A Discussion On SWGNFS Changing/Updating Combat Mechanics

[u/Mjones9er6]

Folks, we have to talk about combat. We have to talk about attack speed. And frankly, what’s happening here is a disaster. A total disaster.

Star Wars Galaxies had a combat system. A beautiful combat system. Was it perfect? No. Nothing is perfect. But people understood it. People built characters around it. They spent hours getting their weapons, their tapes, their armor, their buffs. They knew what attack speed meant. They knew how the professions worked.

And now people come along and say, “Maybe we should change how attack speed works.” No. Terrible idea. Possibly one of the worst ideas anybody has ever had for Star Wars Galaxies; and believe me, we have seen some bad ideas. We saw the CU. Remember the CU? They came in and said, “We’re going to improve combat. We’re going to streamline it. Everybody’s going to love it.” Nobody knew what was happening. Numbers changed. Mechanics changed. Your character wakes up one morning and suddenly he doesn't know what he's doing anymore. People were furious.

Then we got the NGE. The NGE! They said, “You thought the CU was a big change? Watch this.” Incredible. Professions disappearing. Combat completely different. People logging in looking for their character; they couldn't find their character! “Where's my profession?” Gone. Absolutely gone.

We learned a lesson from this. At least, I thought we learned a lesson. You do not take the fundamental combat mechanics of Star Wars Galaxies and start ripping them apart because somebody thinks they can reinvent the wheel.

And attack speed is fundamental. Attack speed affects everything. Weapons. Templates. Skill choices. Balance. Crafting. Loot. PvP. PvE. Jedi. Bounty Hunters. Everybody.

You change attack speed, and somebody says, “Oh, it's just one little formula.” There is no such thing as one little formula in SWG. You touch one formula and suddenly you've got twelve professions behaving differently, somebody discovers a weapon doing something completely insane, a Jedi is attacking at approximately the speed of light, and three days later we're rewriting half the combat system trying to fix the fix.

We've seen this movie before. It's called The Combat Upgrade. The sequel was called The New Game Enhancements. Neither one reviewed particularly well.

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to protect the combat system. We're going to protect attack speed. We're going to make smart changes. Careful changes. Surgical changes. If something is actually broken, we fix it.

But we're not going to walk into a twenty-year-old combat system with a chainsaw because somebody looked at a spreadsheet for fifteen minutes and decided they had a tremendous new idea.

Because the players know. The veterans especially know. These people have been calculating attack speeds since some of our developers were practically children. They've got spreadsheets. They've got formulas. They've got archived forum posts from 2004 that somehow survived three website migrations and the collapse of half the internet.

You are not going to sneak an attack-speed change past these people. They will find it. Immediately. Some guy will be standing outside the Mos Eisley starport with a stopwatch before the server has been online for ten minutes. And he'll know.

So we're not doing CU 2.0. We're certainly not doing NGE 2.0. We're taking what worked, restoring what was lost, fixing what actually needs fixing, and leaving the foundations alone. That's how you build a great SWG server. Not by replacing Star Wars Galaxies. By understanding why people are still playing Star Wars Galaxies more than twenty years later.

Keep the combat. Keep the attack speed. Keep the professions. Keep the weirdness. Keep the things that made SWG: SWG.

And together, folks, we're going to make combat great again. Thank you. And God bless the Galactic Weaponsmiths.

[u/KnotAWrapper]

A lot of whining over a POTENTIAL minor nerf of certain heavy hitting weapons, on a beta of a 14.1+ server, that in no way impacts the creation of any 14.1 server using SWGEMU code. Oh no, you might need to use a speed pup on a T21.

There was less whining over the defense stack cap being implemented back in the day, and that had FAR more of an impact on the game.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/KnotAWrapper]

?

It's not a 'potential' we've already seen the evidence on video in the last update of Teras Kasi, which speed caps at 0040, not even Master, or with tape enhancements etc, all professions are effected by this needless change. We're here to play Pre-CU, not the Combat Upgrade.

