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So WAR is going t do something others didnt
Roche7
Member Posts: 89
Well at least imo they are.
Most game including WAR are not balanced for 1vs1, but something WAR has the others dont is clear cut who your strong against, who your weakness and who equal to you.
So when picking a class I can know ahead of time what its going to be like.
I will know that being a tank I will be strong to light melee, equal to other tanks and weak to range.
Or if I go melee dps I will know that I will be strong to ranged, weak to tanks and some ground with melee dps.
Will be kind of nice to have a game setup so that some classes arnt strong against all but one or two and some that are weak to all but one or two, and then get told its because its not balanced for 1vs1.
Not really sure what my point here is, guess I dont have one, in fact now that I think about it I am not really sure why I am even posting this, maybe someone knows something on topic that I dont?
Comments
thast the problem with level based games you can balance it only by level you can
This is my personal opinion and I have not seen too many games follow suite when it comes to class strength and weakness issues.
Now, I'm going off of what I have seen and read so far but hopefully this stays this way throught out the game. Also, you have to take in consideration of the player's skill (if it is any) gear and the specials they pick (PvE templates may or may not be good for PvP).
I'm hoping the game itself with the classes are nothing like EQ 2 and WOW's dynamic where a person that is twinked can have 30 people on them go to sleep for an hour come back and be at 80% health (true story).
i doubt there is anyway to balance any class in a game... skilled player vs casual player... give a cookie to one and it will benefit the other type of player. So far ive been please with mythic game IE dark age of camelot and what they are trying to do in War hammer is to get the community to work togheter. tank dps healer, the group is set up for RvR. I just can't wait for the epic fight we had in Dark Age of Camelot.
Lets take Eve-Online for example. Here is a game without levels or classes. Yet, people still wind up breaking down a characters progression in an equivalent of levels. Instead of a corp saying, 'We require you to be a level 30 character' they say, "We require you to have 15 million skill points'. It is ultimately the same thing - just differing terminologies.
What you say is true of all games unless there is absolutely no progression.
I can't imagine a game-system focusing on PVP and still be level-based instead of skill-based that would appeal to me and doubt it will ever change. It's really a shame WAR is not going to be skill-based.
REALITY CHECK
Pelase define what you feel a 'skill-based' system is as I've seen about a dozen different opinions on what makes a skill-based system. Not knowing your take on a 'skill-based' system is I can't properly weigh your statement.
yes they did, they just closed beta for 2 months.
But u know at the end its all about roll of dice doesnt matter if its skill based or level based. Daoc has probably the worst roll of dice system I have ever seen. Someone can have like 20% evade and u will see them evade u like 5 times in a roll or they never evade once in a fight.
There is no way to balance classes because player skill is different. Look at daoc, you can find videos of almost all classes killing 2+ people. From armsman killing 3-5 people, to zerks, to friars to valks, to sorc wiping groups. I remember back in pre toa days a high rr fire wizard killing half mid zerg at a mile gate all by himself.
However think about it this way in war. All heavy tanks have high armor (doesn't effect magic damage, though toughness does) and good fphysical defense (block/parry etc) which means they will do better against those who rely on melee rather than ranged. Melee dps does a lot of damage compared to tanks, this means that melee dps will do better than tanks vs ranged simply because they can kill faster (I also recall there is a "throw weapon" kind of ability for choppas and hammerers that has a range of 65, nukes have a range of 100) Ranged dps is of course good at range but is rather squishy at melee (except engineer it would seem) So, they will naturally do better vs tanks, if for no other reason than the fact a tank can't kill them as fast as melee dps even if they do get in range.
With all that said, I am sure we'll see tanks killing 3 people and the classes those 3 people played killing tanks with ease
The thing that makes war better than daoc, class balance wise, is that in daoc, you had most classes compete for the same role in a group, that being damage dealers. In war, it would seem a balanced group that contains at least 1 class from each arch type would be ideal (thouhg you could go with all dps bing melee or ranged and nto a mix) so, it doesn't matter that a tank class does less damage than melee dps, it still has a very useful role in a group. Where as in daoc, especially before bodyguard, if you didn't do comparable damage to the highest damage dealing class (melee or ranged depending on your class) then you wouldn't get a group unless your class had a ton of useful utility (like wardens, and even then most groups stoped runnign wardens until toa/bodyguard)
Balance has nothing to do with skill, if the classes are as balanced as they can be skill will be the deciding factor(possibly gear as well). The problem comes when there is no balance to begin with.
If one class is overpowered and the other side doesnt have an overpowered class they are introuble no mater how good they are.
EQ bards and necros could rip apart just about anything, meaning if one side had bards and necros but the other didnt well they where in for it.
Same with WoW, If I go into BGs as a melee type, and I bring a healer it is possible for the other team to stack two of the same class and be strong to both a melee and a range, this imo is stupid.
