You know the game is not balanced properly when...

[PsychoBlonde]

Since a game is supposed to be fun, flavor reasons are th eonly reason to play them in the first place. If you play the game to get uber, you have lost something on the way in my opinion.

As far as I'm concerned, the game is only "unbalanced" when only a few builds are really EE viable. This was the case when the epic changeover first happened--it isn't now. Are some builds better than others? Sure, but that's part of the game. There are so many build options in this game that it is a physical impossibility to balance ALL builds against ALL others--not to mention that there are a sufficient number of circumstances and situational differences that it'd be impossible to even TELL when the builds were "balanced".

You know how I tell when the game is balanced? I look at the pug raids I join and see what people are playing. Nowadays I see EVERYTHING, it's not just 6 pale masters, 4 favored souls, and 2 monks the way it was for quite some time.

Druids, Artificers, and Sorcerers need their 3rd tree done, IMO, and it looks like rogues are getting some love in this next update and Rangers possibly soon after.

[Monkey-Boy]

As far as I'm concerned, the game is only "unbalanced" when only a few builds are really EE viable.

That's really not a good criteria considering how easy the game is right now.

[RD2play]

Re: Sorcerer

Well, if you really only wanted to be able to focus in a single element and get fewer SLAs.

I've most often heard players say Sorcerers have 2.5 trees. Which is to say there's a good chance they'll get another tree someday, but are probably lower priority than than a few other classes who definitely have only two trees, any way you count it.

With the Enhancement revamp, in the per-discussions there was talk about "Acolyte of the skin" for sorcerer I take it this idea has been put in the freezer if not tossed aside all together? It did intrigue me back in the day and I would love to see it added. any thoughts ?

[luvirini]

You know the game is not balanced when the only powerful builds are heavy armor two handed or s&b melee.

In my dash of the last few lives to get triple everything I was missing among others one wizard and one sorcerer life. I did the sorcerer life as caster and hated it in harder content as I was then used to running the easy button melees(6 fighter or paladin, 12 what I needed and 2 rogue s&b), the really low power of the sorcerer was.. bad. Sure energy burst does good damage, but the other 19 seconds you are doing really low damage compared to a melee. So next life I did my wizard life as 12 wizard 6 fighter 2 rogue s&b and again everything seemed silly easy.

And that coming from a player who used to love playing casters with more than 1/3 of all my characters/lives ever having been sorcerer and more than 1/3 wizard. But I just could not stomach running two gimp lives after each other.

(Also the ranger twf build felt really gimp. on rogue life I did not even try anything fancy and went s&b)

So today choice is really: play melee or be gimp (and I hate playing gimps and melees so I find myself playing a lot less.)

[Kaytis]

Re: Sorcerer

Well, if you really only wanted to be able to focus in a single element and get fewer SLAs.

I've most often heard players say Sorcerers have 2.5 trees. Which is to say there's a good chance they'll get another tree someday, but are probably lower priority than than a few other classes who definitely have only two trees, any way you count it.

Not to mention criticals. I take 8% water, 4% earth. A single multi-selector tree would offer only 8% total across both elements.

[Cetus]

Fighter is fine, though I agree it is behind Paladin. Their greatest weakness is actually saving throws.

WHAT!

Ok, we need to talk...

Fighter's are far from fine. Vanguard is an awkward tree that performed very weakly against trash when I tested it. Kensei DPS is laughable, AND their saves suck. A fighters feat list enables the acquisition of massive amounts of dog feces, including stellar options like: combat casting, alertness, athletic, bullheaded, and discipline (see my point? There are feats in this game that should just be deleted, and while that stays true - a fighters large amount of free feats is not a strength).

They are FORCED to take 3 weak feats that impinge on their supposed "feat advantage", especially in light of other classes which, despite not having free feats, have quasi-free feats in the form of free stuff like cleaves in KotC paladin tree, TWF and ranged feats for rangers, monks, etc.

Fighter only DPS tree - kensei, has a ridiculous pre-requisite list for MONK synergy, and that meditation ability ruthlessly removes you from combat to sit for a while and gain some insignificant amount of dissipating damage. There's even a wisdom based attack that lowers fortification for all those wisdom based fighters out there...

The vorpal strikes ability shares a cooldown with a boost, which just self destructs the core ability.

