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Potential major balance issues
Snailtrail
Member Posts: 258
This is currently all the rage on the rift forums, however i have yet to seeit discussed here.
First i want everyone to take a deep breath and remember these accounts are ONLY of the content from level 1 through 30. It avoids discussion of "pvp souls" but still highlights a potential issue with the game, given its unique class blending soul system.
As most of the beta testers will tell you, a good portion of the game consists of Clerics and Warriors. This is increased after level 20, where a vast majority of players are one or the other. Rangers round out the third most populair. Followed by some form of Rogue, and last of all Mages.
Now to most mmorpg fans, this seems a bit strange doesnt it? Rogues and Mages have a pretty solid following in most games, people like the mechanics and the thrill of being a short lived, high damage output character. A skilled player makes either class look easy, however they are often difficult to master and difficult to level, one populair game aside at least.
Currently the issue at hand lays in the heart of the Rift class system. The Rift class system offers you the ability to keep active 3 out of around 7 or 8 souls per class, with the ability to switch out with little effort the remaining, as you see fit. Its probably the best part of the game, and one of the few truely unique aspects of rift, eventhough the three active skill tree system is not anything new.
This review of the beta consists mostly of class roles, what your purpose is, and what you excel and are weak at. As an avid long time mage player, i fancy the glass cannon mechanics, and enjoy dishing out serious ranged damage. The first 10 level of rift as a mage are quite dissapointing from my perspective. First thing you learn as a mage is that you need a pet based soul. Nothing wrong with that, however i dislike the pet managment game, its not how i play a mage. However you kill far too slow on your own, and you really need the pet to tank, you learn this before level 10 the hard way. Not a problem though, there are lots of souls, however after extensive testing of every possible mage combination you realize that "i dont really kill anything all that fast". A quick step into warrior world, gives me some insight on whats wrong with the game in the early levels. My tank is a killing machine, kills just as fast, if not faster than any mage combination.
Wait a minuet, i have tons of survivability, and these mobs go down just as fast on my mage as they do on my warrior....
Your first trip into warfronts, battle grounds rift style, same concept, shed light onto why there are so many warriors and clerics. They both are dropping people left and right, mostly mages and rogues.
It seems that the role blending give clerics and warriors the ability to DD just as well as a melee rogue and firemage. However the firmage and melee rogue do not put out enough damage to overcome a tanks health and defense nor a clerics ability to quickly heal in battle. Rangers do well since they get pets too, however they can attack while moving, as can DD caster clerics. For the most part mages are non mobile, and for the typical high damage dealing mage, the firemage (known as apyromancer or pyro for short) you need to stay in you tiny buff zone for maximum damage, all the while casting slow fireball skills and an instant cast with a cooldown.
Warriors and Clerics get the DD of the mage and melee rogue, yet keep their origional purpose, surviving and healing, while the melee rogue and mages as a whole lose their top damage role while gaining nothing from the system. CC's are easily briken by damage or clerics, they are no factor, DOT's are weak and clerics have HOT's to counter. Warriors have soul devoted to not only being a tank, but a tank specific to magic damage, with attacks that gain strength from attacking and getting attacked my magic caster, on top of that they can have a charge and root skill.
To shorten this up a bit, the issue is that tanks and clerics mey not be exactly top DD in the game, but are close enough to make mages absolutly useless, they have no role currently other than getting killed in pvp, if you want a dual weilding high damage melee character, warrior has a soul for you, and youll be able to semi-tank while doing it. Clerics can mele DD and be decent caster DD, all while healing on the fly. There are plenty of mage type fanatics, fans of warlocks/necromancers/ DD firemages / aoe storm mages who are sorely dissapointing in their classes use in game, effectivness, and competativness.
This is why as you level up in rift you see less and less of these classes, and more and more warriors and clerics. There seems to be no reason not to, you get the benefits of melee rogues and mages paired with the survivability of tanks and healers. Theres more to this, in deeper detail i may post about later, but i htink my point has been made.
Running joke is Rift: Age of Clerics they really are that good, warriors are good too but lack the clerics ability to be a caster DD as well and heal (remember you can posess every soul and activate any combination of 3) so clerics can literally do it all.
My hope is that after 30 mages gain some use, not just as glass cannones, as they are currently all glass no cannon, but theres a lot of very interesting souls in the mage arsenal, that are complete garbage due to ridiculous cooldowns, weak preformance of the skills, or utterfailures in in competative use. You know you are in trouble when the supposed highest damage soul in game (in the mage class apparently as their websites soul discription states) requires a pet to tank during casual questing, because you cant kill it fast enough and can barely survive the encounter.
