I'll start off by saying that this didn't really fit in the Class Balancing, VL or Auf fix threads, but it does include elements from all of them. The feedback I want to give is about the direction the meta went to lately, and why I think it's bad. I will also explain how in my opinion this can be reasonably fixed by staff. The main goals of this thread are: - To explain the balance issue in the end-game currently. - To get visible confirmation from Staff that they are aware the issue exists. - To suggest changes/reverts that are easy to implement. More importantly, staff should have the balance issues in mind for future changes, and it should get priority over other factors in my opinion. *Please avoid suggesting anything that is related to class balancing and skill changes, as this belongs to the Class Balance thread and will most likely take a long time to be implemented. Right now, Shads are really strong, they excel at every boss in the game without exceptions. 1) In HT, Shads require less set up/mules and they're still the fastest. 2) In VL, they have the best DPS across all classes due to the boss being very mobbing heavy, and smokes/shifter/meso guard can let them just hold their macro without paying too much attention. 3) In Auf, you don't have to worry much about DP and a Shad+Bucc party combination will not be much slower than a ranged one. As a result of Shads being so good at everything, Buccs got better too, just by being able to TL smokes and dealing decent damage. This in itself was not really ideal until the last update, but players who main other jobs were able to tolerate it. In the last update the following things were changed: - Core and tail touch damage were increased to 1-shot all jobs. - It is not possible to de-aggro Auf anymore. That means Auf will constantly spam DP the whole fight and won't do those mini-pauses it used to do before. Which class doesnt care about those changes? Shads. - Now you just run Auf on a Shad+Bucc mixture and use all smokes and TLs on core. - You don't really care about the DP spam in Auf main body, your avoid + shifter will take care of most of it, with the addition of a few smokes too. Sair mains for example, are completely in shambles because the only boss they were great at (Auf) just got unplayable. For many people who main anything that's not a Shad or Bucc, the only things they can hang on to are: - Maybe PB will be released in the future, so their single target ranged attackers will be relevant again. - The long awaited class balance (Thread started on 2022) may finally arrive soon. - The Auf change will maybe be reverted, together with some VL changes. At this point staff should realize that the Shad meta got out of hand, and it's perfectly fine to battle it to encourage job diversity. The direction should change, and every update should be done with job diversity in mind. That said, I don't think the change should be heavy handed, Shad should still remain the best in some areas of the game, but a change is definitely needed. To encourage job diversity, all you have to do is make some bosses better for other jobs, or make Shads harder to play in them. The changes I suggest are simple too: Auf Haven: As said in this thread, the aggro change needs to be reverted ASAP. This boss needs to go back to being playable for other jobs as well. There were active players who used Sairs, BMs or even Paladins (with shields) for Auf, and now it's just simply not doable. There also needs to be a different approach for how to change things in Auf: 1) Try and encourage active gameplay. 2) Minimize the amount of DP as much as possible. @nut made some good suggestions for how to do that: I understand that the change to Auf's aggro was done to not let people afk in an end-game boss, but this came at a very very heavy cost. Von Leon: VL is an important boss for the meta, since people look at it as the absolute end-game and make characters around it. When a new player asks which char to make, they will often look for it to be viable at the hardest/most profitable bosses. This is where the Shad meta is really on full display. You don't need any other job in this boss, you just fill with as many Shads as you can, and also throw some Buccs in just to have enough Res. You can be inclusive if you want and recruit other jobs, but in all honesty this will not be the ideal way to play. I understand that the changes suggested in the VL balance thread take time to implement (considering players were listened to) and it's not always that easy to carefully balance an endgame boss without breaking it. What I suggest is not to actually change any damage values/major boss mechanics, but only to battle what makes Shads superior for all levels of funding and experience - survivability. On the average party, Shads will spend around 50% of the fight inside smokes (5 smokes, 10 mins cd, 1 min per tp). If you use a TL for smokes, which is becoming more and more meta, this can be increased up to around 70% of the fight. As @Tim once said in shoutbox, it's not a good design to allow people to be afk in an end-game boss, however this is exactly what is happening in this case. On top of that, when shads are out of smokes in b3, they don't need to worry about lasers since Meso Guard will just save them, Bishops are completely optional. This creates a stale meta where shads can just mindlessly hold their macro and watch netflix on the side. How to solve that: - Make lasers dispel on top of the 1/1, so Shads will have to pay attention to them and dodge. - Disable smokes in VL map. * You can also increase VL accuracy even further, in case it's not already cranked to the max. Will this make Shads bad at VL? absolutely not. They will still have a ton of iframes, high avoid and the best damage in the game across the whole fight. This will just require people to pay attention and encourage active gameplay. It might seem devastating to some players, but that's just because we have gotten so used to just attacking in smoke and not having a care in the world about what happens outside it. This will encourage different party compositions, because then shads will be used for their damage only, meaning other jobs will get recruited more just by contributing in other ways to ease the boss fight (def/extra se/extra SI and TL etc). With those 2 bosses changed, I believe the meta will feel more diverse and encourage more active play. If you have more suggestions or feedback, please feel free to comment.
