Since balancing forum is locked posting balancing issue here

[hephasteus]

Ok this is balancing issue with caster caster combos versus tank healer combos and in general caster heavy group balancing versus tank heavy group balancing. SoD having such a wonderful bind wound capability makes an imbalance with resist rates on caster heavy groups and caster combo dual boxing at very low levels. The bind wound helps out these combos espeically when one is a poor healer such as shaman or druid but the resist rate limits the COLOR of mobs you can hunt. Tank healer combinations can do higher level spawns ealier. Extending thier new zone advantages and generally outleveling caster heavy groups or combos easily. Caster heavy groups and combos can be in an area long after a tank healer combo or group has left. This leaves the caster heavy groups and combos working with old area exprience modifiers worsening the disadvantage.
Money becomes an disadvantage as well as clerics in healer tank combos can load up loot well past thier encumberance figures while casters doing this will find themselves in big trouble and when gold takes the form of 8 stone wt loot tables this disadvantage is a huge slap in the face.. These general disavantages essentially continue on forever as reisstances remain a pain in the butt until the endgame im supposing and until everything goes blue anyway.
This screws up raiding, adept encouters evertything.
Whatever thinking is behind this needs to be said or resaid. Casters can do enormous amounts of damge in shorter periods of time but NOT in this game. Honestly if the game remained the same you couldnt balance this out if you gave druids all casters and shamans 60 extra starting points to put in str dex and agility.

 

[Allielyn]

Re: Since balancing forum is locked posting balancing issue

clerics in healer tank combos can load up loot well past thier encumberance figures while casters doing this will find themselves in big trouble and when gold takes the form of 8 stone wt loot tables

I'm not sure what you're getting at here, tbh. Pretty much all classes with Gate or ports are at a huge advantage in this respect, and all pure casters certainly aren't taking major hits if they're overweight. Mind elaborating? Because this point in particular struck me as Really odd.

P.S. is it bad for some classes to be able to do some things better than others? Yes, Clerics can heal better than Druids or Shamans. Then again, Clerics can't port, nor can they canni. /shrug. What's your point?

 

[Wiz]

what

 

[Momatose]

Honestly if the game remained the same you couldnt balance this out if you gave druids all casters and shamans 60 extra starting points to put in str dex and agility.

maybe i missed something (it was an incredibly easy post to follow, too!).. but what do strength, dex and agility have to do with caster resist rate imbalances?

 

[Babs]

*shrugs* My husband plays a chanter/mage combo. I play a pallie/druid combo. Quite frankly, it's my tanking ability that limits us more than their casting ability. Hell, their pets can often tank better than my pallie (I really need to get her some better gear). When they are duoing by themselves, they often take on higher level mobs than we do as a 4 person group. I think the balance there is just fine. And, yes, they carry all the heavy loot when we're hunting together so my dex isn't affected, because they bind by a merchant and just gate out to sell.

The only real problem we've seen with resist rates is their resists building so much aggro that I have trouble taunting the mobs off.

Then again, we're still under level 20. Perhaps things are different at higher levels.

 

[Taedirk]

what

Translation!

Balance:
Caster/Caster vs Tank/Healer and
Caster-heavy group vs Tank-heavy group

Bind wounds is cool. Resist rates suck. Therefore, caster/caster duo sucks as low levels while tank/healer doesn't. Because of this, you can't fight things 5 levels higher than you as caster/caster. Give us more bonus exp because casters don't want to move areas as often.

Money is a disadvantage because it has weight and casters tend to have a strength of 12. I will now use the Slap in the Face euphamism, because this dead horse hasn't been beaten enough. Time to compare resists again!

So, raiding is screwed.

Casters on live have enormous burst DPS, but not here. So please give all casters a +60 str/dex/agi bonus because I'm wearing my pants on my head, wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Edit: My siggy looks cool.

 

[Allielyn]

Thanks, Taedirk. It's all much more clear, now.

 

[JayelleNephilim]

How the heck did you translante that mess? LOL!

In any event, I tend to agree that not having the abilty to carry much as a caster is a pain, but that is why I box an ogre warrior (and summon 100% weight reduction bags ). It wouldn't make sense to make a caster ... less brittle IMHO.

Hell, their pets can often tank better than my pallie.

Don't feel bad. I know your pain! My 62 ogre warrior is also out tanked by my mage pet. It just holds aggro better.

 

[Kobex]

I agree with this post. I also would like to see monk/monk duos and 6-monk groups to be increased in power, perhaps in the form of more starting int/wis/cha for monks.

My 6-monk groups are having serious issues tackling mobs that the warrior/enchanter/cleric + 3 rogue group next to me can handle with ease. Please address this critical imbalance.

