Recently, IMC has been busy to buff peltastas survival, and it has gone up a lot.
However, nearly all of it is passive, meaning you can just fire away on those 100k+ defense without having to worry about anything.
I believe IMC forgot that aside peltasta,there are still 2 other classes on every swordsman build,
meaning he can get complete survival on his own and high damage output from the two other classes in the build.
These things should not happen, as it is unhealthy to make one class overpowered in terms of survival while having 0 drawbacks (i.e. you don’t have a restriction that lowers your attack, you can use your shield defense to attack instead if your weapon is too low, you have strong physical- and magic defense and a shield that reliably absorbs damage to ignore what little damage you still take completely).
I think it is time to give Peltasta a good weakness, something he has to trade-off for being especially bulky.
First of all, Hard Shield should have its magic defense portion removed completely.
The reason is because it is ridiculous in combination with other buffs like pardoners increased magic defense, paladins barrier, oracles counterspell, enchanters armor enchants, normal and legendary Nuaele cards, on top of swordsmans bear and peltastas high guard which reduce every incoming damage heavily.
What is the point of having cloth armor and all these buffs available if peltasta can just get all the magic defense he needs from?
What is the point of party play if the tank can cover for everything on his own, so he needs neither a heal nor other options in the game to survive, while having access to attack buffs from doppelsoeldner,barbarian and damage buffs from cataphract,hoplite,etc.?
Also, how do you generate magic defense from the one item group that inherently does not have any (i.e. shields)?
For the sake of having peltasta rely on either other classes in party or specific items like Nuaele card/cloth armor, I believe that it’s necessary to disable any magic defense gain from hard shield.
It’s also way healthier for PVP environments, since you can then counter peltasta with other classes than oracle,miko or sheriff.
For the skill guardian, make it have only half the reduction value if you don’t use manual block with the subweapon attack button. The skill by itself is fine, but with a high uptime due to the skyaclips shield,
the skill is simply too strong on a standalone point. It also makes no sense that peltasta doesn’t have to lift his shield actively even once to have all the benefits of his skills, which comes off as weird.
why do swordsmen and clerics have the ability to use active block if it isn’t promoted anyhow within the active gameplay?
for the sake of balance and a better gameplay experience, promoting the use of active block would do great wonders to make the games battle system look less hack-away with passive stat protection[which is the main reason it’s so boring].
Guardian should have you to actively guard against attacks for a larger damage reduction.
You cannot expect high damage-reduction if you simply go gungho on the enemy.
The passive block on shield should be already enough protection without lifting the shield.
On that issue, I’d also like to address the AoE defense gain on hard shield.
Make it only apply half the value without having the shield up in front of you to actively block incoming attacks.
AoE defense is really powerful, but at the same time, it is gamebreaking once you reach certain amounts of it, keeping a whole party or even whole guild save from enemy attacks.
I believe it would be more healthy to make the protective ability dependent on the playing skills of the person doing the tanking and not on the dumb monster A.I. this game features.
Maybe this could even become a general feature where your AoE defense ratio is increased when you use active block, similarly to how it already adds bonus block, so you can shield other people near to you, so it can be removed from peltastas hard shield completely and instead become a feature for every class that can use active block.
E.g. active block could provide +50% AoE defense ratio in case of attacker or supporter classes and +100% AoE defense ratio in case of defensive classes (quarrel shooter, paladin, peltasta) via class mastery.
that way peltasta would lose nothing, but at the same time active block would gain more meaning (as you can protect nearby party members) and defensive classes would be able to take the tank role in the party, allowing for non-swordsman to do at least a bit of tanking.