Debate about why Order is how it is.

[wonshot]

Hello,

Over the years the topic often see the light of day "Why is Order lacking tanks, so full of RangedDPS and dpshealers?"
And while there is some truth to it on a general pug-scale of things, the premade 6man teams are doing alright and warband guilds still manage to get their 2-2-2 setup. So why is that, what do YOU think?

Here is my take on why that happens (very generally speaking for the realmwide problem):

1) Order tanks are just not looking "cool" or "good" compared to the Destro supperior evil tanklords.
IB get a simple look with a bucket-helmet, SM is hardstuck looking like an elf in a dress like the rest of the Highelves and unless you are diehard into that apperence it might throw you off, and last but not least Knight with feathery hats and 1800's beardstyle &hairstyles.

But look is not everything to some people. So how does the order tanks compare in playing them with their toolkits.
IB with a very interactive classmechanic is wonderful for duo upto 12man playstyle, some would argue. Fast swapping of oatfriend and buffing & debuffing for your team requires fastfingers and good keybindings.
Swordmaster swinging that big plastic sword around dealing big spirit damage with a mechanic that feels satisfying to jump between balace-stances.
Knight with the least interactive or interesting mechanic of the auras, bring so much value in terms of stat buffs/debuffs just for being in range. And while +15% strongerhealing is amazing in organized play, that benefit is hardly what is making Average-Joe roll the class, as bringing something like that to a pug scenario is hard to remain excited about and get a satisfying feeling of contributing to the team directly. Aoe staggering and superpunting are tools the knight bring to the table but will average players use these tools correctly instead of giving out free-munities?

2) What happends when a realm is begining to lack tanks?
You will see the meleedps be unguarded and hesistate, die unguarded, and if the spiral continues they will stop playing their melees and go to other archtypes or go more into a solo roaming style as we saw a while back with guardian WLs everywhere during NA hours when it was low pop.
So With lack of tanks, not much mdps. The frontline is none exsistant on the realm generally speaking.

3) players will now see an overload of RangedDPS as players dont want to die unguarded on their meleeDPS classes. if they still want to deal damage, or they go to dps healers because who want to heal instant dieing unguarded meleedps So purehealers are still to be found but with an increase in dpshealers instead.

So I am interested to hear what reasons the rest of you RoR community think is the reason we are seeing Order being more backline heavy, where as destro is more frontline heavy.
Is it because Order RDPS feels or look better? Does destro frontline toons just feel or look better?

What do you think?

[Nekkma]

Is order that low on tanks though? I feel like destro is overstacked with tanks and order with rdps.

[raistomen]

you have evidence that your claim is true ?

[Elemint]

you have evidence that your claim is true ?

I'm writing a thesis on it at the moment, could you please wait for a week to get it peer reviewed?

[Acidic]

Would say a lot is based on the races and why ppl chose a race.

[Starx]

Order RDPS has a history of being incredibly busted.

>flashfire BW
>festerbomb SW

IB has been the worst tank in RoR since forever and is literally just a walking armor debuff for double slayer groups. It has shitty utility compared to knight and SM, and SM damage is absolutely BONKERS.

AM healing is pretty shitty, the DPS spec is pretty fun in pug situations. Ask yourself how many dps shamans there are compared to dps AM's. And when ppl say BUT DPS SHAMAN HAS MORE BURST, they are not only wrong but stupid.

Destro MDPS looks cooler, no fat baby with 2 rattles.

For some reason there are a bunch of order tanks with chinesehero syndrome, who even if they did guard would always be way to deep to actually have someone follow them and live etc...

Lastly look at city, there are at least 4x as many organized destro groups. MDPS sucks balls in pugs and solo, order is way more pug heavy if city is any kind of indicator and it makes sense that most people would be like "**** melee im going ranged".

Also elves are cool watch your tongue man, its the dw*rfs that people dont like :^)

[Nameless]

Imo the look play huge role at that. Not only characters look but also thier armor's visualisation. Many ppl disike dwarves, I hate tall elves' look, empire is meh.
On destro everything look cool, may be beside magus and sorcs.
That is the main reason imo, at least for casual, pug players and we all know that they are the back bone of war so orders more often than no, just lose

[PieTreBlu]

Destro frontlines just look more threatening/imposing/cooler while the opposite is true (sorta) for ranged classes.

