The Star Wars Galaxies official site has been updated with a developer diary detailing the evolution of the Jedi Expertise System.

Howdy! I'm Thomas "Hanse" Eidson with another designer diary for y'all to peruse. The first diary I wrote explained a little about what a system designer does. My second diary had a high level explanation of how I approached a balance issue with Player versus Environment (PvE). In this diary, I will explain how I approached the Jedi expertise in Chapter 2.

At the time of the first expertise chapter, Jedi had already been revised and given many special actions. Their special actions were way more powerful than any other class and they had a larger variety of them. The expertise's intent was to allow for players to customize their character in a way they wanted to play as well as make them slightly diverse. This also went in hand with something to look forward to spending points on as you advanced with the profession.

The brainstorming began for the expertise. One of the other designers had been assigned the expertise and already had a basic flow chart designed for them. I had been assigned the Jedi by Helios and took over. Since I had a limit on introducing new abilities, I roped a few into the expertise. Too many new abilities would have caused major problems for designing the other profession expertise, as we might not have had time to complete the entire profession changes needed. The theme for the two expertise pages were general and the other light and dark abilities.

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