Possible Balance Solution?

[Tindos]

I got an idea while posting on my guild's forums about our dps and itemization problems. What if in raid areas there were drops (like spell runes) that classes could turn in to a guildmaster or something and get upgrades to their entire character to make them more viable in a raid situation. This upgrade would only be available to raiders so that people who were lower levels and not in this content, experiencing the same division of power problems, would not become overpowered for their current content (granted, people could raid, get these things, then go do older content, but they can do that in any case after getting any gear). This would make them able to level out the playing field for raiders in a way that balanced the raiders without throwing everyone else out of balance. Also, for each expansion, there could be a couple tiers of this improvement, one from the middle raid content and one from the upper raid content. I would suggest that they could go back and implement these into older expansions, but that could throw the encounter difficulty out of wack. These would be innate abilities bestowed upon the person who hands them in, giving them things like an improved double attack or a mod to resists on their spells (and anywhere in between, depending on the class). This would further separate the raiders from the nonraiders, as well as giving a solution to help out with class balance and utility in the higher-end game. Has this been suggested before? What do you guys think of the implementation?

[bham]

The improvements you are talking about should already come from raiding, in the form of gear upgrades. Unfortunately itemization for beastlords is Fubar.

If pet focus's scaled properly, beastlord weapons had better ratios / procs and a balance of spell focus's were available on top-end gear, then beastlords wouldn't have a problem.

There is no need to introduce a new system to fix it, we just need SoE to admit that beastlords arent balanced at the mid and top end and have the itemization changes made....

[Tastian]

Like I've said before (like 2 mins ago in another thread actually lol) there are tons of ways things could be fixed, but really there is no need for anything new.  We already raid, we already get items, we already get new spells, ancients, focus effects, etc.  Sure some new mechanic could be introduced and armor molds could be used and a dozen other things, but those are just different ways to address the problem. 

Our issue right now isn't that there isn't a way to fix our dps it's that we still haven't heard word one that they understand our dps and why we have issues with it.  Soon as they come back from their parsing, checking, whatever and say that beastlord dps isn't where it should be then there are tons of options for how to adjust it.  Innate changes definitely, hopefully some itemization changes, hopefully a few AA/spell tweaks as well, etc.  For now though it's like people asking for armor molds to get bst only weapons that would simply result in poor bst only weapons anyway because they don't understand us.  I used an armor pattern for my dummul's tunic and got my 5th +cold focus for the love of god lol. 

The ideas are great and certainly keep them coming, but lets not lose sight of the real issue.

[Hornet]

I got an idea while posting on my guild's forums about our dps and itemization problems. What if in raid areas there were drops (like spell runes) that classes could turn in to a guildmaster or something and get upgrades to their entire character to make them more viable in a raid situation. This upgrade would only be available to raiders so that people who were lower levels and not in this content, experiencing the same division of power problems, would not become overpowered for their current content (granted, people could raid, get these things, then go do older content, but they can do that in any case after getting any gear). This would make them able to level out the playing field for raiders in a way that balanced the raiders without throwing everyone else out of balance. Also, for each expansion, there could be a couple tiers of this improvement, one from the middle raid content and one from the upper raid content. I would suggest that they could go back and implement these into older expansions, but that could throw the encounter difficulty out of wack. These would be innate abilities bestowed upon the person who hands them in, giving them things like an improved double attack or a mod to resists on their spells (and anywhere in between, depending on the class). This would further separate the raiders from the nonraiders, as well as giving a solution to help out with class balance and utility in the higher-end game. Has this been suggested before? What do you guys think of the implementation?

so what about the casual Player (me) that doesnt really have time to raid and get all thos runes or whatever... that would create a balancing issue itself cause if your not a hardcore gamer and can skip lunch and breakfast just for a raid...then wee you get to be good, what about the people that cant find the time to raid? your just gonna let them shrink into the background and be forgotten? Soe wouldnt like that cause i would guess about 25 or 50% of all players are Casual ones... sorry it sounds like a flame...

[Dummkopf]

The problem at the moment does not exist at the casual level yet. It is primarily a raid-level problem.. yet. It will be a casual problem soon so i agree it shouldnt be a raid only solution, it has to be something that will work for all but dont overpower casual gamers (face it, best equipment and most power can only be achieved through raiding).