A good death has a whopping 30 second cooldown whereas fists of iron and divine sacrifice have like 3 seconds. The deepwood sniper one is pretty short too (6 sec?).

And...it has a massive pre req with a useless crit accuracy enhancement (who needs to confirm nowadays?) and a measly 1 crit damage per tier enhancement.

Oh, and since melee power was introduced, kensei offers none of it.
Fighter is a mess right now, let's just agree on that.

[bartharok]

You know the game is not balanced when the only powerful builds are heavy armor two handed or s&b melee.

In my dash of the last few lives to get triple everything I was missing among others one wizard and one sorcerer life. I did the sorcerer life as caster and hated it in harder content as I was then used to running the easy button melees(6 fighter or paladin, 12 what I needed and 2 rogue s&b), the really low power of the sorcerer was.. bad. Sure energy burst does good damage, but the other 19 seconds you are doing really low damage compared to a melee. So next life I did my wizard life as 12 wizard 6 fighter 2 rogue s&b and again everything seemed silly easy.

And that coming from a player who used to love playing casters with more than 1/3 of all my characters/lives ever having been sorcerer and more than 1/3 wizard. But I just could not stomach running two gimp lives after each other.

(Also the ranger twf build felt really gimp. on rogue life I did not even try anything fancy and went s&b)

So today choice is really: play melee or be gimp (and I hate playing gimps and melees so I find myself playing a lot less.)

Gimp means gimp. It does not mean Not The Uberest, you know.

[Vint]

So today choice is really: play melee or be gimp (and I hate playing gimps and melees so I find myself playing a lot less.)

This is only somewhat true as casters are viable in EE (if they are good players) and completely untrue if your ego will not let you run anything but EE.

[Monkey-Boy]

Gimp means gimp. It does not mean Not The Uberest, you know.

In the words of that great philosopher and humanitarian, Ricky Bobby, "if you're not first you're last.*"







* I don't really believe this, just felt like throwing in a Ricky Bobby quote.

[bartharok]

In the words of that great philosopher and humanitarian, Rickie Bobby, "if you're not first you're last."

"When youre not first, his back is in front of you, waiting for the stab"

[Monkey-Boy]

. . . completely untrue if your ego will not let you run anything but EE.

You need to explain this some more please.

[patang01]

Re: Sorcerer

Well, if you really only wanted to be able to focus in a single element and get fewer SLAs.

I've most often heard players say Sorcerers have 2.5 trees. Which is to say there's a good chance they'll get another tree someday, but are probably lower priority than than a few other classes who definitely have only two trees, any way you count it.

I like the setup of several trees since I've often played my sorc using earth as primary and water as secondary. Altho I considered the elemental ones to be like 1 (intellectually) it's nice to be able to pick from several.

[RTFM]

Please if you want balance go play online checkers...or chess...or something like that.

DDO will never be balanced. If it is ever "balanced" it will be 1000% times more boring than it is.

If you think something is overpowered just roll your toon to that and enjoy it.....while it lasts...Everything always runs in cycles and it will not be king forever. Just enjoy yourself and leverage the imbalance to your enjoyment. Save the complaints of imbalance, instead go read through the 2006-2014 posts on imbalance and laugh about how stupid those posts look now.

...the creator of the Pale Master Guide is building wizards with melee capacity to deal with red named mobs Melee wizard.

I already commented on how blanket immunities and bosses with hundreds of thousands of HPs are damaging specialists and favoring raw DPS only (LINK). This is just an example of how down the line we are.

I am recently playing a barbarian for the first time. This is not a class I enjoy playing, I really dislike just cleaving to death masses of mobs. Yes, it requires skill, but I couldn't help but notice how self contained the class is. It packs heals, it has some CC via destinies and it has raw DPS (the best kind of DPS in DDO) to clear trash and bosses alike.

Aside from flavor reasons, why play any of the "old" classes and not stick to the uber powerful new overlords? Paladin, barbarian and bard, when build properly, pack absolutely everything you need for 99% of the game. Other classes do not.

Is this where the game is heading? Are we going to be seeing more of this update after update? Where will it stop, when all classes are self contained to the point that you can beat solo any content at any difficulty and not be considered an achievement? And if this does not happen and some classes are not upgraded to this uber level, won't some styles be unfairly penalized?

Thoughts, comments?

[luvirini]

Gimp means gimp. It does not mean Not The Uberest, you know.

