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Upcoming Balance changes vs Hot fixes
This guy was busy tonight
Hey everyone, I had a couple of random posts I wanted to get out tonight, one of them being on the differences between Hot Fixes and Class Balance patches.
There has been a lot of traffic on the forums questioning why we have been making small changes here and there but haven’t yet put out a large patch to deal with XXX or YYY. Ultimately what it comes down to is what we do via Hot Fixes and what we do via balance passes.
Hot fixes, in general encompass easy, low risk items that traditionally target a specific ability or set of abilities that are broken and not functioning as intended, or that we find are being used to trivialize specific pieces of content. Many of these are small systematic changes in response to various events in the game, and can occur on a daily basis.
Balance Passes, are less frequent and instead target larger issues that would result in the adjustment of numerous abilities in a single class, or calling. These are the types of changes that we need to do more thorough testing on both internally and our public test servers. As such these adjustments tend to occur on a longer patch cycle frequently taking a few weeks to find their way up to the live servers.
Now that I’ve cleared that specific point up I want to go into some high level points about the upcoming balance pass that will go live with 1.1
We are aware of the concerns about DPS warriors reigning supreme, and we’ve tracked the issue down to a couple of talents that have been seriously misbehaving. In order to not swing the pendulum completely in the opposite direction we do need to tweak a variety of other DPS abilities as well.
As promised Mages will be seeing a general bump in both survability and DPS, as well as a few additional tweaks that will be helpful in PVP. That being said please don’t expect to see a massive boost, Mages definitely needed some love, but at the same time some of that comes from tuning down other calling builds that were too good.
Saboteurs will also be getting some tweaks, we want to keep the tic.tic…tic….. BOOM game play that makes the saboteur so interesting and exciting, but there were definitely combinations of talents and abilities that were taking things a bit too far.
While the above covers some of the high level concerns there are numerous other changes in the pipe that we are working on, and hopefully in the next couple of days Sweet and his crew will be able to stop by and fill you in with more info, and possibly full patch notes as well
Thanks!
-Gersh
Adam Gershowitz
Producer
RIFT : Planes of Telara
Comments
I dunno.... so far all of the changes they have made (including from Beta event 1 to live) have only caused to make the game more enjoyable and fair.
While personally I don't necessairly agree that Warrior classes are OP or that Saboteur's need tweaking ( I think the main problem with the Sabo is that you can't really tell when they are attaching charges to you when you have 20+ buffs/debuffs constantly changing positions on your buffbar. Fixing the ability to know when you're about to be blown up would go a long way to balancing that soul) .
I know that Trion has their own in-game data collection tools that they monitor, they aren't just making changes based on a few forum complainers.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Actually the saboteurs charges make a very distinctive sound when they start stacking up, hard to miss if you identify it for the first time.
There is a balance to be struck, AC2 was too influenced by the players, they kept changing the classes right up until the game closed down. DAOC did not seem to bother to address class balance while I played it.
But DAOC is the game that is still here, maybe for others reasons, but if you keep changing classes it causes palyer angst. Better to have well considered balance patches than loads of hot fixes.