f13.net

I'm not sure if this is a design issue or not, but it's a topic that has been in my head for years. 

Here's the plot: 

1) Create a game with x classes

2) Create a situation where y classes are purposefully overpowered

3) Change the overpowered classes periodically to cycle players into these classes as a means to prolong subscriptions.  Call these changes "class balance fixes".

My question: Is class balance really as hard as it's made out to be or are the power shifts in classes really just a marketing strategy to encourage players to reroll into the new, fotm class?

Those of you on the inside... any thoughts?

That assumes much of the "overpowered" whining is accurate. I think it's more the case that certain classes are underpowered in that they provide nothing necessary that another class can't do better, and so the slowly-progressing casual players who happened to choose those classes early on find it hard to join groups. Unless something is done to keep those sad folks in the game (like "class balance fixes") they'll give up once they hit the endgame because the idea of spending additional months on an alt is too daunting.

Any game with sufficient overlap in class abilities will ALWAYS create a new underpowered class every time they "balance" the last one. Players identify this new class relatively quickly and start preferentially excluding it from PUGs. so designers have only a short time to start "balancing" it before its share of casual players stop paying their monthly fee.

When a class is genuinely overpowered, like WoW's hunter and rogue for PvE and PvP respectively, it tends to remain uniformly popular and gets buffs to focus its advantages rather than being balanced in and out of its top seat like the also-rans. Overpowered classes are great for retention, and if a MMOG could have nothing but overpowered classes it absolutely would.

"Flavor of the Month" is a separate and unpredictably psychological issue, and if game designers could predict that of thing they'd be making a fortune in the stock market rather than implementing "class balance fixes".

Players invariably learn, over time, to exploit weaknesses in any game system.  I'm guessing that finding these holes are what creates many imbalance issues.  What I've seen, particularly in pvp mmo's, is an imbalance paradigm that shifts with time.  It seems to keep players involved in the game as many are intrigued by figuring out how changes in mechanics create new holes in the existing mechanics.  This generates rerolls and a fresh influx of new toons. 

Is this really psychological, inevitable, or manufactured?  I don't know and it's likely a combination of the three.

I don't think, as a general rule, players are retained by making them abandon their favorite character and start over with a new one. Some will, of course... but to make a successful design strategy out of it, they'd have to outweigh the ones who abandon their favorite character by canceling their subscription.

Excellent point there.  What about when your subscribers are distilled to the hardcore fans?  Those that are willing to create and recreate guild groups to maximize their effectiveness against mechanics and/or content?  Aren't we starting to see this in WoW? 

Define balanced and overpowered?  In early EQ you had on the one hand the prenerf omgz necros pwn the prenerf game but you also had the holy trinity dominating group play and the pamper the clerics guild policies.  Also, as a personal rule any serious balance tinkering on classes or items triggers my exit stage right for that mmo.

edit: also I generally like to play the underplayed classes and it really really pisses me off when they turn them into the FotM with a balance boost so any idiot can utilize them successfully.

Unless its a PvP game...I'm not sure it matters.

I agree.  Imbalance in PvE is pretty meaningless as it's a matter of you vs the AI.  PvP balance is much more meaningful. 

Well, that's why i never understand the nerd rage in PvE games, other than keeping up with the Joneses.

In a world where there's only X number of slots in a raid or group, imbalance matters because anyone who's not the overpowered class wouldn't get invited to a raid or group.  If you have group or raid content in your game, then you have to balance enough not to exclude players of certain classes, even if there is zero PvP whatsoever.  Course, if your game is 100% solo content that's a different matter, but then that's playing a single-player game with a chat client.

Or, you could make classes that do not have only one trick, utility, reason for being. The rest is just conditioning.

Even in the PvP game I doubt it's advantageous for designers to purposefully toss the "overpowered" hat around. What's economically important, again, is the characters who feel underpowered and impotent (outliers like Salamok notwithstanding). The ideal game would make every single class feel overpowered in its own specific area of expertise, explain and develop that area early in the character's game life, not switch areas partway through the leveling curve, and assure that there was always fun to be had and contribution to be made by that class in the vast majority of in-game situations. MMOGs have thus fair failed to produce that ideal game.

By area of expertise I mean something like the PvE trinity (DPS/tank/heal) or what TF2 means when they split PvP classes into offense, defense, and support. Those are, by the by, six different things. The gameplay learned by a healer is as little preparation for what will be required as PvP support as the experience of tanking prepares someone to play defense. Worse yet, the ideal PvP designation of a MMOG class tends to wander as they and their allies and adversaries gain new abilities, so low level PvP might not even prepare you for high level PvP.

