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No balanced classes please.
Telil
Member Posts: 282
yes i know you may all think that is a crazy staement but hear me out.
Fans of the original Everquest lived in a world where we relied upon each other for many activities.
You needed a Healer to heal, a Tank to tank and a dps to...well dps. Yes lots of classes found thier own way to solo hunt, heck my Ranger soloed most of his career. But for some adventures we had to pull together or grab friends and take down a coman enemy as a group.
Now i am not saying lets have forced grouping, but EQ did it in a way that you could choose how you entered a battle by using the con system. you could go to crushbone when all mobs were yellow, you just needed a group, ex would be amazing and you would have great fun. or you could wait a few levels and eneter when mobs were blue. you would get good exp and have great fun. but esentially the most fun was to be gained with friends.
The great thing about this system was that there was no class balance. because of this you could enter certain areas and know you would be in demand as a certain class.
But enter PVP. imagine an unbalanced pvp class system ( yes i know all games are haha ) how would this play? well my opinion is that it would be great. there would be no more running about a pvp arena solo, as you know you could only solo certain classes. but if you grouped and worked as a team it would end up being a pvp group battle. something that you dont often see in games these days.
What are your thoughts on class balance?
go on hurt me!
Comments
I think you are confusing the term Class Balance.
Maybe but i have been playing many PVP games that demand it recently i wanted a refreshing change to the dynamics.
In EQ i loved the fact that a certain classes would tear other classes appart it played even reasonably well. To me that is class un-balance. I think most old EQ players will understand what i mean.
But care to give your side friend?
I feel the solo player is the ruin of many MMORPGs and should be the one group of players that should not be considered when making this genre of gaming. Class balance is only a symptom of the underlying problem. PVP is where the majority of this variety is stripped away and garners (rightfully) ire from the PVE players. The solo min-maxer is caustic at best when he/she does .03 less damage than his opponent. If EQNext does their PVP right (if there is PVP-which I think there will be), then this is the player they need to upset most. Make them rage on the forums. Make them /quit. The entire community would be better off. Why? Because they DO NOT CARE about theme or if it makes sense in the world they are playing in. They only care about numbers and that's destroying the worlds these MMORPGs are designed for. It's time to start giving some love back to the PVP/PVE players that want to feel like they're in fantasy world again when they play.
Full disclosure: I play solo games. I love them. I think MMORPGs are better suited avoiding this type of play style.
If they get rid of levels and go to a "skill" based system, which come on, is only more levels, I think that people will balance out and compliment each other in the end. At least I hope so, it would suck if everything boiled down to how late game EQ became and if you were not such and such class then you were excluded.
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
Skill based = god please no.
Skill based games are good dont get me wrong but not for an Everquest game. In Everquest we need variety and skill based systems dont really give you that, granted thats because it has never been done good enough. but so far my experience of skill based systems is that they all end up the same class in the end.
If they do it the same way as they did old EQ then an unbalanced system of classes could work again.
Just my eq tinted glasses opinion though.
Easy way to have both seperate the pve and pvp so changes made for class balance in pvp dont affect pve side was made in CoH/CoV if my memory dont fail me.
And the game becomes more meta and less immersive. And who says it would be an 'easy way' to do that? Sounds like a headache to me.
Problem is, with the unbalanced system (which I loved in EQ), nowadays everyone would just play the 'OP' class. You would see groups full of whatever class was the best for pvp.
Off topic: I think EQ's enemy NPC system was what made players able to solo or group. There weren't 'elite' enemies. Just different enemies with different levels.
Balance is a myth.
Give us the tools that allow skill to over come.
And ones that reward working together (whether PVP or PVE) would be even better.
Two things ruin this paradigm.
The first is PVP. Then disparate classes have to be 'balanced" so that one can kill the other, unless you get into a rock paper scissors scenario.
The other is players competing for spots on DPS meters and theorycrafting. Both are difficult to discourage but it is easier to stop competition if there is something to do besides simply spam your buttons and DPS.
Examples would include rangers kiting, druids kiting, druid rooting, etc.
