Yeah, but that’s what I mean when I say real balance is pretty much impossible. Too many things changing will shift balance in unpredictable ways. And there’s only so much you can put in the game to apply only to a class/mastery.
I think the most you can achieve is parity, which, in my mind, is more important. Parity is when each class/mastery is able to do all content. Some will be stronger or weaker, but no matter what you choose you can tweak it to do whatever endgame exists.
Like for arena. It doesn’t matter if some masteries can get to 1k waves as long as every single mastery can clear all the bosses for their loot. Or, if you introduce some reward at x waves, that they all can reach that as well, whether they have an easier or harder time.
Likewise for dungeon bosses. As long as all masteries have some way to finish them, it doesn’t really matter if one can insta delete bosses and another will take longer.
The important thing is that you always have some way to do whatever you want no matter what you choose.
That is because the standard threshold is usually applied to the meta builds. What should happen is that they all feel good to do and the meta builds should feel great. That never happens though. If your build isn’t performing at the level of the top build, players feel bad. It’s a matter of perception and human nature, which I understand though.
Maybe it’s a different term. I’ve seen it referred to as parity. The point being that if classes aren’t balanced (as they will never be, in my opinion) but they can do the same content as others, most players will be somewhat happy with that. But if the imbalance reaches a point where you say that class X can’t do bosses or can’t do some other endgame, that feels worse.
Anyway, to conclude this, I don’t think real balance is actually possible in a live service where things are constantly shifting. I’ve never seen one acomplish this even though all try to. But that doesn’t mean that LE masteries don’t need a re-balancing, because they do. Some haven’t been changed in a long time and are outdated with the current state of the game.
Once all masteries are a little more balanced, and if players shift their perspective on what a mastery really is, then maybe complaints about this will decrease (though they’ll never go away).
Not when you have class-specific passive trees. Those alone completely negate this entire paragraph. Shaman needs more mana regen… add it as a threshold passive bonus, or tweak existing bonuses. It could also be added as a specific node bonus in a skill tree, if it requires even further limiting.
And GD has a far more complex build/skill/item synergy system. And yet, somehow they managed to figure it out. The fact it’s single player has nothing to do with it. If no Nightblade builds were capable of farming Ultimate bosses, players wanting to play Nightblade would bitch.
Balance isn’t some mythical unicorn, that doesn’t exist. It does…maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s possible to get mostly right. And, LE is pretty much there. Just a couple lingering ‘weak’ skills, and a bit fewer knee-jerk nerfs, and things could be sitting rather pretty.
Sure, but as I said, if you place all the boosts/nerfs in the tree, over time you’ll get passives bloat where all the right side of the tree does is introduce balance and not unique/thematical stuff. It’s ok to use every once in a while, and most trees already try to do this, to some extent, but you can’t rely entirely on that.
I only disagree on that because they don’t have to do balance changes every 4 months. If you don’t add mechanics/uniques/whatever for a couple years, it’s easier to tweak things until they’re mostly balanced. But if you’re doing changes every 4 months and you try to rebalance the classes accordingly, it’s much harder to actually maintain that balance.
Especially because changes usually bring about unexpected results and if you have a couple years to figure those out and balance them it’s a lot easier than having to adjust in 4 months before the next changes arrive.
I agree that LE is pretty balanced right now, but that is also partly due to having little endgame yet. But I agree that LE’s system is pretty thought out and allows for easier balance than most games.
That’s a problem by design and less a problem of the peopele and how they see things. Look at all the CC fro LE for example that call for example Sentinel the class and you pick a masterie in said class. It’s everywhere and the base archetype is called the class while masteries are called masteries.
If they want something to be something specific they should’nt call classes classes and masteries masteries . That’s what labguage is for to specify and name things.
One of the “problems” I have in LE is the lack of some basic classes and class fantasies and that’s why it was sometimes a bit irritating for me in the beginning. First time I played I picked a Sentinel because I like the heavy armored brute playstyle when I test stuff. Well guess wht there is not that typical class that simply hit enemies untill they are dead. When I blindly picked a Warrior in Lost Ark I knew from level 1 what I was in for. When I picked a Barbarian in Diablo 2 I knew what I was in for. When I picked a Sentinel in LE I was in a “meeehhhh!” state. This shifted a lot with knowledge but going into LE blind wasn’t that pleasing first.
