Nudges Towards Class Balance

[Somebody87]

Note to the devs: Everything below is a bunch of individual suggestions that do not depend on each other. Read through and just pick a couple easy ones. Every change I suggest is intended to make each class more fun and useful but not necessarily stronger. Doing one or two each update would be perfectly fine.

Alchemist:

• Apothecary Tier Five: Swap Dissolve with Mass Turn To Frog (30 second cooldown).
  --> Mass Turn To Frog: Throw a BIGGER vial a GROUP of up to four enemies who must succeed on a Fortitude saving throw or be turned into frogs.

Ranger: Arcane Archer Tree:

• Core stances should not be exclusive with each other.
• Core 5 Shadow Arrows should grant ghost touch.It's in the name!
• Capstone should grant Wisdom and increase the elemental arrow damage dice to d12s. See Eldritch Knight Tree!
• Tier Four: Banishing Arrows and Smiting Arrows should both be entirely passive and non-exclusive with anything else. The fort bypass against constructs is good but not worth losing elemental arrows.
• Paralyzing Arrows: Should cause helplessness. The archer is giving up lots of elemental damage to get CC, at least let it be good CC.
• Arrow of Slaying: It should scale with ranged power.

EPIC FEAT: Allow rangers to take Improved Sneak Attack. -->Deepwoodstalker's rely on sneak attack damage a lot.

Monk: A class that uses their fists and the energy of the universe to break the game and drive developers and players alike INSANE with their simultaneous OPness and weakness. I don’t think this one needs to be fixed but I rarely play monks. I would like someone to explain how that class even works.

Sorcerer:

• Tier Five abilities should be Charisma-based not Constitution Based.
• Immunity bypass should be granted at level 12 because half the stuff in Giant Hold is immune to 1-2 elements.

Worelock: Meh…
I don’t know how to improve this one but it does need to be improved SPECIFICALLY IN EPIC. Someone suggest something...

Wizard:

• Add an Enchantment option to the Magus Epic Destiny specific dcs.

Druid: Everything else is about Druids. It is a versatile class that is a patchwork of different abilities drawn from other classes. It is rough to use because it is all over the place but that problem can be reduced in any number of ways...
Potential Melee Changes:

• Nature’s Warrior: Alpha Strike: Lower cooldown to six seconds. This gives wolves a better AOE damage option.
• Animal Form Required Spells: All of these should use tactics DCs, including Howl of Terror. People in wolf form are still in melee gear. Since spell power is so easily buffed in augments, I wouldn't worry about making Ice Breath use melee power.

Potential Casting Changes: Designed not to outright increase spell damage but make Druid casting easier to use and thus less unbalanced. This involves making it easier to specialize as either Summer Focused or Winter Focused as a druid.

• Make the SLA’s in the Season’s Herold Tree multi-selector with each tier having one option for a Summer Spell (mainly Fire, Force, Light) and an option for a Winter Spell (mainly Electric, Cold). Example: Tier one: Multi-selector: Produce Flame OR Creeping Cold.
• Core 4: Return to Nature: Finger of Death (Druid’s ONLY necromancy spell) now works on all non-boss and non-death warded targets. It now also uses the highest of transmutation or necromancy bonuses.
• Core 5: Multi-selector: Sunburst OR Storm of Vengeance.
• Capstone: Mass Frog SLA: Does not share a cooldown with any other source of Mass Frog. Cooldown: 2 minutes.

Druid Spells to Fix:

• Ice Storm: Change the bludgeoning damage to cold damage. Bludgeoning is force damage which is a SUMMER attribute on a WINTER spell.
• Ice Flowers: Change the pierce damage to cold damage. Same problem as above.
• Storm of Vengeance: As a level nine AOE spell with a long cooldown, it should target more than one opponent at a time. Even if the duration is long, nothing except a boss will be standing inside of it for more than ten seconds so it needs to be hitting everything at once to be competitive with Sunburst.
  In addition, Summer Druids have stronger healing, thus Winter Druids need slightly (~10%) stronger damage.

If anyone has anything to add, I'm all ears!

[reywas]

Part of the balance pass should be some more spells across schools and types for all sorts of casters.

More access to domain spells for clerics, like elemental type spells for fire/air etc clerics. Just added to spell lists for every spell level by domain.