EQ started out with a holy trinity of tank healer CC and everyone was DPS as much as they could. It was not kill the boss as fast as possible and top the DPS meters. It was ranger joe kite that add druid X root that mob, of course a chanter was the master CC and when you have a class that can only CC...well then you are headed down the right track of not tank and spank fights and more along the lines of that stay alive until we can get this boss dead.
Todays MMOs have you take on 10 mobs and AOE them down while the tank holds threat on all of them and they die so fast that the tank getting overwhelmed or the healers going oom is not a consideration.
Heck I remember in WoW on Gollemag we used healer rotations, eq style, where one set of healers stopped healing meded while the other group healed. That need didn't make it into BWL let alone BC.
And I am not basing this only off WoW I mean RIFT, SWTOR, bla bla, all of em, Ive played them all and they are all designed now around who does the most DPS and tanks and healers are ... not respected. They are just there to hold the mob still and heal while the DPS competes on the DPS meters.
Bring back the need for cc and offtanks and make fights about control not zerging ASAP.
i find that developers who balance classes in the pve part of the game, because of imbalances in pvp, are stupid...
i liked the way each class was different in everquest... each had their own uses... though some more than others...
But with their experience now, they should be able to have that, and still have them relatively equal in powers... as long as they do not remove stuff that works in pve, due to pvp... i'm sick and tired of classes getting nerfed, because something is op in pvp...
skill based with class template is the way to go.
Start with a set class template.
This would give you maybe 5 skills you start with that are class specific and generic.
for a warrior you get permanent ac and health bonus and starter skills something like
Skill 1: Bash: stun with damage
Skill 2: Kick: quick damage between main attack
Skill 3: Ankle Strike: Damage with a snare effect
Skill 4: Swipe: Aoe attack
Skill 5: Battle Cry: buffs self and group providing additional health health and armor class temporary and angers mobs.
From here you can choose to level these up or not based on using them. Maybe you want to get skills not related to warrior like healer or druid or shadow knight or ranger. Basically this opens the full pool up to players so they can play a mage tank or whatever they want to create. Or they can stick with the same skill line and get additional skills at the warrior trainer.
Once you level a skill up you can lock it or let it drop down as it is not used to the point of zero points.
The beauty of this system is you can hurt your guy if you build him wrong but are never really hurt. You can always switch your skills out for others by visiting an appropriate skill vendor. As you venture further you may encounter additional skill vendors or quest npc's that give you the option to get even more skills that were not available earlier. There would be a total skill point cap for characters though so you wouldn't be able to be expert at everything. This would make choices challenging in building characters over time, but rewarding since you may stumble upon an epic combo of skills that work crazy good together along with an initial class template to form something maybe never seen in mmo's yet.
So let that system with point caps be the class balance. You want to make your guy an expert early in a few things but skip out on the other 4 things, you may find yourself super undermatched against other guys that built in different ways. But in a group battle this would end up being epic crazy business.
They must separate the skill mechanics for PvP and PvE. It will save them a lot of headaches and the players will learn to adjust. Gutting PvE abilities for PvP balance has resulted in 2 second fears and 1/4 second mezes, lots of fun.......PvE people have gotten the short end of the stick when companies try to create a game balancing both at the same time, it's time for that to change.
They should ask people do you want all the classes to be essentially the same but you get to have "balance". Or they balance things separately and you will have to adjust your playstyle a bit according to what your are playing PvE or PvP. Trying to balance both at the same time has always been the impossible which no dev has been able to pull off to this point.
To start I love PvP and hope EQN has an area for PvE and another area for PvP like DAoC, ESO or AA. That being said I get where the pure PvEers are coming from. You can balance skills but the compromise starts right at class design. They start designing classes that can have skill sets act different in PvP and PvE. Take a enchanter, how awesome would that class be if all mez spells lasted 2-5 seconds like most CC in PvP games. They are designed to control a crowd, so whats their core roll now? How do you balance that set of skills without making them a new class or breaking the core of what they are.
Same with a class like a druid, even with all spells balanced for PvP, they have so many tools they would be a god in PvP. So the core of what makes a class work in PvE can often not be balance for PvP when the design of the class is made for PvE. Now go tell the EQ fans they cant have Bards and Enchanters or Druids because the core design cant be balance for PvP. Sure you could shorten their CC times and make it so the AE CC limit the number of targets but what do you have left? Pure PvEers want a game designed from the ground up with nothing but PvE in mind, from teaming to solo.
no thanks eq as a skill game blech,i played a mage started rioght before kunark maybe halfway.
