EA / CG,
Prior to the update I spent all of my resources farming Jedi to get Yoda and then run a solid Jedi team. The Jedi are my favorite part of Star Wars and that is why I chose that route. I had pretty good success in Arena and Galactic War, but never really felt like my teams was overly strong but balanced enough to win and I consistently stayed in the top-10 in Arena with it. Post update, my squad is all but useless. Individually Yoda, Qui Gon Jinn, and Lumina have good utility but as a Jedi squad itself; the Jedi suck. I did not play this game to toss random characters that have nothing to do with each other into a squad and play. While I think it's fine for those that like to do that, I feel that I should be able to build a Jedi or Rebel squad and be competitive but that is just not the case now, especially not post-patch. For me personally, playing a Rebel squad, or a Sith squad, Droids IS Star Wars, that's why I play. If I wanted to play an RPG with random characters I could've played the Marvel game because players from different faction do team-up and even change sides here and there, but I chose to play Star Wars instead.
Over the weekend I accepted the fact that the changes to the Jedi attack strength, and the addition of Protection and higher HP caps means that I need to try something new. I swallowed my pride and moved on and took an interest in the Resistance squad. I figured that in this meta something like Expose would be a good effect, plus Poe's taunt, Rey and Resistance Pilot's foresight, and Finn's higher Protection and Health would make for a decent squad. I was pretty wrong, couldn't do a single thing with Royal Guard and some of the other mish-mash of troops. Count Dooku is still widely used on my server and it's almost impossible to land an attack without it being dodged and then when you do hit it's only taking protection away.
I understand the addition of Protection and why some damage was mitigated either directly or indirectly by increasing HP and / or Armor. The game was definitely too fast before and something needed to be done, but there are still some tweaks needed here. Evasion as a leader bonus, is too strong in conjunction with high levels of Protection and Health. Count Dooku as a character with his regular abilities is average to above average in my opinion, his stuns are annoying but he's not awful. His leader ability is way too strong and I think that's why he's still so widely used the way he is now. As players manage to buy more Darth Maul and when Obi Wan (Old Ben)'s leader ability is fixed you'll probably see similar issues.
Lastly, I think the teams needs to think about Star Wars from a fan's point of view. What is it about Star Wars that is exciting? What is it about Star Wars that makes it Star Wars and drives people to play Star Wars themed video games? Some people get behind the Rebels, some get behind the Empire, and some will additionally get behind certain characters like Anakin / Vader, Yoda, Han, and the newer characters like Rey and Kylo Ren especially because we don't know what awaits their future. But ultimately those characters align themselves with a certain faction. Anakin as designed in this game aligned himself with the Jedi (until later), Luke eventually aligned himself with the Rebels and later the Jedi, and Rey will most likely align herself with the Resistance and probably Jedi as well. If you think about it that way, this game is NOT Star Wars, it is just put the best random character whether they're relevant to the Star Wars universe or not together and play the game because that's better than team synergy. Not that it's necessarily wrong to just put random troops together who's abilities have some synergy to them, I CAN totally understand that, but unfortunately that is and has been the ONLY way to play this game to-date. Building a full squad of one faction is not feasible if you want to be highly competitive and players should have that option as well. Unfortunately for me that's the option I would like to have for this game and not having it now post-patch makes it hard for me to stay interested and continue to invest time or money in this game. Let the community flaming begin...
Best Regards
EA Staff (Retired)