Again if I am good at say my witchelf, and they are bad at their Kotbs, and I can kill them and someone else with them that doesnt mean the witchelf is overpowered just that they need to learn their class.
Now if I run into pvp and I can take out just about everyone then that would mean I am overpowered, I should not beable to kill the majority without trouble. WoW has been plagued with this, almost always one or two classes that have an advantage vs almost everyone.
As long as everyone has obvious weaknesses there should be no problems. From what I have seen the PvP in war is slowed down a bit, guessing it will be a bit faster then what we see in videos since most videos are of people that never played vs people that never played. Slowing down pvp alone is a big step, when you allow a class to be capable of killing someone without time to react it drops the skill required down a bit. Double trinket mages, I am sure some people remember these guys, if you didnt see them first there was a good chance you would die before you could do anything at all, this isnt as much of a problem anymore.
Also nice that at all times everyone should be of use, like say in WoW if I go into BG on my paladin and the other team is loaded with locks, priests and mages well I might as well sit that game out because they are going to make me useless. WARs setup should allow tanks to be usefull even if there are lots of range, be it buffs,debuffs or whatever. Dont know about the rest of you but going into a BG and being nothing but a free kill isnt all that fun, would be nice to at least be of service to my team.
Your paladin would still be usefull because you could cleanse and heal, and bof that warrior. Now goign in a bg full of mages withotu a paladin stuck to you chain spaming cleanse/heals and putting bof on you, now that's useless.
Wow has many problems, gearnever being equal between 2 opponents i one, horrible cc immunity implementation is another. However, you rarely/never see 1v3 fights in wow, even with all the gear differences it's hard to win a 1v3 in wow, only thing that come close is rogues ganking one before the other 2 react and even that is almost never done.
But look at daoc, gear is pretty equal. So, how do you determine if it's an overpowered class or if the player is just good? Sorc have been killing 4+ people for years. Yet back when I played a valk (one of the op'ed classes =p) I would consider a solo sorc free rps, they'd need 2 10 min timers to not die.
Warlocks in daoc, got hit with a nerf bat 3 or 4 times, but will still kill most people in seconds (mostly due to how their class set up, 70& of the damage they wil do in 10 seconds is done in the first 3) but with an armsman (havey tank, that has an ability that boosts your magic resistances by 50%) I would rush at a lock, hit that ability, along with gear and resistance buffs I am looking at somethign like 70% magic resistaance, it's funny killing locks when they do 120(-300) damage. Locks had no chance against that, yet that same combination would kill most other classes in under 5 seconds.
Over the years, there are videos of daoc, of just about every class winning a fight with 2+ people. It gets pretty hard to determine which class is op'ed and which is made good by the player. Then there is also counters to thing, a sorc can wipe a group assuming no one uses purge. yet just 2 people usign purge would pretty much screw a sorc over (unless sorc had 2 timers of his own) so, is sorc balanced or is it op'ed?
I remember back in the golden days of chanters, debuff, stun, nuke nuke nuke dead ( you think wow isunbalanced =p how about a 9 second castable stun on a high damage caster that has a debuff for their own damage type lol) the only counter to it back then was purge, which was on a 30 min timer. So, were chanters balanced (because you could counter their stun) or op'ed?
I am sure mythic will do a decent job at class balance. But just like in daoc, there will always be nerf cries and soem classes will likely be op'ed weather in reality or just percieved as op'ed.
i think war will require a fair bit of skill, considering every person has a roll to play if they do not know their class and cannot play it correctly in a team situation then the team will fail.
Lets take Eve-Online for example. Here is a game without levels or classes. Yet, people still wind up breaking down a characters progression in an equivalent of levels. Instead of a corp saying, 'We require you to be a level 30 character' they say, "We require you to have 15 million skill points'. It is ultimately the same thing - just differing terminologies.
What you say is true of all games unless there is absolutely no progression.
Hmm Guild Wars does have progression without leveling. Max lvl is reached pretty fast . And after that collecting skills and equipment can be done in nearly any order you like! And having collected 300 skills does not necesarry makes you more powerfull than one that have picked up 30. But it does give you more options!
I have also thought about the classes, especially after the last podcast and I agree with the headline of the OP. If WAR delivers, that is.
From what we have seen in the chariot podcast i figure that f.e. you could play a "light" tank.
You still choose the tank class, but the assumption of people meeting, inviting you: "Aha. This guy is a tank, lets take him for tanking !" might be wrong.
Because if every Action, Tactic, and Morale ability I pick goes into another direction (for whatever reasons of taste), you would have a versatile character that can also tank. But he will never be the best at it. On the other hand you can have a Ranged DPS character whose defensive abilities you can bolster, etc.
