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Class Balance Is Terribad
ArEf
Member Posts: 233
Yeaaaah... The class balance is awful.
Sentinel / marauders are so underpowered it's unfunny. They can barely complete (and, in some cases, CANNOT complete) their class quests because of how squishy they are for a melee class. In all fairness, the juggernaut / guardian is also hopelessly underpowered.
Compare that with sniper / gunslinger (which I recently switched to) and it's just... light and day. You're a medium armour (like the sentinel/marauder) wearer but you have cover which provides a lot of range defence and you have range attacks and you do massive burst damage. Take down elites etc with ease, and most of the time you don't have to be in cover!
Of course, say this on the main forums and you get called a noob that doesn't know how to play. ._.
Anyone else got beef about class balance?
Comments
Its more to do with the companion you get IMO.
Theres a number of classes where the initial companion makes little to no sense in actually helping you depending on your spec.
I personally am playing Jedi Shadow infiltration spec so Qyzen as a first companion is ideal as he tanks whilst I take people from behind, fnar fnar, now if I had went Kinetic combat spec Qyzen makes zero sense and I'd be stuck until the mid 20s for getting a actual useful companion.
I have to question ones mmo gaming background to act suprized that there is no class balance in a Holy Trinity themepark.
The issue is that the sentinel / marauder is equally bad in PvP due to a lack of survivability. It's been underpowered for the entirety of the beta. In the last beta patch they give it a pretty big buff but it's still terrible.
What did they end up doing? Give it a bunch of buff skills that allows it to increase other people's damage. ._.
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Glad you like sniper.
The operative actually makes a sniper look weak however. I solo 2+ heroics where my bud with his same level sniper just shakes his head and waits for me to help him as he dies in the doorway when solo.
That said I am reserving all judgement until end game. There will be balance patches like all mmo's get, especially after release.
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Okay.... I play a sentinel in a competitive guild. It looks like you might be missing what a sentinel is. They are not a true melee dps... they are really SWTORs bard or even closer I'd say something like DAoC's skald.
For PVP:
A sentinel's strength is that the class has a lot of utility and some really nice group buffs.
The weakness is that solo you're not in your element because you lack punch and hard CC.
In PVE if you're having issues with anything other than gold story quest mobs your level you're doing it wrong or missing a mechanic. PVE other than a few mobs has been pretty easy for me.
Sentinels / Marauders have short term extreme durability. If a stealther gets the jump on you... you're kinda screwed because they'll time their CC's to hit you while your self buffs are down.
So it's not aweful.... it's just not easy. However, in a group fight you really shine.
They'll improve it a bit more, but it does a lot of damage already, so it can't become much more survivable or it will be god-like.
But this is mainly a companion issue, have you tried doing the harder quests with T7 (tank) rather than Kira (dps)?
Probably not.
I really didn't find this to be the case at all. For the type of MMORPG that it is, I found the classes to be very versatile and still capable, especially in PvP which is odd. If you're talking specifically about PvE though I think it has more to do with getting used to how certain classes play. I've played all the archetypes up to level 20-25 and none of them felt underpowered to me. The only thing I think I would change is to give the "warrior" archetypes their first CC earlier, preferably the same level as the other classes.
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Member Since March 2004
it also doesnt help that almost all of the classes in this game are ranged classes. so the few melee classes that do exist seem to completely weak and pathetic in comparison.
i was playing my sniper then made a jugg and in pvp i was shocked at how little damage i could do and how quickly i got destroyed.
poor melee people always get screwed haha
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Class balance perception is almost always made up of incredible amounts of personal bias, if you kill things with easae & dominate in PvP then your class is balanced, it loses 1 PvP battle & the class that killed you is OP, if they kill a mob you were not ableto then omg that class is Overpowered or yours is gimped.
Without some kind of statistical/metrics driven hard info back up, perception is all there is & it is seriously flawed as a guide to class balance, even then, hard statistics don't give a full picture ever, just a very rough guide that can maybe pinpoint a glaring anomoly.
Class balance is very hard to get right no matter the game.
I've read a lot about this in the forums, both Marauders/Juggernauts complain quite a bit. I will say this...I have a Juggernaut and a Mercenary, the Mercenary is far far superior soloing than the Jug (at least speed/efficiency wise). I haven't tested this for PVP though, and quite often tanks are slow leveling classes (though, my Jugg is a DPS build).
It's not always black and white you know, it's not all about numbers.
They got some nice utility, don't they have a 30m charge, or leap of some sort? extremely useful in PvP.
I see you already rerolled, so there ya go, hope you enjoy your new choice of char.
Err ... so ?
I dont know ANY game, MMO or otherwise, which has all classes being equally hard during levelup. No title ever archieved that, not even remotely.
The crucial question is IMHO if PvP at maxlevel is balanced. If they already managed that one, I'm impressed. They have to juggle no less than 24 possible builds (mirrored by realm, there are 4 starter classes which spawn into 8 "advanced" classes which each have 3 skilltrees one could specialize into - for a total of 24 builds).
Again it's not terrible.. but you'll have issues in solo fights because of the lack of punch and CC. Also keep in mind you have a psuedo vanish on a fairly short cool down.
They have 3 options with the sentinel/marauders
1) increase damage - the easy way out which will likely get it nerfed.
