SWG Combat Upgrade and Rebalance (Score 1)

Many of us that protest and dislike so many of the changes brought forth by the CU have been actively voicing our oppinions on the Test center since the CU started open testing. Of course we're written off as whiners, the simple fact of the matter is everyone felt the game needed improvements, and to be honest, the Galactic civil war changes, the loot changes, the spawn increases, all of those had me excited about where the game was going. Then I tried the CURB on the test center, WOW! 2 steps forward 5 steps back in my opinion. Many supporters of the CU claim its because we can no longer play in "god mode", but this is really a cop out to the actual intellectual debate that rises from this issue. In an attempt to summarize I will say that I personally don't mind the game being made harder, or players being made weaker how ever you want to slice it. What I don't approve of is completely gutting the mechanics of the entire game. Alternative solutions were viable, reducing the effectiveness of doctor and entertainer buffs, decreasing the effectiveness of armor, I personally feel adding stimpacks for mind damage and consumables to cure poisons and disease which require very little to no medic skills is all the game needed for balance, some of these things did make it into the game, but many more changes were made too. Such as removal of the combat queue, a game dynamic unique to swg, without the combat queue, swg has been reduced to button mashing, which in SOE's eyes means more tactical and faster paced, I will say in my play experience it is neither of those. In the original swg, all players had 3 health bars referred to as HAM(health, action, mind) if any of these reached 0 you were incapacitated and could be killed via a death blow from either npc, creatures, or other players. To coincide with this various classes had the ability to attack one specific pool, such as carbineers hitting action, pistoleers hitting health, riflemen hitting mind, the same goes for the melee skills. In the new system you only become incapped when your health reaches zero, while action and mind allow you to use special attacks (consider them a mana pool for all proffessions except jedi they use a force pool, which is borked at the moment as well). So targeted pool specific attacks are no longer effective as they once were....this is a very big example of "dumbing down" the game and making combat much less tactical. They have also added a root attack, this completely destroys any balance they may have been trying for. The game is also based on levels now rather than skills, so now, there are damage multipliers involved based on level, what this equates to is a removal of individuality, before players were able to dabble in several different skill lines to make unique characters with unique offensive and deffensive attributes granted deffensive stacking needed a bunch of balancing work, but this removed individualism from the game and is forcing everyone to go with cookie cutter proffessions, pro CURB supporters will say cookie cutter templates were already mainstay.....only in pvp, and that was more of a flavor of the month. Balance in an MMO is not a good idea, and to be honest will likely never exist. There will always be some template, some skill, some equipment that gives a player the edge over others, and thats the motivation, without it you may as well just play a game head to head with you pals and forget the subscription fees. There are many many many things about the CU that take away from the SWG I signed up to play, but these are just some of them off the top of my head. I am suspiscious that they have turned SWG into a button mashing fest in order to follow suit with EQ and release it for the gaming consoles, that might be a good question to ask, but I don't know that I would trust what SOE says anyway, they have a history of lieing even in the face of the truth. Good luck getting some info! Can't wait to see what they have to say, if they have anything other than the mindless blither they've been spewing forth so far. Would be intresting to hear what their justifications are for deleting many threads on their forums, begging and pleading for them to not make the change, I know they'll chalk them up to being "un-constructive" or rants, which many are, but for the mods to have to delete hundreds of them daily, when is it time to say, maybe there is a problem here! Wow this is really long already gonna stop there and go back to playing guild wars :)