End-game balance

[Deathofan]

A more logical approach would be to not allow auto attack to be triggered automatically by using 1 skill. This would be a less "riskier" change that I think would change pvp a bit. This would mainly make birds a little less OP. It might seem like a small worthless change, but since I solely pvp on a bird I can for sure tell you that most bird fights end in "2 shots". Really though it is only 1 shot but since auto is triggered automatically, this makes it so birds just need to use 1 skill and still hit auto. If players had to turn on auto manually like it used to be, then it sure would tone down most birds quite a bit. Because most birds don't have the speed to shoot out several skills. They depend on that auto attack triggering on its own. It should be taken out of pvp and the old way brought back. Auto attack required to be turned on manually. It should be kept in pve though, because I am sure it makes it easier for the newer players and is very useful. But from the pvp standpoint, players know what they're doing. So yeah, in closing auto attack should not be triggered automatically by using 1 skill, it should be turned on by the player manually. Only in pvp though.

that was the only thing that could make a bird win against a mage. blast to break shield then auto and blind repulse (all in less than a sec), now I think auto hits first when I press blast and it feels worse than before. I agree with auto beign returned as it was before.

[tHelonestud]

Id say give bears like 400 health more
And 200 dmg less

[shhhnfight]

Hey Techno -

I've been part of PvP since day 1, and I'm very familiar with stats (as well as SEVERAL other players. I'd love to come up with a list of players that would love to help out that are also experienced and familiar with many PvP levels).

I highly recommend that you try to find a bunch of players to gather up and discuss stats. Your dedication and responses to the community mean a lot to us, but as Noodleleg mentioned above, if a class is significantly underpowered, rings will not be the solution to the problem. We need to stop avoiding the prime issue with balancing classes and items by simply adding stats, because in reality (or I guess you can say 'virtually'), the legitimate act of balancing stats is what makes the difference.

I just think that this is the most reasonable solution... I mean after all, we're the ones playing your game all the time, in it's real action! (Not just testing).

Ok. INT SET SUCKS INT MAGE SUCKS SQUISHY AS MARSH! OKAY FIX IT TECHNO.

[Waug]

Ok. INT SET SUCKS INT MAGE SUCKS SQUISHY AS MARSH! OKAY FIX IT TECHNO.

I can really feel the pain of not being able to crush birds by 1/2 hit anymore.

[AbsolutePally]

that was the only thing that could make a bird win against a mage. blast to break shield then auto and blind repulse (all in less than a sec), now I think auto hits first when I press blast and it feels worse than before. I agree with auto beign returned as it was before.

Remove auto auto!!!!

[Deathofan]

Remove auto auto!!!!

Seriously this could make some oldies come back. Twinks l10-18 will be back thrashing the newbies that all they know is spam skills and turn auto on by default. At endgame, only the experienced pvpers can turn on auto at 13m if there was a xbow and kite effectively if devs get rid out that -1m while running away. I would personally still be using phantom xbow if the difference between elite bow wasn't that huge (110dmg......). But I couldn't agree more on taking away the automatic turn-on on auto attack when casting a skill.

[Hadesofshadow]

Left that out. Mages are uber weak* in PvP, like Shil said, the majority of end-game mages are SADLY pallies.

lmao

this was the way it was for over a year

then they nerfed strength and now that its buffed to hell again what do we have?

pallies because of high base damages you can get away with it

you also have to consider the fact that this is STS

their end game pvp has been trash for over 3 years

[Waug]

4. End-game characters need more armor.
- How much more armor? (Ex. 50% more Armor.)
5. Strength should contribute less to Dodge.
- How much less? (Ex. 25% less.)

I agree that adding HP per level or attribute points will turn the bigger nob of the game rather hp and extra armor should be added at specific levels where it's require for example max skill point distribution has been raised from 6 to 9 from the level 65, but no steps have been taken to factor in that extra damage means, to balance that extra damage. Isn't it? That+other factor leads to this current game one hit kill problem slowly.

Let me explain what's other factor - as game approaches from the begining level it's clear we always needed less numbers of hit to kill enemies in pvp on an average and in general, fact is hp remained same but that's not the problem as there are other defense mechanisms one is dodge other is armor but unfortunately dodge got overpowed due to many factors and I think I talked a lot about it. But nobody like dodges in pvp 30-40% dodge is okay more or less depending upon buffs, de-buffs, hit etc, now the other factor armor could not factor in that extra damage that always increases with level cap and that's a fault. for ex. A particular skill against a particular enemy at level 75 could do nearly same damage as that particular skill against particular enemy do at 55 if and only if damage - armor was properly balanced also it was required as hp remains same.

