Nestor wrote: »

It's kind of funny, when I die, my reaction is: "Well, I need better tactics, gear or some levels or group with someone" I don't fire off a forum post saying that something needs to be nerfed in the game.

Nestor wrote: »

It's kind of funny, when I die, my reaction is: "Well, I need better tactics, gear or some levels or group with someone" I don't fire off a forum post saying that something needs to be nerfed in the game.

Pendrillion wrote: »

Class and Weapon Specs are a Work in Progress in most MMOs. For the whole duration of the games existence. To assume that a situation as this is some ongoing irreversible issue, is the epitome of ignorance.

GreyBrow wrote: »

Okay Zenimax, surely you've read through the thousands of topics begging you to nerf this, buff that, and fix all the things. Essentially, these "discussions" amount to millennials crying about something they perceive as unfair, when in all likelihood the actual problem is that they have become accustomed to the new industry trend of hand holding and the mentality that everyone gets a trophy.

You will never hear a gamer from the 80's or 90's complaining that some player is "too good", or that some quest is "broken" or "too complicated" because games used to be HARD. There was a time when when games required you to think, when you needed to solve problems, find solutions, and complete complicated tasks. If you were able to do this, the game rewarded your intelligence and ingenuity with a prize, or a level completion. If you weren't competent enough to solve a puzzle, or not skilled enough to complete a level, the game didn't feel bad in letting you know it. If you couldn't get to the end of donkey kong and rescue the princess, that was that. You just couldn't do it. Sure, your ego might be a little bruised, but at the end of the day we all became better gamers (and consequently, human beings) because of it. As games evolved, so did this system. In older MMO's, if you were naive enough to fall for a scam, you lost your gold or items and that was that. You couldn't run crying to mommy to get your stuff back... Sure it sucked, but you picked yourself up, brushed yourself off, and learned to be a little smarter. You learned a valuable LIFE lesson, not just how to play a videogame.

I realize that if you implemented such a system, where not everyone was able to complete the game, or have the best gear, or feel awesome about being amazing in PvP, you'd loose your player base. However, if you let the industry standard of nanny-gaming, hand holding, trophy giving, and boo-boo kissing continue, you're going to lose a player base that is much, much more valuable than these bickering, complaining kids we have today.

TL;DR:

To this end, I propose a final solution to end the bickering about class balancing: A solution that seems almost TOO obvious, and something you should have done from day one. The main problem is that some classes (DK, Templar) have very good class specific skills, while others (NB, Sorc), do not. With a maxed out Sorc, the highest DPS you can achieve using ONLY class abilities is around 500. Therefore, DPS Sorc must necessarily use a destruction staff as its primary means of attack if he wants to have a DPS that is competitive with a DK or NB. This represents an in inherent imbalance, because while a Sorc must rely on a destruction staff as his primary means of damage, a DK has access to all the same destruction abilities, in addition to his class abilities. If you apply the same thought experiment to tanks and healers, you begin to see a very, very large problem that cannot be addressed by simply altering the numbers of one or two abilities.

Furthermore, changing any ability with regard to weapon skills is an exercise in futility, as it does nothing to alter the balance of the game, according to the above stated principles.

I suggest you conduct a very simple experiment. This experiment is based upon two ideas: first, your policy of "any role, any class", and second, the fact that each class has equal access to any weapon tree, as well as equal access to all of the various items and sets within the game.

1. Because each class has access to every weapon skill tree and every item, the only thing differentiating classes are their 3 class skill trees and the accompanying passives.
2. Control for as many variables as you can: weapons and armor. Ideally, you would have a "naked" character, using no weapons and no armor.
3. The variables you modify will be the actual numbers for each individual skill, and if need be, you would modify the effects of the skill.

During this experiment, you will have 4 separate people. You will instruct each to make a character of a different class from the others, but of the same race, to control for racial passives. You will then instruct each person to achieve the highest AoE and single target sustained DPS they can, using ONLY CLASS ABILITIES. This result will be your measure of balance. You then modify the abilities of each class until the values converge on a single integer. At this point, you will have achieved balance.

Then, you will conduct the same experiment, but instruct each person to build a tank, and adjust the abilities until the survivability of each tank is equal. Then, a healer, and adjust the healing abilities until each character is able to achieve the same heals per second.

Unless you do this, you need just come out and say that a Sorc is the DPS class (which is laughable, because the abilities that give Sorcs the best DPS are abilities that are also able to be used by every other class), that the DK is the tank, and the Templar the Healer, and admit that true "balancing" isn't something you never intend to do.

Either way, you have a responsibility to the people who give you money each month to do one or the other and put this issue to bed once and for all.