Every suggestion counts because without yours we wont know which one is the best. Cold exist in the absence of heat.
I grabbed DEX and CON because my Class benefits in an unusual way from it,though. Sadhu gets more evasion during OOB if I have more DEX, and Kabbalist gets more HP during Ein Sof with more CON.
The problem is the retarded design of the game with the way evasion and defence are too powerful. There are e.g. damage modifiers for different armor types and element types (depending on your type of weapon/element), but they don’t work very well because defence renders them useless. There are base damage values for skills which encourage you to spread your stats, but they don’t work well because defence renders them useless. There are damage attributes for skills, but again defence renders them useless.
Then there is defence. It’s useful to increase the worth of your HP and evasion rate, but the level difference penalty renders it useless (too many levels difference= defence overbuffed or negated; doesn’t apply to magic).
There’s also crit resistance, but monsters don’t really crit against players(Dragon Nest has the same issue with monsters unable to crit, making it a useless stat in PvE).
Evasion is useful and basically impossibly powerful, but negated by level difference (penalty+negated defence= busted) and magic attacks.
I believe that the large gap in difficulty increement within level 280+ maps was actually a pretty nice move. It was forcing players to try new tactics, and limited power-creeping a little. The problems were mainly the unbalance of Classes and the impossible-to-reduce magic defence.
Stronger monsters should be more dangerous. There’s nothing wrong if a monster can kill you in 1-2 hits if you don’t have any CON once it’s over lvl 300. The problem is that this is not Monster Hunter.
Maps are swarmed with these monsters and quests require you to kill xy monsters regardless of Class advancement/status build. Worst is that the Class advancement tests are even forcing the weak Classes to fulfill such ridiculous tasks only to advance to another weak Circle.
Hunting monsters is not rewarding enough for the trouble you have to go through on a non-meta build. Same as stat-spreading.
Where are the monsters that ignore your defence and hit you where it hurts? Where are the monsters who ignore your flee rate? Where are the life-threatening debuffs? Where are the buff removals by monster attacks/skills? Where are the field instance-removal skills (e.g. sth like Land Protector that cancels all magic circles and removes e.g. Diev statues) to make other Classes more viable and monsters more than stupid sitting ducks/HP sponges/power creeps?
RO did a good work by balancing everything until Renewal/3rd Classes hit, so why can’t TOS do the same?..
My point is not taking a rank 2 at rank 10. It is that if one rank invalidates the rest there was no reason to take all the other ranks. You only took them because you were forced.
This is progression, but not done right. I can’t think of the right answer but the current one most certainly isn’t.
This will most likely lead to a barren player base.
Ranks are NOT the means to measure ANYTHING going forward in balance. If anything they are the REASON everything is broken. Why is everything broken? Because ranks come with its own power creep. Rank + power creep is the philosophy driving content in tos. This is fact already. The evidence is the content itself.
The power creep introduced per rank invalidates EVERYTHING attached to the previous ranks. This formula gives you 1 relevant scale at a time out of the 8 (current) scales we have at our disposal. Every time you rank up you don’t keep the current scale, you replace it with the new 1. We don’t have 8 relevant scales, we have 1 at any given time.
It is worse because as the scales get replaced, our skills do not adapt to the new scale. They stay with the old scale that we ARE NOT USING ANYMORE and THAT causes the imbalance. Ranks were supposed to be “more buttons to push” and not “stronger buttons”. It was evident in the betas where the power creep wasn’t so blatantly obvious. People knew this DAY FKNG ONE with ranks and flat scaling.
@Composition I’m resonating more with your universal scaling than anything else in here. What are your thoughts on if everything scaled as if rank1 x your current rank? Each rank will still obviously be stronger than the last but you at least have a rank1 version of everything to compare with.
A linear progresion would most certainly be more stable than the current exponential mess that will spiral down out of control.
If you had only one scale on to which project everything then you’d most likely would be able to create a system on to which latch any progress going forward.
A systemic creation rather than an outburst of creativity would bring more stability and create a semblance of fair balance, atleast under my eyes.
So you’d always feel progress, your first ranks skill will be less powerfull, but if you create content based on the scale there would always be room for those lesser skills.
Why? because you would not face this sudden outburst of HP, if monster only had like 50K HP hitting it for 2K is still valid.
Ranks were supposed to be stronger buttons, not more buttons to push.
They stated in early interviews that they wanted early classes to fall off and they liked how much Auto Attacking players were doing because of cooldowns.
Players complained.
Hell Shinobi at the time of its introduction, basically only served to make Swordsman 1-3 not total ass.
