aslan132

When did Tiers of DPS go out the window?? Every "nerf" or boost put in was said to help "balance classes", but when is it too far.

Sure Predators and Sorcerers still top parses, but only barely and only the very good at thier class. Summoners and Rogues are damn near even and Conjys can beat a Wiz on grp encounters. Brigs and Swashys alot of times are even topping Assassins. Hell, even Warriors are showing up on parses and Crusaders/Brawlers cant be far behind.

So when did balancing classes come to mean normalized DPS. I know the devs use parsers (have the testers use them), so is the goal really to do away with the seperation of DPS. Balanced to me means its a give and take. Higher DPS means lower utility. Less surviability should mean more DPS. DPS was Tiered for a reason, why play one class over the other if theres no seperation.

Is it me losing my mind or have any others seen this happening??

Cheddar

Balance went out of the window a long time ago, I really dont think SOE give a shit anymore, they seem to have lost all idea of where the game is going and how the mechanics/classes are supposed to work.

I personally think the game mechanics are simply broken and have ruined the game. Increasing stats does nothing, resists dont matter, spell quality is barely noticable beyond Adept3/Master and once you hit 80 and get 140 AA's the game is over and the vast majority of loot makes no real difference in terms of character progression.

kyros

there should not be class balance.
every class should have its strengths and weaknesses and should be left that way. attempting to balance things so that everyone can do everything is a waste of time.

edit:

wrong on every account in my opinion.
though i think we might agree that most loot worth a salt is stupidly powerful, which leads to not worrying about stats and resists since there is already enough on all of your gear.

Cheddar

There's too many classes for that to ever happen sadly.

kyros

but there are also too many classes to have them balanced properly.
most of the changes made to the game have been made in efforts to keep everyone at the same relative level. to what? i don't know.

though to answer the original post: not everyone has the same dps.

Ariste

Agreed. The whole notion of class balance is a fallacy; it only leads to bland classes and shallow game mechanics.

I'd rather have unbalanced, unique classes than balanced cookie cutters.

I think it boils down to this: class balance is something to shoot for, but it should always be secondary to depth and uniqueness.

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Pinski

Uhh, balance doesn't mean everybody does the same thing. Balance means that their strengths make up for their weaknesses.

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kyros

it depends on how you're looking at it. the original post dealt with comparing one class to another. the balance between one class's overall power compared to another's.

speaking of balancing a class by itself: yes, what you're saying is true.

dakkota

You can balance classes all you want and give them respective roles...but here is the problem. Take a huge pool of players - some clueless people, a huge amount of average players, and a decent handful of well above average players. Now disperse them randomly among all the classes. There you have seemingly unbalanced classes but in reality imo, they are doing their roles good enough and if you think a class doesn't compare with another, chances are you are comparing a shitty player to a good one, not a shitty class to a good one.

RedHawk

IMHO, the litmus test of balance would be 'would you want that class in your group or raid'. If the answer is yes, then nothing needs to be changed.

Edit,
And fuck balancing for soloing, if you want to solo, you should just roll a soloable class.

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