New Classes Discovered

[Elcura]

11-50?

I fail to see the point of this post.

[Loaar]

Sorry, I'm just a bit doubtful that he went from 11-50 in a few hours and was wondering if it was a typo.

[TheMightyQuinn]

Sorry, I'm just a bit doubtful that he went from 11-50 in a few hours and was wondering if it was a typo.

Someone's never heard of a SMN Burn.

[Vitglance]

Just because MMOs have a stigma of being unbalanced, doesn't mean such a thing is inherent to them, it just means they have a history of being so.

Like timesink and paletteswapping, there are things you can excuse when a genre is fledgling that would be a grave disservice to identify with the genre itself as it starts to become mainstream. There's no reason to expect these sorts of cut-corners should be present in MMOs as they begin to move forward. And similarly, there's no reason to give the same kind of concessions to a multibilliondollar corporation producing a triple A mainstream title, as we did the humble start-ups servicing a niche demographic over a decade ago.

You would never smile and nod if you received such shoddy balancing from any other kind of game. We don't shrug our shoulders and hum to ourselves about natural forces at work when a character in a fighting game is unbalanced. We rightfully rail that's he's cheap and the game is looked at lesser for it.

Is it complex and difficult? Well sure. That's like saying how tiring it must be to do construction work all day. Well, technically yes, but that's the job. Maybe you have a hard time imagining doing this sort of thing yourself, but lord knows the cityscapes around you is proof enough it still gets done.

[Battlecat]

Just because MMOs have a stigma of being unbalanced, doesn't mean such a thing is inherent to them, it just means they have a history of being so.

Like timesink and paletteswapping, there are things you can excuse when a genre is fledgling that would be a grave disservice to identify with the genre itself as it starts to become mainstream. There's no reason to expect these sorts of cut-corners should be present in MMOs as they begin to move forward. And similarly, there's no reason to give the same kind of concessions to a multibilliondollar corporation producing a triple A mainstream title, as we did the humble start-ups servicing a niche demographic over a decade ago.

You would never smile and nod if you received such shoddy balancing from any other kind of game. We don't shrug our shoulders and hum to ourselves about natural forces at work when a character in a fighting game is unbalanced. We rightfully rail that's he's cheap and the game is looked at lesser for it.

Is it complex and difficult? Well sure. That's like saying how tiring it must be to do construction work all day. Well, technically yes, but that's the job. Maybe you have a hard time imagining doing this sort of thing yourself, but lord knows the cityscapes around you is proof enough it still gets done.

Expecting certain builds to work better than others isn't shoddy balancing. It's an RPG... you live and die by the decisions you make. If you decide to run with a weak build that's your decision not a problem with the game.

And yes... MW2, the best selling triple A title of all time, was horribly balanced and damn near broken upon release.

[Vitglance]

So, If MW2 is unbalanced it's broken and worthy of ridicule, but if XIV is unbalanced it's perfectly fine and worthy of defending?

Tier spells aside, the presence of a clearly recognizable weak build itself implies imbalance. So your statement reads something like "it's not Imbalanced, because RPGs are allowed to be imbalanced".

RPGs aren't allowed to be imbalanced more than any other game.
Multiplayer non-digital RPGs are expected to be balanced. Singleplayer Digital RPGs are expected to be balanced. Whether or not they succeed is debatable, but we can rightly recognize when it's happening and call it like it is.

What is it about RPGs when they become both digital and multiplayer that makes people seem willing to view flaw as feature?

[solracht]

It doesn't matter whether it's inherent to the genre or whether they're that way because of developer laziness. We know the games can be balanced. You and the other guy don't have to explain it everytime someone brings the argument up.

It just doesn't matter if the developers don't bother, and as you've have acknowledged, for the most part and unless things are really ridiculous, they haven't.

Also: nobody is saying the game will be horribily unbalanced. I expect it to be balanced. I just don't think it'll be perfectly balanced to the point that picking only what you like will work.

Acting like the game balance will be that perfect is an act of faith. Again, if you want to be optimistic, up to you.

[Vitglance]

Fair enough, I won't yammer on about a topic nobody's interested in.
I'm sorry, I can be a right chatterbox sometimes. :3

[solracht]

I actually enjoyed reading your and Kachi's posts, by no means I was trying to say you should shut up. I was just trying to say that we know the games can be balanced and we can move on from repeating that. Knowing that it's within the developers's power, we just don't think it'll be perfectly balanced.

[Battlecat]

I just don't think it'll be perfect to the point that picking only what you like will work.

I think we just differ on what a perfect MMO should be tbh. Don't mean that in a negative way or anything. But what I think is how it should be is what you call seem to call unbalanced and vice versa. I think it'd be a pretty boring game if they gave you all these choices (where to allocate your stat points, picking which abilities to equip) and they all lead to characters that were pretty much the same but with different animations. To each his own I guess. Lets drop it and get back to something a bit more important

[Khamsin]

What the hell is an HP end? If it has to do with curing or damaging, I know some DDs that deal more damage during the course of a fight than any healer could ever cure. That'd put DDs on top and refreshers on bottom, if that's how we're measuring things.

