It's been more than 2 years since the last major class balancing patch here, which pushed certain classes to be popular like pallies and bucc. The last few minor class balance was a buff to drk's & MM damage which imo has now placed drk in a very good spot (unclear about MM, need some MM feedback on it). However, there are still a few classes that are seriously in need of tweaking, and i believe this would help alleviate some of the issues (mules replacing attackers for buffs) pointed out in the multiclient feedback thread. I also believe balancing through buffing, rather than nerfing, is a better approach. Spoiler: DPS chart The current overall dps output chart conducted by Tim in 2019 after major class rebalancing. Note: The values for DRK & MM has been changed since it has been buffed in the recent patches. Spoiler: KREX speed test Sair : 10 mins 44 seconds (~10,7k range) @Tim NL : 11 mins 38 seconds (~10,6k range) @Momo Bucc : 13 mins 56 seconds (~12,9k range) @Tim Shad : 14 mins 10 seconds (~12,9k range) @Momo DrK : 14 mins 35 seconds (~14,4k range) @lxlx *post buff* Pally : 14 mins 43 seconds (~13k range) @Nessi Shad : 15 mins 10 seconds (~11k range) @JackHarrie BM : 15 mins 12 seconds (~10k range) @Nessi DrK : 15 mins 36 seconds (~14k range) @Nessi *pre buff* Hero : 15 mins 58 seconds (~13k range) @Nessi MM : 16 mins 58 seconds (~11k range) @Nessi *pre buff* We can see BM/MM damage is extremely underwhelming for a single target specialist class, with BM slightly edging out heroes & losing out to one of bucc's weaker damage combo (barrage + dstrike). It's of no wonder people rather bring their SE mule instead of taking a BM/MM as an attacker to runs. Also, from the speed tests, we can speculate, once after a certain range, pally no longer triumphs drk in single target damage, which shouldn't be the case as pallies are supposed to be single target specialist class. Obviously, this is because of dmg cap issue that pallies face, and due to that, the gap in DPS is only gonna get bigger the stronger the characters are, which is concerning to anyone that aspires to gear a paladin. Personally, the list of class balances and qol changes i am hopeful to see are (not listed according to priority level) 1) BM/MM having their dps output increased to do slightly lower dps than bucc barrage + demolition combo (not seen in the chart). This change would see that they would more likely get accepted to runs as an attacker akin to how bucc is right now. implemented kinda? 2) qol changes of making Hero's ACA skill undispellable (like how echo works) which would result in lesser dps downtime due to charging orbs when facing constant dispels. implemented pog 3) AOE buff to hero's crash skill to match their warrior counterparts. implemented pog 4) reduced boat mount animation (making it more instantaneous). 5) remove damage cap OR increase damage cap limit OR change blast to hit twice for 290% per line instead of single line 580% for pally to fully show their potential and not be gimped due to dmg cap limitation. I shared my thoughts regarding what i think the paladin class should actually be in this thread - https://royals.ms/forum/threads/new-crash-change-feedback.188147/page-6 6) revert nightlord's and shad's shifter % to its original value (20>30) , (30>40). I don't really care for this change tbh, but if other classes are gonna get buffed, i feel it's only right thieves get back their original shifter value. 7) Allow buccs to combo when not in transformation once again so they can enjoy their NX visuals and make funky faces while in combat. 8) Increase polearm-based skills damage. 9) Change how combo/panic attack works so hero can do more DPS than DRKs on single target, and they actually have to play the game instead of spamming brandish only if they want maximum dps efficiency. More indepth explanation regarding this suggestion can be seen here : https://royals.ms/forum/threads/warrior-rebalanace.188673/page-2#post-1104872 What are your thoughts? Would like to hear the opinions & suggestions of the community, especially from staff & veterans with multiple jobs experience.
I think Heros are pretty bad at Neo Tokyo bosses, partly cuz of constantly getting dispelled. Would be nice to have qol change like you suggested but might hurt balance a bit. I think NL > Bucc > Hero/DRK in overall capabilities. Pally is unknown to me since I don't know Heaven Hammers effectiveness in Zak or HT for adding DPS. Pally seems good in single target but lacks AoE which is warriors biggest strength, so might be better just to play NL/Bucc if want single target. Agree about Sairs, they seem too impractical to play in current state. I've never seen one in HT in my runs.
