This isn’t drama. Swordsman needs a buff or otherwise they need to overgear themselves to be ON THE SAME level as Archers and Wizards who only need to wear common (white) items …
Its not one person, Its 90% of people over level ~200. Because they dont even invite dps swordsman to parties ok?
EVERYONE OVER LEVEL ~200 feels swordsman dps is crap, no matter what build.
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Literally anybody over 200 can tell you how bad of a spot Swordsman is in right now. We are ONLY invited because we can group up mobs easily. Our DPS is ■■■■. We die in seconds to homing magic damage without a cleric babysitting us. We exist to swashbuckle.
And you know what? That would be fine if that were one of multiple options. Build a Peltast/Rodelero and play like that, that would be fine. But currently, that’s EVERY Swordsman class, DPS or tank build.
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So i did some testing on red truffel with my current build (LV 241 Main DEX).
With my current build i do around 50k dmg to a single truffel without any buffs with a full cyclone.
With full buffs (10 stacks Berserk, 1 stack Valor, guang ho max attribute, warcry with 10 targets) the dmg should be around 72k per Truffel.
This however is only the single target dmg. With my equip the skill gets an AOE Ratio of 10. That makes a total max dmg of 720kon all enemys in total.
A full rotation brings 1.4m dmg and has 45s cooldown creating a DPS of 32k/s with 10 enemys)
Does anyone got data for other classes?
You should calculate dps not damage on 1 skill.
While your spinning a ele or fletcher would have plopped down 5-6 skills.
The best way is to just record a 30 second damage on say, a boss.
Aktually i did calculate the average dps when you just use that skill calculated with cooldowns. If you want to add another skill just calculate its dps and add it. A boss however is the exact wrong enemy because it is a single target. Swordman are best against more enemys where the higher AOE Ratio shines.
If he can pump out more skills it doesnt mean the dps is higher if he has to wait 90s to do it again.
I just added lvl 5 Redel and Zucken.
You get around 30s/min skill use time. The total DPS to one enemy is around 4.4k/s (just the 3 skills)
With 10 Enemys the dps rises to 44k/s creating 2.2m total dmg/min
Take a video and upload it. Show your gear, stats, build and skills.
Writing a program that simply calculates your damage output based on whatever your objective for each class isn’t how games are balanced. If a game was balanced simply based on Damage / time, then I believe most games would be broken. There are way more attributes than simply just damage. This whole forum post isn’t just simply complaining about damage, but the mechanics of swordsman in general.
So do tell, how is your program going to take into account things like:
- Hitbox
- Range (aka, being able to kite stuff or even other things)
- Animation time (or even animation cancelling, such as Corsair’s Double Weapon Assault)
- AoE Attack Ratio
- DoT or single burst (This affects a lot. Bursting down a monster before it can deal any sort of substantial damage can be very rewarding in grinding)
- Crowd Control (With each CC having different effects)
And that’s not even talking about mechanics like size of monsters, Elemental property attacks, equipments, group synergies etc.
In fact, there are far better methods of balancing a game, NOT based on simply skill damage. Game developers usually have balancing charts based on statistics taken after play testing:
How effective is a particular class at fighting particular monsters of that level (Time taken to kill, damage taken in general)
Most people don’t seem to understand that balancing classes that has choices every 15 class ranks are difficult. Just simply think of ALL the possible permutations / combinations of classes there are in this game, even when it hasn’t been fully released. Tell me if your program would be able to balance the skills such that on a average, given N number of randomly selected class combinations would result in an approximately equal number of damage / time?
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The true problem of swordsmans aren’t their stats/weapons ranks choices. Dragoons, Barbarians, Highlanders, Cosairs and etc. are generally fine; The swordsman true problem are themselves, the base class.
While clerics, wizards and archers build a strong foudation for their higher ranks with structural and scalings skills/buffs like [Quick Cast] +50% damage attribute, 15 Tiles of %HP lv15 [Heal], [Kneeling Shot]'s atk spd + Dex damage scaling, 1600% P.atk damage lv15 [Multi-shot], swordsman c1 gains a crap 25~100 bonus damage buff, c2 gains a non-scaling useless skill plus a not-that-good supportive debuffer buff and finaly, after wasting 3 ranks, c3 gains another useless low damage skill.
This is something that often flies over the average player’s head, because they don’t understand that damage numbers are only part of the issue with Swordsman classes and Melee DPS in general. In fact, numbers tuning should be the simplest part of the problem to solve. We also have monster abilities, combat coding, and even monster AI that unfairly punish melee DPS classes or make playing such classes extremely unfun and unrewarding. All this requires much more work on the part of the developers, and may even require an overhaul for these aspects of game design.
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Funny how other classes have damage % while we’re just flat out damage … lol
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Swordie lives matters!