So my point is clear Devs failed to add necessary amount of armor each level. Now balancing pve is way much easier job so pvp should not be according to pve but the opposite.

Here I'll try to put an example if Devs add 30% armor to an endgame class than the opponent should do nearly or less
(2 x 30% of armor) less damage assuming 100% crit. Meaning if current armor is 300, per hit damage should be reduced more than 180 after 30% armor increase approx.

Secondly and specilly as defense is getting powerful balancing 2h weapons is more necessy and important-, IMHO, DEVS failed again to balance 2H and 1H weapons current elite bow is just a small step, by small I'm not meaning small power or something. Proof is everywhere at pvp field look at that, how many bears or mages used 2h weapons that means they failed against shield and 1h the advantage should be more prominent, so in next level cap, not only elite weapons, make every 2h weapons more powerfull.

[Elf-Orc-Naga]

Right now...

I think you should focus on The mages, bears, and birds and then move on to the rhino's and foxes. I don't think it was even a good idea to bring two new classes with the amount of imbalancement end-game PvP has. So, what you should do, I think ALL SKILL LEVELS should be reduced BACK to level 6. Having skill levels at 9 is ridiculous and was a bad move in the first place. Bears now can hold 95+ dodge, and their skill damage is very high. Like I said, skill levels NEED to go back to 6, permanantly to prevent other riots/imbalancement. Int mages are ultra squishy now. They don't stand a chance vs. an overpowered bear and ofcourse the overpowered bird. Also, what happened to staff mages? They are suppose to be more dominant than wand mages. Now birds...where do I start. Birds now can one shot any class they wish with their what, 547 blast? Something like that? They dodged nearly EVERY SKILL with their ridiculous dodge. I sometimes have to use my skills TWICE, just to kill one bird. Instead of increasing their damage...how about increasing their HP some more and reducing what is actually needed to be reduced?


-My feedback.

Edit: You should also look at Reun's post in Rushorgtfo's thread called "Need a developers input".

Very well said! I really like this non noob view...well players especially old ones really have those experience to evaluate qualitatively not technically. Increasing skill level to 9 is the laziest thing to do i think. Looking forward to more creative ideas on skills. my constructive feedback

[Hadesofshadow]

Very well said! I really like this non noob view...well players especially old ones really have those experience to evaluate qualitatively not technically. Increasing skill level to 9 is the laziest thing to do i think. Looking forward to more creative ideas on skills. my constructive feedback

only way to balance game to include skill is

remove dodge

increase hp/reduce damage

rng makes games unfun

[Fusionstrike]

<inadvertent double post>

[Fusionstrike]

Here's my deeper, more considered look at the rhino. I decided to compare against bear, since rhino is most similar to that class. Sure, rhino has magic, but it's not very close to the enchantress. It has only two party buffs, and only one can be active at a time. And the enchantress has plenty of damage spells and buffs to throw around, making it very different from the rhino. The rhino is much more like the bear in that it isn't a damage dealer, but rather more like a tank with a few party supporting tricks thrown in. Thus my comparison will focus on rhino vs. bear.

I happen to have capped characters for both classes, so I just compared them as is. They both have enough str to wear top of the line str gear and put the rest of stats into dex. The skill allocation probably isn't an exact parallel, but it should be close enough to draw some meaningful conclusions.

Looking at the skills provides the best way to compare. Here are the skills of each, grouped by their main purpose. I captured all these skills with no gear equipped, so what you'll see is the base damage and effects with no weapon damage or stat boosts factored in.

RHINO
single target damage
charge (7) - 8m, 103-153 damage, 3s cooldown
redemption (9) - 133-151 damage, heal self, 2x combo damage, 5.5s cooldown

AOE damage
rhino might (7) - 6m, 70-74 damage, -9 H/s for 3 sec, stun, 6s cooldown
holy tempest (9) - 8m, 151-210 damage, 60% chance -30 hit debuff for 3 sec, 5s cooldown

buff self
guardian (9) - 8m, cure effects party, +40 armor and 10 dodge self for 8s, 20s cooldown
stone skin (6) - +33 armor self for 12s, 32.5s cooldown

buff party
brute force (6) - 20s +5 armor party, +7 dodge self
vital force (9) - 20s +36 damage party, +27 hit and +10 crit self

debuff
summon (6) - 12m, 5 sec -12 dodge debuff, -18 H/s

other
restore (6) - 8m, 110-125 heal, +40 H/s self, 5s cooldown
reincarnate (1) - 6m