2) increase CC - more plausible.. if bladestorm actually stunned in pvp it would be pretty nasty.
3) Keep going the bard/skald route and give more group buffs and CC breaks.
Ranged classes are definitely easier, more efficient to play than melee classes in SWTOR. I wouldn't say this makes the melee classes worse though. My Shadow tanks fine, but needing to get into melee distance wastes precious time that the ranged classes don't have to worry about.
I'm happy so far, but anyone who's played Beta for any serious length of time knows that ranged classes are easier.
Actually my easiest target as a sentinel is a bounty hunter. Trick is to get on them and stay on them... keep your snares and roots going.
I also went combat spec.---
Just a point of fact but each advanced class, whilst having 3 trees shares 1 with it's archetype's other advanced class, so there are 20 builds (if you assumed purely 1 tree being used).
Melee tanking is a bit easier from what I've heard.. ranged tanks complain that mobs don't path right.
All classes in TOR are supposed to be comparable in regards to how much DPS they do, and it's a well know issue since beta that the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior and it's sub-classes are underpowered. The class boards in beta were full of thread requesting that the class be fixed, I know that Guard/Jugg have a update pending but if it's anything like the sent update it will be another nerf.
Unfortunately you've chosen the hardest class in the game to play and the only advice I can give you is stick with your smuggler, no point burning yourself out playing the class and waiting for the fix.
Never experienced mob pathing issues, but I've grouped with several Vanguards in Flashpoints so far and they are much better at dealing with spread out groups of mobs than I am. Especially as a lot of mobs in the game are ranged as well and either stay at range and shoot or will continue to move out of melee range to shoot. Then there is damn knockbacks, which are point blank and don't even touch the range tank but send me flying...
I could go on, but I'm only better than a Vanguard when it comes to handling groups of melee mobs or single hard bosses.
I've had no trouble completing my class quests as a Marauder so far, and I'm level 14. My character actually feels quite powerful.
I don't play a Sentinel myself, but I've had to help out a few Sentinels in their 20s with bosses in their class quests. I also noticed that 30+ is significantly harder than the early levels (not difficult really, just a big difference). This posed a small problem for me in one of my class quests as a Shadow tank with a healer companion, so I can imagine it could be worse for a Sentinel or any other dps class.
If you think Juggertaut is underpowered, you are playing it wrong.
Marauder can be very effective at max level especially. They are more than just dps.
Low level Marauders are hard to stay alive with at times. They are "late bloomers"
The classes are all really balanced at 50. Low lvl some classes do have some problems till theyn gets ome of their more potent skills. But over all they are fairly balanced.
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No offense, but you really can't comment as you've seen practically nothing at that point. I first noticed that the strong and elite enemies began getting stronger towards the end of Coruscant, and at Taris, I died a few times to them. Nar Shadaa was manageable, but Tatooine was terrible. I wiped probably 15 times to this Sith Lord elite for a class quest. When I got to Alderaan, I began pulling my hair out as now almost every side quest had me killing elites, and some quests involved killing elites like regular kill quests (ie go kill 3 of x). Even some of the strong mobs seemed largely unbalanced and a bit too overpowered for their rank. The final class quest of chapter 1; however, was what strongly almost made me quit the game in frustration. I wiped to that guy so many times, I completely ran out of money for repairs and had to PvP over and over again until I had enough money to afford repairs.
Balmorra was manageable for me for some reason. I had little trouble killing pretty much every elite on the planet, though I began there at level 34 when the recommended level range begins at 32. I got a healer companion shortly before leaving the planet, and everyone on the forums says that's the best companion for my class. He keeps my alive fairly well, though as a result of glitches or poor AI, I found that it wasn't wise to forceleap from a distance. The companion will run to max firing range and just sit there and pelt me with tiny heals because I can only assume his big heals don't have the range. On Quesh, I began feeling underpowered again as Captain Jesh or whatever his name was in a quest where you kill him and two droids lit me up like a Christmas tree and not even my healer companion could keep up. My tank companion did a better job for that fight, but BioWare really needs to teach them to stop standing in the fire. Whenever you face an elite that places a mark on the ground for an attack that does massive damage, about the only way you can keep your companions alive is to make them follow you then run like hell away and even then, you may not run far enough for your companion to get out of the line of fire. Either way, that attack took half of my companions life bar and he died soon afterwards.
That's really my largest complaint. I do not believe that all elites are balanced for the skillsets of each class. For a single-focused class with little survivability like the sentinel/marauder, some elites are downright nasty. Because these quests are designed to be completed solo, I really think it is in BioWare's best interest to nerf these guys pretty much across the board or honestly, just nerf them down to strong-type mobs and leave elites to group quests and flashpoints only.
You can say all classes are balanced at 50, and you're most likely correct; however, classes should be fairly balanced throughout each level range and not simply at 50. Players should not have to slog through the game playing gimped classes for 49 levels just to see them begin to shape up as they reach endgame. Most likely, those players will never reach endgame as they'll all quit.
classes not ment to be balanced.. ever..
guys.. dont come again to this game with the balance bullshit.. that will just ruin the game. A good game as underpowered/overpowered classes, and players adapt. Some players like to play the underdog, some not.. just pick the class you like to play with wihtout checking first if this is underpowered or op or w/e.
just have fun.