This post is being written by Xanthia and Azrael with input from the members of Venom.

Thesis: Improvements to the gaming mechanics are not only necessary to improve gameplay but to ensure the quality of players and content in the future. There are many ways to achieve this goal, however this process is very time consuming and mana draining. This is where the loyal, engaged, and trustworthy community members and beta testers of the game have pooled resources together to engineer a document like the one you are about to read. Without further ado, it's time to "Shake off the SOE," and turn and burn! Enjoy! (No pun intended for the DEV's just sounded funny)

Abstract: We are going to provide one TLR post that will cover all the issues that need to be fixed in the game as it is right now and ideas for the future. The post will be discussing the pressing issues of PvP Imbalance, distribution of statistics, friends joining passworded games without a password, the issue of currency, trading optimization, PvE farming and boss killing, and finally guilds. Also the post will be a in-depth look at the DEV's bible for the long term direction of PL that we would like to see the game move toward! Ideas like Removal of Player Distributed Stats, Extensive Crafting System, 10-Man Raids, Achievement Points, Skill Trees, 6 New Hero Classes, and classes wearing class specific gear only.

PvP balance:

There has been a lot of ideas floating around about how to make PvP a more balanced and enjoyable experience. Probably the biggest issue players have had with PvP combat is that it simply doesn't last long enough in many cases. There have been serveral fixes applied by the devs to fix this issue, and the result has been that sometimes PvP fights last too long, and sometimes it is far to quick. There are two main culprits: The artificial lowering of damage done in PvP as opposed to PvE by the developers, and the dominance of cooldowns in PvP. The damage systems in PvP and PvE should be universal. Instead of changing damage artificially, it would be better to change the statstics of characters. In the next section is an explanation of the changes to be made to statstics. Briefly however, strength would provide a heavy increase to HP which would make PvP battles last longer. PvE damage from mobs would simply be changed in order to compensate for any changes to the stats system. This would also make PvP more challenging, and make the role of the tank more necessary, since players without and strength and only dexterity or intelligence, would in effect be "glass cannons." To put it simply, Cooldown spells define PvP. The problem is so great that one can reliably determine who will win a fight based on who has their cooldowns ready or not. Most notably are the cooldowns Iron blood, Rage, Evasion and Focus. Cooldowns should either be less powerful, or have a much longer timer on their cooldowns. Combat should not be based entirely on rage and focus specifically, and to a lesser extent evasion and ironblood. There is also an issue with damage mitigation, where a player can hit an opponent that is buffed for very little damage, but then hit for high damage when he crits. For instance, if a player has a high armor rating, and normal attacks are hitting that player for 2-10 with a 2 hander, that 2 hander will still crit that same player for around 130 damage. There seems to be an issue with crits doing far more damage than an auto attack would against the same enemy. Skills that are for direct target should not go off if the target is out of range. Avians evasion should work while the player is moving. Elven healing is the biggest thing needed in PvP to offset the no potion use, however, healers are unable to use heals correctly because they are killed in 2 hits with Blessing of Vitality up and Magic Shield up. A player should never be killed in 2 shots with 108 armor rating. Elves should have a much higher heal ability to offset the large damage that other classes can produce, and a second less on the spell regeneration.

Hybrid Classes

Hybrid classes are simply getting out of hand. The best example of this is the Avian class. Avians with strength builds for example are able to use two handed weapons with very high top end damage to heavily boost their ranged abilities. Besides it making absoluelty no sense for a two handed weapon to be used in a long range attack, these hybrid classes make certain skills too powerful. We have already explained that the cooldown skills dominate pvp. Because of this, an Avian in pvp uses focus, then break armor, and then unleashes his/her shot skills. When the target is buffed (evasion, BoM, ironblood), these are the only attacks that will matter, any other attacks will have minimal affects. What this means is the only attacks that really matter are the skill based attacks, all of which work at range, and with the two hander's damage. Melee attacks after that are a bonus at best.

Singling out the Avian two hander is easy because of how ridiculous and yet effective it is, but this can be applied to any hybrid class. Not only do these hybrid classes often not make sense, but they are impossible to balance with other classes in a systematic way, because every change made to their skills or damage also affects players who play the same class with the weapons that were intended to work with their skills.

Classes must be changed so that they can only use certain weapons and armor. It is best to add new classes, which would be rather easy quite frankly compared to balancing 3 classes that are in effect 9 different classes. At the very least however, skills should only work with weapons that fit the skill. In other words a range skill should not work with a melee weapon, and a melee skill should not work with a ranged weapon.