Markytous wrote: »

I don't oppose the idea of subclassing either but I don't think the combat team is ready yet. We were so close to getting a shot at balancing this thing after Chapters concluded and now they're opening up a huge can of worms with Subclassing balance... This is going to take a year more to properly balance.

This, exactly.

We haven't had a real balance effort since U35, and we finally get one... right before Subclassing happens.

I'll be blunt. Before U35, I had pretty decent faith in that those in charge were largely making the right decisions. Sometimes it would take months or even years longer than it should, but they'd get there, and balance was a constantly moving pendulum between the classes (at least in PvP) which was kinda fine so long as the biggest outliers got clipped periodically. I honestly believed.

After the debacle that was U35 and especially how deaf or at least entirely unresponsive they were to near-universal dislike for animations, changes, and things they had implemented, I really lost my trust. The transparence we got when they streamed those Battlegrounds didn't help, either. It's not so much that I'm against Subclassing as a concept (I'm pretty ambivalent), it's that I don't trust those in control to handle such a MASSIVE change when they haven't done a good job with balance or game-breaking Sets for *years.*

Subclassing is like starting over, it's HUGE. Will they just suddenly get way more in tune with the game? Will they become drastically more aware of the impact things have in various settings?

It would take more optimism than I can muster to say yes. Not since U35, I just don't buy it.

The_Meathead wrote: »

Markytous wrote: »

I don't oppose the idea of subclassing either but I don't think the combat team is ready yet. We were so close to getting a shot at balancing this thing after Chapters concluded and now they're opening up a huge can of worms with Subclassing balance... This is going to take a year more to properly balance.

This, exactly.

We haven't had a real balance effort since U35, and we finally get one... right before Subclassing happens.

I'll be blunt. Before U35, I had pretty decent faith in that those in charge were largely making the right decisions. Sometimes it would take months or even years longer than it should, but they'd get there, and balance was a constantly moving pendulum between the classes (at least in PvP) which was kinda fine so long as the biggest outliers got clipped periodically. I honestly believed.

After the debacle that was U35 and especially how deaf or at least entirely unresponsive they were to near-universal dislike for animations, changes, and things they had implemented, I really lost my trust. The transparence we got when they streamed those Battlegrounds didn't help, either. It's not so much that I'm against Subclassing as a concept (I'm pretty ambivalent), it's that I don't trust those in control to handle such a MASSIVE change when they haven't done a good job with balance or game-breaking Sets for *years.*

Subclassing is like starting over, it's HUGE. Will they just suddenly get way more in tune with the game? Will they become drastically more aware of the impact things have in various settings?

It would take more optimism than I can muster to say yes. Not since U35, I just don't buy it.

Part of the problem here is that the balance team seems to have a nasty tendency to consider things in isolation. Someone in another thread highlighted the example of the Radiant Destruction changes, noting that they make sense if you compare them to the Nightblade's execute and don't consider the passives that modify each skill. When you do take those into account, it goes from "balanced" to "inferior."

They've said that going forward, they aim to balance things by skill line rather than by class. The problem is that in doing so, they're losing sight of the passive synergies that are causing all the power inflation. They now have 6,000+ possible combinations they have to consider. I don't envy them.