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Why have useless abilities, classes and specs?
Vermillion_Raventhal
Member EpicPosts: 4,198
It's one thing that's always bothered me. Some are gimped from the start or nerfed at some point to uselessness or just week.
Two classes that standout to me were the Thane in Dark Age of Camelot and Shaman in World of Warcraft. I think I played both classes in beta and while I know the Shaman was overpowered for sure both got nerfed and we're below the curve for a long time. Maybe still are as I don't really play anymore.
It's like developers just see a class on power being too strong and troublesome to balance they nerf instead of fine tuning them. Better to leave it below the curve than above.
Maybe it's just me.
Two classes that standout to me were the Thane in Dark Age of Camelot and Shaman in World of Warcraft. I think I played both classes in beta and while I know the Shaman was overpowered for sure both got nerfed and we're below the curve for a long time. Maybe still are as I don't really play anymore.
It's like developers just see a class on power being too strong and troublesome to balance they nerf instead of fine tuning them. Better to leave it below the curve than above.
Maybe it's just me.
Comments
I'd imagine it's probably a similar story to the Shaman in WoW.
Every class had a good mixture of primary role + utility. The utility in the game was designed to balance out the primary roles.
For example, LotRO had 2 DPS classes - hunter and champion. Hunter was ranged single target, champion was melee AoE. That in itself was enough to make both roles equally viable at all times. Champion would sometimes be superior, othertimes hunter, but virtually all content was balanced with a mix of situations so neither class was superior.
But then, take the burglar. A dps/cc/debuff class. On the DPS front, it was inferior to champions and hunters, but once you added CC and debuff it balanced out to be an equally valid class in all situations. The balance was obtained via ability to complete content, rather than on specific aspects like dps, mitigations etc.
This was further reinforced by content designed to have more than one strategy. The game completely lacked enrage timers for a long time, had no DPS meters or anything like that, so there was no pressure to bring specific builds. So, a 6 man group could be tank, healer and 4 dps, aka "brute force". It would be straight forwards, relatively quick, but lacking in subtlety. Or, go tank, healer, 2 dps, captain and burglar. This would slow you down a bit, but the captain would buff everyone, making life easier, whilst the burglar would debuff and cc, making it easier still. So, you're balancing speed with safety. The game was flexible enough to run just about any group combination. I ran raids without a tank class, instead stacking up on debuffing and healers. I ran 6mans with 6 captains / loremasters / burglars, relying on crazy utility rather than normal tactics.
I ramble, but the point is that LotRO never once had useless classes whilst I was playing, because every class offered a unique playstyle and the content was well designed.
Now, useless skills and specs....meh. Skill bloat is definitely an issue with older MMOs, but at the same time part of the skill is in fully understanding your class and weeding out the bloat. Same with specs. If you have specs, it means you offer variety which will invariably lead to gimped specs. As long as 1 spec is always useful (and fulfils primary role) I'm happy. For example, my captain in lotro had dps spec, tank spec and healing spec, yet the class was a buffing class. It meant regardless of spec, I could always fulfil primary role, I just got to choose which secondary role I wanted to focus on. I would never expect secondary roles / specs to be as good as other classes primary roles. If / when that happens, you end up with a game that lacks specialisation of classes and is therefore too bland for me.
Allowing "gimping" allows and advantage to the pros over the scrubs.
Allowing a large number of skills gives us more flavor and the feelings that go with it. Call it immersion if you will because I won't call it that.
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Looking at it from the other side of it. If all skills are perfectly equal, how do you make the system interesting rather than boring.
Suppose you have a plus 10% damage to long swords as a skill. Giving +10 damage to maces would be equal. Then each weapon gets a 10% damage skills. Now some boring person will come in to say why not one skill that is +10 damage for all weapons. You sir, are why gaming sucks now.
So the crux of the all skills are non-gimped is that they need to be equal in power because if they aren't equal then the less powerful one is gimped by definition. So how do you balance it?
Test: You have three skills you want to balance:
Skill 1) +15% shield blocking.
Skill 2) _____ movement speed.
