There are two game mechanics designed to create the framework of what your player can do. The first thing to address is how fast a player can perform a task: how often a player can attack with their Lightsaber. This mechanic is called a Global Cooldown timer. It is currently set to 1.5 seconds. When you hit the button to attack with your lightsaber, you have to wait 1.5 seconds before you can attack again. This is to prevent your character from firing off abilities as fast as you could mash the keyboard.
Players with faster computers and faster internet would have an advantage, and the goal of an MMO is to create a fair and balanced playing field. So the next resource system is designed to throttle how much of a particular ability you can perform. Your character will have many different abilities; some attacks will do a little damage and other attacks will do a lot of damage. Why would a player not just repeatedly use the attack that does the most damage? Well that would be pretty boring if you chose a single attack and performed that attack over and over. Game developers want players to use many different attacks and abilities based on the environment and situation. So the resource system is a way to throttle which abilities you choose to use. Let’s look at the resource system the Sith Warrior uses.
Rage
The Sith Warrior uses the Rage system. In the Rage system some attacks generate rage and other attacks cost rage. Your character starts with 0 Rage and must use an ability that gives the player Rage points that they can spend to perform more powerful attacks. This addresses the issue where a player cannot continue to use the most powerful attack over and over, they will run out of this resource we call Rage.
Let’s use some specific Sith Warrior abilities. The Sith Warrior can perform an attack called “Assault” which gives the player 2 Rage points and does a small amount of damage. The Sith Warrior can also perform “Impale” which does a great deal of damage but it costs 8 Rage points to use. So if a player wants to use the Impale ability, they must use the Assault attack 4 times which gives them 8 Rage points before they can Impale. The Impale costs 8 Rage points which sends the player back to 0 Rage points. The player will then need to Assault 4 times to attack with another Impale.
It will look like this, with your Rage points in parenthesis: Assault (2) -> Assault (4) -> Assault (6) -> Assault (8) -> Impale (0)
Tips
Capping
“Capping” is the term used to describe filling your resource bar. In our case, we can only store up to 12 rage points. If we have 12 rage points, and use the Assault ability, we will still only have 12 rage points after the attack. We cannot go over 10 rage points (unless there is an ability that increases your resource limit).
Dumping
“Dumping” is the term used to describe using your resource, or rage in this case. If you Assault 4 times to generate 8 rage points, you “dump” the rage by attacking with an Impale which uses up all 8 points of rage. Your rage has been dumped.
Don’t Cap Your Rage
One of the most important tips I tell players over and over is don’t let your resource cap, whatever the resource is. The damage potential of your rage generating attacks is more then just the amount of damage they do.
Example:
Let’s make up some numbers for this example. Each Assault does 40 damage. Each Impale does 100 damage. You can’t Impale without the 4 Assaults, so the value of assault is 40 damage + (Impale Damage/4). So the value of Assault is actually 60 damage in our little scenario. If you cap your Rage however, you are wasting the rage generating portion of the attack because you can’t generate any more rage. The value of Assault is only 40 and you just lost potential DPS. If your next attack is going to exceed your resource limit, dump the resource first. For Sith Warriors, this means if your next rage generating attack/ability is going to exceed 10 rage, dump some rage prior to using the rage generating attack. There would be exceptions to this rule; for example if it was a killing blow and you needed to maintain your level of rage for your next target.
