Thursday, March 1, 2012

The saga continues

Star Wars has burrowed into my brain, in that way that every new MMO seems to early on, where I can't stop thinking about playing. Sith Assassin turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun once got a few of the higher level abilities. No levitating yet, but plently of moves that support my stealthy playstyle.

I'm really starting to like Khem Val too. It's easy to apprecaite a simple being who wants nothing more than to kill and consume force-users. Also, with the gear I've been synthweaving, he's actually turned out to be a pretty decent tank. Now that he has a high-threat AoE move, anyway.

The only thing I'm missing now is a single healing ability. In any combat situation no matter what I do it's still my DPS versus Khem Val's life bar. That said, the only time I die to elites recently was when they attack me straight out of a cutscene and I'm unable to begin combat with advantage of a stealth ambush. Because that is just cheap.

I want a damage meter. Please. I currently have no way to see how much real damage my abilites are doing. I base my ability priority from the damage values given on the tooltips, knowing full well that I have no idea whether those values are taking into account talents or bonus stats.

Speaking of ability priority, I went back to my Sith Juggernaut again [solo with Malavai Quinn] and it's remarkable how much better the combat flows for this character than the Assassin. I'm fairly certain I'm doing less damage overall, being tank specced, but the rotation is a hell of a lot more predictable and just feels... like I'm more directly in control of my character. Maybe it helps that it's very similar to the WoW Warrior class and thus feels more natural to me. It probably helps that it's not a hybrid caster/melee spec like Assassin is, and now that I think about it, it definitely helps that I'm not constantly staring at my buffs to look for ability procs. Somebody tell me why, in 2012, we are still expected to squint at these tiny little icons to judge which ability to use. WoW fixed this... how many years ago? But I suppose they are working on stuff like this. They already added those numeric CD counters, which are a huge, huge help for easily identifying what's available when. Now they just need to stop them from glitching out all the time and making me think my cooldowns aren't available when they are.