[Kiarax]

An absolutely retarded way to make a point.

[Reiryuu]

What the hell is an HP end? If it has to do with curing or damaging, I know some DDs that deal more damage during the course of a fight than any healer could ever cure. That'd put DDs on top and refreshers on bottom, if that's how we're measuring things.

It's scary... but I think I actually understand him... it took me a while though.

I believe what he is trying to say is that he dislikes RDM specifically. As such, a character like the red mage that has refresh, regen, heal and convert to make their MP and HP last for long periods of time enabling them to survive some fights a typical DD could not.

Edit: The "end" in HP end would, then, be short for "endurance". How long their HP can last, in this sense.

[Vitglance]

I think what he means is balancing things via HP metrics.

It means looking at how much HP a move either ends up granting others or takes away from the foe, and then determining things like TP and MP cost based on that. It's easiest to think of it terms of 'x attack does more damage than y attack, x attack has a greater HP end, so it should cost more'.

It seems really simple at first glance, except that everything has to be boiled down to it's HP end - even things that don't directly grant or take away HP.

Refresh creates alot of MP, which means it's HP end is however many cures and nukes can be used with that mana gained. if Cure's HP end is 30, and if refresh gave you enough mana for 10 cures, Refresh's HP end would be 300.

[Khamsin]

An absolutely retarded way to make a point.

Maybe because it was a shot in the dark at what "HP end" might have meant. If it has to do with survivability, then I could agree that those same DDs I was referring to might be pretty low on the totem pole. All depends on what exactly it means.

[miokomioko]

Is it bad that all I could think while reading all of this was "Buttersheep"?

The fact of the matter is people figure out what works the best and they use it. MMO developers are nowhere remotely near the point of balancing to the point where "there is no best." Might as well get used to it, nobody has even made it to where there aren't best *classes*, let alone best abilities to use.

Everything -SHOULD- be situational. In a perfect game, there's a situation that isn't completely rare where every spell/ability/job is the best option. In this respect, I feel like every event/battle/etc. should be fashioned so a certain group of abilities/jobs/spells are the best to use and make sure each time they construct such things, they need to make sure they aren't leaving some jobs/abilities/spells out of this inclusion any more than the others.

[Jotaru]

if Cure's HP end is 30, and if refresh gave you enough mana for 10 cures, Refresh's HP end would be 300.

I'm not sure I quite agree with this measure of balance. If Cure cost 10 mana and restored 50 HP, it'd have 50 HP end. If Refresh gave 15 mana over, say, ten minutes (exaggerating, as it makes a point easier to demonstrate) it'd have an HP end of 75. Should we consider Refresh more 'broken' than Cure since its 50% more powerful? I don't even think people would use it.

[Havocxx]

I'm not sure I quite agree with this measure of balance. If Cure cost 10 mana and restored 50 HP, it'd have 50 HP end. If Refresh gave 15 mana over, say, ten minutes (exaggerating, as it makes a point easier to demonstrate) it'd have an HP end of 75. Should we consider Refresh more 'broken' than Cure since its 50% more powerful? I don't even think people would use it.

The measure would have to include a unit of time, like DPS in WoW. Obviously Cure with an imaginary 2 sec cast time, for simplicity's sake, being 25 'hp end'/sec would be much better than the .125 'hp end'/sec your exampled Refresh would be. Restoring that 15 mana over a 3 second period would be the "HPend" balance point, not including any cast time/mana cost on Refresh.

Not that this is really a great metric.

[Jotaru]

You end up with funky numbers depending on cast time / cooldowns / mana costs / durations though.

You could theoretically (very easily) come up with a Refresh that is 'better' to spam than cures itself, though they obviously don't heal anything in itself. I vote for 'poor metric'

[Esse]

Everything -SHOULD- be situational. In a perfect game, there's a situation that isn't completely rare where every spell/ability/job is the best option. In this respect, I feel like every event/battle/etc. should be fashioned so a certain group of abilities/jobs/spells are the best to use and make sure each time they construct such things, they need to make sure they aren't leaving some jobs/abilities/spells out of this inclusion any more than the others.

I think balancing around specific classes is not a smart design decision, and I think SE has done a lot to undo this in XI. For example, adding a Red Mage or Bard to any exp party nearly doubled your party's efficiency in killing anything. This was even more aggravating when there were not many alternative leveling spots that did not include (insert incredibly powerful buff that needed dispelled). We had how many jobs, and only two could dispel for a large chunk of the game's lifespan? You had three choices when creating a party: spend more time finding/traveling to a camp with suitable mobs, spend more time killing the mobs if you had no dispel, or don't party up since you couldn't find a Red Mage or Bard.

Later on they added more jobs capable of dispelling, and less mobs that needed it, which I was grateful for. For some reason that would always grind my gears, though... and I even had a rl career RDM friend. I really hope they are flexible with the utility given to different classes, especially damage focused ones.