“for all the complaining” … you mean a single sentence in my initial post talking about Wizard changes and about the change in class schedule schedule, c’mon. Its not often that IMC makes new classes, and however you want to put it, in the end Scout still got a new class option and Cleric is one class short.
That aside, the meta has always favored Burst DPS, no surprises there. Its still comical to me the state of class balance when the rebalance changes in Archer patch should’ve ironed out such stand-outs yet class balancing is still so screwed. IMC wanted to make every class be standalone and killed synergy in that patch so they can balance things easier but they previously forced such synergies to force players into playing specific builds to make it easier to balance in the first place. All classes are intrinsically different, internally and externally, and I feel like IMC failed to understand this in their balancing. Burst classes will always perform better than Sustained classes in practice, Wizard builds benefit better focusing on certain elements, mounted classes will always be mounted, summoner classes will always be used along with Isgarinti, certain classes benefit more with certain Goddess/Demon armor and Arks, classes have varying levels of power with and without Vaivora yet one can only use 2 Vaivoras in a build, every class has its own unique skills and gameplay design, Res Sacrae’s nature always made it benefit certain classes and class combinations more. different content favors different build types and so on.
Even worse, IMC didn’t even completely shut down all synergies and left certain classes keep such utilities (like Crusader Chants buffing all skill damage in future, not just Crusader) for some reason. With how every other class became more standalone, every other class is worse off as builds like Doppelsoeldner-Blossom Blader-Dragoon, Pyromancer-Chronomancer, Hwarang-Appraiser, Crusader-Zealot (in future) and Clown-Enchanter that aren’t as affected benefit the most (ironically most of them are meta classes previously). IMC said they balanced classes taking into account their utilities VS their DPS, but some of those classes are doing well with both. Mixing and matching the best of these aspects gave rise to builds like Swordsman’s Doppelsoeldner-Blossom Blader-Dragoon, to put it simply.
My dumb tin foil hat theory is that IMC did the rebalance patch, not to make all classes balanced, but so that IMC can manage more easily what classes are strong or weak since it got too complicated, thus allowing them to be able to more easily jack up the power of new classes they introduce so they can sell more TP and TP packages. Jokes aside, I feel like the patch somehow made things worse as expected of IMC, and in pure comedic fashion, builds like Doppelsoeldner-Blossom Blader-Dragoon are meta due to how well the build works together in a meta where IMC tried to make all classes standalone.
Class balancing is a joke, as always.
Kurdaitcha gameplay was certainly unique, but that doesn’t mean it was fun.