BEAR
single target damage
vengeful slash (1) - 64-92 damage, 4.5s cooldown
crippling slash (1) - 64-77 damage, 6s cooldown
super mega slash (3) - 76-137 damage, 60% chance -10 armor, 4s cooldown
crushing blow (9) - 121-135 damage, -80 damage and -45 dodge for 5s, 4s cooldown

AOE damage
stomp (9) - 8m, 158-177 damage, 90% chance stun, 5s cooldown
beckon (7) - 12m, 88-95 damage, 50% chance stun, 7.5s cooldown

buff self
iron blood (9) - +60 armor for 12s, 32.5s cooldown
rage (9) - +60 crit and +90 damage for 20s, 28s cooldown
evade (9) - +20 dodge for 20s, 30s cooldown
taunt (9) - +14 dodge for 12s, 6s cooldown

debuff
hell scream (9) - 12m, -60 damage and -60 hit, 5s cooldown

Now let's look at a typical "round" for each class. Taking the top damage for each skill, we'll find out what each one does when it cycles once through all its damage-dealing skills.

Single-target and AOE damage skills

• Bear: 92+77+137+135+177+95 = 713
• Rhino: 153+151+74+210 = 588

So bear does more damage, mostly because it just plain has more damage skills to fire off. But there are two other factors that make it even more lopsided. One, my particular skill allocation has rhino maxed or near-maxed in all these skills, while my bear has almost nothing in the three slashes. Put another way, the rhino is nearly maxed out while the bear still has lots more room for improvement, and bear still kicks rhino's butt. The other factor is that bear has rage, which vastly increases the chance that any of its hits will be crits i.e. doubled. Putting these two factors together, bear has an incredible advantage in damage over rhino even without pouring all skill points into every possible damage avenue.

So what about the play style? Well, bear obviously has better tank and crowd-control capabilities, with beckon to pull, much more health to withstand damage, and taunt to get aggro. Rhino has a skill that supposedly taunts, but in my experience has a lot harder time attracting and keeping aggro than bear. Also, bear has much more effective AOE strikes, both in range and effect, due in part to the fact that two AOE skills form the bear's combo. Rhino has just one AOE skill with decent range (holy tempest) but needs to use single-target attacks to form its combo. Charge is a nice way to get in the room first, and summon has great range to attract mobs initially, but they inevitably lose interest and attack other, higher DPS targets almost immediately.

One thing rhino has that bear doesn't is party buffs. However, as discussed before, these buffs have negligible effect on the party, are mutually exclusive and have a realtively long cooldown time. These three factors together pretty much completely negate them as any meaningful factor in party performance.

Rhino also gets restore and reincarnate, which bear doesn't have, so it can support the party that way. However, these end up functioning more as emergency measures for the party than an integral part of the combat. This is obviously true for reincarnate, which has no value other than to recover from a catastrophic falure. It's also true for restore because of its relatively low amount of healing and long cooldown. This means that it's much more efficient to just let the enchantress take care of "normal" healing and save the rhino's heal to jump in at a critical moment of low health to avert disaster. Also, being able to rev and heal a downed enchantress (especially when the party has only one) is a valuable skill, but one that is again just a disaster recovery option that is rarely needed by good parties.

So my conclusion is that the rhino as currently implemented is too much in the middle between party support/buff specialist and tank/damage source. It's not strong and capable enough to replace a good bear tank, and it doesn't have anywhere near the buffs it would need to make it a worthwhile performance enhancer for the party. It's caught in between as a "jack-of-all-trades and master of none".

Here's what I would do to improve rhino. Any one of these would take the class out of "no man's land" and solidly into a clear and useful role.

1. Make the party buffs better. This means boosting their effect and/or adding other party buffs to really transform the class into the "secret ingredient" that makes the party excel.
2. Add some more damage options. This means boosting damage, both targeted and AOE, and/or adding more skills that do damage.

Either way, the rhino has way more self-buffs than it needs, so I think some replacement of skills will ultimately be the only way out of the current bind. Just making the two existing party buffs better isn't going to be enough. Similarly, just making the existing damage skills stronger isn't going to do it either. There's just too much dead weight in the current skill design to leave room to manuever the rhino into a really effective class unless some of the skills are replaced or completely reworked.