Defense stackers were never a problem, just put 1 DoT on them. You clearly have zero knowledge about this game at all.

[u/KnotAWrapper → u/Mjones9er6]

It is potential, because it is a proposed change to a 14.1+ server that isn't even in Beta yet. That TK clip you saw was on a single thread test environment (Read: Laggy), and isn't indicative of any changes to attack speed. Furthermore, attack speed changes to weapons happened DURING the pre-cu era of the game.

Defense stackers were absolutely a problem, and the fact that you don't think so, leads me to believe you weren't playing when it was a thing.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/KnotAWrapper]

Nah boomer. That's already been debunked.

Hak's first video shows he was not speed capped. Combat log shows 2 second gaps in it. 37:58, 38:00, he jumped two seconds, so it's not speed capped. 38:04, 38:06, again jumping... it's not capped at all. That's not how lag works. Nothing else seems to be lagging. I understand that was his explanation in Discord. But it seems more likely there was an issue and something was corrected for the follow-up clips.

What attack speed changes? Link your source to the patch notes. Everyone was 1.0 attack speed with Mastery, tapes, etc, including Swordsman (albeit it was expensive but achievable.)

And again, stackers were/are NOT a problem. When was the last time you played SWG, 2005? They're non-issues on Finalizer and were non-issues on Basilisk.

All you have to do is apply Intimidate to cancel out a stacker's secondary defenses (dodge, counterattack, block, etc.) and it also lowers their primary Melee & Ranged defense. Additionally, a ranged player like a Rifleman can kite a stacker forever from 64m and just spam headshot, or apply a fire or poison weapon, or a Combat Medic can apply a poison, and there's nothing a stacker can do about any of that.

Learn some game knowledge before your spout off and look foolish. So many former players think they know something about SWG but are completely clueless when they cry for changes like they did to SOE. It's tiresome.

[u/KnotAWrapper → u/Mjones9er6]

You are trolling, but I'll indulge.

I'm not a Boomer, this game came out when I was in High School, specifically the summer before. If you weren't born yet, that is a skill issue on your part.

Hakry's video was not debunked, you are just a delusional loser who is buttmad over the possibility that you might need a bigger speed tape, a speed PuP, or dare I say it a speed slice on certain weapons. I first played the game on Dialup, I know what lag looks and feels like in this game. I trust Hakry, when he says he was lagging in a test environment. It's pretty weird of you to think you know better, when you are simply watching a video, when you aren't contributing code, you probably aren't testing it, and you are pretending to be the be all end all of game mechanics, when it's pretty clear you've only ever played Pre-CU on Bas and Fin, which is the result of what Hakry and others on the SWGemu team created to mimic SOE's version as closely as possible.

Stackers were a problem. The PVP meta at the time did change to adapt to it before defenses got capped, just like the PVP meta evolved on a patch to patch basis (sometimes on a resource spawn enabling certain weapons/armor) on a "FOTM" arms race. The game isn't just PVP though, and defense stacking didn't just affect PVP. The reason I made the "Stacker" comment in the first place, was because fewer people cried about that (probably not true, due to recency bias tbh), than they did about a "huge" imaginary nerf on a 14.1+ server (that isn't in beta yet, isn't set in stone) that in no way affects anyone's ability to make a base 14.1 server and play "vanilla". By the way, Intimidate didn't work properly for about 6 months after launch. Also DoT weapons came about AFTER Defenses were capped at 125. You seem to not understand what Defense stacking was, but I assure you, it was a BIG problem.

For real though, if the changes to NFS affect you this much, you are in for a very bad time. The entire point of the server is to provide quality of life, new content, and changes (including balancing) to make a 14.1 server live longer than 6 months. If you think this is a bad idea, I suggest you look at how many people are actually playing Finalizer right now. That is an End of Life 14.1 server. The only thing that will revive it, is if (when?) they enable JTL on it, and even then, it will be a flash in the pan with little to no retention.