If this is complicated for players, it's even worse for designers who are trying to balance for the endgame (both PvP and PvE) without trivializing pre-existing content. The player retention bonus would have to be enormous to make them do it on purpose.
Unless every character class is equally good at everything (in which case why have character classes at all?), there will always be one who is better in particular situations than another. The more their situational advantages overlap, the more likely this is to happen... not less. Substitute "builds" for "character classes" if you think an open, skill-based system would eliminate this problem.

I think this is a key to a great game world -- finding a meaningful way to minimize useless content.  And I'm not referring to a stupid fedex quest to a point in the middle of BFE nobody would ever travel to without the quest (see: Onyxia or EQ epic quests).

There are so many really freakin' awesome zones in WoW -- Gnomeregan for one, that aren't used by the majority of the population playing.  Why can't devs make an interesting instance zone that takes advantage of the old content and makes it fresh and new?

You know you could've just said that they should make heroic versions of old content?

It's not like that at all, it's more like a new flavor to an entire subsection of a game world.  Heroics aren't what I had in mind at all.

I can't picture a way to do that, gameplay wise, other than 'heroics', bumping up the levels of stuff to the cap and making the same content useful and challenging again.

If you're not going to outlevel areas, then there's only a few possible options available.  Either all content scales with the player fighting it, in which case...why have levels at all (see Oblivion or other similar games where your enemies are always scaled to match you) or you don't have levels at all.  Either way it seems you lose a considerable amount of gameplay and more significantly business wise, you lose a major retention feature.

On the other hand, if you mean some kind of redesigned old area with a new twist, then resource wise, that's no different, or at most, not much different than making an entirely new zone.  Even if you reuse the old layout, textures, etc, you still have to go through the full process of placing each spawn, enemy group, giving them abilities, and all the standard stuff involved in making a new zone.  The vast majority of players would rather see an entirely new zone than see an old zone redone in a different way.  If this redesigned area replaces the old area, then you get people that hate the new one and miss the old one (see every single zone revamp ever done in EQ) along with the people that like the new one.  If it doesn't replace the old area, then it's going to be no different than the old zone in the first place, because remember...most players don't even pay attention to the story or lore.  It doesn't matter why players need to return there, they're going to be 'goddamnit I hated that zone the first time and now I have to go back!?'

Some zones should be revamped, but this can't be a general thing, because it really doesn't work out that well.  Too much resources, not that much gain.  But, if you ARE going to revamp a zone, one important point: Keep the old version there!  It doesn't matter what you put into the game to 'explain' the old version still being there, just keep it available.  Because even if "everyone" hated the old version and the new version is a 1000% improvement, some people are going to be really damn pissed that the old version is gone.  And it takes very little resources to keep an old instance available, especially if it's unused most of the time.  EQ and WoW both made this mistake.  For every zone revamp in EQ, there are a lot of people that liked the original versions.  And the funny thing is the original versions were -still active- on the server.  This was observable with the Freeport and North Ro revamp, because it was possible to get to old North Ro (by using MacroQuest to issue a gm /zone command).  The zone was still fully active and functional on the server, and a segment of players would have been quite happy to be able to go to the old zones.  Resources used = ~0.  Customers made happy = >1.  WoW did the same thing (although I don't know if the old version is still active on the WoW servers) with the removal of Naxxramas Necropolis for the new version.  So, with minimal resources they could have put in something like say a 'time portal' that leads to Naxxramas Necropolis, in the past, when it hovered above the Plaguelands.  Very little effort and there'd be a good few people who would be slightly happier.

Meh, I've gotten off track.  Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what you were suggesting in the first place, but the possibilities that I understood, at least, seem to have some issues with them.  And if you replace a zone, leave in a way to reach the old version.

This isn't really true. PvE balance is a lot more than that. If a game has a large PvE element and one class can burn through that content much faster and with less reliance on groups or other outside assistance then you're doing it wrong. Think Necromancers in DAoC compared to say... any stealth class.

It's important because it skews the graphs on distribution of currency, item acquisition and so forth (even if you ignore the faster levelling aspect). If you have a gross imbalance then players who don't have an alt of that class are at a disadvantage compared to those who do, you're essentially mandating that everyone roll one of these as a provider/powerleveller for their other characters.

Oh and to the original question, the answer is 'no'. I don't think it's possible to balance a class precisely enough in a test environment, you need the volumes of data from the live servers to accurately spot where things are wrong. I do think that developers err on the side of caution when releasing new expansion classes because nobody wants to get players excited about an under performing class. That doesn't always work out however (hi2u Valkyrie!). I would say in general that classes become overpowered by accident and not by design.