Hero's and Drk's are too strong against multi-parts to need a dpm buff, but if there's a lack of multi-part bosses in the future patches (there's probably not too many, to be honest) then maybe they do need a buff. The damage cap will hurt Paladin's more and more as time passes because of newer and better equipment. Buccaneer's are in a strange position because they give a party buff to classes that they themselves outdps.
I'm still very doubtful that archers are doing bad damage. I'm training a new marksman to try things out but it's gonna take some time before it is ready. Waiting for more timed runs at krex eye 2...(https://royals.ms/forum/threads/krexels-2nd-eye-dps-thread.177083/) Agree to this. Mostly a qol upgrade and won't affect the balance between classes. Yes. Drks get better damage and hb for the effort of zerking now. And their crash removes dmg buff additionally when compared to hero. No idea why hero's crash has to be nerfed to this extent. A big no. Corsairs are really strong and in my honest opinion, way stronger than nls. Sure, they don't do as well in HT or toad, but they are incredible at other bosses -- zak, the boss, krexel, auf, ... If Corsair players find it too much to dismount perfectly in HT, then just don't lol... It's only a 90s repair time and your overall DPS will still be higher than non-NLs. Yes, but to be very real, damage cap doesn't affect DPS massively. Feel free to change my mind on this matter though. Shifter is broken. Why the need to buff it again? EDIT: regarding point 7, I fully agree. I was a strong proponent of buffing certain classes back in the days when shadowers and buccaneers were doing half the damage of other classes and was very happy to see balance buffs made for them. However, in the process of the buffing, buccaneers lost a very key trait to the identity -- uptime and downtime between their transformation. In fact, its other pirate counterpart, corsairs, have a similar mechanic of ship uptime/downtime. Buccaneers were supposed to manage between their forms and optimise it by let's say, time leap. Allowing unlimited transformations via magic rocks seemed to have dumbed down their gameplay unfortunately. That said, buccs are relevant now, so the buffs weren't bad per se; it just needs to be further tweaked/improved on.
The reason for this is because i believe the general design of all the classes was designed without factoring in HP washing & since royals is heavily hp wash meta centric, it only makes sense to me that skills should scale with royals values, not original MS values. (1-1 skill in a non hp washing context doing lesser damage) I believe its highly dependent on the level of gear one has, at a certain point, pallies don't benefit anymore from having SE which is kinda sad. And as orcagel has pointed out, damage cap is gonna hurt pallies more as the power creep in the server grows. More importantly, the idea for this change is to have pally mains not hit a wall where they feel like they're not benefitting as much as other classes from upgrading their characters once they hit a certain benchmark.
It's not impossible to juggle hp against 1/1 hits? Anyways, I think reducing downtime of ship or increasing ship hp would benefit corsairs across all kinds of bosses excluding the 1/1 bosses (out of the scope from the problem you are trying to address). I think a better suggestion might be a damage cap to ship. For example, ship can only take at most 10k damage even if you took 29k damage. Still, I think corsairs should be down the list of priorities compared to other classes or issues. I remembered doing the math on damage cap and pallies a long time ago and thought it wasn't a big deal. I would do the calculations again but what would you consider an intolerable nerf to damage due to damage cap, percent-wise? Using what attack potion (which potion do you think well funded pallies use frequently)? And at what kind of cgs (total wa from cape shoes gloves)? Just looking for some information before I crunch the numbers again.
Yes, this would be a better alternative and suggestion than the one i proposed. The list of changes i proposed are not listed according to priority level , just suggestions off the top of my head. I think most people are generally aiming for 63 att CGS as end-game gear. Onyx apples are usually the normal go-to att potions for majority of end-game boss runs. The recent damage buff to DRK saw DRK gaining a 5% improvement to their DPS and to me as a DRK main, that's a significant improvement, so i would say somewhere around 5% in regards to your question.