Then there is the issue of mana managment, how slowly it recovers and how the mana managment skills in the mages arsenal require quick fights to work properly, long boss fights mean you OOM first, and not pulling damage. More on this possibly later.
So as it stands there are serious, major issues with the current content, that will be the downfall of rift if they make their way into engame. I know no one who looks forward to cleric/warrior raids with possibly rangers and support buff mages as filler.
Questions + comments welcome,i have extensivly tested every single mage combination and can offer more insight.
Comments
I believe Scot Hartsman (might be some other dev) said that they believe there are so many soul combinations that balance isn't really an issue.
This would be true if there were a tanking mage option, which there isnt. Mages in rift will never have survivability, even with a higher health gaining race, your locked into cloth armor, and have a very low defense. There is a healing soul for mages, but why be a low survivability mage with poor mana regeneration, when a cleric, whos chain armor is stacked with wisdom, a mana regenerating stat, has better heals?
The problem lies in the fact that while tanks get the high DD output once reserved for melee rogues, and clerics can do close to a mages best damage output, with little OOM issues for long battles, why go with the low survivability of a mage, with poor mana managment skills for any long battle?
There are big issues with class competativness, tanks can be decent melee DD, clerics can be decent range DD, Rangers are by far the superior range DD in pvp, yet mages gain none of the benefits these other classes are gaining, same is true for the melee rogue.
A mage in pvp gets torn up, becasue other classes are geared to take them down, with souls specifically aimed at this, while the mages recourse is to DD them before they can kill you, however this isnt the case, they simply do not pack enough punch to even dent a tanks health, let alone a cleric who can just heal it away.
And speaking from an account building perspective, if you level up a cleric, rather than a mage, you can be a great melee DD, a great caster DD, a healer, and quite close to a tank. A mage excels in well...buffing at the expense of DD, healing at the expense of DD, and well kind of straight DD. It has no direct role or purpose.
As you pointed out, in beta we've been capped at 30 as of now, alpha being uncapped. Later on mages do some serious damage, not to mention add a lot of much needed CC. I'm sure they'll tweak mage dmg up a bit, but complaining about not doing much damage at lvl 10, come on. No one really does much at 10, specially a class that is usually as gear/stat dependent as a mage is. I'd say just take a deep breath, and see what the devs do before release. And if it is as skewed as you claim, I'm sure something will be done to fix it. Trion has been on top of everything so far and if something needs a fix they do it almost immediately.
I believe you misread my post. I never said that there would be too many souls for balance to be an issue. That would mean I am taking an opinion of mine and passing it off as fact (which I didn't do). What I said was that one of the DEVS (not me) stated that they BELIEVE (opinion) there are too many soul combinations for balance to be an issue. These were the words from someone who works at TRION, not me.
Well, no one knows for sure if mages do top damage later on yet, and yes as i stated this is a review of the current beta content. There is still the issue of melee rogues being meh in the DD department as well.
Perhaps re read my opening paragraph if you think im all worked up, i am simply highlighting my extensive testing of mages, with some experience playing the warrior class as a comparison to how classes have benefited from this soul system role blending.
I think class balance issues are going to be very hard to wrok out in this game, seeing what tools and abilities clerics and warriors posses. My hope is that these issues are only though the first 30 levels, but it is something i think potential buyers need to be aware of, as its something that may end up following though to endgame.
And hey, i think this is a good purpose of the beta, the extensivly test a class and report on it...
questions and comments are still welcome.
The developer may very well be correct, but based on what i see in the first 30 levels, im not so sure it will pan out as such, my comments were more or less directed at the developer you quoted and not you yourself.
Just something to keep an eye on as we move into the next beta, which will put to rest these concerns once and for all.
I'm pretty sure that since the latest beta it consists mainly of Rogues now.. then Clerics.. then Warriors. However, people have the misconception that no other class competes with these three. There is thousands of ways you can do your build(s). Why not take the time during beta to find out a as people would say "OP" build?
Its clear as day that clerics are by far the most popualr choice, you see it in the starter areas, you see it in the level 10-19 warfronts, you see it after level 20. They are the most versatile class in game. Warriors round out the next most common sighting, they can be tanks, 2h DD and dual weilding DD. Rangers round out the third most common, but are a rogue class. Its the melee rogues that become rare after you get he ability to really start swapping souls, and people swap out of what doesnt work and into what does work best. This is what i see across several servers, and warfronts 20-29 lay out what classes participated, you see a lot of mages at the start, but its clear they dont stick with them, and i can see why, what sounds interesting isnt very viable or competative as a mage, and sometimes downright unfun, while warriors and clerics are quite literally facerolling melee rogues and mages in pvp, with more versatility overall.