[Rhoam]

I would really like to know whether you just assume that the problem does not exist at the casual  level or whether you have played your beastlord in the current content with non raid gear.  I submit to you that I play every day with a mix of casual gear and some raid drops and that my DPS is way off of what much lesser geared people are putting out. I dont mean this as a flame but before you just assume that there is no problem in oow or don content for casual level 70 beastlords, I suggest you strip off your raid gear and put on some bazaar/don/planar gear and see for yourself. Suggesting, in ignorance, that only raiding beastlords have problems at the present time is just plain wrong, divisive in our community and irritating. Any fix that goes into effect should affect all beastlords appropriately. If level 60 bsts are low on dps compared to other classes with similar quality equipment, then their defficiencies should be addressed. I dont know if they have problems because I havent been level 60 for quite some time. Much the same as any raiding geared beastlord cannot comment on whether casually geared beaslords are deficient in dps compared to other classes with similar gear. I dont know why it is assumed that the same division of power that hurts raiding beastlords doesnt hurt a beastlord geared in full DoN gear versus another  melee class in full DoN gear. It seems to me that the don geared beastlord would not see the same jump in power with the fists of five blades and gold dragorn mace in comparison to a ranger/rogue/warrior with the best DoN weapons. If my logic is somehow flawed, show me how it is, but please dont just assume that only raiding beasltords need attention, it is just extremely irritating.

[Gungagunga]

Whoa Rhoam no need to get all excited.

The issues we face start more or less at the 65-66 range with poor spell upgrades, itemization, and aa's that require us to work harder than other classes yet dont help us nearly as much.  The worst part is SOE has been working on class balancing for how long now and they still have not determined as far as I know what our role is.  Every change that has been made towards our class has been nothing more than a broad sweep of the brush which hit other classes as well not specifically bst.

Until SOE actually defines our class we should all continue to overwhelm Tast with ideas on how to fix the problem.  I think we can trust him to seperate the good from the bad and continue to make suggestions to the devs.   :wink:

[sunkash]

To some degree I would have to agree with Rhoam. I've see it stated on this board more times than I care to think about that beastlord issues are only at the very high end. While that was maybe true up to and including GoD, it is no longer the case. That changed when levels went past 65, and remains true now. My charachter is a classic test case for this statment. I was one of the few that just didn't go along with the Max Level >> ALL, and leveled to 65, and went 100% aa, starting at about 60 AA to around 190'ish. At that time I was doing pretty decent DPS for the level, went to level 68 in about 1 week, same gear, and even with a parser could not see any increase in my DPS, so I went 100% AA again to around 225AA before going to 70. Also then from 68 ->> 70 no measurable increase in DPS, which means 65 --> 70 == zero DPS increase, and the same can't be said for any other class. On another thread while 65 I was complaining about the 65 slow just not landing in the new zones, and was told, it was due to my level, and when I got to 70, it would stick better... nothing could be farther from the truth, its exactly the same. The only improvements for me was increases from AA's and as we know it takes us a lot of aa to see even a small increase, due to the way, our DPS is broken up, the 68 pet from the 65 is barely was barely any increase in DPS, but was at least something, actually the only noticeable change.

Then of course Tast is correct there's litterally tons of ways to improve our DPS, some good, some not so good,; getting SOE to agree to improve our DPS, or even admit it needs to be improved, is really the root issue. however the really sad part is that it's at least apparent to me, and me thinks some others that SOE has no intention of increasing our DPS ever. In another thread someone's named many of the dev's,in reply to one of my posts, and pretty much said they "i.e the DEV's", don't believe we have any DPS "or other issues", worth addressing, which is just a sad state of affairs in my book. Several other classes have had quite a lot of attention paid to them in upgrades, and now after 1 and 1/2 years of patches seeing other classes getting upgrades, we're still here asking for very little, and getting absolutely nothing, patch after patch. Then I read, well we have so much less DPS that most other classes because we're a buffing class, then I just gotta say ":HELLO!" what buffs are you talking about!  Are the 66-70 spells someone knows about, that the rest of us don't? Several other classes can solo, so it can't be that. I've even seen Shaman solo stuff that would just tear me up, albeit not so effecieintly, but at least able to take on mobs I just can't touch. Now there's a buffing class!!, actually there's a buffing class SOE has listened to, improved them,, etc, not that they didn't deserve it, but SO DO WE!! The new slow, that was billed as class balancing, comparing ours with the new shaman and enchanter, just puts us farther behind, the curve.