I won't even get into the fact that the monk groups can't loot ANYTHING HOLY CRAP

 

[Niki]

It is tough to stay under that encumbrance, but it's feasible. One thing you need to start doing is considering what items are destroyable. For example, a 12 weight sword that vendors for 5gp isn't worth carrying around if you're high enough to be dungeon exping. Also, watch the auction channel for weight reduction bags, or go and loot them yourself.

 

[Liam]

this is a serious balancing issue

 

[rab]

I don't understand why groups like to fight reds anyway. Last time I was in paw (...a while ago) with my wizard, they kept pulling reds, so OF COURSE my nukes didn't land. I rarely get resisted on blues. Last time I grouped with my beastlord, it was in King's Pass, where we just chain pulled blue after blue and it was not only more fun, but resists weren't an issue for the wizard. So, I guess I just question the killing of reds in any sense. Find many blues and pull them to your heart's content.

 

[Taedirk]

How the heck did you translante that mess? LOL!

I took l33t as a second language. Rambling Gamer Post is related, like how the romance languages share similarities.

 

[Manluas]

How the heck did you translante that mess? LOL!

I took l33t as a second language. Rambling Gamer Post is related, like how the romance languages share similarities.

Wisely spoken young Padawan.
Besides...you really enlightened me about what he wrote.

 

[hephasteus]

I knew you all would pull this crap.

Exactly what I expected. Yes im aware that white yellow mobs have fairly similar abilities to do increased damage and take decreased damage by mellee heavy groups and this is theoretically balanced by resists but its still doable and with a caster group or combo it's not doable with any consistency. You can sit there behind a modeling of probabilities all you want but here's a simple fact about random number generators on computers. You can't freaking do it on any chip besides the revamp of the cirrus chip by VIA. Random numbers are generated by reading the clock circuit on the computer which is a sine wave. Sine waves work excatly like pendulums. Get on a swing set and look closely at what happens through time. People spend enormous amounts of time at ends of the sine wave moving very quickly through middle values. Yes cmputer scientiests have devised ways to try to make random numbers from this configuration but it still doesnt work. Random numbers are still patterned. In this patterned world boughts of high numbers only affect 1/2 of the combo if you dont take critical heals into affect because more often then not you will get patters of both mellee and mob missing or both mellee and mob doing close to max damge. The cleric in these comobs are unaffected by it. In a caster group a bought of resist rolls kills both casters or in a caster heavy group it results in low dps followed by long med times.

Single heals dont generate much agro are never resisted and you can literally load a cleric up with 3 times thier max wt with no ill affects. You do this with a caster combo loading both with 2x thier wt and you're in trouble. Even group heals dont generate enough agro to make mobs want to swarm a cleric with 30 agility and no ability to run.


I'm not trying to create a truth here folks. I know this is hard for you to understand. I'm simply stating THE truth. Having higher than 75 dodge skills on casters priests helps balance this but to truley be balanced casters would have to have about 1/4 more hit points per level or much higher stats for real world performance. When the random number generator goes into a pattern attempts to skew it 25% don't matter

One last note about community. This game creates such huge ego expression in people that the community becomes very aggressive shutting off all receptivity. Discussing the game becomes pointless because nobody is receptive to anything. Everyones motivations become an attempt to give themselves an advantage so they can create imbalances between how they perform in the game and maintain rediculous delusions of inequality between themselves and other players. The game has so much conent that it takes his huge amount of aggression to get anywhere in it. Then it wants to be group oriented making you group with a bunch of egotistical jerks. EQ died not because people got tired of it. They simply overwhelmed the players with a mountain of content.

 

[calaran]

Roll a cleric and tank. Make friends with people who are not casters. Form a group that works.

The point of the responses, sarcastic as they may seem, is that you are trying to play a group format that isn't supposed to work. Healer + Tank basically ensures survival tho slow killing against equally leveled mobs. Add casters to that and you're gtg.. especially with someone for CC. However, I don't see how someone can cry that their group of casters can't kill things as well as a well-balanced group can.

The group I normally play with is: Cleric, Necro, Warrior, Shaman, Enchanter, Wizard... that means basically 1 tank, 1 healer, and 4 people who are using casts to do damage to mobs.... and we do fine. We probably would do better with a Rogue instead of the Wizard or instead of the Necro... but, wtf... For a good group (unless it's a speciality group like a kite group, etc... which I'm not sure even exist here) you need a tank, a healer, CC if in an area with multi-pulls and adds, and then DPS... it's a simple formula... If I tried to play a group of 6 warriors.... it'd suck.

The game mechanics are not going to change so drastically that you will suddenly be able to straight-engage kill red cons with a group of 6 casters... it's not how the game works.

 

[Tydarius]

From the aspect of role-playing, I would imagine that having a Mage or Enchanter who was able to stand in the middle of a fight and take a beating b/c of his/her sheer physical strength/dexterity/agility has chosen the wrong profession.