Well... the reason I came to this thought in the first place was precisely because of expansions.  Nearly all expansion classes introduced to games are more powerful or more favorable unbalanced than the original classes.  This is part of the attraction to the expansion beyond just the existence of new areas or gear.  People like new classes not only because they're new, but often because they are overpowered relative to older/original classes.  That sure seems like a purposeful marketing gambit to me. 

Are they overpowered? Or are they just new?

No.

Short answer: Balance is hard.

Long answer isn't worth typing out.

In the case of the two new classes in the LotRO expansion, they certainly seem overpowered but I suppose that might be flavored a bit with newness.  I kinda think a Guardian with a two-handed sword is overpowered vs lower-level mobs, so I guess it depends on a lot of things.

LotRO is probably a bad example for this discussion but I haven't played anything else in years.

On the original question, I don't believe the MOG developers are capable of such a tactic.  Malice vs stupidity, as they say.

Paraphrase then. 

I'm interested in hearing the opinion of someone that plays MMO's for even shorter periods of time than I do. 

The best way to think of it, imo, and to understand how difficult it is, is to just look at Ken and Ryu in Street Fighter.

You've got two guys who are basically on parity with eachother. Short of some changes that have come about between II and IV, they were both designed to essentially be the yin and yang of the shoto fighting style. Ken ended up being preferable due to a number of reasons, most of which weren't discovered until after players got their hands on it. Is he better than Ryu? Probably. But a skilled Ryu against a shitty Ken is going to have a field day.

This is what happens at any studio making any sort of game that pits humans against eachother. AoEII had Elbows, Rise of Nations had a number of totally imbalanced races, Starcraft happens to be relatively balanced all things considered. Warcraft III however was a mess, may still be, haven't been following at all. Anyway, I know you don't play single player that much so I'll stop with those comparisons and look at WAR.

Each race - despite not having one - should have had a dedicated healer. Unfortunately we're stuck with comparing the Arch Mage and the Rune Priest since the Zealot was a big, sloppy, ill-conceived mess of a broken class. The Arch Mage in terms of soloability was a fiend, I can't think of a class I had an easier time just "staying" alive with while prancing around the world. The Rune Priest was effectively neutered in PvE, but unlike the Arch Mage, it was a monster in PvP. You have to wonder how this happened. Well, for starters, I blame the players. Not really in a "Oh, you chucklefucks" sort of way, but rather, no classes are going to see any modicum of balance unless you get 10,000 hamsters spinning their wheels. You can do all the beta in the world, all the internal testing you want, but unless classes are a 1:1 proxy of eachother, NOTE FOR NOTE, you'll never have balance. Case in point, the tanks of WAR. What a big goddamn mess.

Now, why do I blame the players? Well, simply because if companies came out with an MMOG that had two sides that were EXACTLY the same with a different skin, players would bitch and moan. And rightly slow. It's not their job to balance the game and it's definitely not their job to make any given race, class, or structure a unique entity in a game. That is, this class plays one way, and the priest or whatever on the other side plays a way that meshes with that race.

In short, it's a big fucking mess. And since MMOGs have ONLY RECENTLY started introducing ANY sense of skill into the equation, we had to rely on developers nerfing and buffing in a war of attrition no one will ever win.

So, it's fucking hard. Because developers cater to the players, the players don't "get it" and everyone on both sides has their thumbs up their ass designing (or expecting, in the case of the players) the same kinds of systems that are flawed at their core.

I think both cover the topic well. 

I guess that, originally, I had believed that the devs were more clever than I should have given them credit.  I believed that, rather than balance being hard, they would see through the mechanics and simply use them as a means to manipulate the subscriptions through balance.  I play MMO's with a lot of scientists and mathemeticians and they break down mechanics into equations rather quickly.  One friend is an actuary and grinds the numbers to find the most efficient ways to do anything.  I only assumed that every development house would have someone similar to get to the heart of min-max play early in the dev cycle since that's ultimately the approach that a subset of the playerbase will assume. 

The lesson I've learned: Never assume anything. 

You've played what, nearly every major MMOG?

And you've come across the exact same problem in every single one.

And you thought it was because developers were clever?

Protip: Marketing has no idea what developers are doing. Developers want marketing to go the fuck away.

While that relationship doesn't work, it's just how things go unfortunately. No, they are not more clever than you'd think, they are in fact less clever and it's why no one besides Blizzard has been able to produce bupkiss in the last 5 years.