They have somewhat become more flexible on that ideology and buffed early classes to have more value later on.
That philosophy was replaced in cbt2 where previous ranks where KEPT instead of removed on each class change. Even in cbt1 this was NEVER true because [heal] was a rank 1 skill that scaled FOREVER and could NEVER BE REPLACED because it dealt with % hp healing. All it takes is 1 example to destroy a claim and there are other “forever scaling” skills in cbt1.
What they said and what they actually did were VERY DIFFERENT.
“Players complained.
Hell Shinobi at the time of its introduction, basically only served to make Swordsman 1-3 not total ass.
They have somewhat become more flexible on that ideology and buffed early classes to have more value later on.”
Heal was buffed to go up to 15 tiles. If you’re trying to use a small amount of skills to make a statement against a general trend and design philosophy held amongst the overwhelming majority of skills most of which are still in the same predicament then you’re just being arbitrarily defiant.
We can already extrapolate based on Solmiki mobs what Rank 9 mobs will be like, given rank 8 mobs basically copy the stat advancement of ET just as prior mob health brackets were introduced in dungeons before they showed up on fields. The majority of lower class skills Still fall off. Hello, Energy Bolt, Earthquake, Flare (lol), Thrust, Bash, Pommel Beat, Gung-Ho, Concentrate, High Anchoring (lol), Barrage, Critical Shot, Oblique Shot, and the list goes on and on. You get 1 or 2 skills typically, sometimes none at all and sometimes more that can carry on into later-gameplay. The rest of skills you acquire at low ranks become trash. The general trend is still a fall off for previous classes. Itemization is still the name of the game (just now more than ever) with the big difference that Dex has now completely overtaken STR.
I actually was one of the very few people who got to Cleric3 in iCBT1 and it wasnt Heal that was the problem but Cure because of not having the hit limit. I had Divine Might too and it blew up everything it touched. But this is all kind of irrelevant in times past because Sadhu could also OOB off the screen with Divine Might.
I still play this game because im curious about future ranks. You could say i still playing because the class system is good in my eyes. I only feel bored right now because there is no challenge anymore in PVE, (thanks to people crying rank 8 is nightmare).If IMC changed class system ill probably just leave.
I’m not saying change the class system. I want all classes to be viable but we don’t have that, because one can hit 4 times more enemies at once than this one.
There’s many skills that do not behave as its rank brothers, neither in damage, AoE size nor utility. This create a clear divide in which is best. creating less class variety among the players. And lets not forget about class elitism that there once was and somewhat persist.
And by force I meant something like: You’re rank 9 and there’s this godly amazing rank 10. Why, would you not take it? Also the fact that you were forced to choose between the other 9 ranks. You can stay as a rank 1 forever, but good luck doing anything.
General Class balance is whatever. That’s a discussion you can have everywhere and it always an on-going process, frustrating as it may be, in any class-based MMO.
Fundamental, foundational crap like stats being fuked up? That’s not right. In a game where you generally cannot reset them? What kind of nonsense. With the class system a class of X rank is supposed to at the very least be relevant (and if its not you make the adjustments eventually) for content at which it is introduced. This at least means that picking something appropriate to your rank isn’t supposed to fuk you over hard because previous class choices matter less as you go on. The more earlier classes matter, the more punitive your early class choices are to your late-game success. Like a 50% Damage difference on the same r10 skill due to quick cast.
Not wanting early ranks to have that level of impact isn’t an inherit problem, but it does screw with the whole marketting spiel that they provided with the game.
We are forced to take a certain Class at a certain Rank, because otherwise we cannot advance towards the next Rank, as you need to reach Class level 15 to become able to do so. We also can’t save Ranks for later Classes, because Classes have Rank restrictions and not level restrictions.
If the Classes are trash, we only have choices inbetween this trash, that’s as simple as it can get. Since there isn’t a clear path where to advance towards, your choice can make a huge difference or none at all.
E.g. Krivis>Taoist advancement or Rodolero>Murmillo advancement or Dievdirbys>Miko advancement to name a few of these combinations where your choice makes or breaks the character, as other advancements are less viable.
Then there’s the Class advancement issue. As for the earlier Ranks, most Classes advancing to Circle 2 and 3 didn’t really feel that inferior to the Classes introduced on the Ranks. However, the Rank 8 Classes made Rank 6 C3 and Rank 7 C2 Classes look bad in many cases.
Hopefully this won’t matter that much anymore with continuing Rank advancement (towards Rank 11/12), but currently it’s a huge issue.
If it wasn’t, why would the developers bother starting adjustments with Rank 5-7 Classes first instead of starting at the lower Ranks for rebalancing?
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