Possible Balance Solution?

[Tastian]

There are a lot of mix and match things that go into "balance" too and that's part of the problem.  Because of how our damage is divided up and how vast the game is there are just too many combinations of beastlords at the various stages.  Back when beastlords were only 60 and doing vex thal you had one thing, then you had 60 or 65 beastlords in VT and various AAs, now you've got 70 and maybe you have a 70th level beastlord with his 70th level pet in plane of water.  At this point the "pet" is technically ahead of the content, but weapons/gear assuming everyone else was even wouldn't be.  Kinda like how spells with a new expansion for a caster can skew things a lot.

If people actually wanted to run some numbers and do some tests it'd be great to see, but the truth is there are just so many situations and different things that could be parsed it'd be almost impossible to really cover most things.  Also, since sony still hasn't come back and said where they see us we wouldn't even really know what to make of the data if we had it.  I do think some passive changes are reasonable at this point that would effect everyone and definitely some itemization issues that just jump out at most people.  *shrugs*

[hakaaba]

Actually im not entirely sure people would flip out at higher ratio beastlord weapons.  For example pally/sk already have considerably higher ratio 1hs weapons.  And im almost entirely sure the (non-bst) people i know would see it as an entirely needed upgrade to bst weapons more than an indirect 'nerf' to themselves

[Bengali]

Part of the problem I see is that people are used to seeing mnk/bst, and since they couldn't give monks an insane ratio 1h on the level we're proposing they would feel left out.  Consider the epic 1.5.  The initial version had a better ratio than the current one (and a better ratio than what monks had, or so they thought), and monks raised a huge fuss over it.  The fact that we've been linked with monks for so long w/o really having similar offensive abilities is going to hamper us, and it would not be wise to underestimate the monkly capacity for flipping out over other people getting stuff.

If the devs really thought about it, mnk/bst would be more rare, and bst/brd would exist in the same vein as pal/sk, because bards are in the same boat as we are when it comes to melee abilities.  But that's about as likely as Bill Clinton inviting Ken Starr over to his house for a BBQ.

[Tastian]

I'm certain some would flip out.  This is EQ and people always flip out.  Whether they are right or wrong, justified or not, etc. 

Brd/bst makes far more sense, but just never happend.  There are quite a more bst only weapons these days, but some of them like the 2hb from MPG just don't cut it.  There is actually a break point in weapon creatation that allows for monks/bst to be on the same weapon and both gain the proper dps boosts from it, however it invovles tweaking proc rates and damage and most monks would flip if they saw a weapon with a much worse ratio and miss how good the proc dps was. 

Most people understood that knights didn't get DW, but fail to grasp that we(brd/bst) don't get true double attack hehe.  I still can't get over watching the monks complain about MH their 1.5 and complaining about the bst 1.5 that I threw OH immediatly because of the ratio on ours.