Nebu's a candid romantic. We've covered that already.

They need to figure out a mmog where your character just looks to you more leet than everyone else.  You inspect other people and the gear shown to you ranges tween crap and crud, everyone walking around looks drab except you, damage meters always show you as #1, kill shot always go to you and careful chat filters change player chat so that it supports all of the above.  Then when all the people who need that epeen viagra go chase the shiny the rest of us can maybe get a decent mmog released.

Well... ok... I'm naive.  I get it.


Laugh all you want, but I'm willing to bet this would be more popular than you might imagine.  People playing games these days want to win and win often.  Gamers want to be challenged on their way to victory.  I consider myself (and most others here) a gamer. 

Expansion classes are often better simply because the Dev's know what works in the game, class/mechanic wise. They know which pitfalls to avoid that go around AND have that clean slate to build on. (Deathknight)

In some cases, they have a multitude of suggestions of how to fix original classes, to use as a new expansion class (Animist, Valewalker, Reaver, Banshee, Savage etc...)  :awesome_for_real:

The very simple answer to this postulate is that class imbalance is not a feature. It is a realistic assurance. If Blizzard, et. al. could snap their fingers and assure that they could have a hundred different classes that all had different gameplay but still managed to be effectively equivalent to each other in terms of competitively compared environmental / pvp capacity, they would do so. If they could snap their fingers and have a hundred classes with just the amount of class imbalance variance that they have between the classes they already have, they would do so, and they would start making a bunch more classes.

The mechanics of today's mmo's are too complex to make class balance realistically possible, just like the complexity of today's fighters are too complex to make the rosters completely balanced. Just like Street Fighter is going to have its inevitable 'top tier,' mmo's will have to constantly struggle to try to keep classes in a sort of equilibration with each other as best they can. If they are very attentive and intelligent about it and work hard at it, then 'broken' will come and go in phases for different classes and it will more or less balance out over time. If they suck at it, classes OP at launch will likely have that OP-ness perpetuated across the lifetime of the game, and crap classes will likely remain crap.

EQ went the wrong route with classes and they perpetuated the class gamble. Blizzard cut the WoW classes down to a very, very select few and concentrated on trying to balance that limited set. You wouldn't have the dilemma in WoW that you would have had for class choice in EQ, where there were definitely 'right' vs. 'wrong' choices (Necromancer vs. Shadow Knight, for instance).

Balance is hard but at the same time there is way to much 'the grass is greener over there' whining.  Frequently when the vocal minority on a forum is calling for a nerf it's just because that particular class is better in one area which gets a lot of comment.

Look at the infighting between Clerics and Druids in EQ1 for instance.  Druids were solo-pwn-mobiles, no one could solo outdoor content like a Druid and they could power level like freakin mad.  Eventually they were quite capable in a group as secondary DPS/Healer or even primary healer on second tier content and don't even talk about general utility, there was always something they could do that was generally helpful.

Clerics on the other hand were absolutely required for top-teir, bleeding envelope content, no one could keep a whole group up and running like a good cleric and no one would even think of doing raids at the edge of their ability without one.  If you only had an hour to play and not enough time to devote to a group or just wanted to solo you were pretty much SOL.

To a certain point of view that is a good example of two well balanced classes yet, Clerics constantly complained that they were not self-sufficient enough compared to a druid and druids whined that no one wanted them in groups when there was a chance at a cleric available.

I don't think imbalance is intentional, nor do I think balance is easy. The biggest problem, or barrier to balance as I see it is trying to get PvE and PvP to co-exist. The behaviours of any class in PvE and PvP are so wildly different that you're effectively on a see-saw, and pushing up one way often ends up pushing down the other. I think overall Blizzard have done a good job with PvE balance. Once you filter out all the terribles you find that most DPS classes are within 5-10% of each other, a margin that is within the range of player skill easily. They have also ensured assymetric redundancy of utility, so there are very few must-have class/spec abilities that would otherwise bias group/raid selection decisions. It's not perfect, and they are still making moves such as slapping replenishment on some classes as temporary fixes. Still, compared to TBC, and especially the original WoW, there is a semblence of balance. Here by balance I mean all classes within a given archetype are equally desireable and are similar amounts of fun to play.

However PvP balance in WoW is seriously seriously broken. A large part of this is because the game turns on it's head, healers are forced to tank, tanks barely exist and DPS is focused on nuking rather than sustained damage. I don't know how you balance this.

