What is balance?

[_______MarkusSparkus]

...to an extent. Having your class going through constant changes is not...
variety between classes is more important than balance. Where balance is most important is PvP, because fairness comes into play. If a certain class can solo red mobs and a certain other class can't, then the only problem is that the lesser class will be jealous...tough. I prefer "close to balanced" classes than constantly changing classes.

[_____________Paldorr]

Darkbane:

While I believe you are correctly divining the minds of the developers in your crystal ball, to me the whole balance thing is reminiscent of the chicken and the egg.

"Which came first: the balance or the nerf."

Because - in every MMORPG to date we have suffered countless downward spirals where some good this is declared unbalancing thing and is nerfed only to expose the next thing ad nauseum.

AC has realized their mistake and has "un-nerfed" GSA back to pre-patch days. Why? Because it wasn't unbalancing at all - it was just a victim of the whiners who cried "balance."

To me, when the word "balance" starts coming out it makes me roll my eyes and want to puke, because the game is about to get fubar'd for no good reason - only someone's perceived weakness at some low level. Now that we have people even past mid levels how unbalancing would FFAs be? They wouldn't be at all, but low level non-pistol people cried "balance" and *poof* they are gone.

Sorry, but "balance" in a MMORPG is always an excuse for a nerf in my book.

[Darkbane]

Your explanation is probably right, at least to some extent. Balance is often in the eye of the beholder, one person's balance will be another person's nerf. Of course, it does sometimes happen the other way.

Now I can see where your coming from - thanks for the more detailed exposition :-)

[locomdenom]

Originally posted by Zuleica
"equally able to participate" is NOT the same as 'able to participate equally'.
This significant difference is what Funcom, and many of you, seem to forget.

Think about the difference...

I can't find one. I'm a native English speaker - those parse out identically to me, since both can be twisted to mean either meaning. I think what you were getting at is:

Option A) Everyone is the same, and therefore everyone can participate. (BAD!)

Option B) Everyone has a unique and valid contribution, all of which are approximately equally valuable. (GOOD!)

I meant option B. If you parse my statement, you'll see that it's a quite valid way of describing option B.

[_______________Skara]

Nicely put!

B is exactly what I was talking about in my posts.

I was not saying that an Adventurer or Fixer should be able to the best tanks (though I must admit, in my wildest imagination I don'd think an Engineer should be a tank especially after reading the Engineer description in character creation), but the classes should each function in such a way that building a solid party takes some thought.

Taking the Engineer over the Adventurer or the Fixer should provide some benefits, but at the sacrifice of benefits the other classes provide. The problem is, an Engineer my lvl (77) can have a pet that is so deep red that not only would my heals be pointless, my dmg would be as well.


Skara