I'm probably going to ruffle someones feathers (as in "start a discussion") with this but I believe in what I'm about to say and I think it's important for FC to think about it.
You (FC) are now working on balance. More specifically, you are twisting and reshaping all professions into shapes that hopefully will seem more pleasing and reasonable than they currently do.
This is great. Make no mistake about it. It's always a good idea to keep an eye on the profession-landscape and it's good that you have the guts to do something about it when you spot various flaws.
However, this is profession vs profession balance. This specific type of balance, while important, is less important than gameplay-balance. That's my opinion at least. This thread is about promoting gameplay-balance and to suggest that it gets the attention it deserves, while you are in the process of restructuring professions.
So what is "gameplay-balance"?
Well, let's start with prof-vs-prof balance. This type of balance is centered around how each profession performs in a PvP environment (and PvM to some degree), relative to other professions. Not just how one profession handles another but also how many professions each individual profession can handle well, ok or poorly. This last point is more or less what the rock-paper-scissor system is about.
Gameplay-balance is basically how the gameplay-aspect of AO impacts the fun you are having. Let me make an example:
If all 14 professions have a perk with 1 second recharge that blinds everyone in the area for 100 seconds, then everyone will be blinded 100% of the time in PvP. Being blinded 100% of the time makes PvP very boring and frustrating. It's just not fun. So this extreme example shows that if gameplay-balance is way off, the fun-factor goes down the toilet.
Now, the reason I say gameplay-balance is more important than prof-vs-prof balance is because prof-vs-prof balance does strictly speaking not HAVE to be perfect. There are various games where some classes perform well in PvP while others hardly perform at all. In some of these games, this imbalance is not such a big issue because every class has their own fun-factor and while one class is crap in PvP, it's still fun to play for other reasons. People that play such a game can make characters of classes that does well in PvP-combat and make other classes for other things. In AO, the general consensus seems to be that every profession should be equally valuable in PvP. While this perhaps makes the profession-landscape in AO a bit bland, as everyone no matter what their profession is, will be suited for war, it's still a design-philosophy that I don't mind at all. If it's done right, it has great potential for providing fun for every class in the area of PvP. It's very hard to do right but if you CAN do it, then .. why not.
I don't think we should forget why we play this game and ultimately why you (FC) are working on prof-vs-prof balance atm. It's all for the sake of having fun and maximizing the fun-factor. While prof-vs-prof balance is important for PvP'ers to have fun in a game like AO, I honestly don't think finetuning prof-vs-prof balance will provide MORE fun or a higher fun-factor than fine tuning gameplay-balance would.
This does not mean that I think you should focus less on prof-vs-prof balance. I just think you should focus more on gameplay balance because there's a lot of fun-factor to be gained in that area and I do feel it's bing overlooked a bit atm.
So what specifically am I thinking of when referring to neglected gameplay-balance? Well, think of everything/anything that you find annoying and frustrating in PvP. That's basically what I'm referring to. Blind rings, blind perks, aoe blinds, single blinds, snares, snare-perks, stuns, chainstuns, stunperks, roots, root-grafts, fears, aoe-fears, debuffs and so on and so on.
Blinds, roots, stuns, fears, debuffs, snares and so on are all nice and provide fun tactical situations in PvP but my point is, they are not balanced with the gameplay very well. There are too much of them. They last to long. They are too hard to get rid of.
My point is, it's all well and good balancing professions against each other but I do AO PvP to have FUN and prof-vs-prof balance is not the issue that detracts the most amount of fun from me. What attracts the most amount of fun from me is the utterly relentless spam of nanos/perks/abilities that quite simply is (currently) designed specifically to annoy/frustrate me.
Blinds, roots, stuns, debuffs and such would be very interesting and provide fun tactical situations in PvP if they were in fact part of a tactic. Right now they are so common and accessible that they are part of every single encounter, every single time, always.
While you are balancing professions, I want you to balance these things so that the gameplay isn't completely swamped by them. Remove blind rings. Make anti-root/snare stims way more powerful. Up the recharge/nanocost on these things by... a lot. Reduce the duration on a lot of these abilities by.. a lot. Then while you are balancing professions, balance them up towards this new and less annoyance-saturated PVP landscape. Let people fight MOST of the time WITHOUT being blinded, snared, rooted and debuffed. I want these abilities to be something that you use when you need to. Right now everyone uses them all the time because.. why not.. the recharge isn't long and they are very effective so it would be silly not to. There's no choice or strategy in that. Just spam. It's only annoying and it provides nothing interesting to the battlefield. I also don't want every profession to have access to most of these things. I want just very few of these abilities available for each profession, given to the professions that they "belong" to.
To put it another way, all these abilities that everyone has such an easy and effective access to, is far more damaging to my funfactor in PvP than weapon-specials ever was and you are working on balancing specials now. So why not get more bang for your buck by focusing on these abilities as well while you are at it?
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Shrubberyman
.
