Just to remind you at the start what I’m talking about, here’s a quote from your developer blog post:
We at the dev team feel the need to reduce this ‘class disparity’.
We have implemented five class patches so far. These are the goals we have been aiming to achieve with them:
Each class should have its own characteristics and roles.
Adjustments should be carefully planned to avoid one class dominating its rank or being left out, and to achieve a fairly equal distribution of classes in each rank.
Rather than letting one class become too good to the point of self-reliance, we should devise a plan to encourage different types of classes to work together and develop new play strategies.
Class disparity is basically created by you because classes inside Ranks are not equal to each other. By that I don’t mean that they should have equal skills or equal roles, but be equal in terms of CD time, AoE, Overheat charges.
Why is it e.g. that Paladin as a tank class [blue icon]
has an attack skill with low CD time[9 seconds] and 2 overheat charges while Sadhu has high CD times[20-30 seconds] and no overheat charges on his skills as a damage dealer class [red icon]?
Also, Paladin has 7 skills while Sadhu has only 6, and Sadhu C3 only features a support skill with high CD time [which also cripples the Sadhus damage by taking away his stat points] as a damage dealer while Paladin gets a support and a damage skill (again with overheat)?
How can Sadhu not be outclassed by Paladin in this setting?
Less skills, no overheats, higher CD time on the damaging skills, useless support skills with high CD times…
The same again with Rank 7 Kabbalist vs Plague Doctor.
Plague Doctor has overheat charges and lower CD times on most of his skills (or at least it’s possible to increase the lasting time to equalize ± the CD time of buffs within 6 skilllevels e.g. Blood Letting/Healing Factor)
while Kabbalist has high CD times and no overheat charges at all.
Also, the buff skills don’t last long enough(Ein Sof lvl 10 lasts only 50 seconds with 60 seconds CD time) or are removed after one hit (Revenged Sevenfold), which makes them pretty useless unless you have a Dievdirbys in your build to reduce the CD times.
However, this is against your point 3 as it forces builds with Kabbalists to also include Dievdirbys into their builds to become viable/useful.
Supporting should be the role of Kabbalist, but he isn’t able to do it properly because of the CD time restrictions, skill duration restrictions, attribute restrictions, and, most of all, because of the total absence of useful number-calculating skills.
How can Kabbalist have any worth if Reduce Level or Double Chance don’t work on boss monsters because you always calculate 0 on them[= Double Chance does nothing against boss monsters as it lasts for 0 hits]?
And why is it that Double Chance can be triggered by everyone in the party, not just the Kabbalist himself? Do you want to have the Kabbalist ask everyone to stop attacking to debuff the monsters first and then attack them if in a party/dungeon/mission?
Then there’s that issue with Kabbalists signature skill, Merkabah. The skill has many useful buffs etc once you hit Class Circle 2 via attributes, but
45 seconds CD time and no overheat vs. 20 seconds CD time and 2 overheat for Plague Doctors Incineration seems unbalanced.
You simply can’t enjoy the skill with this CD time and the issue with it only travelling a certain distance and then exploding. The new hits that are applied by the wheels itself are also scaling badly as they are applied too slow and only scale with matk. As the enemies are hit by rotating wooden planks, why isn’t this based on physical damage?
The skill needs a fix asap with lower CD time, physical damage and/or overheat charges for the sake of justice and balance.
The Kabbalist also needs more skills based on number magic, and useful skills while we’re at it, not only debuffs (all number skills are only debuffs applied on the monsters) which are useless because they apply only to few monsters/have high CD times/have too many restrictions [especially the short duration which is comparable with Plague Doctors debuff skills but with worse effects].
The same drama with Oracle vs Druid, as most Oracle skills have a CD time way too high to be useful and the damaging skills are nerfed/unusable vs boss monsters [Death Sentence, Twist of Fate].
Oracle is again a class that almost cries for Dievdirbys in its builds because the CD times of the useful skills are so high [Resetting 150 seconds, Counterspell 90 seconds, Death Sentence 600 seconds, Foretell 42 seconds] while the magic circles [Counterspell, Foretell] only last 1/3 of the CD time.
Oracle seems to have no real characteristics or roles at all because of the high restrictions and limited usefulness if compared to other classes which could be chosen instead. Nearly nothing makes it worthwile to Circle up Oracle as its skills aren’t becoming any better aside from Prophecy, and the new skills are not even close to be useful in the current situation [damage skills useless against boss monsters because of nerfs/restrictions, supportive skills require Dievdirbys/Miko to be effective]
So, to sum it up:
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The base concern of balance issues are not the issues of damage, it’s the issues of class compareability.
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CD times are not balanced and many classes require circles invested into Dievdirbys because of high CD times and the total lack of overheat charges in contrast to their Rank counterparts who are better in all aspects
[more useful skills, lesser CD times, higher buff/debuff sustainability]. -
certain classes lack useful class attributes, which make them even more inferior compared to other classes
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classes are either heavily reliant on other classes or self-sustainable; every class should have the ability to participate in the game, not just some with higher basedamage or higher sustainability [see endgame content: magic defence issue, HP issue(not enough damage dealt with certain skills), CD time issue (certain builds lack filler skills, i.e. skills with good damage and low CD time and take forever to finish content; Cleric skills like Heal and Cure shouldn’t be the main source of damage until you hit Rank 8)]
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some class mechanics are not working/punishing and don’t benefit the user [e.g. Out of Body instantly killing the user if hit with 0 defence when facing high level monsters/bosses (considering we’re only at lvl 330 of 500+ levels targeted) unless stacking HP equipment and having Kabbalist C2/3 for Ein Sof, Clerics Fade removing all Boss damage contribution, Pardoners skills requiring high amounts of Silver to deal little to no damage if not overgeared, Taoist requiring several expensive talismans to use skills]
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classes are not consistantly increasing in power/helpfulness with Rank and Class Circle [many lower Ranked classes like Dievdirbys are often better investment than going 2 or 3 Circles of a certain class like Pardoner, Oracle, Kabbalist, Sadhu or Monk]
Please try to take these aspects into consideration when balancing the Cleric classes, as from Rank 4 onwards there seems to be always one superior class and one utility class (“take one Circle or leave it be”).