Just put a BG in sov next to an IB in his amazing bucket helm and iron kilt or a BO next to a SM in his flowery dress.

For ranged it's almost the opposite: Magi look cool but are stuck on a weird discus, SH are, well, gobbos and have to compete with Legolas' cooler and edgier cousin and Sorcs feel like a gimped BW with shadow powers and you're stuck between playing Maleficent's slutty sister or an elf in a lvl 15 robe quickly textured after they decided to avoid having another female only dark elf class.

As subjective as aesthetic/class flavor preferences are it's pretty obvious where the people who are interested in certain archetypes will "generally" gravitate toward.

[DoomedDragon]

Destro frontlines just look more threatening/imposing/cooler while the opposite is true (sorta) for ranged classes.

Agree with this point, order could really need something imposing, like some big fat Lizardmen (I wish) as frontline haha

[videogamer]

It's not just the tanks, there is other factors in play that make the Order frontline unappealing.

Slayers are big babies swinging their rattles around and whatever piece of armor you equip it still looks like you just created the character at level 1. Witch Hunters are decent however Witch Elves remain superior aesthetically, not that anyone cares about stealth classes anyway. White Lions - well everyone knows what kind of player plays a White Lion, sure it's popular because it's overpowered but at the same time there are players will refuse to play simply because of that fact.

One issue is that Bright Wizards simply do way too much AOE damage. People are willing to look the other way when it comes to this because of Order being "weaker" in terms of compositions and in winrate but it is part of the reason why compositions are so static. The Bright Wizard is simply too good. Why would you roll a melee DPS when you can be a Bright Wizard which is significantly better at AOE DPS AND it's ranged? On Destro that difference is much narrower, Marauder, Squig, etc can be competitive in AOE damage to Sorceresses if not better. The Magus' damage profile might be garbage in that it's sustained static aoe damage but atleast numerically they match up with Sorcs. In any real solution you're going to have to entertain the idea that the Bright Wizard is not going stay as strong as it is.

The Shadow Warrior archetype is in every fantasy game and they're always hugely popular not much you can really do there and even despite Shadow Warriors being SIGNIFICANTLY more **** at everything in the game people still play them in droves. There isn't much you can do to solve this problem, I mean the class it's literally broken and absolute dogshit and people still play it.

If you were to summarize your arguments the Engineer personifies them perfectly. It is exactly the kind of class you play to play ranged, to play solo, and to play without teamwork. To be fair Destruction have the exact same thing in the Magus except the Magus isn't as cool in comparison with other Destruction classes. DPS slots are way more competitive on Destro because much more stuff is viable so Magus don't really get invited to anything which keeps their population in check. On Order you pick Bright Wizards, then Slayers, then...well whatever you can get basically if you don't have the above, Engineers know this and take advantage of it, you have to invite them because you don't have a choice, on Destruction Magus sit outside the Maw waiting for their solo queue to pop.

So what can be done about it? Well it depends on what exactly the developers are capable of doing. If they're capable and willing to create new gear models they can do a lot to remedy this. Balancewise the Swordmaster and Slayer are in a good spot but they in particular could use more imposing, cooler gear to entice people to play them. Gear progression is a huge factor in this game and it sucks when you get a new item only to find it looks exactly like your current items. You cannot tell the difference between a level 16 Swordmaster and one in Sovereign. The difference between a level 1 slayer and a RR80 Slayer in Sovereign is a totem/standard thing on their back.

You could make the Knight and Ironbreaker models slightly bigger (maybe 10-20% bigger). Afterall they're both clad head to toe in armor so it makes sense they'd be slightly bigger to be able to wear that weight, like how a Chosen is bigger than other Chaos humans. It doesn't make sense an armored knight is as lithe as an assassin, you'd expect he'd be a big meaty thiccboi. Maybe you can make more imposing helmets for the Ironbreaker so that there's some variety in what type of tin can you're wearing.