Overarching balance changes

[Stormslap]

If soft caps are removed, melee power and **** like it can be removed and changed to other stats, there will be no need for an offensive and defensive set, and we can increase the general speed of gearing in rvr, this brings problems of it's own into play but I honestly think this is one of the bigger issues facing ror is the pace of the game

[Stormslap]

And it punishes glass cannons, sure you can with the removal of soft caps, but were not talking about the removal of hard caps here and everyone will have more tank stats.

[roadkillrobin]

The game has been """balanced""" since launch with casters not having any real auto attacks (non phy ranged auto attacks). You would probably also need to create some kind of animation and projectile for them as well?

It just doesn't seem necessary too me, as well as potentially making BW/Sorc a lot stronger. I actually like the idea, but it just seems like fluff that won't fix the core problems each classes are facing in whatever arena they are underperforming in. Or at least it's certainly not the only way to deal with say magus not performing well in small scale fighting.

I am not saying that you should give casters any scaling over their staffs dps, i am simply trying to point out how weapon dps going higher is only going to increase the disparity between melee and ranged , nothing else. How you want to approach that is beyond me but it WILL become an increasing issue i can promise you that.

Casters get cast time modifaction instead of AA. Incase of physical dps casters they get everything. Weapon dps, AA and cast time bonus.

As for wich abillities that get both ranged and offhand meele contribution i can't remember right now but someone mentioned it in AD chat a couple months ago and i tried it out with low lvl weapons without stats and some abillites increased in damage when I equiped the 2nd weapon and some didn't

[Jaycub]

Removing softcaps would increase build diversity (in my opinion anyways), everyone just did the same thing on live. They hit a few key stat thresholds or softcaps then dumped into defense. So with each new tier of sets the game got slower and slower... although on live it would of been hard to tell since majority of people where casuals running around in **** gear while you guys globaled them in warp lol.

I'm not personally a fan of slower gameplay, it just waters down the effects of making bad decisions.


Lack of any real choices behind gear sets and weapons also didn't help either, not asking for like ARPG level customization... but I was always bummed at the 2 choices between sets and a clear cut BiS wep.

[Corvineus]

Jaycub has a point regarding the soft caps but, I think It's better that the game gets slower paced end-game. I'm sorry but I don't wanna see a keep's gates break, and watch 6 bruisers get insta killed because we decided to remove soft caps so they have absolutely no defense.

Sure, having a defense set could be an option aswell but realistically - That would take AGES to farm with the current structure, so I'd rather we just keep soft caps and change only the absolute necessities.

[Stmichael1989]

The way I see it, this game is "balanced" on a very tenuous structure of a few individually overpowered abilities/classes. Guard and WP/DoK *need* to be as powerful as they are, because without them we would all have shorter lifespans than in an FPS.

Individual survivability is severely lacking, and tanks/healers are a "you must have this much to do anything" kinda situation. I'm of the opinion that individual survivability should be buffed across the board to go with a nerf to things like guard and healing so that a players survival is more tied to their decisions rather than how many healers he has and whether he's got a tank to guard him.

[Jaycub]

Stmicheals posts above does bring up a good point, and is the reason why people could get away stacking nothing but power.

But i disagree at least from a organized group vs organized group perspective with the removal of softcaps I don't believe classes like slayer/chop could get away with going full glass cannon. But I could def see a class like Mara doing so as not only can they rely on their tanks/healers to keep them up they also have very strong defensive mechanics built in.

I guess i should of said "it might increase build diversity by a small amount on some classes" rather than making the claim I did.

[tomato]

They argued long and hard that RP could be tankier and harder to kill than the WP. And yet I just watched their 6v6 against CCM, and Gankbus clearly targeted the RP first and killed him in under 3 seconds in both fights. If they believed what they said and weren't just trying to con us, why didn't they target the WP first? Why did they find it so easy to kill the incredibly "tanky" RP?

PS. And it isn't subjective unless you are arguing that a 10% block strikethrough is as good as a 10% parry bonus. Is that what you believe?

I we believed what we say we would have played with a rp in our order main group.
Oh wait, we did.

Good rp still can be tankier than a wp.

It comes down to you not having any useful 6vs6 experience I guess.

And we played on both sides, contrary to lots of other people who like to voice their opinions on balance matters. Do you really think we wanted buffs for our advantage? Worst case we just switched them out...

[Annaise16]

You could try for a little balance in your post before asking for balance in the game.

You are being awfully agressive against a post that only intended to put another point in the discussion.

So how did the increase in damage compare for casters versus physical damage classes? I actually made this comparison for SW versus dps AM. I worked out the damage that abilities did in lower rr level 40 gear attacking toons of the same rank for both classes. Than I did the same for higher gear levels. I took into account changes in stats, weapon dps, armor, and resistances. The result was that the two classes had almost equal increase in damage when expressed as a percentage change. For example, the better gear gave both classes about 20% extra damage against toons of equal rank.

So to prove me how im wrong in saying melee vs magic/ranged , you took a ranged class and a magic class as a comparison *clap* *clap* and conveniently you ignored the part about AA and AA modifiers that my post included and focused on just ability damage.

If you are looking for examples don't look at the SW because while it may use weapon dps it only uses it from one weapon either the sword for melee attacks or the bow for ranged attack. Unlike melee that can either get contri from 2hander or 2 one-handers. And my entired point wasn't even about ability damage which i KNOW it has better scaling for casters , it is the fact that with AA included higher weapon levels will give you a disproportionate damage increase to Melee Abilities and AAs TOGETHER , as it is easier to reach the caps while having weapon skill as a 2ndary attribute ( and i'm not even using wepon skill as a boon here for penetration , i am just implying how you can get to cap with having alot of "wasted" stat allocated into WS)

And as far as the developers of the game weren't idiots they WERE considering at the end of the game changes to the contribution of weapondps to casters, which never made it into the game cause the initial balancing was hard.

I just did a comparison of the damage increase for a WH vs a BW between renown ranks 45 and 100. The comparison took into account only changes in weapon dps and damage bonus for the two classes. It was assumed at rr45 both classes had damage bonuses of 210, the WH's weapon's dps value was 56, and that they were both attacking a toon that had a toughness of 200. At rr100 the damage bonuses had increased to 310, the weapon dps value was now 84 and the target still had 200 toughness.

Under those conditions, the WH's dps would have increased by about 40-45%, depending on which abilities they used, while BW's dps would have increased by about 35-40%, again depending on which abilities they used. These are the values before mitigation by armor or resistances.

The percentage increase values for both classes are fairly similar. Both classes had fairly similar gains in crit rate and crit damage between rr45 and 100, so crit probably wouldn't change the comparison. It could be argued that armor values increased faster than resistances because of the relatively low cap on resistances when compared with armor. If this was the case, the percentage increase values would be even closer together than the values stated above.

So we would be looking at a difference in increased damage of only a few percentage points over 55 renown ranks. That looks fairly balanced to me.

[Corvineus]

What Tomato said. Each class has their individual mechanics which makes them strong, or weak depending on circumstance, depending on opponent, depending on gear.

In all honesty, in a 6v6 scenario - You can win with -ANY- all-around setup even if you are all equally geared. Or a mirror setup, it really doesn't matter. Your skill, your coordination determines most outcomes, RvR or 6v6, there are meant to be things which aren't balanced, but only given the circumstance. In all honesty the base mechanics are fairly well-oiled from an all-around PoV.