On the topic of skill-based games, I don't see that you get any better balance in those. People will always move towards the path of least resistance, and you will get homogenisation towards the optimum, much like how people will chase the FoTM in a class-based game.

They would only be balanced if you had access to both simultaneously. Otherwise that is pretty much a clear cut case of out of balance. Two classes sharing the same role, but one is obviously superior in all regards. 

I've been convinced for years that the way to minimize these balance issues is to minimze the number of classes in an MMO as much as you can. Mythic has never understood this; Blizzard has been better although they still probably have a little too much role overlap.

I've probably said this before like 32 times but DAOC could easily have been reduced to 6 classes per side or so and been a better game for it.

I both agree and disagree.  One of the reasons that I stayed with DAoC so long was that each realm played a bit differently which was due entirely to the number of classes available.  What impressed the hell out of me was that, at least in 8v8, the three realms were pretty darn close to balanced.  Alb had their advantages in extending and Midgard had their advantage with interrupts, but a well played group could still be dominant regardless of realm if they were able to maximize the group dynamics. 

I loved DAoC because you could build a competitive group so many different ways.  Rerolling (group builds or realm) and changing tactics with each expansion really added replay value to the game. 

I'm going to do something out the norm and actually post something instead of just lurk. What a more fitting topic for this mere opinion.

Balance is a real tricky thing because mostly it's common not to balance classes say 1v1 as opposed to grouped game play. I can tell you this though, having complete balance is for the most part almost possible minus things like hardware, interweb connections, real life, skill, experience and other things I'm completely missing here. To help prove the point here, take a generic FPS where everyone is the same character with the same weapon. Overall, everyone is balanced as much as they can be. You both have the same weapons and same height, weight and even color advantages in-game. The only thing that sets you apart are those other things I mentioned with player skill (aiming), hardware (speed), interwebs (more speed), and real life (omg mom no).

Taking systems like that and tossing them into an MMO is generally hard. What if I took the Assassin in Age of Conan and duplicated him 8 times? Why play any class but the first one? Why have 8 other classes to begin with? 1 class is all I need and we are as balanced as we can be. There should be no complaints of being overpowered ever! Problem solved, go play! But being realistic here, that's simply not fun at all. Players want more than 1 class and they want to all feel unique while doing it. No one wants to be a stealth assassin and really play like a priest. The same with no one wanting to be a stealth assassin and look like every other stealth assassin the run into. So you need diversity in classes and this is where the uphill battle comes into class balance.

I agree with IanC here that unbalance is not intentional. No designer wants to piss off players just to piss them off. There are of course holes with feedback time to time but that really falls on opinion rather than fact (yes, unbalanced classes can be fact not opinion). Thus in the long run it is a win or lose game with balance because everything looks good on paper until you get it out there. Even then, you can't expect every player to play the way you want it and you can't really tell the player how to play either. It's something most designers have to suffer with because it's important that we keep tweaking classes to be where we want them and where the player wants them, yet having the understanding that it's a damn hard job to keep balance between both PvP and PvE.  :awesome_for_real:

Those differences could still have been there without having such a huge pile of classes, though. Hibernia didn't really gain anything by having 3 different cloth caster classes. You could easily have done everything interesting those classes did with one class, and 3 actually deep spec lines. Look at how thin a spec mentalism was for mentalists for YEARS. The same thing goes for wizards/theurgists and runemasters/spiritmasters, etc. etc. There were so many classes in vanilla DAOC that the actual powers got spread very thinly. Heck, that's part of why Albion suffered for the most part in equal fights compared to Midgard; Midgard had deeper classes because they took the basically the same number of powers and divided them among 8 instead of 11 classes, or whatever it was, so for the most part a given Mid class had more tools than a given Alb one.

The balance issues were compounded by the silly base class system that meant that, say, midgard's AE dots were weak compared to other realms because the Shaman didn't benefit from acuity buffs, etc., but that's a separate and more-specific-to-DAOC problem. But too many classes comes up for a LOT of games.

I see your point. 

I think that the goal was to create a bunch of specialists.  One of the problems that we saw playing midgard was that it took much better players to be successful.  Take a pac healer, for example.  They were tasked with the role of healing, cc, shears, and interrupts for midgard.  In Albion, you had a theurgist for interrupts (along with minstrel for those groups that ran one) and a cleric could focus more heavily on being a heal/shear specialist.  By having fewer tasks assigned per player, it made it easier for less experienced players to do one role well.  In midgard, more experienced players could better utilize the multiple roles under pressure.

It was similar for the different caster types as well as the melee classes.  Runie was different from Eld and they were both more useful than a wizard even though all three were considered the dps caster.

