I am one of the lucky ones who had saved Cantina Energy and Credits and was able to outfit 3 squads with t5 mods. After having played ~ 20-25 battles against others who have t5 in arena and GW, I feel I can give more input than those who were sadly unable to mod up.
For reference later:
My Arena Squad - Max Gear/Stars Dooku, RG, STH, Rey, QGJ
My Arena Squad in waiting - G9 Akbar, G9 Leia, G8 Poe, G8 Poggle, Max RG
FACT 1: EA Botched this Roll-out Badly.
No Denying it. EA themselves has to be admitting it in closed door sessions. Did we as a community expect anything different though? There has been a consistent pattern of poor communication leading up to and after patches.
A patch of this magnitude needed much more up front communication to let the players really understand what was coming and get their buy in. They needed to act as change agents, identify key points of resistance, and address those points. In hindsight, they probably also should have released the t1/t2 tables for about a month prior to the challenge tables. People could have gotten their feet wet.
Patch 2 was also laughable and should be rolled back. They dug the knife into an already irate community by lowering drop rates and tripling prices.
Going forward, I highly suggest EA adopt a release schedule that many other IT vendors utilize. Namely alternate bug and enhancement releases each month. Also, release Enhancement full patch notes the month prior to dropping an Enhancement. Two or Three weeks out drop video examples of the content. Get User input and adjust as necessary.
MYTH 1: Mods invalidate all the work we have done on gear, stars, and abilities.
This is untrue. All that we have done to this point is still the base layer. If the base layer is not good, then the mod is not good. Case in point, my Arena squad could consistently beat all but 1 team (B2/JE Droid Team) on my shard before mods. After Mods (and the droid team modded as well), the same is true. Additionally, my secondary arena team which is not highly geared, still cannot beat other highly geared teams that are also modded. Gear is still king.
FACT 2: GW is Impossible for those unable to mod quickly.
I normally never play my arena squad in GW. I usually play with different combos for fun. I had to break out my arena team for the final nodes. If you did not have an opportunity to hop on the t5 band wagon early, you are now screwed. Fact of the matter is an unmodded team cannot beat a modded team. If you need credits to level mods and you can't beat GW, how are you supposed to advance? Mods needed to dramatically impact arena power and GW matching, and they did not.
MYTH 2: We can turn DPS into tanks and Tanks into DPS! Characters are losing their uniqueness.
No Sorry. While it is true you can give a pure DPS more health or tanks more offense, they are still what they were. More Health on a DPS means surviving one more turn. More Offense on a Tank means the ability to finish off a low health DPS that's in the red instead of tickling it. At the end of the day they are what they are.
MYTH 3/FACT 3: Using Cantina Energy for Mods forces me to choose between farming toons and farming mods.
Under the original patch this was a myth, as this situation would have only been temporary. Once you had a few days to get basic mods, you could go back to farming toons until you could unlock additional tables.
Unfortunately, with the reduced drop rate, this is now FACT.
FACT 4: It is hard to quickly tell how exactly someone is modded.
This is a big issue for me. We can quickly tell set bonus by glancing at the character creation screen, but then you have to dig deeper into each individual mod to see the actual impact to character. Taking Rey as an example, is she speed modded, health modded, or offense modded? I'd like to quickly know this so I know what order I am targeting her in. If she is health modded, I'm hitting dispelers before her. If she is one of the other 2 she becomes my primary target.
I feel like there needs to be some basic color coding of mods to somehow quickly display this info.
Also, perhaps a legend that shows turn order of the 10 toons?
MYTH 4: Mods are too powerful.
Ok. Modded Teams destroy unmodded Teams. Guess what? Geared Teams destroy ungeared teams. Once everyone is the same level, it all evens out. Plus everyone loves offense. Who doesn't want to watch a high scoring football or baseball game? Big numbers are quite simply more fun than smaller numbers. Remember how slow everything when protection was first released prior to the tweaking? That is the opposite of this. In the meantime, go 3 star any pve content you havent touched yet.. it will have to be eventually updated.
FACT 5: There is too much math involved with mods.
Do I want to use 12367 Protection or do I want to use 94% Protection? Seriously? I don't want to have to break out my calculator to determine if Mod A is better than Mod B. I want to know by looking.
Let's change all mods to be consistent. Either use raw numbers or use %. Don't use both for the love of Pete!
FACT 6: Credit Crunch is much worse now.
Prior to Patch 2, a worse credit crunch would only have been a temporary consideration. The initial costs to level t5 was reasonable.
However, with the updated costs, outfitting one character with t5 costs an additional 3M!!! Unacceptable. Greedy. Disheartening. We didn't have enough credits PRIOR to this update. Exacerbating the costs are the inability for many to complete GW or the scoundrel event. This is a huge, huge issue.