We should be asking for a 25% discount on our monthly fee, as we're just playing a beastlord, that the dev's just have no time left to waste on our class. There are many people that are still under the incorrect assumption that beastlords, are doing way more DPS that we actually do, complain to SOE about it, and we're stuck with that misconception, and not much of anything is from what can be seen, going to happen to address our DPS issues, that really do exist for ALL beastlords above level 65, not just at the very high end.

[hakaaba]

Yeah and as casual gear continues to improve to the level raid gear was at at the ~time level and higher, the more casual players will continue to experience the problems that initially only plagued raid equipped bsts.

The basic problem is the fact that gear increases alot and our pets just dont.  Although the fact that we only gain a percentage of the benefit from a given upgrade multiplied by a ton of upgrades also hurts us alot.

Its an inherent flaw with the way bsts were designed that was fine at the time we were designed but has become exposed as gear has gotten better and it doesnt discriminate between raid/nonraid beasts.

That said, it doesnt do us any good to argue amongst ourselves :)

____________________________________________

About the original idea presented here, in my opinion that would involve a lot of work to implement and it would just be yet another blanket upgrade.  They would obviously have to implement 'raid character upgrades' for all classes and would most likely balance them the same way as they do items so most likely, so not only would it not help us beasts it would probably make it worse.  But im a pessimist.  Just pointing out the fact that blanket upgrades wont solve anything (look at the new slows)

[Oiingo]

There are two distinct camps involved in the DPS discussion on these forums and elsewhere: 1) ``End game'' or high level players that raid almost exclusively and 2) casual players or those that raid infrequently.

While it is certainly true that beastlords as a whole need improvement, reading these boards will clearly show that the raiding beastlords often parse and have tracked their progression with both equipment and AAs as they've followed the SOE-designed progression path.  I know the warrior that raids with me now was once struggling to hit 200 DPS in Time from behind the target while I was doing the same, but now he does 250 while tanking a flurry 1.5k hitting target while I'm at the backside only doing 275 with pet.

The same can not be said for the more casual playing amongst our community.  There needs to be more data to establish your place with the gear and AAs that you are able to obtain and in the places that you spend your time.  If you feel that the casual beastlords are lacking compared to other casual classes, then throw out some numbers and let's see if your argument will hold its ground.  This is the sort of information Tastian and others need if we wish to present anything to the development staff at SOE.

With the advent of augmentable gear and the vendor-sold supplies at the DoN and LDoN merchants, the casual players may indeed have a point and if so, it should definately be addressed in our DPS discussion, otherwise they may get left behind.

[Rhoam]

I apologise if my post seemed argumentative. I was more frustrated at the assumption that only raiding beastlords are affected by a lack of dps progression.  To me,  all beastlords at some point in the progression line are hampered by the fact that our spell line and pets dont scale properly. I mean, we have been told that we are a utility class that is supposed to have moderate dps. We sacrifice beastlord melee dps because our pets are supposed ot make up for our lack of true double attack and we dont get the same melee skills as say warriors and rangers and monks because we have pets and spell utility. The problem is that necro and mage pets were initially improved to be in line with our pets from a tanking standpoint a while back and then we have all received the same pet upgrades by focus but not by pet level in subsequent expansions.  Our spell line has received very little improvment in 4 years, aside from our pet heal which I still rarely use in regular experience groups. Our buffs are pretty much useless to most classes from a stat standpoint as even bazaar geared players have max stamina, max strength and max dexterity in more cases than not. Our spiritual vogor line is not even close to the pally line or ranger line in desirabilty and our focus buffs are only taken as a last resort.

Our nukes have not scaled up well, nor have our dots and the insertion of slow mitigation has trivialized the importance of our slow (when it lands) in most experience groups due to the lower hitpoints that most of the new mobs have and the increased Dps that OTHER classes hurn out now. If my slow doesnt land, the effects on healer mana are not nearly the same as they used to be in older game content.. The only useful thing we add to experience groups is the ability to offtank (less efficiently than most true tank classes and even rangers and monks) and our mana regen line which isnt as important as it once was given the abundance of FT augs in the game now.  So, as we stand now, beasltords bring subpar dps, average but somewhat trivialized slowing capabilities and trivialized mana regen to groups. We lost the ability to provide buffs that even average geared players would value and we are stuck with the compromise in melee dps that our supposedly uber pets and utility made up for so long ago. If some of our own members dont take the time to consider these problems across the broad spectrum of player experience (from raiding to casual geared players) then how can we expect SOE to acknowledge these issues for any of us?

