SWTOR CC System Must Change By Launch

Star Wars: The Old Republic announced long ago that they were approaching crowd control in a new innovative way. They call it Resolve. Each character has a Resolve Bar under their life bar that fills when CC is applied and once its full, it turns white and they gain temporary immunity to all CC. When I first read about this concept I got excited at the potential a design like that had. Unfortunately, the most recent working implementation of Resolve in Beta testing is a far cry from what I expected. I still have faith that they can salvage the design but my confidence in the design team is dwindling every second the changes aren’t made.

Last time Resolve was functional in the Beta, it worked like this:

• The Resolve bar made an assumption when a CC spell was landed that the CC would last full duration, and the bar filled immediately according to the max CC time of the spells landed.
• The CC that triggers the Resolve immunity is not itself affected by the immunity. Only CCs landing after the Resolve immunity is triggered can be ignored.
• The Resolve bar would also account for multiple CC spells even if they landed at the exact same time. For example, if you received two 4 second stuns at exactly the same time, Resolve would react as if you were stunned for 8 seconds even though you were stunned for a maximum of 4 sec.
• The bar would reach full when you received a total of 8 seconds of CC, granting you a short period of CC immunity.

So why is this a horrible design? Often times the CC does NOT last full duration due to CC breaking abilities, or “sleep” mechanics( a CC that is only effective as long as no damage is dealt to the CC’d target).

With a Resolve bar that doesn’t have anything to do with the length of time the character is actually CC’d, you could end up gaining CC immunity after only being CC’d for a fraction of a sec, or you could be CC’d for 15 sec without the CC immunity helping your cause. I have experienced both scenarios on the SW:TOR Beta.

Here are examples of the 2 scenario extremes I just mentioned:

1. If someone uses an 8 sec long “sleep” on you from an empty resolve bar, it immediately fills making you immune to additional CC. This means someones resolve bar could go from zero to full immunity via a “sleep” that is broken immediately.
2. On the other side of the spectrum, I’m going to use some specific references to help illustrate. Let’s say you’re playing against a skilled Juggernaut and Sorcerer. The Jugg Force Leaps leaving you unable to move for 2 sec, then stuns you for 4 sec (potentially 5 if spec’d?) , now you have been CC’d for 6-7 sec and your Resolve bar is still not full. Then comes the handy 8 sec “sleep” cc from the Sorc . It is possible that you could be cc’d for 15 sec before gaining immunity due to Resolve. The stun-to-sleep tactic is very popular in Huttball to literally CC players to death on the fire vents.

So the previous two examples show how you could be CC’d for less than 1 sec and gain resolve immunity, or you could be CC’d for 15 sec without immunity. I am confident with the amount of negative feedback Bioware has gotten they will come up with something a lot better than this.

The way I originally assumed it would work was that the Resolve bar would fill dynamically by the amount of CC the character is enduring. For example, if I am “sleep’d”, the Resolve bar would fill up for every sec I was CC’d until it reached the max, at which point I would be broken out of the CC and gain the temporary immunity. Seems reasonable right? This would make for some interesting situations where players would have to decide if they wanted to use their CC breaking abilities or just wait out the remaining amount of CC required to trigger the Resolve immunity and save the ability for later. FTFY.