WE/WH: What really went wrong

[Adapa]

from order player perspective: WE come, 75% damage while first attack, knockdown. you can do nothing against them. guess I go play a different game. makes 0 sense to me, to make half naked dark elves as tanky, strong, life regeneratable and all while stealthing is there. oh they can punt you, jump at you too . unique to them to have both right? im giving up on this

[nocturnalguest]

This is such a tired argument.

Look at the population: https://maartenson.net/ror_graph.html

Even at prime time EU, it's only for an hour or two max that the population pops above 400 in T2+ on either side. The rest of the time, it's just low pop and at times even dropping below 100 in T2 for either side. Most organised guilds that regularly field an organised WB on discord left. You got Formosa rocking up twice a week, Unreal forming when Brodda is on, Retribution is a shade of its former glory, LNM quit, etc, etc...

Solo builds wouldn't matter much when the game was at live and fully populated with proper WBs running around most time of the day. Now it's just a PUG fest, with often times not even PUG WBs around, that's why a good proportion of the time the lakes are dominated by solo DPS healers and stealth classes.

The game is now at such a low pop that it should balance solo classes as well, or the game becomes unplayable for a decent chunk of the day.

I made no argument, i just stated a fact.

Also no argue about pug fest info, all true.

However i dont think that balancing solo is an option tho. Its just that optics are bad again, itemization nobody asked for right in the middle of so declared "balance" patches, random none working orvr events (while official thread was full of out-of-box ideas) etc.
oRvR (not even oRvR specifically but replayability in general is in worst spot ever, using oRvR just cause its by design main gameplay) desperately needs an overhaul and a balance group + focus group is clearly not enough for such a task. Real cities are completely dead, rankeds are literally turned off (even if they would be on then horrible bo3&wounds system nobody asked for is in place).

If anything i believe main focus should be put into oRvR/campaign overhaul, then make cities great again, then fix rankeds (delete rings by crests but give a clear path to earn insignias, introduce all the cosmetics, put pve stuff there as an alternative path to earn stuff without suffering in boring outdated by years vs modern games content).

Balancing around solo in current game mechanics is just unrealistic to happen. Thats definitely shouldnt be on a list of priorities. All the serious tweaks there echo group play too much, so the only real direction there is to cross out unique nature of classes and nullify all aor spirit and just unify everything with mirror selfsustain abilities like in modern mmo's, so picking a class will be purely aestatic, cosmetic decision.