Hi guys! I’m a level 271 Pyrolinker, and i’ve partied with a Couple of DPS swordies. One of the players in my static group is a Sword 3 Cata 3 Dragoon 1, and his DPS output is ok.
I have partied with a Sword - Highlander - Barb 3 - Doppel 2 as well. His DPS was pretty good actually. His spin2win cyclone was critting for like 8-10k per tick non stop, which is pretty good imo.
At higher levels, it’s quite likely you’ll need a class with CC to stunlock groups to open up time for your melees to DPS. (Cryomancer, Linker pull, Fire pillar, or archer full draw etc) No class can really solo at level 200+, and the best utility you offer is with Peltasta. However, the same could be said of clerics as well in terms of build diversity (No cleric 2 or priest 3 = GTFO).
Meta builds will be meta builds, if you are playing something without what the meta wants, expect to be shafted. Not every build performs equally in every platform.
- Hitbox - AOE component - the higher the AOE the less the damage it should do. All you need in this game is medium size aoe skills since monsters dont block each other with their hitboxes. Meaning you can gather all mobs in really small space. So after reaching certain aoe size it doesnt really matter anymore.
2)Range is more of an defensive mechanism rather than offensive one. All it give in offense is uptime of your possible damage period (ex. you are able to hit 70% of the time due to mob movement). Thats simple multiplication formula.
3)Animation time is…animation time. How much time it takes for skill to complete from start to the end is one of basic components in calculating skill DPS. Why even mentioning it?
4)AOE attack ratio is again AOE component - explained above with the diffrence it literaly defines the numbers of target you hit so its more usefull than aoe size stat.
5)DoT and burst in this game dont make much of a diffrence if it comes down to PVE. In normal game burst damage simply gives you more defense, since if enemy die quickly it wont damage you back. Here nobody care about that since you got healers and tanks that take all aggro. If defense would matter than ofcourse DoT skill should deal more DPS than burst skill.
BONUS 6 ) Games should be centered around offense rather than defense for a simple reason. Defense is needed for players who make mistakes, thus need to cover them with large HP pool or damage mitigation. Good players mitigate or nullify incoming damage with their player skills (refleks, reading of enemy movement patterns, CC skills and so on) thus all they need is offense, not defense.
Want people to be more concerned about defensive stats, then :
- Make them useful
- Remove healers from game - it make people turn brain off
- Reduce perfomance of tanks - it make people turn brain off too
- Require more of manual dodging and positioning from players - each mistake will be painfull, thus people will either become better players or either invest in defensive stats or cry how the game is hard since doing 2 steps to the left in mids of battle is so impossible to do.
cldw92, I think you are about right. I still think Swordsman needs a buff in some compartments - like the AoE ratio attack so that way we can be useful. Out of 7 party makes from yesterday for Evac, only one of them would invite a Swordsman. We take a hell of a lot of damage if we’re not properly geared. So we do need to be buffed in that area at least to mitigate some of the damage. Because really, we’re on the front line while Archers/Mages are in the back line.
It just would make more sense to bring range who have larger AoE radius and more AoE attacks. Take for example, Cross Slash. TERRIBLE AoE radius and Skyline has even worse AoE radius. We have to be really well geared in order to be on the same damage level as Archers and Wizards (if the mob doesn’t move, too).
I’m level 243 if you want to ask. I host under the username acetatsujin on Twitch for as much as I can and I’ve put in over 300 hours so far.
It’s possible to solo mobs if your well decked out. Like, REALLY well decked out.
I have Superior Royal Plates (top and bottom) with 5+ on them and 2 sockets open and I have green gems in each of them, each gem is level 4 star. Each gem reduces the chance the mobs will crit me by 9 rating. Glass Bracelets with 3+. Magi Two Handed Sword 6+ with 2x level 5 green gems for 22 Crit Rating each, and the Roxona Plate Gloves and Plate Boots. The Gloves have 2 red gems at level 4 for 16 Crit Attack each and boots have 2x level 4 blue gems for 4 magic defense each.
All of that, and I still can’t do freaking 20K-40K like archers and mages with a single attack with a large AoE radius. And they’re wearing gear from level 90-120 quests and using some level 220 white weapon.
Not to mention how useless Skyline is against enemies who don’t bleed … Oh man, TERRIBLE damage. Not even worth spending the SP on. Vertical Slash is the worst ability we have for a Highlander and those who spend points in it … I’m not sure what to tell them. Respec and don’t put one point in there. Very bad skill and doesn’t scale what so ever.
Cyclone right now is bugged and not sure what really triggers the bug. I have a level 9 Cyclone, and when the bug is active it drops to level 3 Cyclone so the duration goes from 4.9 seconds to like freaking 3.2 or whatever level 3’s duration is and the damage goes down by a lot … Deeds attack speed only works if you swap weapons (just have the same weapon you have equipped for both swap icons) and it attacks faster but it seems like there’s an animation limit on it? Not sure.