I call it gimp when it takes more than twice the time to do something from a moderately useless build that the ranger was and three times the time of the good builds.

Before update 9 I did normally try to give my wizards good melee capability as the spell points just did not last enough to do whole dungeons.

After update 9 I enjoyed playing casters that focused on casting only and played a lot of caster wizards and some sorcerers. At some point they nerfed the instakills badly so I switched more to sorcerers, still enjoying casting.

Then after u14 the enemy hit points scaled up a lot and casters did not scale, so sorcerers became less useful and I went to playing monchers and illusionist wizards, bot reasonably good in killing high HP mobs and enjoyed the challenge of EE. T

Then we got the easy button where melees that could do a lot more sustained damage than sorcerers ever since the new trees but had to be careful in applying it suddenly could go in middle of enemy groups and keep doing that incredible damage nonstop. So I played the melees to get the lives done, but *sigh* it is so boring...

[IronClan]

In the words of that great philosopher and humanitarian, Ricky Bobby, "if you're not first you're last.*"







* I don't really believe this, just felt like throwing in a Ricky Bobby quote.

It is true though*. Except that Ricky Bobby would spell it "if your not the first your the last"

I believe that's how the person Bartharok quoted sees it though.

*in Forum DDO second place DPS is just the first loser, and last months Flavor is useless this month... How else do you explain Centered Kensei now being "gimp" and Evasion now being useless.

The truth is otherwise, but perception is as we know everything in Forum DDO.

[Vint]

You need to explain this some more please.

I am not trying to divert from the OP, but there are 4 difficulty settings. If someone does not know simple game mechanics and they prefer to make some garbage build, then maybe they do not belong in elite.

Many players seem to be confused and think that everyone should be able to roflstomp EE.

Come to Thelanis and I can find you someone that can run EE on any class.

For those players who know little about the game, they may find eh more enjoyable.

[Krell]

As far as I'm concerned, the game is only "unbalanced" when only a few builds are really EE viable. This was the case when the epic changeover first happened--it isn't now. Are some builds better than others? Sure, but that's part of the game. There are so many build options in this game that it is a physical impossibility to balance ALL builds against ALL others--not to mention that there are a sufficient number of circumstances and situational differences that it'd be impossible to even TELL when the builds were "balanced".

You know how I tell when the game is balanced? I look at the pug raids I join and see what people are playing. Nowadays I see EVERYTHING, it's not just 6 pale masters, 4 favored souls, and 2 monks the way it was for quite some time.

Druids, Artificers, and Sorcerers need their 3rd tree done, IMO, and it looks like rogues are getting some love in this next update and Rangers possibly soon after.

I would agree that a higher level goal is to have lots of classes/builds that are viable in end game, instead of very few as we had in the past. This leads to greater diversity and choices. When a bigger percent of the player population can play together, I think that is good for the game.

The next level of goals if to try to have all the viable end game classes/builds somewhat balanced with each other. Not the same, and not exactly balanced though since that would be bland. Different strengths, weaknesses, and play styles with end game viable builds is good as long as one or two do not clearly outclass all others.

The fact that we can debate which of multiple classes/builds are most effective in end game content means that Sev and his team are making good progress in my opinion.

[luvirini]

This is only somewhat true as casters are viable in EE (if they are good players) and completely untrue if your ego will not let you run anything but EE.

It is not about ego. It is about having even remote challenge, Even the gimp ranger or caster build could steamroll EE, just slower and more carefully.

And yes casters and really any class is viable in EE, just gimp in being slow to kill stuff compared to heavy armor twf/s&b melees.

[Vint]

It is not about ego. It is about having even remote challenge, Even the gimp ranger or caster build could steamroll EE, just slower and more carefully.

And yes casters and really any class is viable in EE, just gimp in being slow to kill stuff compared to heavy armor twf/s&b melees.

I understand and agree with you, but when there is talk of making the game harder the “not good players” cry because they will not be able to survive in it.

The “not good players” need to quit complaining and just fit where they fit and quit trying to dumb the game down to their level of difficulty. This is the overall sentiment of threads like this.

There are too many uninformed idiots that go by what they see in the achievement thread that lack any knowledge of what happens in game. These are the ones I want the devs to ignore. If they want to invest little at knowing what/how game mechanics work, maybe they belong in EH or EE.

[BigErkyKid]

There are too many uninformed idiots .

Bad boy. Detention for you!