Druids need some level 9s for the elements, though new addtions did some of that. Would also love to see spells for the animal shapes at every spell level. To go with their thorn option, maybe work a third type of caster druid with nature majic over cold or fire, taking the boosts from those seasons to focus on acid, earth, and negative spells. With a corresponding Nature Elemental form, SLAs like the seperated Winter and Summer SLAs. Give those druid spells a proper niche and add in new spells to support. Already have some with the swarm spells.

Illusion needs spells above Phantasmal killer and shadow walk. Archmage pass for wizards with a spell school pass in general to.make all schools legit options would be nice. More varieties of spells in between levels to even out lists. There are still disparites in the lists for the elemental damage types and filling out more on Sonic for Spellsingers and Force for archmages would see bew life in thouse builds

Artificer Arcanotechnician needs a redo. It needs to have things for the runearm. Its the caster tree and I feel my rune arm is barely worth charging. Add more fire and force spells to go with the electric ones and raise the crits to the 2 % every other class gets. Have stable tier charge at every core like battle engineer and add rune arm boosts in the tree, like effects or superior recharge. Make the level 20 core mean something with making rune arms better. Finally, allow it to pick 2 spells per level like the alchemist.

Not related to casting, but artificer got me thinking, but make the armor docents part of enhancements and bring it uo to oar with other ac. Warforger should not have to get a feat for worse ac than fleshie armors. Make it a t1 or the first core to choose a plating type that enhances by level for parity with armor and docents.

Palemaster t5s are a mess. Please give finger or circle of death slas. Illusion has phantasmal killers up the whazoo, necros should get something. And abilty to penetrate neg damage immunity on Death Wards and immune enmies that arent undead like Golems.

Agreed on everything you said.

[Somebody87]

Part of the balance pass should be some more spells across schools and types for all sorts of casters.
More access to domain spells for clerics, like elemental type spells for fire/air etc clerics. Just added to spell lists for every spell level by domain.

Yes, I agree. Cleric domains need more spells for each domain and they need to be a little stronger. I understand clerics aren't sorcerers and shouldn't be but they should definitely be matching favored souls in damage at least.

• Add a domain spell to each spell level and make it so clerics gain access to those spells at the same time a wizard would.
• Change the domain bonuses, so they don't just have light and the element share a spell power but also a critical chance.

Illusion needs spells above Phantasmal killer and shadow walk. Archmage pass for wizards with a spell school pass in general to make all schools legit options would be nice. More varieties of spells in between levels to even out lists. There are still disparities in the list for the elemental damage types and filling out more on Sonic for Spellsingers and Force for archmages would breath new life into those builds

I was thinking that maybe archmage needs to go a different route than forcing people to specialize. Imagine Archmage if it focused on universal DCs, crit chance, and spell power in an effort to make all spells viable at once so Archmage becomes a tree built around adaptability. It would allow players to rotate the best spells from all schools. The damage would still be weaker than a sorcerer and the CC worse than a Vampire Pale Master but having a decent amount of both would make them good together.

• All DC enhancements: Make them universal including both the tier 5s, and have them stack with each other.
• Core 1: Don't have it lock in a particular spell school. In each core hereafter, let people choose whichever SLA they deem most useful from any school.
• Core 5: All spells you cast now use your Impulse Spell Power and Spell Lore if those values are higher than the spell's original type.
• Capstone: In addition to current bonuses, make heighten free and grant +3 max caster level with all spells.

Artificer Arcanotechnician needs a redo. It needs to have things for the runearm. It's the caster tree and I feel my rune arm is barely worth charging. Add more fire and force spells to go with the electric ones and raise the crits to the 2 % every other class gets. Have stable tier charge at every core like battle engineer and add rune arm boosts in the tree, like effects or superior recharge. Make the level 20 core mean something with making rune arms better. Finally, allow it to pick 2 spells per level like the alchemist.

I'll take your word for it.

Palemaster t5s are a mess. Please give finger or circle of death slas. Illusion has phantasmal killers up the whazoo, necros should get something. And abilty to penetrate neg damage immunity on Death Wards and immune enemies that arent undead like Golems.

Absolutely:

• Tier 4: Swap Deadly Versatile with a negative energy SLA. The shrouds aren't different enough to justify swapping in ANY scenario.
• Tier 4: Change Unholy Avatar to grant immunity strip against all foes.
• Tier 5: Swap Animate Ally with Finger of Death SLA. Everyone scrolls resurrection anyway!