Wow has 10 classes with 3 talant trees each -> 30 specs
Rift has 4 calsses with 8(?) talant trees each -> 32 specs.
I dont see how it will be harder to balance then WoW.
Rift has 20 classes, 10 for each faction. you can have a total of 3 extra souls, and you can have 4 different builds per character.
Plus Rift is also listing 'Coming soon' under classes. That being said, I think the people whining about balancing are kind of silly, I mean its made it through closed beta phase 1; 99% of people haven't seen the guardian faction yet, 99% haven't done any pvp yet, and no one has made it to end game. Arguing about this or complaining how this isn't going to be balanced is useless at best. Most of the people who have had any experience playing the game are still under NDA and those who are breaking it are either fanboys or people who hate it (I like to call them people who play wow). So any info you get unless it's first hand is probably going to be heavily biased anyway.
I will say this, the complexity of this game will balance it. There are so many builds you could have, that having one 'uber' build wont matter because somebody will just push a button and bam they are tweaked to fight you. I also don't get the whole argument of balancing. I don't get why a priest needs to be able to fight 1 v 1 against a rogue, or a warrior needs to be able to fight a mage. The whole point of playing a mmo is to have a customized avatar that you connect with, if they are all cookie cutter then where is the customization? I mean if you are playing only for pvp and want completely balanced fights, then why not go play a fps?
Also another side note, I can't go into it, but i dont think the majority of people even know how the classes play. I was pretty shocked in beta how some classes behaved, Rift is definitly it's own MMO. And to all the people saying the soul thing is like WoW, you really need to play some older MMO's. Just because WoW has talent tree's doesn't mean that everything is based off it. EQ had Advancement tree's too, as well as a ton of other MMO's. Not everything is WoW, in fact my brief time playing Rift showed me just how bad the MMO scene really is, RIFT was a breath of fresh air. I am really looking forward to what they have in store.
There are 4 classes. Warrior, Mage, Priest and Rogue. What they call classes is called talant trees in other games.
Do you realise what is the diffrence between a class and a talant tree? You can change your talants but you cant change your class. Hense callings are talents not classes.
What they call classes is callsed talent trees in other games.
Not to be an ass, but they don't actually ANYTHING "classes". But yeah, otherwise my assumption based on previews of system's the same as yours, except there aren't 32 options, there are like hundreds of possible combinations since you can mix any 3 of the 8, whereas in other games you're stuck with whatever 3 "talent" or skill trees you're given
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall Currently Playing: ESO
What they call classes is callsed talent trees in other games.
Not to be an ass, but they don't actually ANYTHING "classes". But yeah, otherwise my assumption based on previews of system's the same as yours, except there aren't 32 options, there are like hundreds of possible combinations since you can mix any 3 of the 8, whereas in other games you're stuck with whatever 3 "talent" or skill trees you're given
There is more freedom, yes, but the current talants suggest that you are not supposed to mix talants randomly. Alot of souls have skills that dont stack with each other (f.e. assasin poisons and nightbalde(?) weapon enchants). So there will obviosly be "coockie cutter" builds that everyone will use. Essentialy balance will come down to balance of theese builds, and buffing underused souls.
There are 4 classes. Warrior, Mage, Priest and Rogue. What they call classes is called talant trees in other games.
Do you realise what is the diffrence between a class and a talant tree? You can change your talants but you cant change your class. Hense callings are talents not classes.
I don't know if I would agree with this at all, First of all you are able to pick which classes you want, you aren't hooked into a static three 'trees'. Thats like arguing that all mmo's only have 4 classes and you really only pick trees. I would agree with you if you picked warrior and then had three trees to pick from, but even without breaking the NDA, you can go to the website and look at all the classes. Yes the classes share an archtype, but all classes in every MMO share an archtype. The shaman and the inquistor are both 'clerics' but they have completely different skills and totally different play styles. In WoW (For lack of a better comparison) the talent trees dont change the class just empower certain skills you use and you adjust your tactics from there, but in Rift if you invest in Shaman, you won't have any inquistor skills and vice versa. Not only that if you roll a cleric there is a chance you won't even be able to use anything inquisitor wise unless you pick that class and pass up other classes. I would call this more along the lines of EQ 2 when it first came out and you had to get to a certain level and do certain quests before you could progress from an archtype class to a higher level class.
There are 4 classes. Warrior, Mage, Priest and Rogue. What they call classes is called talant trees in other games.
Do you realise what is the diffrence between a class and a talant tree? You can change your talants but you cant change your class. Hense callings are talents not classes.