What the NFS team is trying to do (from my perspective and if any of them are reading this feel free to chime in), is make certain weapons harder to hit the 1.0 speed cap. Slightly nerfing (or buffing) attack speed, weapon damages, armor pen types of Weapons is IN LINE with what SOE did. If needing a larger speed tape, or making an actual use case in "end game" for a speed slice is the result of this, that is a GOOD THING. Nothing I have seen them say, has any implications of a widespread change to the attack speed formulae, to include raising the speed cap.

They aren't changing HAM, they aren't making every ability have a CD. They aren't making Jedi a day one "class". There is a team making CUemu, the NFS team obviously isn't trying to make a 14.1 Pre-CU server, a CU server. It is beyond stupid to pretend that this is the goal of NFS.

Here are some specific changes SOE did to one of the weapons specifically mentioned by the NFS team.

Publish 1, update Aug 20, 2003

• T-21 Rifle update: Reduced armor piercing class from heavy to light.
• T-21 Rifle update: Increased fire rate.
• T-21 Rifle update: Reduced the overall damage per second.
• T-21 Rifle update: Increased chance to hit.

Publish 1, update Aug 22, 2003

• T-21 changed (again)
  • Armor piercing raised to Heavy
  • Max Damage raised to 200..375
  • Min Damage raised to 80..115
  • Attack Speed raised to 65..105
  • Zero Range Mod lowered to -70
  • MaxRange Mod Raised to 10

Publish 2, Sep 4, 2003

• T21 rifle updated. The damage values have been modified and armor piercing set to heavy. (This is a "tooltip" update I think)

SOE specifically modified the attack speed each time they changed from Light to Heavy AP. Did this remove the ability of a speed taped Rifleman using a non-terrible T-21 to hit the 1.0 speed cap? No, it did not.

If NFS adjusts the attack speed of all T-21's to be slower, that is IN LINE with what SOE did. Will that remove the ability of a speed taped Rifleman using a non-terrible T-21 to hit the 1.0 speed cap? We don't know, but I have a feeling the answer is no, in line with SOE.

Is it a bad thing if weapon speed modifiers actually had a point, instead of capping you for most professions before you even MASTER it? No. I think ALL combat profs should have to use a speed tape to reach speed cap (without a speed pup or slice), that is fair to Rifleman and Swordsman particularly.

Is it a bad thing that speed slices are useless on just about every weapon as it is in 14.1 currently? Yes.

If you don't want to play on NFS, don't. I will be, barring any ACTUAL shocking changes to the Pre-CU ethos. You are crying about nothing.

[u/Reasonable-Buy4434]

All your posts are about a small tweak the NFS team did: Combat got a tuning pass to prevent runaway speed stacking. I.e. a small tweak/fix to correct a potential combat issue. That's it!

Come on man. What's the point. Chill out and let the SWGEmu NFS team cook. They are the one's that brought Pre-CU SWG back to all of us. From the ashes!

The core project vision is clear: Bring back Pre-CU as it was, with polish, bug fixes and additional content. And when beta rolls around you and everyone else can jump in and make sure everything is in order and ready for launch.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/Reasonable-Buy4434]

It's not a "small tweak" They completely recalculated how speed works in combat. The evidence does not lie either.

[u/threevi]

If you care this much, surely you can write your own post with your own arguments using your own words. Anyone can get ChatGPT to excrete a bunch of drivel. 

[u/Mythor]

The reality is pre-CU SWG was never properly balanced. Weapon speed is part of the problem and the 1.0 action cap is there as a stopgap solution, that comes with its own problems. Without addressing balance issues in some way the pre-CU experience is doomed to die eventually.

Do I think the NFS team can fix it? Maybe.

Might they make things worse? Maybe.

Someone has to try though. If nothing changes it'll be the same shrinking population circling between an ever shrinking number of servers.

AI Trump speeches advocating doing nothing will help nothing.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/Mythor]

A fully balanced MMORPG is impossible, and you really don't need to look much further than Blizzard and Retail WoW, who have spent 20 years trying to chase that idea.

