Question about Fighting Claws

criswolf09

In Beta or Launch, how was the playstyle of Fighting Claws? I've heard that it used to apply a number of poisonus Chi effects but that's all I've heard.

bluhman

I never had direct experience with Fighting Claws early on, but I'm confident that it wasn't good. I say this because I did experience the meta during near-launch, and how Unarmed stood in that situation.

Basically, there's a few things to get straight about early CO's meta:

1. Not all powersets had 'essentials'. Stuff like a toggle form that would work with several stats and for several builds (i.e. Concentration, Focus, etc) didn't exist. Most powersets only had one passive to choose from if they were even lucky (so for most of the MA powersets the only in-set choice was Lighting Reflexes, No Way of the Warrior! For the longest time, Force had no passive period.) Roles and Spec didn't exist either, so your 'class' in a fight was not clearly defined. This often lead to very specific cherrypicking of useful skills from different powersets to basically make the most broken fighting build you could handle.
   
2. Superstats played a much lesser role. All those dual-superstat choices at the top of the innate talent list? They're remnants of the old 2-superstat system, and because of the above reasons this also meant that focusing chiefly on superstats was a no-no. Not only because it wasn't enough to really cover all the bases of offense/defense/energy, but also because superstat stacking didn't have the same buffing properties it does now (no bonus healing or damage strength increases back then.)
   
3. Equipment had funny and cool descriptions but was a lot less flexible. Offense-stat was very rare to find on most pieces, and there was usually not many effects such as +crit or such either unless you got very lucky. So with that said most of the bonuses you'd get for crit chance and such would in fact come from statting things like Dex.
   
4. Melee was trash, because so many of the melee moves back then had self-roots, only a 5 foot range, and in some cases really weird recharge limitations. The closest you'd get to a passable melee set back in 2010 was Dual Blades, simply because it had so many spammable AoE effects that were just easy to charge in with and cut things to pieces. Second place was Might and that was essentially only because it had access to Enrage - And back then it was a click-activated ability that would stack up to 6 times for each time you remembered to use it. Basically just having it was a global damage buff, regardless of melee or ranged so long as you kept using it, so you'd have a lot of higher-strength builds running around stacking this effect while using just about any other powerset than a melee setup.
   
5. As for Unarmed itself, it was certainly on the lower end of things, still strongly built around dodge stats, but didn't really have the equipment or specs to back it up (people recommended doing unarmed tanks with Regeneration back in those days.) It had a lot of weird decisions as well. Originally Thunderbolt Lunge was a dual-purpose utility that would do the current lunge it does now if you were moving, and if you were standing still would instead do an Evasive-Maneuvers reverse lunge. Burning Chi Fist had a cooldown period of around 10 seconds, so I believe the only real consistent charged melee attack you had with that set was Dragon Kick, which had a self-root and was still a cone.
   

Asking about a Fighting Claws playstyle from near-launch is about pointless, because just about nobody did a pure-claws build. I will surmise that many of the issues that Claws has had for a long while (such as its lack of AoEs) were just exacerbated even more back then.

Atari mismanaged a lot of stuff at launch. I'm so glad I've stuck through and seen the game mechanics become so much more ironed out, but it's just a shame how broken the whole thing was at launch had turned off so many players.