Time for a re-hash?

[Bloodskittle]

Currently in the game melee is the Dominant style, however the previously dominant melee class of fighter, for it's versatility and balance of dps and durability must rely heavily on monk splashes to compete with Barbarian or Paladin. Begging the question, is it time to give fighter some attention?

I do not think a total over turn as we saw happen to barbarian is necessary however it is past time that fighter was improved.

[phillymiket]

There was a thread about a week ago that got this response;

I am going to break tradition and talk about some early musings on balance so player's get a glimpse into our early balance and design thoughts. These have not even gone to player's council yet so I hope players will keep an open mind and realize this is all subject to change. In the past we haven't talked about early design thoughts because players often consider that a promise or definite plan - which this is not intended to be.

Kensai has always been a pet peeve of mine; why the only Fighter DPS tree was designed so that you had to splash monk to maximize its potential is something I've never understood. In the long run we will probably add some heavy armor options through multi-selectors to the tree. I'd personally like to create a new fighter tree, but we really can't add a fourth tree - at least until Favored Soul, Druid, and Artificer get their third trees.

Right now we feel that Rogue probably needs attention more than Fighter, and melee Rangers could use a bump in mitigation.

Our balance check list includes the following items in no particular order, and with no particular timetable attached. These are our current thoughts, but they are early and haven't even been discussed with the player's council.

~ Add Ranged Power to epic levels and epic destinies, while balancing Manyshot and 10k Stars. We want current high end ranged builds to keep their DPS - we just want to open up some underperforming ranged builds. This change will allow many more ranged builds to participate in the epic levels. Artificer repeater builds and ranger ranged builds will be better without needing to splash monk, and we might even see players experimenting with throwing builds. It also allows us to make some heroic abilities scale with ranged power.

~ Rogue pass. Mechanic is particularly bad.

~ New Favored Soul tree.

~ New Druid tree while we fix the many issues with druid forms.

~ Fighter pass. Kensai needs some non monk options. We think we might want the fighter advantage to be tactical DCs so fighters will probably get boosts to those.

~ Rangers could use some more tweaks, particularly with their mitigation.

~ Artificer pass. While the ranged power changes should really help Artificers, rune arms have fallen behind. Part of it is that they need better scaling into epic levels. Neither the damage nor the DCs scale well into higher levels.

~ We understand Divine Grace creates a bad situation where characters without it have a hard time competing with Paladin splashes when building for good saves. We don't want to nerf the saves of top builds, so we are looking into adding a bonus type to the Divine Grace saving throw bonus and creating some saving throw items with the same type of bonus type. In other words, players without Divine Grace will be able to make up some of the difference through itemization.

Sev~

[the_one_dwarfforged]

pure fighter isnt as bad right now as popular idiocy would have you believe.

harmor buff + kta + twitch = win.

they still could use some adjusting though but remember this is turbine. either they will go way over the top (ie: bards, pallies, and barbs) or their changes will fail miserably. im leaning towards fail miserably because based on what sev said, well, yea its just not looking good.