Forums Aflame - Companion Nerf Under Fire

The Star Wars: The Old Republic forums are afire with the nerf to companion damage and healing outputs that arrived with yesterday's patch. Bioware's Eric Musco took to the forum to explain why alterations in companions' base stats and damage/healing reductions were necessary, a post that has generated an astonishing ninety-six pages of angry posts from players who feel that the changes were a 'knee-jerk reaction' to what most acknowledge was an overpowered system.

Musco wrote:

In KotFE, with a large focus on going back to story, we wanted to make sure that all of our story content was accessible to all of our players. The power that Companions bring to the table, definitely played a part in that accessibility. Companions, from a combat perspective, should complement and provide support to your character, not overshadow them. However, in looking at how strong Companions are, we may have gone a bit too far in that direction. Simply put, while playing through much of the game, there are a lot of situations in regular combat where it is practically impossible for you to be killed if you have a healing Companion. Although this can be fun for a time, this wasn’t our goal. Companions should be strong, they should fill any role you need, but they should not make your actual gameplay be overshadowed by how strong they are.

You can also check out our own MMORPG.com forum about the issue in a thread created by jesteralways:

Fast forward 1 month, patch 4.0.2 just hit and companion burst heal and damage nerfed by 75%-80%, Dot and HoT buffed by 10%; and we are dying like cockroaches in heroics of any planet above 35, our companions can't keep up with their heal or their tanking or even damage enough mob while we heal them to before they die and take us to void with them. A level 65 player dying constantly in lowbie heroics, that was not what Bioware promised us when they "sold" us kotfe and level sync.

You can read more at any of the links above. Have you played SWTOR since the new patch? What are your thoughts and impressions of the changes? Leave us your thoughts in the comments.