I didnt mean to flame anyone, nor was I upset really, I was more frustrated that some of our own class members were making blind assumptions in stating that only raid content players faced the inadequacies that confront casual players like me much the same way they affect players in raid content. I see the same problems with using the new don weapons with other classes using the same gear as raiding beastlords see when they compare their dps increase from a raid content weapon to the dps increase experienced by other melee classes using the same or similar weapons. We all lose out on the fact that our pet dps doesnt scale properly and our spell dps doesnt scale properly. Lets hope we can present these issues to SOE from a unified perspective rather than from a raiding beaslord only perspective.

[Rhoam]

 I posted my response above ath the same time as Rizz apparently.  And so, again, for the same reasons raiding beastlords experience less dps gain from new items in comparison to other classes, so do casual beastlords experience less dps increase with new items compared to other classes with the same content gear. The division of our power between pet, player and spells affects all of us. It should not matter what the ratio on the weapon is, we all experience the penatly of lacking some of the melee skills that other classes possess. If there is some basis for saying that a casual beastlord would scale up on dps with 17/19 weapons equiped when compared to other melee classes with the same weapon, then explain that basis to me, I fail to see the logic in this. Due to our lack of certain melee skills, we all suffer as far as our melee dps scaling is concerned and given that our pets are basically the same but for certain focus items (which actually make the high end beast pet stronger to some degree) I think there is more than enough basis to state that casual and raiding beastlords both suffer from as far as dps is concerned.

[Tindos]

Wow, i didn't want to start a raiders vs nonraiders thing here. I was a nonraider this same time last year (unless you count open raids in which i won no gear at all, just flags. I understand that this would create problems for non-raid beastlords who don't feel as powerful as they used to be, but i was taking a purely raid perspective where there are usually multiple beastlords in the raid who do nothing but dps, due to the lack of utility and especially overlapping utility with other beastlords. I also took the idea most raiders have that beastlords drop off majorly in time+ content. Gear from non-raid content is almost up to elemental quality now, which is before time.

Now, one year ago, when i was a casual beastlord, i would argue that i also saw some minor dropoff in my comparative power. However, now that i raid, there dropoff is becoming much more visible as i am looking at time and ep god gear for my only upgrades needed. I am still barely in balance dps-wise, but in this part of the game, i can offer things such as offtanking, semi-useful perfection of spirit mgb's, and once in a while buffs if they havent been cast by another beastlord already. I might be off in my perception though, as there have been 5 levels added since then and very minor advancement was made through those levels. I would argue in part that other classes also received only minor upgrades in our major areas (like slows only getting resist mods), but that may not cover the whole spectrum.

I don't know what kind of people you are grouping with (non-raiders or raiders), but it seems that non-raiding players are getting to the point where they also are seeing this curve start to really effect them. I guess in that case, these power boosters (which would be tailored to class after having defined what each class should do, so that each class is capable of doing something the best in raids and feels useful due to what these upgrades would adjust) should possibly be added to the highest tier non-raid areas in ways that improve our power for operating within that content. It all depends on what SOE decides is our definition as a class and how they think is the best way to achieve that, but this could be a specialized way at looking at each class and putting them where they should be instead of hoping that upgrades through content and AAs should make up for that (AA upgrades can effect people of much lower lvl and content, anyways, in the way that they can now be purchased regardless of where that character is).

Again, i was not trying to say that non-raiding beastlords do not have any problems but that currently, the problems are more at the higher end (though drifting slowly towards casual players). Maybe next expansion, non-raid gear will be about ep god and time level, with the way they are currently moving. That would put everyone in the same boat. Sorry for my lack of understanding in that area and forgetting to look at the current game rather than where it was when i was at that level of playing not too long ago.