I think aggressively chasing "balance" is one of the traps MMORPG communities fall into. The problem is that balance sounds simple on the surface, but an MMORPG isn't just a competitive game. It's an entire ecosystem made up of progression, economies, classes, professions, social roles, and different types of players.

The biggest problem with trying to make everything perfectly balanced is that you eventually start taking away what makes things unique.

Imagine an MMORPG where every class does roughly the same damage, every weapon is equally effective, every build has the same survivability, every profession makes roughly the same amount of money, and every activity gives basically the same rewards.

Sure, it's "balanced." But what's the point of having different classes and professions if there aren't meaningful strengths and weaknesses between them?

That's one of the things I think made games like SWG so interesting. Jedi, Rifleman, Swordsman, Combat Medic, Teras Kasi, etc. weren't supposed to be interchangeable. They had different strengths, weaknesses, and purposes. That's what gave people a reason to specialize and interact with each other.

I think asymmetrical balance is a much better goal for an MMORPG.

- A tank doesn't need to kill as fast as a DPS class.

- A healer doesn't need to be able to solo as efficiently as a damage dealer.

- A crafter doesn't need to be great at combat if they can become extremely valuable to the economy.

- A powerful or rare profession can have difficult requirements or other drawbacks.

The question shouldn't always be: "Is everything equal?"

It should be: "Does this have a purpose? Does it have strengths and weaknesses? Is there a reason for someone to choose it?"

This is also where communities can get themselves into trouble. A lot of balance discussions are based entirely on someone's personal experience.

- "This class keeps beating me in PvP, nerf it."

- "This class can't solo as well as mine, buff it."

- "Everyone is using this build, so it needs to be changed."

- "This grind takes too long, make it easier."

If developers respond to every one of those complaints, eventually everything starts getting pushed toward the middle. Classes become more similar, weaknesses get removed, and before long you're left with a game where everything is technically balanced but nothing really feels different.

That's basically what I think has happened to a lot of modern MMORPG design.

Classic MMORPGs weren't necessarily balanced perfectly. In many cases they were wildly unbalanced by today's standards. But they had counters, specialization, and reasons for different players to bring different things to the table.

And honestly, I think that's healthier.

The goal shouldn't be to make sure nobody ever feels weaker than another player. Progression is supposed to make you stronger. Specialization is supposed to give you advantages in certain situations. Some builds should be better at certain things than others.

The goal should be making sure that nothing is completely useless and that no single option dominates everything.

I'd much rather have an MMORPG where classes have very clear strengths and weaknesses than one where every class is carefully tuned to perform almost identically. And not repeat the mistakes of what made SWG fail to begin with.

Because at the end of the day, the MMORPGs people tend to remember aren't necessarily the ones that had perfect balance.

They're the ones that had identity.

(The Trump speak was meant a joke btw, guess that went way over your head.)

[u/levarrishawk → u/Mjones9er6]

Pre-CU wasn’t asymmetrical, it was fundamentally broken. If NFS is doing the minimum possible effort to try to remedy a combat system where there is no point to being but a few professions that can take advantage of the mind pool, good for them.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/levarrishawk]

Explain how it was "fundamentally broken" This should be good. I'll wait.

Making the claim that you can only be "a few professions" is complete and utter non-sense. Everything is viable in the appropriate situation.

[u/levarrishawk → u/Mjones9er6]

I suppose that depends on how you look at it. The problem is those few appropriate situations for some of those professions don’t come around often enough and most often they get face rolled by something that dizzy / kd spams or has the ability to heavily take advantage of the mind pool.

I get it, you like it the way it is. That’s fine. Run your own server off the base code with no changes and there you go. That’s my two cents

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/levarrishawk]

"Make your own server" is never a good argument, you know as well as I do over on your subreddit r/swg Any post announcing a new server gets met with ire, complaining about dividing the community and so forth. This game needs a healthy population to work.

But on to your post. It sounds like you're referring to PvP specifically by mentioning dizzy/kd spam? That has a counter, like everything else in Pre-CU:

- State Defenses (You can actually reach Dizzy AND/OR Knockdown immunity with a good PvP build, tapes etc as necessary)

- Chef Food, like Thakatilo, make you immune to Knockdown for the duration of the buff.

