[Poll] Class balance of 2024

[Gravord]

Hello
In December 2023, a major ability rework was finalized. Starting in January 2024, RoR entered extensive balancing period.
It seems like a good time to ask the community for their opinions on a full year of changes.

First balance patch starting tank focus phase: viewtopic.php?t=52335

Second patch: viewtopic.php?t=52372

Third patch: viewtopic.php?t=52494

After initial 3 patches balance group shrunk by one member and initial rapid progress stalled for a while, to be restarted from May.

Fourth patch: viewtopic.php?t=53038

Fifth patch, healer phase start: viewtopic.php?t=53335

Sixth patch: viewtopic.php?t=53721

Seventh patch: viewtopic.php?t=54273

List skips over target cap experiment and various bug fix patches.
Each voter can give at most 5 points to each patch with 35 points in total.
Rating is as follows:
0 - hate it
1 - very bad
2 - bad
3 - not great, not terrible, neutral stance
4 - good
5 - very good

Feel free to discuss and comment on whether the game balancing meets your hopes and expectations.

[Tisaya]

It feels like a reasonable job in some areas and a complete mess in others, but how much of this opinion is influenced by my own biases, is hard to say. Probably, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

[Gravord]

Bonus clarification: you can give score to each patch, not just one favourite.

[anstalt]

I feel like we need to wait until the DPS balance phase has gone through before we can really judge. Knowing they've balanced 2/3rds of teh classes means that of course things won't be perfect.


That said, im pretty happy overall. Every MMO I've ever played has done balancing, and every patch makes some things better, some things worse. That's just the nature of having different combat roles and capabiliies. WAR feels no different. Sure, it sucks if your favourite class gets hit with nerfs during a particular cycle, but if you wait long enough it'll get buffed eventually.

[Aethilmar]

This poll is a mess. What exactly are you hoping to accomplish with it?

[rady]

I would give -10 to patch nr 4 if I could...
I also think we should vote for pve changes separately. Pve team did awesome job!

[Gravord]

This poll is a mess. What exactly are you hoping to accomplish with it?

To gather community feedback on an important topic. Private servers live and die based on the commitment of their player base. Balance changes have a substantial impact on this, and the staff should be aware of how their efforts in this area are perceived.

[Culexus]

I don't see the point of rating individual patches. What sort of information are we supposed to gather from that?

There have been some hits and misses, but the changes are going well overall. I don't think it's fair to judge the changes until all the stages are complete and we see the full picture. This is after all an ongoing process and unforeseen mistakes and interactions are going to occur. The team has been good at addressing these fairly quickly, although may have been a bit too heavy-handed on occasion. I'm optimistic about the future of the patches and look forward to seeing how it all turns out.

If there's one thing the team could do better, it's communication. The absolute disaster of the parry re-work could have been avoided if the team communicated with us before and after patches. That patch shattered the community, causing many well-known players and guilds to leave and not return, a guild to go on strike, and plummeting the population to low levels that have only recently recovered with the big influx of new players. If no lessons are learned from that for any big future changes (balancing magic and physical damage for example) then there's a chance it'll happen again, and maybe this time there won't be a wave of new players replace those that leave.

[Aethilmar]

This poll is a mess. What exactly are you hoping to accomplish with it?

To gather community feedback on an important topic. Private servers live and die based on the commitment of their player base. Balance changes have a substantial impact on this, and the staff should be aware of how their efforts in this area are perceived.

Okay. So what are you going to do with the data? What do you hope to show? How are folks supposed to interpret the results? I find it unlikely to be useful because each patch has a lot of stuff in it and are snapshots in time working towards an end goal that few outside the dev team know about.

Potentially more useful questions for a poll:
- Do you think the last several patches are moving the game in the right direction? For PvP? For PvE?
- What area of the game requires the most developer attention at the moment e.g. Class Balance, Campaign, Scenarios, etc?
- How would you rate each of these areas of the game on a scale from 1 to 10 e.g. RvR, PvE, Guilds, Socializing, Community Help, Gearing, Renown Ranks, etc?

This would at least provide feedback to the devs about potential areas of improvement although they already have a regime for questionnaires in place so not even sure of the value of that.

[Misaji]

Vote for Patch 8.