I don't know if I would agree with this at all, First of all you are able to pick which classes you want, you aren't hooked into a static three 'trees'. Thats like arguing that all mmo's only have 4 classes and you really only pick trees. I would agree with you if you picked warrior and then had three trees to pick from, but even without breaking the NDA, you can go to the website and look at all the classes. Yes the classes share an archtype, but all classes in every MMO share an archtype. The shaman and the inquistor are both 'clerics' but they have completely different skills and totally different play styles. In WoW (For lack of a better comparison) the talent trees dont change the class just empower certain skills you use and you adjust your tactics from there, but in Rift if you invest in Shaman, you won't have any inquistor skills and vice versa. Not only that if you roll a cleric there is a chance you won't even be able to use anything inquisitor wise unless you pick that class and pass up other classes. I would call this more along the lines of EQ 2 when it first came out and you had to get to a certain level and do certain quests before you could progress from an archtype class to a higher level class.
Yes and no.
Sure, you have 8 trees instead of 3. The favt that you need to pick 3 trees is irrelevant, it whold propobly be detrimental to your build to invest in more then 3 trees anyway.
I have to somewhat dissagree that talant trees in WoW "Just empower skills". You actualy gain essential skill to your role deep in every talent tree, just like in Rift, making Fereal and Resto druids eqivalent to Shaman and Inqisitor clerics. Sure a Fereal can heal but he will be very bad at it. I will not be suprised if even the most dps oriented Cleric soul has a heal.
I have to dissagee again, because you missed the point I was trying to make. You can respec your souls just like talants in WoW. That means that essentialy you level up and equip 1 Charecter that can be Shaman today and Inquisitor tomorrow. Meaning that if Shamans are gimped by a patch you can just respec to Inquisitor and be fine. The point of the discussion is BALANCE, remember?
Okay, out of the 5 pages of this thread that I have read, there is not many people that I agree with on this subject.
While I do see where you're coming from, I think you're looking at it from a reversed angle from what the developers are. I do agree that balancing a game can be hard. However, there are extreme cases on both sides of the "customizationscale" where this doesn't really apply.
I guess you all agree that if you have one race, one class, with no customization whatsoever. You gain your skills through leveling and not by choice. It's clear that the only advantage you could possibly have would be actual player skills or a level advantage. For the sake of this discussion, let's say that two players, equal in level and gear, would encounter eachother on a battleground. This would be perfectly balanced. The only thing that separates the two players is their actual skill in the game. The same applies to group PvP. This scenario would be perfectly balanced.
Now the other extreme case on the customizationscale would be infinite amount of choices in customization. You could choose from endless amounts of skills and could mix it all together in anyway you'd like, with the sole limitation being the amount of skillpoints. While this is an impossible scenario, lets for the sake of this discussion use this, and i'll make my point brief at the end of this post. Now, if you could choose any skills you'd like for any class etc. there are unlimited possibilities there are also unlimited amount of counters for each possibility, hence it would be perfectly balanced.
Now we all know there wont be an unlimited amount of possibilities, but the more options you have, the more ways there'd be to counter each option as well.
All mmorpgs now that has any kind of PvP in it are attempting balance for group PvP (at least all of the ones I have played) and most of them are failed in the balance section. Why? Simply because there are too many options for it to be easy to balance, but too few for "the players to balance it out themselves"
While balancing something for group pvp certainly can be harder than balancing pvp for 1v1, that's not necessarily always true. Let's discuss 10v10 just to keep it simple. If each character has lets say 150 different options (different soulsets and different skills), then that group would have 150^10 different combinations of options. And the other group would have 150^10 different combinations of counters. The more options you have, the more counters there'll be.
While not all of these combination will be effective at all. Let's say that (like someone said earlier in this topic) 90% of them are useless, there'd still be 576650390625000000000 that were effective, and i'm pretty sure that would be enough to include something that would be better than what the opponent uses.
I'm pretty sure that this is what the developer meant when he said that "the players will balance it out themselves"
The options still only boil down to about 6 basic damage offence
Burst Damage
Damage Over Time
Roots
Slows
SMall Fast DPS
Big Slower DPS
Options for Defense will be about 6 basic defense
Blink away
Run away fast
Heal over time
Burst Heal
Heal with DPS
Group Heal
Sure there will be tactics thrown in to make it more interesting like damage coats and pet damage and mounts to ride away on, and stun, but the basic structure stays the same.
So in the end, even though you can build all these fancy ways you really only are focusing on doing 6 different kinds of damage or defending with 6 different ways of defense.