Skill 3) _____ archery range.
What numbers do you put into skill 2 and skill 3 to make all three skills equal? Show the proof.
Not so simple is it?
This is where some turd will suggest a boring hierarchy. By that, he will point out those three skills shouldn't be at the same level choice-wise. They might suggest you group "movement skills" and have players pick one of the movement skills when they choose skills. Given that, you still haven't shown how the movement skills are all equal. Additionally, this boils down to the boring choice given above with the +10% damage.
What do you say to the open system players who might want to pick and choose skills from a large list rather than using a hierarchy. Do you tell them you can't do it? If you do give them this large list, how do you make everything equal? You thing make Skills 1-3 equal was bad enough, how do you do skills 1-50, 1-100, or 1-300?
Perhaps this issue WHICH IS YOUR ISSUE isn't that simple.
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Another approach is EVERYONE is EQUAL. All characters are identical in skills and gear. This is great for those people who have a desperate need to show their leet skillz in a video game. It is anti-rpg to me.
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I guess people want less from their video games. It makes sense if you are a free to play player who hops from game to game and don't care about any of them. I expect more from my mmoRPGs.
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Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Then no more changes are done to it because they often have more important things to do. Months later they probably do get back to balancing it again after they have enough data to prove a change is warranted.
I'd say that while balanced classes,skills, and abilities are important, they probably aren't a high priority next to getting everything working correctly.
Every class should excel in group pve. Every class should excel in pvp. Crafting should either be entirely separate from class or uniquely bound to each class.
The nature of classes is that, though they should excel in these things, they should excel in different ways at these things. Each should bring something different and important to grouping. Each should have a crucial role in pvp. If you cannot provide a new role or niche to justify adding a new class, that class should not be added.
To do otherwise is to design your game backwards. If I look at a game's website and their assassin's/rogue's info page explicitly states "this class is recommended for pvp," then I laugh. That developer has shown its idiocy.
I self identify as a monkey.
As someone who is primarily a PvE player, there is no such thing as a useless class. You can't "win" at PvE. No, I don't consider rapid leveling to be "winning". Every class plays differently and provides useful variety to a game. I played a Thane in DAoC. It was my favorite class. When I wanted to RvR, I could always have a spot in my guild's group. Nobody complained about how gimp I was (although the Thane certainly is the weakest). Pickup groups were another matter, but those were of little interest to me anyway.
Even "useless" abilities are fun. Again, I'm not competitive so I don't feel constrained to only use the best abilities. I enjoy have a few odd or situational abilities I can use just for variety. I would get bored without them. Perhaps developers are throwing in those "useless" classes and skills for folks like me.
you had to use really different skills and combinations depending on your enemy\timing.... for example you are a tank fighting a dagger assasin... you wait for the dagger to pop his triple %evasion skill and only then pop your ultimate defense skill.... then the assasin will try to play mind games ect.. go behind a rock use the skill and come back.. so its important to look at his active buffs at all times... sometimes its better just to run away... meh.. im high... Lineage 2 was fun.
Basically clicking away text windows ruins every MMO, try to have fun instead of rushing things. Without story and lore all there is left is a bunch of mechanics.
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The problem is that in most of these games all your different available skills and classes all equate to one thing which is COMBAT. Not even complicated combat. Everything does X damage and everyone has X hit points. If you try to make 5 classes with 10 abilities each all related to how much DPS you can achieve you are always going to get a very black and white "This is the most effective build".
In a real RPG game only 20% of the available classes or skill are combat related AT ALL and there are plenty of other fun things to "role play" skill wise than combat which can make as much XP but unfortunately MMOs only focus on combat for everything.
League of legends is probably the best at balancing and making 120 characters at 5 abilities each plus 100 items all do "combat" together and still have an absurd amount of strategy where one person gets annihilated playing a certain build but put it in another players hands and they can kill everyone with it. because the game isn't about mashing buttons or combo chaining.
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"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
And even for classes or skills that are genuinely useless, what makes you think that was intentional? The more variety there is, the harder it is to make everything useful.