Day one of beta you saw nothing but mages and melee rogues. This speaks volumes on what the community thinks is more enjoyable and what they believe to be "the best class for...." since while you advance in game these classes become less and less seen in game.
There are not thousands of ways to build a character, some souls conflict with other, your not going to want a warriors 2h DD soul paired with the dual weilding soul, there are souls that compliment each otehr quite well and souls that conflich with eachother. Perfect example is a mages pyromancer and stormcaller, both are DD souls, however anyone familiar with good skill rotation knows, you cast you best preforming damage skills, its a waste in this sense to jump around skills that underpreform skills you have. People learned to take one DD souls, a pet soul, and a support soul, for a complete and well rounded character. This is true for all classes, there are good combinations that play off eachother quite nicely, while other combinations make little sense.
Also i should point out that you cannot take any souls from another class, you can only have rogue souls if you are a rogue (that includes ranger)
Since players tend to gravitate towards the best skill trees in games with an open-class system like rift, I suggest that devs o these games produce some sort of dynamic balancing system. The more players that opt to get a certain skill the less powerful that skill is, probably on an exponential basis so that small degrees of variance in # of players adopting the skill does not have a significant effect on the skills power but large variances have an extremely large effect on the skill. That way the devs dont have to struggle to balance skills... The skills will balance themselves.
When I used to play SWG I would wish they would do this but they never did. It would have complimented the SWG skill system a lot... I think rift will be in the same situation.
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I have played three classes: Cleric-warrior- rogue. Not mage yet.
I dont agree with cleric´s damage output like some said. For me is low cos I prefer to choose a healing role. Comparing with my warrior thats it.
Rogues doing fien for me. I hate games where rogues are op like conan.
I heard somebody saying elemental mage with his pet (the rocky one) plus pyro soul are over. Maybe. The necro looks cool also.
Mages can heal themselves too but yes they wear cloth so they are weak in melee fighting but...
Dont you noticed that all classes have a bunch of knockdowns, fear, stuns etc...?
I think this is the only game I tried (except everquest I tried all) that every charactr has a LOT of survability.
maybe mages get deadly at level 50 who knows? But yes dont expect something like wow´s frost age or war´s bright wizard, no thanks.
I like a tradeoff system.
My suggestion on the rift forums was to have souls effect hard stats and outputs.
Example:
For every warrior tank soul you have active, you damage is reduced while defense is increased
For every Cleric DD soul active mana regen and healing abilities are reduced while damage increased
For ever Mage DD soul active damage is increased, but support is reduced
The tradeoffs dont need to be huge either, just put a little dent in opposing roles.
My champion/warlord/voidknight has great DD fromt he champ line. aura buffs/debuffs and defense from the warlord, and mana resist, defense, and attacks that directly mess up anything with mana, I am near impossible to kill while at the same time a great damage producer, and i get bullcharge, which stunns and roots, usually casters, who rarely dent my health lower than 75% before going down. Its too easy, and not really fun to faceroll that bad. I never have to worry about whos attacking me, i can always make it near a healer who can fill me up. I literally bullcharge hop from mage to mage, stunning and killing them, while the ALL rain fireballs on me, which only make my attacks hit harder. Its quite sad.
Its not that clerics are top DD in game, its just they do good damage, and if you are a mage with low health and low defense, its just another class you stand no chance against.
I will say, the only class as a pyro mage ive been able to take down has been a non healing melee cleric, i dont win every time, but its one of the few classes i know i can take down.
Not to worry 1 month into the game and there will be 4 builds in the game for each situation, either that or all the souls are so similar that it won't matter.
I agree that in one month you will have precalculated best builds. However the souls vary greatly from classes.
Like in all games in the past, if a class is Over Powered it will be nerfed, fact of life.
MAGA
Well.....
Frost mages in wow are sooo over
War´s warrior priest and disciple of khaine too
Aion´s cleric and rangar same
Is assasin still over in aoc?
etc...
However if mages are too weak they should make minor tweaks.
But this guys at trion are a dedicate bunch of pro workers (at least until now) and I trust them to fix whatever is wrong with this game.
But I insist we ahvent seen mages at their full potential yet.
Lets wait.