That being said, if you just wanted to tilt the rhino towards fighting/tanking, it might be possible to do so with some major tweaks but no completely rewritten skills. I have my doubts that would be enough, but here's how that would go. First, making the AOE skills have larger range and higher damage, making taunt work better, and maybe even adding some kind of pull to one of the skills would let rhino be able to do tank/crowd control duties. Another improvement would be to make charge and redemption deal AOE damage as a way to both get more hits in and attract more attention from mobs when charging first into the room. The final thing I can think of would be to boost the output of the skills that damage over time (rhino might and summon) to something meaningful. But they would have to go up a lot compared to the meaningless amount of damage they do now, and this alone wouldn't be enough to save the class; other changes mentioned above would have to come with it.

My conclusion is that in pretty much all facets, parties are better off with a bear than a rhino. The rhino is a class with some neat tricks but no really clear role, as the "specialists" always end up being more effective in the end (bird to damage, bear to tank, enchantress to heal and nuke). In order to make the class relevant, you need to adjust it to find a real niche that other classes just can't cover as well. But first you have to figure out exactly which niche you're aiming for. Right now, the rhino class just doesn't have a purpose that brings enough value to the party.

[Flawless]

Simple, just take mages and bears out of the equation permanently. (Thank me later.)

[Waug]

Calculating class damage isn't that much easy, there're really many many factors. Even I assume that all your data is true and you calcuted all data even hidden data, for example many skills doesn't show damage but deliver damage on enemy.

Single-target and AOE
damage skills
Bear:
92+77+137+135+177+95
= 713
Rhino: 153+151+74+210
= 588

let's calculate roughly it on an enemy whose armor is 60 and I found they are doing nearly same damage

713 - (60 x 6) = 353
588 - (60 x 4) = 348
but that doesn't even implies that they are equally balanced either. Cuz there are many many factors such as cool down time, multiple enemies in case aoe etc. etc.

[MightyMicah]

A more logical approach would be to not allow auto attack to be triggered automatically by using 1 skill. This would be a less "riskier" change that I think would change pvp a bit. This would mainly make birds a little less OP. It might seem like a small worthless change, but since I solely pvp on a bird I can for sure tell you that most bird fights end in "2 shots". Really though it is only 1 shot but since auto is triggered automatically, this makes it so birds just need to use 1 skill and still hit auto. If players had to turn on auto manually like it used to be, then it sure would tone down most birds quite a bit. Because most birds don't have the speed to shoot out several skills. They depend on that auto attack triggering on its own. It should be taken out of pvp and the old way brought back. Auto attack required to be turned on manually. It should be kept in pve though, because I am sure it makes it easier for the newer players and is very useful. But from the pvp standpoint, players know what they're doing. So yeah, in closing auto attack should not be triggered automatically by using 1 skill, it should be turned on by the player manually. Only in pvp though.

Excellent post. I agree on every point except your very last sentence. It shouldn't trigger in PvE or else people will learn it wrong while leveling.

Welcome to the forums

[Suentous PO]

I also agree with ending auto attack being triggered by pressing a skill, BOTH in pvp and pve. In pve having an "auto auto attack" kinda encourages button mashing with less thought. If it were to be ended in pvp only, it's gonna confuse new folks who try out pvp and then realize ( if they do) that there's an unwritten rule only applying to pvp -Odd.
In pve there was a utility for the absent auto.
Example; during the dragon ichor quest we had a way of clearing faster. The Mage or tank would gather mobs bringing the whole map to the center for the kill. So, as a bird I either wait in the middle, which made it more difficult and boring. The other faster way was to run along side the person pulling aggro and as long as you didn't use auto, you could run alongside the tank killing with skills untill the mob was fully pulled, which made it safer in general as there were less mob by the time it all came together. -just one example.
Also agreeing to lowering dodge and most everything Legendfb is layin down.

[Aressgodxx]

-_-... Techno, talk to some experienced PvPers... A ring won't do much if classes are LMAO LMAO LMAO I ARESSGODXX EDITED THE QUOTE :3....

and what you do say makes sense btw

[Suentous PO]

and what you do say makes sense btw

please don't make the devs sift through pointlessness, in a thread like this where we are working together to solve a problem, thx

[XXTHEEAGLEXX]

When is the update coming.. For pvp changes

[XghostzX]

When is the update coming.. For pvp changes

After AL PvP is implemented... all I can tell you.