Does that make sense? 

Well, yes, it is certainly true that for example clerics were easier to play than healers. I don't think that situation helps balance anything though in the long run though; that single stun wasn't going to win you any prizes in group RVR and I definitely saw Albs suffer for it in general (on the few occasions that they weren't outnumbering us 3:1...) Ideally I don't think similar roles should be particularly different in difficulty especially when they're on opposite sides of a realm war type setup; that just sounds like it could be asking for population imbalance to me.

Now granted I was more of a zerg/keep take player than an 8v8 type and so some aspects of this comes from theory more than direct experience. Also I played a thane so expect some level of general Mythic hybrid bitterness.  :oh_i_see:

Nothing stopped "less skilled" players from focusing their Healers into CC or Healing near exclusively. It was common practice even, as to not over ride each others CC's. I'm also half certain Shamans were the Mid's shear specialist, but it's been many years.

That's very true.  What I was trying to get at was not so much the ability of players to use their tools so much as the different gameplay experiences found within each class.  Mythic did a very good job of balancing the classes in a group for group manner.  In 1v1 it was terrible, but that should never be the focus in a Realm vs Realm game.  Group vs Group or Zerg vs Zerg should be the balance focus and that turned out great in the open field.  The balance in keeps was another story (remember animists and shroom stacks in windows?  Ugh!).

They had group vs group balance down, 5 years later, maybe. After they gave the diluted classes more density.


The ability dilution gave Midgard and Hibernia a large advantage compared to Albion, for a long, long time. It conversely hindered Midgard 'zerg' balance, due to an early lack of AE once their ridiculous AE stun was removed. You can't PBAE nubs if your realm doesn't actually have a PBAE capable class yet  :oh_i_see:

Even stealth balance was fucked due to the class dilution and density issues. But fuck stealth classes, cunts all of them.

I disagree, one was obviously superior in all regards, depending on which role needed filling.  There were two roles to fill, and each filled it's role very, very, well.

I disagree with this.  Albion suffered from the fact that people hadn't learned how to optimize the use of the advantages that Albion had.  If you played an extension group with a theurgist or two, you were nearly impossible to beat.  We won't even talk about the crazy damage that Armsmen could dish out with their broken frontal style.  Also a Paladin provided unlimited end for the assist train along with any other goodies (like the added ceelrity later) that put their assist trains over the top. 

For 8v8, Hibernia was usually the weakest realm.  It wasn't due to class dilution, but rather which classes had the more useful tools.  Bards were just terrible as interrupters as they had almost no survivability and no real escape tools when SoS was down.

Paladin's didn't get an end chant for some time after launch. I forget exactly when and I can't be bothered to google it but I *believe* it was after SI. In any case Paladins weren't a popular choice for 8v8 groups due to their low DPS. It wasn't until Bodyguard got a lot of traction that defensive tanks could get groups in RvR. Celerity was added to Paladins very late in the day. Even then the other realms generally had it better - End was a concentration buff on Shamans who were a required group class for Mid and a chant on Bards who were also the main CC and speed class for Hib.

Armsmen did most damage but they didn't have the flexibility that Warriors or Heroes had. Thanks to double speccing and the way Alb weapon skills worked, it wasn't viable to be a pole/2h user and still be useful with sword and board.

Theurgists were awesome though, mine was regularly in extension groups with a sorc, a cabby and a coupel of other Theurgs. There was a bit of a barren patch after the pets got fixed a bit too hard but I can't really complain about the way they played in general.

Mostly Alb had to contend with everything being spread too thinly. In general it was marginally better on a class by class basis but you needed 11 Alb classes in a group to get the utility that 8 Hibs or 5 mids could provide.

How is that not out of balance? In a group they both fill the same role, except one is much better at it. When soloing they both fill the same role, except one is much better at it.

Filling a one dimensional niche and sucking at everything else isn't balanced. Doubly so in a game where you can't easily switch your niche role.



Nebu, people didn't learn to 'optimize' alb groups because those optimizations did not EXIST for the first 2-3 years of the game.

So, your idea of balance is that everyone does everything equally well?

If one guy never gets a group, how is that balance?

They did.  I played all three realms prior to ToA and we did fine.  It was all about using your strengths.  Mid was all about melee, Alb was all about range (sorc mez, theurg interrupts), and hib was kind of a mixed bag.  Early on Mid was the way to go though.  Stungard + doublefrost was easymode. 

I'm sorry guys... I didn't mean for this to be a DAoC rehash. 