I still talk about the experience for new players and want to say it again: personaly I don’t give a rats ass but I see the setup we have now as problematic because the explenations we have ingame are lackluster and new players might pick something that sounds nice on paper that is ass.
I just look at it from a D&D viewpoint.
For example, when you select a fighter in D&D and then select the Eldritch Knight sub-class you don’t expect that you’ll be able to redo it. Much like when D&D still had prestige classes. You select one and you’re stuck with it. But each of the subclasses has a base class you start from and they just add a different flavor to your base class.
Most of my Sentinel builds have been exactly the fantasy you described. Big lumbering 2-hander brute that hits things till they are dead. A Warrior by any other name. I got exactly that (as expected) with my first couple of Sentinels. One Paladin doing Rive crits and a VK Apathy Cleave. Both play exactly as I expected from the class, they hit things till they die.
However one then finds LE is more sophisticated than that (thankfully) and Sentinels offer a lot more than the 2-handed Warrior fantasy. I now have an Auto-bomber VK caster, and a Smite Hammerdin both of whom use a Wand! And also a Forge-Guard Minion build with flying Swords and a lumbering Manifest pet. These are as far from the Warrior archetypes as you can get. But I had to discover those as I learned the game. My initial Sentinels were exactly the fantasy everyone has for that class, a lumbering armour clad brute that hits things till they die.
Point is… game has amazing build depth, but the class archetypes absolutely DO deliver the fantasy you probably had when you first heard of the class or mastery. If you let them.
This, however, isn’t. All of the Sentinels in LE can be played as melee if you want, or some can be casters or minion builds.
One of the main things in LE is that it gives you choices of how you play your class. Every single one can be played as melee, most can be played as ranged, caster or minion.
There was a ruleset in D&D and i was able to read indepth what said class/prestige class/multiclass does. I think this example isn’t so good because when I first read the tooltip on Erasing Strike I was sold on the class. The skill sadly never lifed up to the tooltip.
Sure they could it apples and oranges and it still applies. If it’s still missunderstood by some/many people and CC then it’s either easy to misinterpret or bad by design. Still sure everything applies ^^.
To flashy to colorfull. For me the Swipe Primalist was the closest to it for me.
Sure that’s nice no question asked but to me in the first few days I playd (like 1.1k+ game hours back) it was a bit strange to wrap my head arround classes. After i tested everything I was fine. I just don’t think it’s a good new player experince we have right now and that’s the only thing I try to make clear. As I said I don’t give a rats ass about the system in place because I’m used to it but a short skill showcase video on char creation might help new players to navigate what they gravitate to without needing extern sources.
Same as i said above Primalist Swipe did the trick for me because it wasn’t so flashy/colorfull or whatever you can call it. I’m used to it today and it’s a non issue but I just want to show how someones imagination might decive them from the games reality when you play it first. Or let’s say when I played it so this might be an issue for everyone. I still think there could be a bit more orientation for new players because thx god LE does some stuff different in some cases.
I mean, there is no shortage of stuff that sounds really cool in D&D and when you try them they’re really underwhelming. This is even true for entire subclasses. They are usually called noob traps and LE has them as well (:cough:AcidFlask:cough:).
In most RPGs (not even just ARPGs) there are always classes and skills that sound really great but end up being quite disappointing. They just need to be balanced, rather than discarded.
In theory I’m all for it. Although, with the amount of skills you have for each base class, I don’t think the video would be so short. I mean, for Sentinel alone, since we’re talking mostly about them, you have Hammer Throw, Lunge, Rive, Shield Bash, Vengeance, Warpath, Javelin and Void Cleave. That’s 8 damage skills that all work differently. Not to mention the sentinel passive tree skills, Rebuke, Shield Rush, Multistrike and Smite. That’s a lot of skills to showcase. The video wouldn’t be that short.
Maybe what we need is a better character creation that shows more stuff. When you pick Sentinel it just shows 6 “Key skills”. And Hammer Throw or Void Cleave aren’t among them, for example. Maybe something that lets us view all skills, maybe even the passive tree and the skill tree.
Or maybe the short video could be made for when you hover the skills at creation.
I don’t know what the correct path is, but I agree that LE could be better in terms of character creation and displaying info for players to choose. Since almost no ARPG does this, it could be one more thing for LE to stand out.
