IMC you claimed you were going to keep your eyes open for feedback and improve communication. There’s a general outcry from the playerbase regarding the lack of effectiveness regarding swordsmen for anything but tanking. I’m a 280 dragoon, also have played barbarians, highlanders and am about to do a Squire next. After that I might cave in and do a full tank character. Call me a masochist if you wish.
All criticism is made towards PvE entirely.
1)Swordsmen skills, attributes, sp cost, cooldowns need serious and urgent fine tuning.
200 levels into the game and I was having serious doubts wether the dev team have actually played swordsmen before.
They have tiny hitboxes, do terrible damage even with points put entirely into STR or DEX. You need semi-laser like precision to hit with them properly at times, it doesn’t help the fact meanwhile enemies are throwing sleep, slow, knocking you back. Meanwhile Wizard and Archer classes get to do more damage than you while avoiding most if not all mechanics and threats. Don’t forget the lag, the glitches.
Their cooldowns are too long, they cost too much SP and don’t do damage enough to reward the risk and skill you need to be competent with the very limited tools you have given us so far. For instance, I can’t hope to do damage properly if pain barrier is on cooldown or if my debuffs were on cooldown or resisted because I’ll get likely thrown back and suddenly half my dps is gone. Because while it takes me 2-3 seconds to get up and run back in or more, I already lost my tiny window to do damage properly as my debuff has gone down.
A lot of the skills that are meant to be good (but they really aren’t, they are just good in comparison to what else we have) have negative drawbacks and debuffs to further discourage us from using them. Imagine if Wizards had double SP cost while Quick/Surecast is active or Kneeling Shot would drain SP while its active? There’d be an outrage from them.
2)Melee weapon damage is too low.
This would also benefit clerics. Our weapons do very, very poor damage. Our main damage gains come from weapon attack. The higher scaling STR that was patched in recently at is a very tiny and ineffective buff, so much when you make the math it is not nearly enough to fix any of our problems at all.
Archer weapons get masssive high atk bonus with many additional benefits and they can benefit from offhanded weapons (such as Arde Dagger and Manana) with ranged attacks. The same applies to wizards.
- The game is not melee friendly. This is an understatement.
Most attacks and mechanics center around almost within melee weapon range or double and sometimes tripled of that. The extra HP we get doesn’t make up the fact we have to do less damage in order to keep avoiding damage or crowd control and other debuffs. The skill animations take too long and most of them aren’t really nice or discernible in visually aesthetic either.
- Gear damage and Armor fine tuning
We far too much gear damage because we end up getting hit more often. Meaning, we have to travel more often back and forth than other classes who take mainly weapon damage and spend more silver. Melee fighters in other games also get bonuses for wearing a type of armor. If a wizard can equip plate armor (and most of them do except for gloves) what is the point of anything? I appreciate you are willing to give people more customization options for their characters however swordsmen need bigger bonuses from equipping armor. A new attribute for both problems or one for each available at rank one would fix this.
Also giving rapiers 20+ durability? What were you thinking? Why?! Explain me WHY please. I haven’t even made a Fencer yet but that’s something that just makes me have serious doubts on the competence of whoever is designing the classes of the game.
5)When Swordsmen were weak to begin with, you go ahead and nerf them even more at launch
Cyclone, mount dashing, Crosscut. There were quite literally nothing wrong with these things. Even with Cyclone and Crosscut, Swordsmen damage is average at best and still completely unrewarding. Dashing costs stamina and mount dashing really helped Cataphracts become respectable and infamous attackers by breaking and by passing enemy formation breakers while being able to harass.
The Cyclone and Crosscut nerfs were exclusive to iTOS and it was a silly move on whoever made that decision. Which brings me to my final point.
- You said iTOS would have difference balance from kTOS.
That is fine and I can understand that. However, it is time to act on better judgement and start making an entire class tree functional and rewarding to play. If you are having trouble balancing the class, we have quite a few talented players here at the forum you could contact for guidance and feedback.
All the Swordsmen friends I have met while leveling to 280 have all either quit the game or rerolled into better and more rewarding classes. I don’t need to see server data and statistics to see there is a problem. I can see things like:
A) (Last login 2 weeks ago.)
B) Friends list has only three people that actively main a swordsmen out of fifty.
C)Over 15 friends I have made while helping people with builds, links and teaching have quit and I haven’t seen logged in anymore.
We need a public announcement that you are going to address this and we need to see a list of tentative approaches that you are taking to resolve this. You must do this as soon you possibly can if you wish to repair your image, trasparency and credibility as game designers and developers.
I’m sorry if I got a little heated but this is something we Swordsmen players have been hitting against the wall over and over again. We love the game and we want to see it improve. However we don’t want to wait 2 years for that to happen or risk not anything worthwhile happening at all in those two years when we could be spending our time and effort elsewhere.
Even if you do not bother to read this, thank you.
-Eroica