April 5, 2011: The results are in!
- 62% felt that spellcasters need a boost
- 34% don't PK
- 31% felt it seems pretty balanced
- 21% think fighters need to be toned down
- 18% feel fear is too powerful
- 12% think guild spells make fighters too strong
Although we have no immediate plans to change the fighter/spellcaster dynamic (we have a lot of other changes in the works that need to be finalized before then), we will revisit these results and the comments posted and see if we can adjust accordingly.
The whole poll is based on two things:
ReplyDelete1) people that can’t fight the verm fighters and
2) fighters in general complaining that they can’t properly fight while feared.
Fighters need to be toned down: fighter x caster from scratch is pretty even. Both have the same chances of victory when in the hands of good pkers.
Spellcasters need a boost: while I do believe that increasing the spells damage won’t change anything, this seems to be the general complain of casters. Pretty sure that those complaints come from casters that tried fighting vermillions and weren’t creative enough to find a way through it. Guess what? An increase of damage won’t change the battle; you’ll still get your ass pummeled down if you plan on fighting the same way you did before.
Guild spells make fighters too strong: only bolas cause you can't uncurse yourself cause of the cost of disarm/dislodge. The rest of the guild spells effect everyone evenly.
Fear is too powerful: only if you solely rely on trip/bash/kick. Rangers have bows, barbarians are tanks, monks can work with dragonpunch, and fighters can still be offensive with malas. The rest of the classes don’t need to bother with it at all. You’ll still be landing 2-3 attacks per turn and that is good enough if you know how to fight.
Seems pretty balanced to me: it is but since there's no problem with making PK easier: increase spells damage, nerf bolas.
I don't PK: you should. (:
I agree with Mistah Hate. Spell caster's need a boost but increasing their damage spells will not do as much. You'll still be stuck in a 2 round lag trip vs a fighter and you're still gonna get pounded on. I agree that on a class vs class basis, things are somewhat balanced.
ReplyDeleteThe problem now is, everyone is a power combo and that leaves very little room for your selection of class/guild/race. This is a re-occurring trend that I believe dates back to the very early stages of pk on DR. For example, the top pk classes, in my opinion, some years back were mages, druids, and warlocks. Guilds were filled with them. Druids had a very good mix of utilties and coupled with a terror or tyrins made for a very bread and butter finish. Mage's too but sometimes a bit less on the melee department but was given fast casts/tags as well. Warlocks were popular because I think they were closest thing to a melee class that didn't SEEM gimped (I say seem because of the perception that fighters were lesser than casters, whether they were or not, I'll not comment.) Then some years later, the emergence of bolas replacing brand as the verm guild spell, fighter popularity rose. It evovled years into which when you /who vermillion now, it shows most if not all of the classes there some sort of fighter class. Now its an arms race, were others find a counter to this (ie: fear vs incredible melee landing) and so on and so on. You fight a powercombo with powercombo. And the next powercombo will be made to fight the previous.
I'm not trying to say bolas is overpowered or druids/mages/warlocks were the bomb but that there will always be a trend were people want to min/max to beat the current popular combo of the time. Popularity of a class =/= how powerful they are...well maybe but looking at the circumstances at the time would give you a much better perspective of PK balance than having a pole asking people's opinions, which many times are so very very fickle and biased (me included)
Also if I could vote for more than one thing, I'd say casters need a very small boost, class vs class without guild spells are fairly balanced, and I don't PK.
ReplyDeleteI think you should include Rogue's poison dagger and monk's buddha palm and similar skills in the caster boost.
ReplyDeleteThat or increase the chance of getting the second hit.
ReplyDeleteSo.
ReplyDeleteThe above posters all have fantastic points, notably the magic class damage boost vs fighters and a two round trip (at minimum), and the comment about super combos. I agree those are both issues that need to be addressed, but... fixing that, in my mind, would probably involve reinventing the wheel.
