Hey Hag Master, how'd you get that crow up your ass to be able to eat it while your head is still up there?
Quote:I am going to break tradition and talk about some early musings on balance so player's get a glimpse into our early balance and design thoughts. These have not even gone to player's council yet so I hope players will keep an open mind and realize this is all subject to change. In the past we haven't talked about early design thoughts because players often consider that a promise or definite plan - which this is not intended to be.
Kensai has always been a pet peeve of mine; why the only Fighter DPS tree was designed so that you had to splash monk to maximize its potential is something I've never understood. In the long run we will probably add some heavy armor options through multi-selectors to the tree. I'd personally like to create a new fighter tree, but we really can't add a fourth tree - at least until Favored Soul, Druid, and Artificer get their third trees.
Right now we feel that Rogue probably needs attention more than Fighter, and melee Rangers could use a bump in mitigation.
Our balance check list includes the following items in no particular order, and with no particular timetable attached. These are our current thoughts, but they are early and haven't even been discussed with the player's council.
~ Add Ranged Power to epic levels and epic destinies, while balancing Manyshot and 10k Stars. We want current high end ranged builds to keep their DPS - we just want to open up some underperforming ranged builds. This change will allow many more ranged builds to participate in the epic levels. Artificer repeater builds and ranger ranged builds will be better without needing to splash monk, and we might even see players experimenting with throwing builds. It also allows us to make some heroic abilities scale with ranged power.
~ Rogue pass. Mechanic is particularly bad.
~ New Favored Soul tree.
~ New Druid tree while we fix the many issues with druid forms.
~ Fighter pass. Kensai needs some non monk options. We think we might want the fighter advantage to be tactical DCs so fighters will probably get boosts to those.
~ Rangers could use some more tweaks, particularly with their mitigation.
~ Artificer pass. While the ranged power changes should really help Artificers, rune arms have fallen behind. Part of it is that they need better scaling into epic levels. Neither the damage nor the DCs scale well into higher levels.
~ We understand Divine Grace creates a bad situation where characters without it have a hard time competing with Paladin splashes when building for good saves. We don't want to nerf the saves of top builds, so we are looking into adding a bonus type to the Divine Grace saving throw bonus and creating some saving throw items with the same type of bonus type. In other words, players without Divine Grace will be able to make up some of the difference through itemization.
Sev~
Quote:If by "power creep" you mean more stuff in the Bard, Paladin, Barbarian range then yes. (Paladin is very good but it's not the healing that we are watching; it's the saving throw advantage.)
Part of the reason we allowed DPS to creep up is that hit point creep has been happening on the monster side for quite some time, and there was clear player feedback that many enemies at the game's end had so many hit points that they were boring to kill. As a result of this player feedback we've allowed DPS to creep up as a default.
Sev~
Quote:Things are still very much up in the air, but Kensei changes would probably involve some new abilities as multiple-choice selectors alongside existing abilities. Specifically targeting abilities that currently require or strongly favor being a monk. Not necessarily greatly changing the entire tree.
(Varg)
Quote: Quote:Quote Originally Posted by Grailhawk
Given this when all is said and done were do you (you as in the Dev team) think each class will fall in the pecking order of things (I'm talking in terms of DPS only)? Can we expect other classes to get as much love as the last three or will it be tempered in such a way that these three classes have taken what ever rank they have and will not let it go?
In a perfect world the classes will be relatively balanced. What we have found is that classes with low DPS and lots of utility aren't as fun for a lot of players, and they tend to level slowly. We'd rather have each class have at least one decent DPS option and work on giving all the classes some kind of niche place or utility. The trick is doing that in a way that doesn't feel like everything is homogenized.
As you can see from Holy Sword and Barbarian changes we intend to revisit classes we've already looked at. We might not want to do a large revamp, but it's not a healthy place for us if players panic with a patch because they feel that they have "missed their chance" because our changes for their favorite class might need more balancing.
We do need to prioritize because we can't do everything.
Quote:One more question in terms of DPS how do you expect the "Manyshot balance" to effect melee rangers who rely on it as a massive burst of damage, keeping 3 weapons up today and spending a 11 Ap and 2 Feat to have a massive burst of damage every 2 minutes is not insignificant? Do you expect that the "manyshot balanceing" will nerf that play style?
Honestly we aren't ready to answer specific questions. Essentially our goal is to add in ranged power to epic levels and ED cores and find a way to dial back the top build by the same DPS amount while still keeping it fun to play. Yes we realize that's a non-trivial design goal.
Sev~
Pages: 
2015 Producer's Letter (Read 46316 times)