And even if you do have a really well balanced game in which all classes and abilities are broadly useful, a lot of players will still whine that their favorite is too weak and should be made stronger. If the consensus among players of a given class is that it's decently balanced, that really means it needs to be nerfed hard.
The tradeoff to this was a very involved play style. Your build had to be razor sharp, and you had to monitor everything constantly; your agro, your CC resistance, your health. One mistake and you were using very creative language as you avatar collapsed to the ground.
I was fine with this. I liked the challenge of playing one of these properly, and yes, I used some creative language at times. But to people who did not like the involved playstyle, these tanks were considered 'gimped'.
Everything was hunky dory until the whiners were heard by the devs. In Issue 3 they made the CC resist easy. They made agro easy. They fixed it so that your self heal was separate from CC, and then they made the heal god-like. Now Fire tanks were EZ mode, and everyone had one. Or two.
All of us old timers knew what was going to happen next. Yep, in Issue 4 they gimped the shit out of Burn, the power that made Fire tanks so powerful. After that there was no way to keep bad guys in the Burn patch, and as soon as they ran you lost agro. Now they were tanks with low defenses and no offsetting benefits. And then nobody was playing Fire tanks any more.
My point is that IMO there is no such thing as a truly gimped build, just an improperly played build. The devs would not waste their time on an archetype that was truly gimped from the start. And if you whine, the devs may listen and break the character to the point of non-relevance that people thought they had in the first place.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
mmo's need much, much of this.
My view is that there are no "useless skills", just games that do not encourage use of those skills. What good is Crowd Control (CC) if DPS types have them down in seconds? Who needs healing when all the baddies are dead before ever getting a hit?
Many MMOs have places where skills are useful, but the attitude of most players today is best build and speed, not strategy and flavor, which is what many of these skills provide.
VG
The most common imbalance is the one between different casters and especially with the archer class. They tend to have a similar role in PvE that makes them compete for the same group spot. One of them is going to end up redundant and most often its the archer class.
Hybrids is another problem, how will you balance a class that can both heal and deal decently good compared to a pure healer or pure damage dealer. They tend to jump between mandatory and pointless quickly.
You also have devs that create 3-4 different tank classes that's supposed to tank the same sort of content. There's a good reason why players ask what's the best tank is before launch, its because there is going to be one tank that is simply better than the others and why would anyone have the desire to play something inferior for months or possibly years.
Solution: Create fewer classes, create classes that are different, consider removing a class if they start to become similar to another class. There's no need to have a rogue, an assassin, a gladiator, a monk, a paladin and a fighter if all they do is hit monsters with a different sized stick. If you want to give players variation, make the paladin, gladiator and fighter a spec alternative for warrior instead of their own class.
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Ah the good old you don't like it therefore the devs are incompetent.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Primarily, the lack of class identity comes down to an assumption on the part of modern developers that players are incapable of handling depth.
Build customization in most new MMOs (and even some existing ones - I'm looking at you WoW) has been decreased drastically to make things easier for casual players.
Buffs and debuffs have been simplified almost to the point of irrelevancy.
Classes are increasingly being given all of the tools rather than being allowed to excel at certain roles (here defined as dps, buffing, debuffing, tanking, healing, etc as opposed to pve/pvp).
It has come to the point where good character customization and half-decent debuff design has become something noteworthy, rather than the expectation it should be.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
1. Predictability in PvE
Dungeons and spawns are pre-defined. You always know the challenges you will be facing. Compare this to say, Dungeons and Dragons. You don't know what the best build is because you don't know what your character will be facing. Create more unpredictability such as changing spawns or randomized dungeons and it becomes more difficult to say with any certainty what build is best.
2. Balancing for 1v1s
In PvP you often see builds being balanced in terms of their performance in a 1vs1 duel. PvP should never be balanced around 1v1s. It should be balanced around group vs. group. But watch any thread in any MMO about "_____ needs to be nerfed!!!" and it's all about the 1v1 performance. If a bard rocks group fights hard, and an assassin almost always wins 1v1s that's fine as long as diverse groups with all classes are better than running groups of just a few OP classes.