If I am right, the designation as a "Tank"-class only means this class can be the BEST at this ability. But you can skill him otherwise if you wish to.
I find beauty in this system. I like that. Because what I just hate in many MMO´s is the strictness of a closed system. People tend to believe that there is just ONE way to play a game. "Ok you are the tank you take damage. You heal heal heal and he sneaks." chop chop. Wonderful. We won. "We need a healer or we can´t make it." etc. How often have I heard the last sentence in COH ? And we did the impossible without a Tank, without a Healer or without whatnot and we still won.
I don´t know how you guys feel, but some of my most memorable moments in MMO´s came off of such no win situations.
Sure you can skill differently in other games, too atm. But it´s almost hopeless to try something new because the classes are so restricted.
It seems from the chariot-podcast that the classes (the chariot) can take many different and effective forms.
The way I understand what I have seen so far, you can have VERY versatile groups in WAR which will open up many new tactics among them not least collision detection. Many can heal. Many can deal. Supportive tactics and morale abilities are open to every class. It´s up to you to skill the hell out of your chars to learn new ways. That seems to be the freedom of the system.
So far, it looks good. I would be pleased if I understood the podcast and the whole game correctly.
thank you man you just said what ive been trouble saying. this is exactly how i feel lol the skills you can put into your character are gonna be sweet. i plan on making a witch hunter with 90% offensive, 5% def. 5% supportive skills its gonna own
As a paladin if I went into a BG full of mages the last thing I am going to do is touch my heal button, if I try to heal with mages all around me and am going to get counterspelled and stand there with nothing to do for a bit. BoF was at one time one of those key features of WoW, people hate CCs they hate snares and roots so what they did was nerf how often you can use BoF and give it a nice big dispell me graphic and give more classes the ability to dispell.
Blizzard doesnt make any sense on some of the things they do, I hope mythic doesnt seem to purposly ignore their players, I cant say because I havnt played DAoC but I havnt heard to many people complain about it.
What I mean with blizzard is look at what is happening to paladins right now. They asked for RET tree buffs, they wanted threat reduction for pve and this is the main ability they wanted. Blizzard says we are looking into fixxing you but we dont want to overpower you in PvP, then they release what they are looking to change about paladins and its all PvP buffs, no threat reduction.
From what I have seen on videos and stuff from mythic, each archetype will have its key abilities by default, you wont have to spec to anything to be able to do your job, tactics and whatnot will be just upgrades to things you already do. They are saying 30 possible tactics per class, but you can only buy 18, I would think that if you play a tank most of your tactics would be defensive in some way, be it killing faster so you take less damage whatever.
Also with current groups being 6 and there being 4 archetypes chances are you have to bring 2 extra people in, as roles you probably already have filled. I am hoping the way this is setup you wont see people screaming for healers and tanks all day. I get the feeling dps wont be so overpopulated in this game, since everyone is a dps class, not as a primary function but everyone can dps and often it would be the best choice.
What I really like is mythic admits they messed up in DAoC, they know things they did wrong and are doing their best not to mess up the same things. They know if you make one tank better then another no one will pick the worse tank. So by making it so you can choose what you like and still be just as good a tank as far as tactics go everyone should be on even ground. I also believe there is only one pve tactic slot so can only hope tactics wont play to much of a role in pve, which is normally where the problems come from, not being able to pvp because your built to pve.
After watching some more stuff I havnt seen I have to admit that if they copied everything from wow and just added their quest system the game will be a success. They way they are doing quests sounds like a lot of fun, everything about this game screams fun. I get the feeling from watching people that have played at game shows, seeing how people react at Q&A, on forums all over, this game is going to be the next big MMO. It may be a PvP based game but I think this one might actually pull PvEers in as well. The only way I can see this failing is if they break some key MMO mechanic, thing is they have shown almost everything there is about WAR and so far I havnt seen anything I dont like. So as long as they dont pull an SoE and release a game packed full of bugs I think we all will be having some fun again in MMOs in the not to distance future.
Oh, there were plenty of cries and whines on forums for daoc, still are
Just as many as in wow I'd think though wow is kind of silly because every single class whines that they are gimped and everyone else says that that class is op'ed, where as in daoc it was usually people from other realms sayign that some class is op'ed and people from that class's realm saying it's not.
You are correct though that 6member groups with only 4 arch types should allow for some good variety in group make up, as well as allow pugs to be pretty decent. I would think that dps will be pretty popular still though. Sure tanks and healers can dps, but tanks would help more if they tanked (taunting and what not) and healers while surely nuking some here and there, should heal, where as dps is just all out dps
The difference is where in other games, tanks are just mediocre dps with useless pve-only tanking abilities, in war they actually fill an important role that cannot be filled by other classes.
actually believe it or not a fair amount of people from the warlock and mage commmunity (the OPed community) realized they were OPed and sympathized with the gimped classes. true story
Well, dont get me wrong, I think WAR has a bright future and is a brightspot on the horizon for us MMO'ers.