Eh it is just as much my fault as it is yours. I think DAOC is a prime example to use for this stuff simply because of the vast number of classes it had (and also the vast number of dead end specs.)

Out of curiosity did you play much pre-SI? I think that is the design timeframe Fordel and I are talking about for the most part.

How about anyone who is supposed to be doing that role, does it equally well?


If your job in a group is healer, then you should be able to fucking heal just as good as any other healer. None of that means you need identical abilities or play styles.

I was a class lead in beta and played the entire period from beta up until about 6 months ago.  I did take 3 months off when ToA released as well. 

Wow... I gave Mythic a lot of money.  Some of those periods I had 3 accounts.

Los Ortiz?  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, EQ2 tried that, it sort of works, but they still have the same grass is greener shit going on there.  Check out the boards, there is still as much whining as ever.  6 classes of fighter, healer or what-have-you, further broken up into groups of 2 that are nearly identical but for play style and everyone whines about the others perceived advantages due to your 'non-identical abilities and play styles'.

So, I still disagree with your definition of balance, I not only think it's incorrect but I also think it's unworkable in that it creates large amounts of duplication with providing sufficient differentiation and that, IMO, makes it unfun and unrewarding.

So more rewarding would be to have a class that when Joe Newbie rolls it, he suddenly finds out after a bunch of time investment that he's useless for groups? Seriously?

People bitch on a forum, news at 11?  :awesome_for_real:


WoW is doing it right now (finally). There are four perfectly viable tank classes, four perfectly viable healing classes (well, 3.5, Holy paladins still need a god damn AE/Group heal of some sort, but that is a different rant) and every DPS spec can actually post competitive numbers for the vast majority of the player base (it still has issues with outliers at the very top theoretical DPS numbers, where people have no lag and are in a top 100 world wide raiding guild).


The fotm rant is currently 'homogenization', which is people really bitching that "My previously exclusive raid slot isn't exclusive anymore, my free lunch, QQ" etc.

My bitch with homogenization is that there's no replay value.  If I've played a class to the endgame, I have no reason to play the other realm.  Killing 10 rats isn't that much different from killing 10 elves.  I don't mind classes that can do the same thing as long as they do them a bit differently.  Games are more fun when you can play them a variety of different ways. 

They DO, do things differently in WoW. Which is why it's thinly veiled whining about entitled group spots.

The only thing a Protection Warrior and Protection Paladin share in play style, is they both hits things with their shields. Different resource pools, different attacks, different tanking styles and flow.


It wasn't like when I went from a Hero to a Warrior in DaoC, where the only adjustment in play style was the lack of Bullwinkle power.

No, they don't.  A shaman of one faction is exactly the same gameplay as a shaman on the other faction, minus their racial ability.  If you've played a class, you have seen it for both sides minus the scenery and the toon. 

Then play a druid of the other faction?

He's talking classes, you're talking factions. Viewpoints will never meet.

I understand what he's saying.  I'm saying that having different classes and differetn factions, while tougher to balance. allows for a much broader gameplay experience.  Homogenization is about making both sides EXACTLY equivalent.  While noble, I think it's a bad idea unless you find a way to shuffle the important abilities without causing some classes to become valueless.  I'd rather have small imbalances and more replay value... especially if I really like the game.

The Homogenization 'debate' in WoW has nothing to do with both sides sharing the same classes. It's literally "Oh God, non-warrior tanks have shield wall equivalents, THEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME  :ye_gods: " .

I'm generally suspicious of an mmo that boast of having more than 6 classes.

I don't know if you read my first post but that's exactly what I was saying.  People bitch on a forum regardless, don't pander to them.  Just because they are whining about someone else being 'better' than them doesn't mean they are right.


No, that's actually a different issue.  We have been discussing what balance means.  You're talking about consequences of a poor, likely uninformed, choice.  Either you have to have the class so well defined that a noob, with no experience to draw on, can make a fully informed choice -OR- you have to allow broad respecs. 

This whole discussion just reinforces that I dislike class-based systems.  Give me a huge open skill tree any day.  It's really the only system that I've seen that keeps pretty much everyone happy and can provide the customization options everyone says they want.

This just degenerates into classes again.  People will find the skill combinations that synergize well and break up into a group of specialists.  All class or archetypes do is create preset templates to avoid this inevitability. 

Balancing classes is hard.  Balancing a number of independant skills is near impossible.

So if I am reading your response to that correctly, your theory of class design is that it is ok to have a class that is entirely useless in groups, as long as people are warned about it ahead of time?

