Hey.

Even wgile everyone has his or her own tastes and for each its own and so forth..

For couple of years now. i have felt anger and frustration and will to smash my keyboard some more whenever i hear this called.

BALANCE IS NEEDED...


Why?

Over my 10+ year career of MMORPG gaming, most notably World of Warcraft.. Wwhen ever something is changed for balance, it has meant that the smaller side of player community, the one who has voice in forums, has demanded changes and balances for PVP or group PVE..

And among all this, the "casual" player community who plays the questing and such, tends to be the one who suffers the consequences most.

Classes have their class lore, races have race lore, they all have certain expectations and assumptions how each class/character should "feel" when plqayed. This has litle to do with balance, but much to do with how certain characters are expected to behave in fantasy world..

For example if we take some assassin type from fantasy and think of it... Daggers, poisons, leather armor, that sort of thing, hides, attacks, stick the blade to kidney and kills its victim fast and silent. This feel might easily go away in MMO fantasy if balance demands that the burst is destroyed.

Lets take a mage, a Raistlin Majere type character.. Extremely powerful with spells and knownledge, very weak and fragile physically, can do enormous damage to massive crowds or heal whole village of sick people but can be killed by that assassin if gets close.

Now players call out some more survivabilityt for mages, then other crowd tells they do too much damage, they are made physically more resistant throug game mechanics, damage is nerfed, AOE soft caps and so forth.. Soon the feel goes easily away, you wont die easily anymore but you wont do any extreme damage either..

Lets take a tanky warrior type in heavy steel armor with shining sword and shield. You are hard to slay, a bit slow ye are but you not need the speed as long as you can slowly hack the opponent to death, however mage can electrocute you easily... Wwell, mages kill these juggernauts easily, assassin cant stick the blade through armor that easily. Tankies complain that mages kill them, lets raise magical resistance and these assassin types cant kill yo8u, lets lower the physical resistance, nerf some buffs. Your damage is also eaised a bit to compensate...


In the end, balance is here, every class wears different armor, has different weapons, different spells but all deal the same average damage, all can interrupt, cc, heal,do same stuff that other classes can do but with different tools.

In the end, we have classes as cosmetic templates rthat each have their own look, each have different visuals but sadly, all are still the same in different casing. Balance is here. This is how it practically went in some games, most notably oin Warcraft which i play no more due classes being boring and stripped out of anything interestig.

I just dont want it to happen here as well, Elder scrolls if any, MMO or not, is a game where right feel is extremely important, more important than todays idea of balance and if thats gone, then the game loss its appeal on rthat side, might be good in PVP and in group dungepons but is Elder scrolls about that?

I would also like people to consider the old style balance where we have our massive AOE damage dealer who die easily, our fast single target killers that die average speed our tanky warriors who last anything but cant alone strive, we have our healer tyåpes which are no good in any fight bu6t5 can keep anything alive if done right..

All im saying, is that balance should come from completely different elements working together and games like this, should encourage that behaviour. Todays balance for me, seems to be more of individuals chance to shine on his or her own rather than shine as a part of cooperative team.

In the old style balance, classes can be completely different and may not handle on their own (This sounds more like MMORPH way to me) but the right feel of class and character will stay unlike in the individual balance where any class can do anything in reasonable same effort and efficiency.

The reason i feel bad, is that i dont want to lose feel of my characters because of balance of today, which is really an msiion impossible.

All the best!