I say if we focus on somehow boosting magic classes (blended included, warlocks and bards are -not- what they used to be in today's PK environment), be it damage output or resisting knockdowns or increasing melee defense or... or whatever... we'll fix a lot of the problems currently attributed to a PK imbalance.
We could approach the issue from a class perspective, rather than a class-type perspective? We could come up with a bunch of unique and creative ideas to improve each magic class separately. Just a thought. But then again, maybe fighter classes just need to be toned down, but then we're back to square one (when fighters stunk).
So do we approach this from a holistic or individual approach?
Addendum:
ReplyDeleteAnother approach is to change fighters so that they focus less on melee and more on new skills?
Concept example: A warrior gets melee toned down (hit roll less effective maybe? See previous blog posts.) Say... stomp. Does -dex, adds moves penalty to movement for a duration of say, four ticks.
Or.
Ranger gets melee toned down. Say... set trap . If target hits the trap by moving in and out of the same room often enough (e.g., Meshra) they get hit with a freeze penalty (they can't walk out of the room) for a tick.
Those specific skills, doesn't matter if those are the skills. I was just trying to demonstrate the concept. I mean, that's how magic classes work, they all, for the most part, rely on their unique combination of spells (blended classes are slightly different). Druids rely on using their familiars effectively, while mages rely on maximizing HP and hammering out some killer elementals.
Thoughts?
Wow, yeah.
ReplyDeleteMelee classes right now are relying on passive abilities (melee) to PK. Tone melee dependency down by supplementing melee classes with new (more strategic and tactical) skills.
This way, you also alleviate complaints about fear being too powerful (because it does cripple melee classes).
Yeaaaaah!
Yeah, I've always advocated the addition of new skill set in place of relying on melee to do damage for fighter types but nobody likes listening to me haha.
ReplyDeleteImo, I still think the pk balance is alright-ish excluding guild spells though I believe fighters have a bit of an advantage. But if you look at it this way, almost every class have a way to, at least, deal with melee. Most magic/hybrids have mirrors to mitigate damage(w-mage, lock, bard, mage, necro, psi), if not they have pets (druids and w-mage) and/or can tank fairly well with healing spells (druids/clerics), or are stupid evil and take yo moneh (rogues), or fighters themselves.
But then again, we're all min/maxers at heart really and we always have to supplement our characters with a guild spell else it won't be complete. :P
Also rogues do NOT need buffs lol. Monks do but there's already a ton thats not right with monks so nobody cares about them haha.
You had a lot of good points K-FLO.
ReplyDeleteI would like to add though that I think rangers are the one exception where a guild spell (ty wrath, terror) makes them too powerful with sap arrows. I'd like to see those sap arrows done away with, could live with the other arrows even though they do more damage than my offensive spells at no cost mana wise.
Theoretically magic classes should be great finishers with malas, but really all you need is a good dirt kick/bolas and trip tags to take someone down. I'd like to see trip miss more to counter this process.
In the end I'm all for increasing spell caster damage for non-mages because an arrow/firegem equalling my spells in damage isn't fair. Wands availability/spells on them need to be looked at more closely to keep some cards in the magic classes favor.
Its funny cause I think rangers are very very very lackluster without guild spells. Guild spells really does put a lot of things over the top.
ReplyDeleteThe best example I can think of is rangers. I personally think they are a HORRIBLY designed class. Horrible. A lot of their skillsets don't synergize well and supplement each other. Then the game designers back then gave them some super arrows cause yeah, rangers suck. Guess what? They still suck imo. But you give them something they don't have (curse via tyrins or terror) or something that magnifies the classes' strengths a million fold (their melee being super buffed via bolas), you got something not so sucky and in some cases (for example a tyrin/terroring ranger vs a none gater) to something borderline OP. Sap doesn't work well cause that would be redundant and stupid (HEY I CAN SAP TWO DIFFERENT WAYS!) and the other guilds aren't really PK guilds and are very defensive-esque, save for Dawn but sear on anyone is strong anyways haha.
Of course this is just class + guild combos that I'm referring to. In this day and age, you also gotta add in that awesome, over the top were skill too haha!