Sure but you could do showcases of the base skill and and the skill with the big nodes and how they change things up. i don’t think there is a skill that needs more then 10 seconds to show. It’s a lot of work for sure BUT if EHG makes a game out of it it’ll be nice. Give away some currency for cosmetics for the best shown skill in a 10 sec long video and people would send them showcases to work with even more likely. The best entry might even get a standard steam version gift code so CC might even join in and do soething like that. Well I guess @boardman21 could do something like this from the getgo because reasons :D.
There are plenty of ways that would make life for new players better and if new players AND vetereans praise the game we are in for a better start no matter how release is going.
I’m no designer or developer and i don’t know how much work this is or if this would have some very ugly strain on the servers I can’t tell. I think the devs wathc this thread and we’ll see if they can implement something like this so short noticed or if they even want to.
Again I’m not bothered by this because I can replay a toon from 1-80 again and again and again because I have a lot of times on my hands. Other people might end up pissed and I think everything that stops people from feeling bad about LE is a good thing.
Most H&S games have the same kind of char templates and LE does good by breaking up the same old crap again and again. That’s btw kind of the problem because when I started the game I had 0 clue and dimply toyed arround for 300h so I could tell what classes and skill setups I like. This is nothing 90% of the H&S players I know would do. I think Diablo is the best example. If you pick a barbarian you know what you are in for as an example.
I like the aproach LE took but I dislike the little info there is for new players. I don’t care because I been there and done that dozens of times but I care for the well beeing of LE and I think a good new player experience is VERY important.
There’s no reason why it should strain the server. You have lots of game files locally in your client, there’s no reason why a bunch of short videos can’t be placed there when you install and then used by the client when you’re in the character creation screen. Any load would be local and mostly negligible.
You could even always use them when you hover the skills in the game, again with minimal impact on performance. With an option to turn them off, if we don’t want to always see the video, though.
We seem to have drifted away from the key question. Should Mastery/sub-class/whatever you want to call it, be re-selectable?
I still say a very firm no.
I have yet to see a single positive argument in this thread to support the yes camp. [And please note that “it saves me levelling an Alt” is NOT a positive argument, as far as I am concerned, as I explained earlier, this is the type of game where you are meant to level Alts; lots of them. Game’s very core is designed to encourage just that.
OP my advice is this… embrace the VK you have already levelled. Make a new spec for him that is best suited to a VK (I suggest Autobomber). You might even fall in love with a new build. Meanwhile level a new Paladin to make your dream Javelin build.
Net result could easily be: 2 great chars in endgame you cam switch between on a whim.
I have 20 such chars to switch between depending on mood, it keeps the game fresh.
Personally, I still say I don’t really care either way. Meaning that if it were an option I probably still wouldn’t use it and just make an alt.
That being said, I don’t really see a need to make this happen either. But I’m fine either way.
Well who cares? YOU don’t see valid arguments here but noone is to blame because you are bilnd or narrow minded . You know a lot of people value their time quite a bit and that is reason enough.
Still I don’t care about me in this matter but I can’t tell why anyone is against making this game more friendly for players who toy arround a lot and don’t look up guides and videos and whatnot. You know the people who simply want to play the game without beeing messed with in wastefull ways.
I get why EHG is adamant on this topic and why it’ll change in the future but not right now. Everyone can see this.
What about the possibility to respecc your toon but if you do so you don’t get recognized by any leaderboards. Noone is hurt and people can do as they please.
I still wouldn’t care either way, tbh. I’m fine with not being able to respec and I’m also fine with infinite free respecs. It’s not something I plan on using myself, even if it’s available for free. It’s also not something I inherently oppose.
To me mastery feels like a sub-class in D&D and I don’t feel the need to respec it. But you can also view it as a specialization like PoE ascendancies and allow respecs. I don’t think either option detracts from the game that much and it’s up to EHG to decide what they want and how they feel about masteries.
They already did for the moment ^^. I think I’ll leave this thread be because for most people there is only black and white and they are unable to see all the grey inbetween.
I was not activaly participating in the discussion, but read pretty much everything. You were given lot of “grey” feedback why this is not an issue and people who think different, you are just not wanting to acknowledge the fair points given to you
. That’s what labguage is for to specify and name things.