However, they are using a "rock, paper, scissor" PvP system, which is hardly new. Im not saying it is a bad system, in fact i truely believe it is the only system that can work. Otherwise, you end up with bad players crying foul every time they lose because in their mind it couldnt possibly be a lack of skill.
its the easiest system to implement, and the easiest system to rebalance if necessary. Dont think its impervious to its problems. MMo players have an uncanny ability to find an obscure ability, use it in such a way that in a particular group dynamic it can be overpowered. We gamers are tricky bastards and we sometimes think of ways of using a partiulcar skill that the devs didnt intend.
Another problem with the system is the group dynamic creates issues as sometimes in a group its better to have 4 rocks and a paper, but no scissors. You see Scissors running around all day with LFG tags on and the Scissors forum is overloaded with people crying to be fixed.
Most of its common knowledge if you read up on your class. Game wide usually it's Caster > Tank, Tank > Rogue, Rogue > Caster.
Anyway is it that relieving that you know what youre class will be like? Takes a bit of fun out of playing yourself and getting a feel for things.
Most of its common knowledge if you read up on your class. Game wide usually it's Caster > Tank, Tank > Rogue, Rogue > Caster.
Anyway is it that relieving that you know what youre class will be like? Takes a bit of fun out of playing yourself and getting a feel for things.
So you never played wow then I guess. Hunters are ranged, there have trouble with melee generally.
Some of the best anti caster abilities come from casters, paladins have crap for anti-caster work, wars only really good at stopping healers, which leaves rogues, they are actually good at killing castsers so they fit but still doesnt explain why casters are so good at killing other casters.
Cant see how as a warlock my only fear preTBC was one class of one spec, everything else was just free kill time.
I guess what I am saying is I am glad you find WoW balanced and fun. Unless our talking about WAR in which case I hope your not because people like you are the ones that ruin the community. I am glad you like playing a guessing game as to which classes you are good against and which you arnt. I dont like guessing what spec someone is to know if I can beat them or not, or even waste my time trying.
Problem with WoW is its really hard to find which classes really have major problems and which dont by going to forums.
Say go to the Druid forums and look at the number of complaints. That class has been buffed big time. They where really good preTBC, only real issue was melee scaling and that has been fixxed somewhat. My wife plays a druid and from time to time I do as well and that class is really something if you know what you are doing, there is very little really wrong with it yet you will see them scream they suck, truth is that class isnt broken its players are.
Hunters wars and rogue where often complained about but again it wasnt the class that was broken it was the gear blizzard gave them. If blizzard wouldnt have been stupid there would have never been a problem. And if you played one of these classes before the nerfs they got then you would feel rather weak after, again because people are most likely to say that something else is overpowered not that they lack skill/gear.
Well, I look at it this way (and I love Warhammer) this game for how people wanna look at it, I don't think will be any different from any of the other MMOs out there other than a more PvP balanced game (Guild Wars is to).
From looking at the beta videos in all honesty,the group pvp option looks the same as all other PvP/RvR I have seen in other games. The 1 on 1 player vs player option has not been seen and frankly, the game may not be balanced in that way. You may have a caster owning a tank 9 times out of 10 even with skilled players and excellent gear in the game.
What I am hoping for to be honest, is a set up where every skill and profession has "equal" if not greater chances of beating another class in specific environments (a tank with high resist gear on getting resisted by casters a lot) instead of the "starfall" punch where it's a guaranteed kill before the tank even gets in one swing (50-50 for everyone in certain instances).
It's waaay to early, to tell though and this is a good discussion posted by the op, hopefully "Mythic" devs will take heed to what people want in a group PvP/RvR domintaed game (true balance and true player skill reflected).
Just keep in mind that in a gvg or rvr enviroment balance comes in a different way from single or small scale pvp. Balance usually means u have an option to counter your opponent's strenghts: i.e. if the other team is running a melee spec u can use casters to demolish them, but if u go against a rogue grp with casters u should probably not stand a chance.
Also in gvg skill has nothing to do 1 on 1 pvp where if u (lets say) time your snares and stuns u can kill everything. In gvg skill comes down to coordination and every man knowing his role in the grp. If u focus on a tank while a glass cannon caster is riping u apart u deserve to loose, so imo in gvg calling targets and unloading your debuffs on a toon where it would make the most difference is "skill" in gvg
ya i agree balance in wars gvg pvp will come from the intelligent people working together to come up with counter tactics simple as that
theres a lot of games/mmos where it seems that one class will go on way but totally in another like tabula rasa where you can decide what kind of ranger or commando you want to be or wow where a rogue can kick ass at killing heavily armoured tanks but then suck at killing casters all the time.