Pets could do more damage than a average warrior but we still needed them its not like pets could be told what to do unbalance in balance, rogues imo where a bit over powered.. rangers welll they where useful yes....theres got to be some balance in pvp but dont let it effect pve
Taking your example and applying it to skill based class template.
Take a warrior
Gets lots of health, can wear heavy armor, Has more strength,
Then add in some molten skin from caster class to add more damage.
Then add a pet that interrupts but adds more damage.
These can just be skills you can choose. You go from weak with a pet, to strong with a pet and some absorbing spells.
gameplay > graphics
I definitely agree with less emphasis on class balance.
I wouldn't say I want them to aggressively be making classes outright better than others, but there's a happy medium here.
Lets make classes that are good at what they're supposed to be doing. Not classes where when they run their WoW rotation they come out within 2% dps of each other or something needs to be nerfed.
I'm with the OP here, imbalance is the way to go.
I think a basic part of game design should be to make groups more powerful than the individual parts. EQ did for sure, and I think they did it the right way. Instead of wasting time making the cleric able to defeat the warrior in 1 vs 1 make a warrior and cleric tougher than 2 warriors. That's the most simple example, but it goes for all classes and should become deeper with every added member to a group or raid.
Asdar
Trust me OP ,i am with you on this but money talks so don't expect it.
You see FFXI players that did basically have forced grouping,went in turmoil when Square changed the game to be more mainstream.However games like FFXI and EQ1 never had anymore than maybe 500k gamers.When Wow came on board the MMO industry saw about 10 million instant new gamer's and another 10 million over the years that ONLY know of the main stream type gaming.
Devs no longer want those 100-300k numbers they are trying to find ways to get 1 million plus,a bigger piece of the pie.Smedley gave up on that and decided a better way was to get more money from it's players through cash shop rather than trying to sway gamer's over from WOW,who at one time garnered 65% of the market.
Point is i would not be the least surprised if SOE goes full main stream now and has everyone heal everyone dps and everyone tank.A smart developer should realize you don't NEED to go that route and FFXI proved it.by use of a sub class system,that way players can still solo and you can still have an unbalanced system.However SOE has never watched the creative games ,they always seem to be watching Blizzard.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Class Interdependence: Very Good!
Class Imbalance: Very Bad!
EQ had some great ideas and some terrible ones.
Making snare-casters great at soloing and pure meleers completely incapable was a terrible decision. As was not letting non-meleers bind but not meleers. As was granting hybrids a "flexibility XP penalty".
Players should be able to pick their race/class for RP reasons and not have to worry about being gimped in group OR solo play. They could easily have given rogues some kind of "distract" ability to let them get a backstab in solo once in a blue moon.
(FWIW I never played a pure melee but empathize)
Classes do not need balance... no my enchanter should not be able to go toe to toe with a warrior in melee combat. However, my enchanter should be able to slow the warrior down, while my teammates come to my aid.
Skill based games... blech!!! No classes? meh. The problem I see with games like this is it is not immersive, my character is not unique, skill based is only an illusion of choice. The number crunchers ruin it in MMOs. I have been against multi-classing since PnP games... it makes no sense that a person has dedicated their lives to learning magic and can now throw fireballs but well then some barbarian who has always been a meathead can throw fireballs just as well because they spent a few points into it when they levelled up. It is just silly and there will always be optimal combinations. Having our own jobs to do makes us unique and adds to the community feeling.
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I remember playing early EQ as an enchanter on a PVP server, and no one was playing them as they were so weak, and did little damage and I was always the target of anyone who wanted an easy kill.
Then I got up to a level where I could turn my char into a water elemental and sit safely next to a whole lot of Water elemental mobs, charm a player on the boat going past and have the water elementals kill 5 - 6 player at a time. I got my revenge, but so many complained (mainly as their corpses were also at the body of the sea.)
The enchanter got nerfed hard (charm got made so weak)
There will always be a play style the dev's did not think off which will be over powerful and need to be changed.
If there is PVP, there will be class balancing (and rebalancing forever)