The Smokescreen buff in #65, from 60 seconds to 90 seconds, was unnecessary and a revert back to 60 seconds should be considered. Stacking multiple of the same class for huge benefits, especially when it's iframes, shouldn't be encouraged.
I think the original post tried to focus more on class contribution/strength/ease of playability, particularly with regard to auf/vl(?). While not unrelated to the topic of balance, changes to smoke itself is going to affect a lot more things than that and I think op was hoping the scope of discussion could be kept more focused. Also smoke being reduced to 60s in vl really doesn't matter because shads only use about 60s of the smoke anyway (often less) since vl teleports away every minute. I personally don't mind no smoke in vl and laser dispelling mg for 1/1 because it shouldn't be hugely affecting any decent shad's usefulness anyway. It just makes one have to actually pay attention instead of cheesing it, just as everyone other class in vl has to. Which makes sense since the point of vl as a boss was to have people actively play their characters and learn the mechanics, not ignore them. Though I think if this is implemented, laser actually needs to dispel mg and not just 1/1 shads with buffs intact, because being stuck in dark sight in laser = can't will = defeats the point of getting hw10 (because you can't really see the buff icons to right click dark sight during laser - this is mostly a problem only for the high-ping macro shads, which is unfair stop hating on our asia ping thanks. This isn't a problem if hw is castable in dark sight/assa has no dark sight requirements, but I digress lol).
You seem to be focused on Von Leon. I didn't specify which boss as it's in general for all late-game bosses and this will probably extend into Pink Bean too. I didn't mention anything else for class balance as this is addressing the OP's point on Job Diversity. You can DM me if you're confused and I can answer any concerns.
I think if you nerf shads enough it’ll just push the game back to NL-story. At the end of the day thieves are too good. I believe Staff cannot significantly balance thieves because a wave of early, mid, and late game players will quit if you balanced thief to be inline with the general power levels of the rest of the classes. If we lose even 100 active people, it’ll be noticeable. Why not just buff everyone else instead of nerfing shad/nl?: This’ll require so much manpower to think of meaningful changes to the other 7 attacker classes This’ll cause power creep if you buff everyone and bosses will become even easier to kill Well why not just buff bosses too then?: Why are we trying to figure out how to balance every single boss and non-thief attacker than just tuning thieves into the same tier as the rest What makes thieves more appealing to main? Highest avoid in the game with shifter and LUK scaling. You can probably play 3 NLs easier than 1 corsair in current Auf Best scaling in the game. LUK and WA scale incredibly well for thieves not only due to avoid but also just raw damage What do I do with 999 accuracy? I still need to ACP when I get darknessed. What I think should be change about thieves if I ignore the consequences of waves of players quitting: Hard nerf avoid LUK scaling. Their DPM will be affected as a result. No reason to nerf their damage Nightlords should only be hit maybe 10-15% less than bowmen/sair I believe shads should fall off platforms slightly more often than stance warriors. Assaulter is much better mobility than what Warriors have in HT and access to smoke I believe makes up for it Changes that are easily to implement: Revert auf but disable despair in Auf Buff corsair avoid to equal dex avoid scaling as bowmen Increase cap damage so Barrage and Paladin are more impactful Changes I am somewhat more interested in exploring but aren’t that easy: Rework Timeleap: Maybe reduce Time Leap CD to 15mins but it reduces CDs by 50%, not a full reset. This is more impactful than increase the cd by 5-10mins. This negates a lot of smokescreen shenanigans This greatly increases VL difficulty Also decrease Echo CD to 1hour so you’re not locked out of echo with this change Thieves are the balancing nightmare issue. However for the sake of keeping the server alive, I wouldn’t go through with my avoid armageddon. I’m fine with this server attacker population being like 75% thieves for the 6month+ playerbase. I enjoy the classes I play and can sleep fine at night. Here is an ending Haiku for my long post: I like my marksman Login and enjoy my day At least not a Sair
Please, as I said: @Cynn What you are saying is 1:1 what I said in the balance thread, if you read my comment you would know that not only I support that, but I also said it myself. What I'm suggesting are immediate easy changes that should happen anyway, even in the event of class balance changes, please stick to the topic. Nowhere in my post did I suggest nerfing thieves.
