the Heroics on DK I'm quite happy with my rotations, and my resilience.  Attacks fire off smoothly and, as I said, are very well animated.  The Dramatic Fight Music that accompanies certain encounters can feel a little overdone, and becomes unintentionally amusing when it plays for a full two minutes to score a boss encounter that's over in fifteen seconds.  Still, it does effectively evoke the feel that this is Star Wars.

The problem is that all this hard work is mostly wasted on mundane encounters.  SWTOR has the same problem as Lord of the Rings Online in that the setting just doesn't lend itself to an especially varied range of enemies, but if anything it's even more noticeable in this game.  Aside from ocassional clashes with hostile wildlife I've only really gone up against droids of a couple of different models and a ton of standard human foes, and if there's any discernable difference other than their names between the various slaves, rebels, resistance fighters and mind warped imperials I'm so often fighting I've yet to notice.  They all fight the same way, and they all die the same way - which is to say easily.

I've talked before about the imbalance of this game, but since I'm on the subject of the combat I have to reiterate that the buff to the companions effectively destroyed any shred of challenge that may have existed in the levelling content of this game outwith (some of) the Heroics.  I know there's an argument that's made from time to time that hard content is what endgame is for, but I've never subscribed to that theory.  At best it relegates everything up to that point to the status of a glorified tutorial, and a bad tutorial at that, seeing as if I'm never challenged I have no reason to even try to learn how to get the best out of my character.

Aside from that it's boring.  I don't enjoy godmode in any game, and the only way I can avoid it in SWTOR is by sending my companion away when I'm doing anything that isn't a Heroic, and I don't even always call them up for those either.  I'm not a min-maxer by any stretch of the imagination and from time to time I will, for one reason or another, make a decision about ability usage or gear that isn't optimal, but running without a companion goes way beyond that, seeing as the game claims to be balanced around the character/companion setup.  It was.  Once.

Another factor is the level scaling, which I've also discussed before.  I really dislike level scaling in any game.  Its failings are less obvious in group content than on a solo character, but all in all it's a crude and imprecise tool even when well implemented.

Is all of this bad design?  It's tempting to say so, seeing as bad design certainly exists elsewhere in the game, but it's also possible that this lack of challenge is intentional.  Reading the zone chat on Korriban it did occur to me that being Star Wars this game probably attracts a lot of first-time MMO players, and it's possible that the experience is tuned more to them than to experienced players.  If that is the case then it's doing those new players a disservice since coming up against something that presents a challenge is how a player gets better at a game, and in SWTOR those moments are few and far between.

My experiences in the Heroics has also highlighted a couple of other things about the combat that had otherwise gone unnoticed since they involve mechanics I just don't need to think about in regular fights.  The long cooldown on medpacks seems unnecessarily restrictive given that they are already limited to one use per fight, and the times when I've been facing multiple opponents with stun attacks has made me think similarly of the cooldown on the ability that breaks CC.

Stuns are an overly popular form of fake difficulty in MMOs, since they can be hard to counter without very specific abilities.  City of Heroes introduces the player to the experience of being chain stunned very early on, but that game gets away with it because the player has more tools at their disposal to deal with that, and more importantly the enemies in CoH are so well defined visually it's easy to pick out specific foes and take them down quickly.  This isn't nearly so viable a strategy in SWTOR where there's usually not much to distinguish one enemy from another.

These long cooldowns discourage rapid movement from one group of enemies to the next, breaking up the flow of the action.  I don't expect every ability to be up for every fight, but being hit with a couple of stuns in every group when my counter ability is only up for every fourth group, isn't challenging, it's just annoying.

Finally there's time-to-kill, which is good for standard mobs and bosses, but painfully over-extended for 'Strong' enemies.  I'd like to see these reclassified as 'Resilient', or perhaps 'Boring' would be more accurate, since they don't bring anything new to a fight other than a stupidly high pool of hit points.  They're no more interesting to fight than the rank and file, nor are they really more dangerous - they just take longer to beat down.

So that's combat in SWTOR.  It's a solid tab-target MMO experience, but though it looks good the game goes out of its way to make it less interesting than it should be.