by Tharkis » Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:44 am
On the contrary, i think what EQ needs is less complexity, and almost a convergence of several classes to make class balance, itemization, etc easier. Right now there's a huge disparity between the dps output of "dps" classes, a huge disparity between the healing ability of healing clases, etc, such that everything is out of whack between half the clases, and this is asside from the melee vs caster balance as far as damange etc goes.
Right now melee have much higher survivability than casters AND do significantly more damage for longer periods of time, sort of negating any 'advantages' that 'pure dps' classes without heavy armor were originally supposed to have. Since there are SO many classes in EQ however, it is going to be a significant effort looking at each individual class each ability, each spell / spell line, etc to try to get parity of some sort.
If classes were more convergant towards their archtype (caster dps, melee dps, tank, healer) then it would be easier to start doing things like setting "dps values" to linked spell lines and normalizing them across classes for a particular level, to adjust NPC resist systems such that casting dps isnt so hit and miss, etc. Then you could have each class do it's dps in it's own 'flavor' but then balance everything overall much better. Then if they find a category needs to do more, or less, or whatever of what they do, they bump each of the linked spell groups together and address everyone at once.
I do not envy the devs in their attempt to try to do /some/ sort of class balancing, because EQ is just too complex of a system as it is currently. What really needs to happen is that it gets simplified, like other games are all doing. WoW works because when you have a DPS class, they all do close to the same DPS as eachother, making them interchangeable, it's the other things like specific buffs or debuffs that they bring that makes diversifying beneficial, but as far as raw dps, they're basically the same, just varying in how they do their damage. (range melee vs pet vs spell vs melee, etc)