I'm sure there are more, but I should probably go do some work...
P.S. I will reiterate that I was LUCKY. I got in and got t5 mods at the right time. Had I been unlucky, I would very likely be disheartened to the point where I would certainly close my wallet and seriously consider walking away. I totally understand everyone's anger.
@EA_Jesse
Replies
I only got enough T5 mods to give one character and few to my other arena teams. Everything else is T1 or T2 (with a T3 or T4 in the mix).
I maxed out a couple of of T5 mods before the second patch. After the update I took my remaining T5 mods from level 12-13 to level 15. I had to buy two credit packs and complete GW to do it! I would guess it was around 1.5 mil mark.
That's way more expensive than if I had done it 12 hours earlier. Very frustrating.
I'm not sure I agree with you on the DPS not becoming anything other than a DPS.
I fought a Rey in the arena with over 50k health and protection. She also had a 47% accuracy mod.
By the end of three different fights my Dooku led team (or Lumi led) that Rey didn't miss a single shot and I only lasted long enough to take out ST Han on one round and drop her protection. ST Han only had 30k health + protection.
My GS modded is hitting 11k crit damage without offense up and my modded Rey is hitting 14k crit on her Leverage attack without offense up. I admit my mods aren't the best but that is insane damage (pre update) as my toons aren't maxed.
I actually really, really like mods, in theory. But fact 1 started the ball rolling and EVERYTHING has been disastrous since then. The second patch was full panic mode and only made things worse.
EA is one of the wealthiest, longest standing, and most experienced AAA developers in the world. For this implementation to be so poor is truly unforgivable. Several people completely failed in their jobs there but, sadly, will probably still get their big bonuses at the end of the year anyway.
I'll be the first to roll my eyes at the ridiculous entitlement of many gamers, but this company has earned ALL of the vitriol coming their way right now.
I feel that patch 2 aka the Precrafting 2.0 patch was especially badly handled.
I currently have a 5% drop rate on Mk5 mods that was 100% before patch. Add to the fact that they cost twice as much to level this really makes me feel dishearted.
To add:
1) It's impossible to manage mods. I had to create an excel to define the bests setups.
2) Such a complex update should have been explained better.
3) There is to much RNG on macro level:
- it's fine from time to time have unlucky high dodge rate or dry days on toons farming
- it's NOT fine when your strategy depends on what will drop in the raid
Love the post. My only comment is in regards to Myth 1. I agree, and said the same thing; Low gear = low base number, making % based Mods only as good as your current stats. But what about set number Mods? The issue with the gear grind was that it took a lot of farming to complete a piece of gear that a simple non-leveled 5* Mod destroys in stats. Take Mk6 Chiewab Hypo Syringe for example. +25 agility. Agility affects Phys. dmg, Phys crit rating, and armor. Great, but I have a lvl 7, 5* Mod that gives me 23% crit dmg, 2% def, and 1119 protection, and a set bonus of 10% health. I got all of this from 1 battle. It took weeks to get that Syringe, and it's not even raid specific gear. Mods should have increased stats sure, but the numbers are astronomical and dwarf hard earned gear stats.
Xio
It's not rocket surgery.
EA read this please.
Ounce of prevention beats a pound of bad updates
That is exactly what he said. Whether % or flat is better depends on the character and existing mod/gear so it makes it overly complicated.
What you say is true. My point was... no one wants to whip out a calculator to figure the break even point for each character. It is much simpler if you just make the mods consistent with either %'s or raw numbers.
If you battle others with similar tier mods, you will find gear to be the differentiation.
Xio
The drop rate of the mods is/was brutal and you can quite easily get money back from Google/iTunes if you bought any kind of package coins/crystals. Just state that it was a unfair/unbalanced instant patch that made the game unplayable. iTunes/Google will refund the money and say that they can only help you with this purchase but for any other refunds, they suggest deal with the makers of the game.
That's great, no sarcasm. I love the idea of flexibility too. Now if only there weren't mods adding 12k protection one 5 star mod at a time. Especially after making us spend time and/or money for ages in gearing up with 150s of parts just to get a 6k boost in protection. And, that's just one component of 6 required.
Also, with damage/dodge/RNG being what it is, I'm not sure how far any customization will carry you.
Normally I just buy the daily crystal package. But with mods, I bough 15$ worth of crystals to refresh my cantina energy (Am I lucky that I did that before the precraft patch 2.0)
So why should they care about your complains?
Because they have angered the entire community and may lose revenue in the long term?
Thanks for the level headed approach.