I’ve always accepted casters to be masters of magic and spells, but completely incapable of physical combat. If more people would understand the strengths and weaknesses of their character’s class, then they probably would either re-roll to the type of character that they truly want to play, or look for the best way to play the character that they want to play. To ask for a caster-class character’s stats to be beefed up to bring it more in line with tank/melee class stats seems a bit too much like it would unbalance the classes instead of balancing them.

It is a tradeoff: you want to be able to cast spells? Then you sacrifice the ability to physically stand up to a MOB – you want to beat a MOB to heck? Then you are dumber than a dead stick when it comes to knowing how to cast a single spell.

Am I saying that an all-caster group should not be allowed to fight a MOB? No, they should be able to fight a MOB. Should an all-caster group be able to take down a MOB as easily or better than say a well balanced group with a tank, some DPS, a healer and some casters? No way. I think an all-caster group should understand that BECAUSE of the nature of their abilities, it WILL be harder to take on a MOB without balancing the group. They should accept this as part of the challenge of fighting with this type of group setup.

As for not being able to hold as much b/c of weight restrictions, I just think that the game already offers enough ways around these restrictions in the form of player-made items, summoned bags, and Augments that can boost stats. If you’d like to have more STR on a caster, then get a bunch of +STR augs and apply ‘em. I know, the accepted way to utilize augs if you are a caster is to apply WIS/INT augs to boost your Mana, but again, all this is from the aspect of role-playing, if you are looking for ways to boost a caster’s STR/AGI/DEX – you do have the option of augs.


- Tydarius

 

[Tydarius]

Oh, and as for the Tradeoff part in respect to Hybrid Classes - I have a Ranger, he's totaly incapable of standing toe-to-toe with a MOB, and dead sticks have been accepted into groups more often than him, but I love playing him just the same...


- Tydarius

 

[hephasteus]

Roll a cleric and tank. Make friends with people who are not casters. Form a group that works.

The point of the responses, sarcastic as they may seem, is that you are trying to play a group format that isn't supposed to work. Healer + Tank basically ensures survival tho slow killing against equally leveled mobs. Add casters to that and you're gtg.. especially with someone for CC. However, I don't see how someone can cry that their group of casters can't kill things as well as a well-balanced group can.

The group I normally play with is: Cleric, Necro, Warrior, Shaman, Enchanter, Wizard... that means basically 1 tank, 1 healer, and 4 people who are using casts to do damage to mobs.... and we do fine. We probably would do better with a Rogue instead of the Wizard or instead of the Necro... but, wtf... For a good group (unless it's a speciality group like a kite group, etc... which I'm not sure even exist here) you need a tank, a healer, CC if in an area with multi-pulls and adds, and then DPS... it's a simple formula... If I tried to play a group of 6 warriors.... it'd suck.

The game mechanics are not going to change so drastically that you will suddenly be able to straight-engage kill red cons with a group of 6 casters... it's not how the game works.

Oh I aggree with you there and that's not what i was talking about. And people keep bringing up things that are outside the box of what im discussing. Ya mages are fine. They are basically a tank healer unit in one. Necro's can solo well also as they are sort of all in one as well. Damage outputs seem to go ok with casters if there is a enchanter tashing. Of course you never get resisted when dotting just about anything but deep reds which makes shaman druid and necro ok to some extent.
What the problem here is that a slight imbalance is present both in solo and duo and group dynamics of casters. Dropping resist rates for fire ice and much more importantly magic just a LITTLE would fix it. Oh and those pesky duo's with clerics that loot everything the group kills and waddle back to their squatting hole of elite platage. Wheres the freaking heal aggro to stop that? I'm a good player. I can get groups. But it makes my butt itch when groups pass over every freaking class and load the group up with mellee dps for thier own self interests. There's also extreme tactiacal holes in the game which i won't expose on open forum cause guess what they would be exploited.

 

[hephasteus]

what

Translation!

Balance:
Caster/Caster vs Tank/Healer and
Caster-heavy group vs Tank-heavy group

Bind wounds is cool. Resist rates suck. Therefore, caster/caster duo sucks as low levels while tank/healer doesn't. Because of this, you can't fight things 5 levels higher than you as caster/caster. Give us more bonus exp because casters don't want to move areas as often.

Money is a disadvantage because it has weight and casters tend to have a strength of 12. I will now use the Slap in the Face euphamism, because this dead horse hasn't been beaten enough. Time to compare resists again!

So, raiding is screwed.

Casters on live have enormous burst DPS, but not here. So please give all casters a +60 str/dex/agi bonus because I'm wearing my pants on my head, wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Edit: My siggy looks cool.

Thanks for analyzing my thought processes from the persepctive you live in. Cause it's so wrong that it's funny.