I wasn't making a suggestion, but if you insist on me only engaging specifically with what you originally shared: My feedback is that a fix like simply disabling Smokescreen in Von Leon is not a thorough solution to what is a deep problem related to the Shadower class identity. The overreliance on Smokescreen in bosses needs to be addressed properly via a rework of the skill (and is thus inextricably connected to class balancing). If you mean to suggest only an easy to implement solution, and not necessarily a thorough one, then I think your easy to implement solution probably shouldn't be accepted.
Yeah sorry about that let me realign with your topic about easy changes. I do not think there are any immediate changes that will encourage job diversity outside of thieves. I believe there are no immediate easy changes that will incentivize thief players off of their thief to main a non-thief Or incentivize players who have yet to main class to pick a non-thief class due to the extreme power gap I think there are immediate changes that will help prevent people already on the lesser popular classes from quitting. We can revert auf changes but disable Despair to prevent our mutual corsair friend from wanting to go sky Give dks some sort of avenue to zerk in Auf. I think with RG getting balanced Dk is in such a poor state right now without being able to Auf. At least heroes can kind of Auf. If you need an insane rework to allow this to be possible and not just a 5-10% Achilles buff, then scrap this idea for now I don't mean to be a debbie downer but: I don't really want to support just nerfing Shads to make Nightlord great-er again, which I believe is still the 2nd most popular class. The downfall of Nightlord was heavily exaggerated and Nightlord is still amazing, especially if you have funding to get over the mid game hump (level 135-160). Sorry if it is still off-tangent ranting. Your post is interesting and curious where the discussion leads.
Many points are being made on this thread, but I think we can all agree that the current patch heavily favors the thief classes and maybe buccs, which is very unhealthy for class diversity and why the topic gets repetitively brought up across different threads. I think staff should communicate with us to let us know their view on class diversity and the timeline for the changes. The class balance thread has been there for 2 years but we rarely get any confirmation on what is being considered or never know when the changes are actually happening. This is why people felt ignored and anxious and, hence, ended up here asking for immediate band-aid fixes. I understand staff would like to keep their directions as secrets for the surprises, but some transparency can really help avoid developing detours when "develop bottleneck" is such a big issue in this server. The recent auf agro change is a very good example. It came out of nowhere and made many classes suffer, but that could've been avoided if there had been some public discussion/feedback prior to the changes.
I agree with this a lot, sadly I can't really contribute any suggestion/opinion to what kind of changes need to be made but I can say the server seems to be 50% mules? I don't have any real bossing experience because as a bishop I am not wanted in any boss since most people have mules for that, same with SE for BM/MM or CR or for paladin (I think?). Those jobs are now created, leveled up to the point of maxing a specific skill and brought to a boss fight as a mule to press a skill every X time, no need for them to be active.. Some change to make every class or every boss fight better while everyone is actively playing will be a big boost of encouragement for players who like non-meta classes, would also bring in a lot of diversity to the server.
Maybe there should be a limit to how many times smoke can be used in certain bosses, regardless of the number of shads present?
Although a lot of the discussion seems to have been towards buffs/nerfs. Maybe we can increase the incentive for having more people in a party? Just like with lhc, we have 6 man parties because it benefits each individual involved. I personally dont mind larger krex parties so that i end up saving time, but i think that mindset isnt exactly popular. My main idea would be to have bonus maps? similar to apq but after bosses. This way even if we get bigger parties, the rewards dont neccesarily have to be split down the middle. And it gives leaders more room for negotiation. Either way I have only been active since the start of june so I haven't had a chance to try doing auf/vl/ht since I've been back. Maybe it'll be easier to find parties if there were more incentive to do so without affecting profit margins too much.
+1 Without trying to steer this away from the original post, but the lack of transparency regarding class changes does create these uncertainties. There's a long list and even longer replies on there with changes that may or may not be applied without any timeframe. Understandably a lot of focus on QoL, (another) new source/client and anti-rwt/banning tools has been given in recent updates but in the end we're still left with a game that has broken class balance. Also, the current classing/boss meta has evolved over the years, whereas the class balancing has been almost completely stale.