Dragoon totally needs a buff to be on the same level as Doppel C2. Doppel C2 has access to Deeds up to level 10 which can do insane amount of damage but holy hell how much damage do you take in is unbelievable … You NEED a healer to watch you or if you have a smart tank that doesn’t sit there and hits C and does nothing.
Not to mention the high cost of our attacks. Other classes don’t need to rest, they can just keep moving while you have to rest. If you spend no points in SPR that is (which I don’t find a reason to do so). Putting more points in Con just seems to be the idea.
Anyways, that’s my take on Swordsman for now. The damage calculation needs to be looked at across all ranks in Swordsman and Swordsman tree (the first rank) Seriously needs to be reworked. Gung Ho is just a bad skill at higher levels because of the high defense value it takes away from you … Concentrate grants you more damage if you invest in the passive attribute which it benefits from. AoE radius for certain attacks need to be bigger (Cyclone needs to be at least 12 base, let your gear take you higher). All mobs need to bleed so Skyline can be ‘useful’ otherwise fix the freaking Vertical Slash’s ultra terrible scaling damage so we can benefit from that. Enemies who wear plate should totally have their armor removed, it doesn’t feel like it with Skull Swing.
Anyways … that’s all I wanted to say … for now.
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Some changes that devs could apply to improve swordsman’s dps
Gung Ho - % increase in atk, flat reduction in defense
Reason: Scaling damage, we need and want this.
Concentrate - Toggled skill, costs sp every 3 secs it is active or for every 5 attacks that hit, whichever comes first
Reason: I always forget to re-apply this and I’m sure others do too, being able to keep it active for as long as needed would be better. Managing SP is a lot easier too than keeping an eye on your buffs.
Restrain - Deals damage when the stun procs, **as an attribute maybe
Reason: The stun duration is so short it’s almost negligible
Pretty sure swordsman C2 and C3 would be more viable especially since Gung-Ho would just be a better skill overall.
make the provoke thinngy work with most of the swordsman skills
like warcry for example… so we will not be obliged to take that pelt 1 ( which i really dont want to get)
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Wow… I have nothing to say about this. You clearly are not a game developer nor a game designer. Your suggestion for the removal of almost any mechanic except for offensive ones are truly preposterous. It just makes the game a 1-track/minded nonsense. There are really obvious reasons why the healer archetype has existed in games since ages back.
Perhaps you may want to read up on some game design theories, on what vertical depth vs horizontal breadth in mechanics actually mean before simply throwing out stuff like that, especially if you want to berate every game developer on earth is so crappy at balancing their games.
Let’s look at some of the points you mentioned:
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Reaching certain AoE size, it doesn’t matter anymore? Well, guess what, only swordsman can gather monsters easily. Also, you apparently don’t take into account the fact that monsters in ToS does pathing of some sorts and will not stack unto each other voluntarily unless there are skills doing it (Linker)
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That’s why I said it’s for kiting. Nonetheless, it is useful for not getting damaged.
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Animation time is animation time? Wow. Why do you think some skills have higher burst than the others even if they deal the same damage and overheat? If I could spam Hexen Dropper twice in the same time I do it for a single skill, like Dragoon’s Serpentine, then it is WAY more dps. Animation time IS time itself. You were talking about Damage / Time. Please factor in the time taken for an animation to end before you can cast another skill as well.
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Well, since you say it’s the same as the above, sure, somewhat.
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DoT and burst in this game doesn’t make a difference when it comes to PVE? You haven’t seen Earthtower plays have you? Why do you think people are complaining about Cyromancer skills that are simply cast and forget, run around while monsters take damage? In general, this entire forum is about swordsman melting in the fact of high level monsters. If we could say, bleed an enemy out like wugushi while running around, do you think it would happen? The same goes for burst. Please take a look at how Wugushis play, then tell me that again.
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This is the one I have the most issue is. We are talking about balancing a game, not an opinion of “good players don’t need defensive skills”. Let’s be objective here. ToS has it, so we factor those in.
You haven’t made any answer on how your program will take into account the calculations. Show me a formula rather than simply calculating x + % damage like your original post.
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Even with abilities comparable to other classes in the baseline class, other swordsman classes would still suck. Frost Cloud alone is stronger than all abilities of a full DPS swordsman combined.
Cannon Blast basically does as much (or more if you don’t have Spear Lunge) damage as all Dragoon abilities combined on a comparable cooldown in a greater radius with the option of taking Falconer as R6 for infinite targets.
When it comes to scaling, Dragoon abilities basically scale as well as Multishot or Barrage which are R1 / R2 C1 abilities and Dragoon abilities don’t have overheat either.