[Rhoam]

Again, the problems you have in melee dps scaling are NOT unique to high end raiders. I dont know why we have to go down this road again and again. If you get less incremental increase from weapon upgrades because you lack melee skills as a high end beastlord, then so do casual beastlords with the best don weapons in comparison to other melee classes using the best don weapons. The difference in incremental  melee dps increase assuming all the same stats, same aa would represent the same percentage in dps deficit for both the raiding and non raiding beastlord.  If we are going to talk about twinking melee dps with true double attack, then the solution should address all high end beastlords, not just raiding beastlords. Aside from weapon improvements and some augments (which may or may not actually work), the improvements to other classes are pretty much across the board, while our pets and spells have failed to scale and our melee dps has remained deficient (as it apparently was designed to be).  This is something that affects ALL of us,  and it isnt starting to affect non raiders, it IS affecting us.

[Bengali]

Again, the problems you have in melee dps scaling are NOT unique to high end raiders. I dont know why we have to go down this road again and again. If you get less incremental increase from weapon upgrades because you lack melee skills as a high end beastlord, then so do casual beastlords with the best don weapons in comparison to other melee classes using the best don weapons. The difference in incremental  melee dps increase assuming all the same stats, same aa would represent the same percentage in dps deficit for both the raiding and non raiding beastlord.

First, let me say that I agree 100% that we can't keep making assumptions about where people are in progression and how well we stack up in the game as a whole.  This includes not just raiders vs. non-raiders, but I think the whole "the problems start at 65" mantra needs to at least be confirmed with some actual data, because it may not even be true.

However, it's also not necessarily true that the dps deficit would be the same for raiders and non-raiders.  It very well may be, but it doesn't have to be.  Here are some numbers to illustrate (pulled from thin air, of course).  I'll use a comparison between a hypothetical beastlord and warrior:

pre-OoW/DoN weapons:

bst melee dps: 100
warder dps: 45
warrior melee dps: 145 (for purposes of this example, we'll say that the difference in melee due to having  "pure" double attack for warriors is 45%)

DEFICIT: 0%.  At this stage the two are equal.

Now let's suppose that OoW/DoN weapons come out that result in a 25% upgrade for non-raiders.  The numbers look like:

bst melee dps: 125
warder dps: 45
Warrior melee dps: 181.25

DEFICIT: 6.6%  The beastlord is slightly behind because of the way the weapons scaled.

Now let's move on to raid-level OoW/DoN weapons, which are a 100% upgrade.  The numbers become:

bst melee dps: 200
warder dps: 45
warrior melee dps: 290

DEFICIT: 18.4%.  The beastlord is even further behind.

That's an extremely oversimplified example (among other things, pet damage does go up some), but it shows how it's possible for the percentage deficit to hit raiders significantly harder than non-raiders.  Another thing is that pet damage does not suffer as much of a dropoff against higher level exp mobs as it does against raid mobs.  You can just about always use your pet in an exp group, and if you start fighing red-con exp mobs instead of blues your pet's damage won't go down the same way that a raiding pet's damage will go down against raid mobs (assuming you can even keep it alive).  That means on raid-comparison parses, beastlords look further behind the other melees than on exp parses (if we actually had any :))  Again, I'm not trying to say that the problem doesn't exist for non-raiders, or that it's not substantial.  In fact I suspect the problem affects more beastlords than any of us previously imagined.  All I'm doing is showing how it's mathematically possible for the problem to be felt more by raiders.

In reality it's not just gear that causes the problem, which is why it's not just raiders who are hurt.  If it was just itemization, then you could theoretically fix it with the "right" beastlord gear.  But then you have to have bst-specific items, which raises other problems, and then other classes flip out when they see a bst weapon with a 55/21 ratio or whatever. 

AAs are actually a significant part of the problem, and it's not just the AAs that we get but the ones that others get.  People don't focus on it, but warriors might very well have the best offensive AAs overall compared to other classes, and hardly anyone notices because many of them are hidden (flurry, increased chance to flurry, strikethrough).  And these are AAs that will "stack" with weapon upgrades.  A warrior with Cleave V and Veteran's Wrath is a total crit monster because of their innate crits, and this AA only gets better with the weapons they get.  Improved critical affliction doesn't do jack when you can't land a DoT on a mob in the first place and it doesn't help your brand new mace hit harder.  Moreover, a lot of our players trash strikethrough as a melee effect because we aren't usually tanking.  But for fun, go fight some raid mobs and see how often they dodge, block or parry your attacks.  Now imagine how much damage you'd do if they never did that, and you'll have a better idea of how a warrior feels when fighting (they can get reasonably close to 100% strikethrough when you combine AA with Time+ mods).