looks pretty bad with apple I probably considered stoppers the main potion used previously so didn't think it was much. Spoiler: sample gear breakdown (87 hat, 70 cgs) Spoiler: sample gear breakdown (40 hat, 51 cgs)
Jobs that need to receive some love in my opinion: - MM: enough was said about this one, https://royals.ms/forum/threads/improved-mm-feedback-thread.181149/ - Paladin: after playing this job to 200 (and beyond) I am convinced that it's weak, has no place in HT over other warriors and no place in Neo Tokyo over bucc/shad. Everything you can do a bucc will do better, except crash. To me it needs to have a clear edge over drk/shad in single target damage, meaning blast damage % should be buffed, and damage cap should maybe even be removed or increased. On a side note, 2H BWs need to get a major buff to attack speed, atleast for pink/blue seal cushions and Dragon Flame (seal cushions to fast, Dragon Flame to normal with WA buff to Dragon Flame to compare with skull?). - Hero: I support the passive ACA + aoe buff to crash idea. I don't like changing shifter values back or your sair suggestion, Geybrian's idea is interesting tho.
I'd love the idea of increasing the damage cap, since it can be an annoying bottleneck for Pallys, but supposedly it's something that the staff can't change for...reasons...I guess...(Although if it is actually possible, maybe buff the cap to 250k or something?) So working within that limitation, we could slightly buff Blasts damage % a bit, but I'd want to see the actual cast speed of Blast buffed slightly, since that'd lead to a more consistent way to increase dps (afterall, increasing blasts damage won't mean a lot if you keep hitting 199k a bunch anyways ). Right now, that cast speed of Blast is 630ms at the fastest 2 speed tier, so instead maybe that can be buffed to 600ms at fastest speed, which would put it at the same speed as skills like TT and charged blow. Also, yes on giving blunt weapons some more love, especially 2H. For that, I'd say raise the BW mastery to 65%, and tweak the speed of some higher leveled 2H-BW as you mentioned. I'm not sure if tweaking the WA of existing weapons is possible, so rather, add a new lv 120 2HBW to the game with stats and speed comparable to that of a crushed skull, add that sucker to CWK bonus drops and perion gach, and bam, 2H BW are no longer meme weapons
About 7, YES YES PLS, I can’t stand to see myself in Super Transformation form anymore, I wanna see my nx design that I spent real money on it Really hope they will do something about it, like keep the transformation buff but let us choose if we want it to be invisible or not...
Hello sir, why take this approach and then mention power creep here (although you only mention it for a specific class). I realize the quote is slightly out of context because pallies can hit the damage cap but still I think why balance through buffs instead of nerfs? What do you think buffing accomplishes that nerfing doesn't is my question basically.
Hi, that's a very good question. I guess it's more about not pissing the community off which nerfing usually does. Like, in this balance context, if we were to go with the nerfing route, scaling down the higher DPS classes so other weaker classes do not get outshine, i'm sure many people would not be happy. Also, imo, the issue isn't that certain class are too strong, its more of certain class are too weak.
Yes, we are very interested in hearing the feedback regarding class balances. Thank you for taking the initiative to start this thread
I would love to see more Paladins/Corsairs/ArchMages in boss fights, hope they can buff those somehow (not Corsair dmg but like their ship mechanics), make pala’s threaten useful as a reworked buff or something and maybe make SI a useful buff for everyone? Also what about Hero's Rage party buff being useless?
For Corsair, I don't think they need any buff for now. Maybe in the future, they need to have damage received cap for ship so they can freely hp wash for pink bean. The only problem when I play Corsair is the abysmal drop rate of level 100 weapon. There was a time I farm for 4 hours in Dark Cornian and only got 1 gun with below average att. It discourage people to play corsair as some have to wait for a perf lvl100 gun for months until someone got luck in bossing or gacha and sell them in fm.
Make it so they can't use it to avoid 1/1's or allow PG to block a %'age of the 1/1 damage and I'd be down.
https://royals.ms/forum/threads/reducing-corsair-battleship-mount-delay.140792/ This is what Corsair needs.
https://royals.ms/forum/threads/enrage-skill-modification-suggestion.182569/ I've posted here a suggestion to make Hero skill Enrage more useful. I have no idea if any of the GMs or developers have ever read this so i'm bumping this up.
i agree with this as only "buff" corsair needs now HP or any function altering on battleship will just make more disbalance washing is "optional" all jobs should be possible to do any content at right lvl and with or without HB when funded ( if not content should be adjusted properly not the jobs or wash-remake char...) also highly washed sairs can use "zerk" to avoid the %HPdmg if lazy to dismount or just avoid extremely wash