If the intro to that class said, "HEY THIS CLASS SUCKS IN GROUPS, BUT YOU WILL BE A GOD SOLO SO ONLY PLAY THIS CLASS IF YOU LIKE TO SOLO."

Yeah, I would be fine with that.

No.  That's not what I said at all.  What I said was that skill trees only give the illusion that there aren't classes.  People will still gravitate toward the skills that make them a) the most powerful, b) the most useful to a group, or c) both.  Classses merely select templates containing those skill trees already selected.  It's far easier to balance a group of classes (set templates) than it is to balance a number of skills with many many different possible combinations.  By easier to balance, I mean it's still near impossible... just not completely impossible. 

Why would anyone support classes that are useless to groups in an MMO?  Really... 

I was replying to Murgos, not you. I didn't get that impression from you at all. EDIT: If anything, you are too group oriented in your design theory for my tastes.  :wink:

My own theory goes something like this. In any MMO with significant group content, every class must be able to contribute enough to be desired for that content. At the same time, every class must have enough tools to be able to function acceptably solo, without being at a big disadvantage in leveling speed or whatever else. This naturally leads to a smaller number of deeper classes being the ideal as far as I'm concerned.

EDIT AGAIN: If you leave out either group viability or solo viability from a given class, you are just sowing the seeds for player resentment/burnout.

This is sort of exactly what I am talking about.  You pick your skills to suit your style of play.  There can be multiple 'thrusts' of development analogous to classes in a sense but they are individually selected.  You decide if you want to be a jack-of-all trades capable of working competently but in a limited fashion alone or if you want to focus on one aspect of your character to the point you have to have others around you to make up for the things you are lacking in.  It's your choice and in a good system the choices will be presented at a time when you are ready to make them, rather than at the login screen the first time you fire up the game.

I think it's an illusion that such a style of character development [skill based] is any harder to balance than a traditional set in stone class system.  For every skill based system that has had to have a skill nerfed due to abuses I can probably show you a similar scenario that has occurred in a class based system.

It may actually end up being easier because each skill being able to be treated independently allows you not to be responsible for any particular groups viability as a whole.  Add in mechanics such as respecs and/or a completely open and available tree like Eve and the players can rationalize any change you make without it being seen as a personal attack or vendetta (i.e. SOE hates Shadowknights!) which should help keep discontent down to a minimum.

The problem is you also have to get into managing combos, which still involves plenty of nerfing and mistake making, if not more than with a class based system (cf. Guild Wars, and all CCGs ever made.) It doesn't look any easier to balance to me.

I'm actually all for synergies involving several players that provide drastic improvements.

Regardless if it's more work to balance a pure skill based system it has been done successfully before and I think the rewards from such systems more than out way the penalties.

Well, group-based synergies are a common potential problem area in both systems - I was more speaking in terms of combos in a single character's 'deck' of powers.

Well group based synergies or any synergies breaks the skill based model, because ideally each skill is its own little universe that more or less competes with other skills while at the same time existing in a vacuum.

I think this entire statement is wrong.

Lemme give a personal example here.

After CoH introduced dual builds I made one for my primarily team-focused radiation defense/sonic attack defender.

In team mode she has various team-useful powers: Assault and Tactics ("power pool" leadership toggles providing a weak buff to the whole party), Recall Friend ("power pool" teleport, does what it says on the tin), Vengeance ("power pool" leadership, needs a dead ally in range, buffs the whole team), and Fallout and Mutation (radiation defense powers that explode a dead ally for damage/debuffs and rez/buff a dead ally, respectively).

So I run low-power buffs for the entire team, and if shit goes south and somebody dies, I can yank them over to a knot of enemies, buff us, drop a giant chunk of damage and debuff on them, and then raise the dead.

In solo mode I toss all those powers out for Swift, Health, and Stamina ("power pool" passive abilities that increase HP and power regen), Shout (a strong ranged attack), Siren's Song (a cone sleep attack), and Screech (a single-target stun). So, more attacks in the chain, more power to cycle them all, and crowd control.

I guess that's more deliberately creating synergies that weren't there before, rather than emphasizing one stat at the expense of another. But I'm not sure how CoH's "power" model maps to a traditional "skill" model. Maybe somebody can help me there.

The limits of team synergy are roughly as follows: resists and damage buffs cap based on archetype, to-hit is kept between 5% and 95% before being modified for level difference and rank. Aside from that, go nuts. (This has the quiet effect of creating potentially greater synergy between a buff set and a debuff set on the same team than two buff or debuff sets acting in unison.)