so tempted to 4box at start.. 4 Bounty hunters would rock!
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so tempted to 4box at start.. 4 Bounty hunters would rock!
OK, so some of the information from Revenant has come from me, and I apologize for not sharing it here as well.
Boxing in SWTOR
possible, and doable in certain situations.
PvE - no problems. questing, easy and really good idea as a boxer. Instances should be easy enough with a boxer group. think...
PvP - also ... doable.. BUT with the caveat that, because BGs are 8v8 a 4 boxer has a huge amount of responsibility, and it could be difficult to coordinate with the other half of your team to effectively hold your node, or the ball, or the flag etc.
in swtor, there are a TON of CC abilities, even more than in WoW, and some of them suck. almost every class seems to have an aoe knockback ability, which is usually instant cast, similar to thunderstorm. for any ranged class, this isn't so bad, as you can still kill that person after being knocked back, and it prevents them from being able to aoe you down.
HOWEVER.. in games like Huttball, which is a large, complicated blades edge arena, where you MUST carry / pass a ball to the enemies defensive line, it will be almost impossible to effectively be a ball carrier, as everyone on the other team can split you into 4 parts of the map almost at will. that will be very.. suck.
AGAIN HOWEVER... you get a lot of EXP and currency for even a loss in BGs, and so if you are intent on just getting gear, you can cheese your way to gear by just sitting in a flat part of the map while the raging jedi / sith race towards what they perceive to be free kills and watch them burn as the other 2 people on their team win the match.. so you will lose, but as long as you get the match "achievements" finished, you still get a good amount of currency. PvP gear is pretty easy to get, and for some BGs boxing would be fine. There is a map where you need to defend bomb sites, and attack bomb sites, and I think having 4 coordinated toons would be useful there, maybe even 2 boxers to attack and defend one side each would be really nice.
Anyway.. im not sold on 4 copies of the game, but I WILL be buying 2, so as to lvl effectively (there are a bunch of heroic quests that you can probably 2box with good companions) and then see how PvP is at higher levels when the game comes out.
-Dan
Half the advanced classes in the game have an AoE knock back. This is like half the classes in WoW having an AoE fear that you cannot block.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mosg2
You simply will not be able to effectively box Huttball. It won't work.
Inquisitors are light armor. If you want to draw a parallel between TOR classes and WoW classes.
Inquisitors are priests.
Personally, I've leveled up a half dozen level 50's in the last month in the proper beta and I've multiboxed with ISboxer on the beta weekends. Right now with how the game is, four boxing is going to be a nightmare.
First as of right now you HAVE TO hardware box, so unless you have 4 computers capable of running the game atm, you are simply SOL.
Second, there is no elegant way to setup assist or follow. You have to brute force it all the way. Right now, this is how assisting works.
Target Party 1, Target of Target.
Following = Target Party 1, Follow Target.
Now if you run 4 clients on one computer (let's hope they make this possible) you are going to run into a situation where you cannot easily just jump from client to client with window swapping and have assisting working off of your new master. Your assist/follow macros will all be set to one character, this means that if you want to run 4 characters and have the ability to hotswap you need 4 different sets of assist/follow macros.
With 2, it is simple, the other guy is always party 1.
Right now there is no chance I would recommend anyone 4 box out of the gate. Two WILL be ideal and 3 if you really have to push it will be a balance between taking advantage of the absolutely fantastic companions, and filling your group up with PC's.
Companions can tank all of the flashpoints in the game, and they can do it as well as a player can in a pure mitigation/threat generation standpoint.
For me, two is absolutely ideal. This allows me to run a tank companion with a healer companion or a DPS companion. In world PvP I can run a DPS/Healer with two DPS companions and I will have extremely solid damage throughput. I can also run DPS/DPS with DPS companions, or DPS/DPS with healer companions.
Interestingly enough, I feel that the ideal 4x PvP team will actually be scoundrels and operatives in the melee tree. Melee works surprisingly well with autofollow tied into your DPS spam key, and the HOTs they get will make it very difficult to down them in PvP. Stealth, super burst, healing, medium armor. They are very beefy.
Merc, thanks for the detailed info about boxing in the Beta. I'm just a little confused about the fact that you say that you've successfully used ISboxer to multibox, but right after that you say that you have to hardware box:
Could you please explain this a little better? Are you saying that ISboxer will open but that performance is really bad running 4 sessions on a single computer?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mercbeast
@Mercbeast:
Ditto Esca's question. Also, there is an autofollow your target button that works on enemies?
If so, maybe melee *will* be doable. It's like IWT but better.
Now, I've been accused from time to time of being a Negative Nancy (Tm) and of being intentionally argumentative for no good reason, but...
You're the second person that I trust that cited knockbacks as basically a show stopper for boxing in BG's. I appreciate where you guys are coming from--You do BG's as a solo toon and get CC'd and knocked all over the place. I also appreciate that (after watching many hours of BG gameplay) Huttball is a really complicated map. At the same time...
I remember when I first saw Thunderstorm, and Typhoon and Death Grip and I thought "Wow, boxing is dead." Of course that was an overreaction but the idea was the same--I was convinced that these would hamstring boxing enough that it wouldn't be fun spending half your time collecting your guys. It isn't, but I don't spend half my time doing it. I spend just a bit of my time doing it.
~~~
One of the differences I've seen between Sith Inquisitor and any WoW caster is how many more insta cast abilities the SI has. As long as you don't get knockbacked onto another level of the map (I'm looking at you, Hutball) then you should be ok. Knocked into a loose formation? Cast the insta heal or the dot while you run back to the main. /shrug
I just feel like it's too early to throw in the towel and say "4 boxing will be way too hard at launch." Some of the brightest people I've ever known are active here on this site and I'm positive that with all/many of them working on these problems (follow, assist etc) we'll have an entirely workable setup for 4 boxing within the first week.
I guess we'll see, but for now I've got super excited face on :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Esca
Bioware has made this very clear... no macros at the launch of the game. This makes SOFTWARE boxing rather difficult, if not impossible.
Of course as soo as someone "says" impossible, some knuckle head will argue it, or claim they have a work around.
Either way, what hes saying is, HARDWARE boxing should work at launch.
I believe he is saying that only one instance of swtor can be open per a PC at the moment. macros presence, or lack there of has no bearing on software or hardware boxing really. but please give me a free pass, as today i am hopped up on pain pills and bed bound, so if i missed the point completely please just ignore me today
yup. reading is hard. I missed that comment. Tkx Crum
<3
3chars
@Apps:
I don't understand how the presence or absence of macros makes hardware boxing easier than software. I spent two hours working in ISBoxer and got a setup that should work fine for PvE:
I have an individual keymap for each character. When that character gets pip swapped to it activates his map and deactivates the others. Each map has a unique "target partyX" and "assist partyX" bound in game. Then, every button that needs an assist has two steps; One step sends the unique "assist partyX" and the next step sends the keypress. Each of these activates on keypress down or up, so you can just spam the button.
It's not elegant but it's about the best that can be done without macros. It breaks down in BG's where you may or may not get to reorder your characters properly.
As long as multiple instances can be opened on one PC we're golden now... And I'm sure Lax can or has already included an option that will force games to open.