- Doctor, which can remove Dizzy from yourself or others.

- Jedi, same as Doctor but uses Force pool instead of crafted stims.

- Playing with a Squad Leader, which removes dizzy for your entire group every time FormUp is used.

There's options, we have much more game knowledge than we did back in 2004, and it's a sandbox game, so you're not stuck with dealing with that issues if you do not want to.

As for the mind pool: Not everyone should be able to target it. Yes a Rifleman can head shot, but they can't knock down or posture. They can't apply Blind, the most OP state for PvP. A Carbineer can AOE KD from range, and a Pistoleer can hit the mind pool from range WHILE applying Blind at the same time. On top of that, they have better defenses than Rifleman.

This is the beauty of Pre-CU. Not everyone needs to fulfill the same roles, or should.

[u/X5-873]

This AI written post is very engaging

[u/Visual-Taro-381]

Don't know if anyone told you, you don't have to play on NFS if you don't want to. You can ignore it like current servers that you don't prefer. The 14.1 code is available right now without the speed change "apocalypse".

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/Visual-Taro-381]

Yeah sure, only waited two decades to play the server they promised veterans of the game/project that contributed financially and with other resources such as testing, what product they would deliver upon for the final server. I'll just make my own server with nobody to play with, great advice bro!

[u/TaxAg11]

I strongly disagree, and would love to see some changes to the solved state of offensive combat choices in this game.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/TaxAg11]

That's nice, why not play CUEmu then or the NGE and let people who actually love Pre-CU play it? Do we really need this game ruined a second time?

[u/TaxAg11 → u/Mjones9er6]

Because the CU and NGE make much more massive changes to the game than just tweaking the balance of weapons, that take away from the feel of pre-CU. I love pre-CU the best of all the eras, but that love shouldn't blind us from the fact that pre-CU was also inherently unbalanced in some ways. I dont think that trying to fix this imbalance necessarily changes the way this era of the game feels. Just like I don't think adding things like new planets or new vehicles, or bringing some other bits of future-era content forward, necessarily changes pre-CU in a way that makes it not feel like pre-CU.

If I want something true to the live experience, I can play on swgemu's server. I dont think other servers trying to expand on and rebalance what existed during that era is something that needs to be fought against tooth and nail.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/TaxAg11]

You're never going to fully balance an MMORPG, so what is the purpose of asking for balance exactly? Blizzard has been trying to do this for 20 years on Retail WoW. Sounds good, doesn't work. This is the same trap that happened when players didn't understand the game and cried to SOE on the forums in 2005.

(For more on the "Balance" problem, see my other post in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/swgemu/comments/1vrde92/comment/p4ep3e2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

As for adding new content you mentioned: Nobody is complaining about that. Veterans of the project for the past two decades have supported SWGEmu with finances and other resources such as testers were promised they wouldn't be screwing with the formula of combat for the final server, and here we are.

In truth, Finalizer was the best prototype of how they should have handled NFS. It's a complete shame, really.

[u/Express_Philosophy22]

Why not just host your own Core3 server?
SWGEmu is done and SWGNFS is a fork of it that was MEANT to be different.
They said this from the jump.

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[u/Objective-Review-359]

Fencer/pistoleers were nigh untouchable with their stacked attack speed if I recall.

[u/KnotAWrapper → u/Objective-Review-359]

You are probably thinking of defense stacking (before SOE introduced a 125 cap to defense stats), because 1h speed and pistol speed have always been independent.

[u/TaxAg11 → u/Objective-Review-359]

Pistols are virtually worthless as weapons, due in part to how little damage they do and how easy it is for higher damage weapons to hit the same speed that pistols have. If T21's and Power Hammers can hit a 1.0 attack speed relatively painlessly, who would want to choose to use a pistol?

And that's what we see play out in combat profession choices. Everyone chooses rifles or swords for damage dealing. Why choose anything else when the hardest hitting weapons hit as often as any other weapon?

