Yellow Posts: Darkside Disfigurement and Tanking

Every week in Yellow Posts, we dive head-first into the depths of the Dev Tracker for you and eek out every tasty developer morsel worthy of your eyeballs. If you’ve missed anything, this is the place to catch up!

This was a pretty slow week for developer posts so I’m going to dip a little bit into last week. I am really looking forward to my Dark side character getting disfigured and misshapen the further he falls to the Dark side. But some people my not share my enthusiasm for a Palpatine-esc visage. Never fear, BioWare has included a feature to toggle off the grissly appearance should you desire. As Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer, explains:

Like ‘Hide head slot’ or ‘Unify colors to chestpiece,’ this is a game option, on by default, which can be toggled on a per character basis.

Forum poster torsjn started a thread titled “I *Really* Hope SR Misspoke Here :(” about something that Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager, said at New York Comic Con.  Basically he said that the Shadow/Assassin ACs are off-tanks which was a departure from what we had heard before regarding tanking in SW:TOR. Torsin was understandably confused, and Georg Zoeller provided clarification on Mr. Reid’s remarks:

Nope.

By design, all tank capable ACs can spec to be fully capable main tanks.

There are no ‘off tanks’ unless you intentionally spend your skill points into different trees.

So, no need to worry, every class can main tank unless the player chooses talents specifically to off-tank. Stephen Reid also clarified his statements a little bit later:

As you’ll see from Georg’s latest posts, I did mis-speak. My tanking experience is limited (in MMOs generally; as I said in the interview, I’m a DPS lad) and I did point that out in the interview.

I think my confusion came from playing a Sith Assassin in our Eternity Vault demo many, many times, who was specced to be an off-tank, not main tank. However, as Georg has now corrected me on, that’s not a limitation of the AC, it’s a choice on the part of the player.

Sorry if I confused everyone for a minute. This is what happens when you ask questions of the Community Manager that are better suited to the development team. It’s not their fault that they can’t make it to every show, we want to keep them hard at work on the game. 

Apparently, Amazon.de reported (for a time) that the release date was sometime in April 2012. Jasdemi got an email from them saying that the release date had changed which was quite strange, he though. So it took to the forums and asked about it. Stephen Reid responded, saying that this was just an error in Amazon.de’s system:

…our release date has not changed.

According to our investigation there was some confusion between Amazon.de’s warehouse and the main site, hence the update.

Nothing’s changed regarding our release date. To ease confusion and to ensure this is the last message anyone sees in this thread, I’m closing this now.

Until next week, keep the yellow text flowing.