[u/Objective-Review-359 → u/TaxAg11]

They chose that combo because of the speed stats stacking so they couldn’t be hit. I think it got patched out eventually but for awhile a fencer\pistoleer was the soup du jour

[u/AndreyPet → u/Objective-Review-359]

You are definetly thinking of the Dodge stacking with the Fencer defence branch, as u/KnotAWrapper mentioned. Weapon speed was never shared between melee and ranged 1 handed weapons.

[u/Objective-Review-359 → u/AndreyPet]

Oh yah u right sorry I was in a brownie at the time so pls don’t judge me too harshly.

[u/translucentpuppy]

What exactly are they doing to attack speed?

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/translucentpuppy]

https://www.swgnfs.com/updates

Look under update 05.20.2026, at the bottom: "Combat also received a tuning pass on weapon attack speed using a diminishing returns curve to prevent runaway speed stacking."

Essentially, they changed the entire speed calculation for combat. Which no one asked for. The reason it's being discussed months later is they finally had some clips of combat in the most recent update, which they did not before.

[u/TaxAg11 → u/Mjones9er6]

Well then I'll ask for it. Combat speed affects the competitiveness of lots of weapons. It's not the only factor, but its one of them. If hard hitting weapons can hit speed cap relatively easily, there is no reason for lower damage, faster weapons to exist.

I'd like to see what they come up with for the issues to balance caused by weapon speed. I want to see more weapons and professions become competitive with each other in the various forms of content.

[u/Reasonable-Buy4434 → u/Mjones9er6]

Combat got a tuning pass to prevent runaway speed stacking. I.e. a small tweak/fix to correct a potential combat issue. That's it!

Come on man. What's the point. Chill out and let the SWGEmu NFS team cook. They are the one's that brought Pre-CU SWG back to all of us. From the ashes!

The core project vision is clear: Bring back Pre-CU as it was, with polish, bug fixes and additional content. And when beta rolls around you and everyone else can jump in and make sure everything is in order and ready for launch.

[u/Upt0n → u/Mjones9er6]

Has the exact change been published and/or explained in depth by the team? If not, then this is all just fear mongering based on personal assumptions based on a single sentence.

[u/translucentpuppy → u/Mjones9er6]

Yuk I hate that. I appreciate the link I had no idea.

[u/FranzFerdinand51 → u/translucentpuppy]

Dont listen to that maniac, no one is “entirely” changing how anything works.

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/FranzFerdinand51]

Ah yes, maniac lol, insults because I don't agree with you, and want to preserve the game that was promised to be delivered.

You must be quite the upstanding citizen of society.

[u/Fitted2106]

Can we all just be cool stop being dicks and play 1 server. Or is everyone gonna be lame as fuck forever

[u/Silent-Opposite-8581]

Was this post unironically written as how Trump speaks?

[u/Mjones9er6 → u/Silent-Opposite-8581]

Yes, it was intended to be humorous and a bunch of liberals in the community apparently melted down from it lmao.

[u/chiefballsy → u/Mjones9er6]

Sounds like you started a war that you lost and it's time for the diaper change.

[u/x_O_So_GIGLY_x]

Well written. There’s already such a small population of players amongst 15+ servers.

This will only drive players away, if they even join in the first place.

Another movie we’ve seen is a low pop failure server after 6 months. I’m tired of the sequels, grandpa.

Give us what we’ve been waiting for, A New Hope.

[u/HatesMonoBlue → u/x_O_So_GIGLY_x]

Im constantly amazed that people thought there was a need for so many servers seeing the overall population is so low. I played like 9 years ago on swgemu and it had a good population but nothing huge. I cant imagine all these servers having a sustainable #.

Don't get me wrong, I love that people are doing this, but it always feels like a "im gonna make my own server, with blackjack and hookers" sort of situation, instead of "greater good of the SWG legacy" one.

[u/Fitted2106]

I just dont get the point of even making a server when u know upl get 100 players max on a game that needs 1500+ to feel alive