That being said the game becomes much easier to balance out. Especially considering the team play concept. I mean if you have a nuker that does burst damage you might kill someone but be out of energy and need to be protected or face death. If you are a stun locker with damage over time stuff then you need to watch out for the Heal with DPS and big slow dps.
All will balance out in the end. One character can't be super omni-character that destroys worlds....there just aren't enuff points to spread around.
Now that is strictly speaking character point distribution. They can still have an over the top insane character due to gears....and that would be a bit scary...run for the hills!!!
Alot of souls have skills that dont stack with each other (f.e. assasin poisons and nightbalde(?) weapon enchants).
Actually, they do work together. As for your cookie-cutter comment, I agree that there will be min/maxing in this game but that doesn't mean it's always the best way to spec either.
This game, so far, is looking like one that you can play how you want and are far more free in how you choose to play. There will likely be soul combinations that are very strong and others that are pretty useless for certain parts of the game, but at least having all of this freedom should feel nice for a change compared to many MMOs that give you 3 talent trees per class.
I played WAR for quite some time, and using that game as an example, in Rift I can make a Rogue that feels like a mix of a Witch Hunter and an Engineer if I want. I can make a Cleric that feels like a mix of an Archmage and a DPS Warrior Priest if I want too. WoW couldn't do that.
When u have a lot of customization options (many,many possible builds u could try),combined souls and stuff its great for the gameplay. Now i dont understand what are these horshit ppl complaining about balance. If u want by any means to build a good dps specc u have the tools to make it. If by any means u want to make a build that offers great survivalability for pvp u can experiment. U want cc build? u want mix of cc +dps? u want cc+survival? EVERYTHING ppl want to try they are free to do so. Now if some class combinations that doing similar jobs to yours work better only u have to do is pick some other talents maybe????
Seriously all these complains are meaningless about balance. When i play an rpg my goal isa to make a smart build that works well and do the things i have in mind and provides things,skills talents that suit my combat style. Rift and any game that gives many options for my characters customization is welcomed.
Now about balance in pvp, if there a justicar with x build that beats a paladin with x build,there will come a mage with x build that will beat the justicar,and a warrior with x build will beat the mage etc etc etc it will be impossible for the wow braindead kids to go at x riftjunkies arena site to see the best build..LOL..And all these complains about balance focus on this thing!
NO SIRS there is not going to be best build for pvp so u can go check in x site and copy paste!
U SIR are goin to have to use your brain to determine a good build xD xD and that thing is terryfying them xD xD
And tbh thats the best thing in a good mmorpg. Discover and speculate whats best for u. From theory to reality there is going to a long way of experiments so each player dtermines for himself if his build is strong and suits him for the things he wants to do.
As Morpheus said: There is a diference between knowing the path and following the path!
I think balance will likely be an issue, and there will undoubtably be FOTM builds based on the patch of the day, but I think giving the player options and customization is worth the cost.
I think most will agree that Rift is following the traditional mmorpg formula, so one of the few things it has going for it is the diverse classes. There is nothing more boring than having every warrior be a clone, and everyone grinding to get to the exact same place as everyone else within a class.
Quit worrying about complete balance. Let the players balance the specs themselves. Balance the 10 classes decently and then let the players experiment on builds. They will find the right combinations.
Souls and combos may balance out at level 50, we just don't know yet.
As it stands at level 20, you may as well grab as many clerics as you can, because everything else is sub par.
According to the Scott Hartsman interview at Riftjunkies, they'll be making souls available at lower levels and increasing points available for allocation. This may change everything.
Comments
There are 4 classes. Warrior, Mage, Priest and Rogue. What they call classes is called talant trees in other games.
Do you realise what is the diffrence between a class and a talant tree? You can change your talants but you cant change your class. Hense callings are talents not classes.
Not to be an ass, but they don't actually ANYTHING "classes". But yeah, otherwise my assumption based on previews of system's the same as yours, except there aren't 32 options, there are like hundreds of possible combinations since you can mix any 3 of the 8, whereas in other games you're stuck with whatever 3 "talent" or skill trees you're given
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
There is more freedom, yes, but the current talants suggest that you are not supposed to mix talants randomly. Alot of souls have skills that dont stack with each other (f.e. assasin poisons and nightbalde(?) weapon enchants). So there will obviosly be "coockie cutter" builds that everyone will use. Essentialy balance will come down to balance of theese builds, and buffing underused souls.
I don't know if I would agree with this at all, First of all you are able to pick which classes you want, you aren't hooked into a static three 'trees'. Thats like arguing that all mmo's only have 4 classes and you really only pick trees. I would agree with you if you picked warrior and then had three trees to pick from, but even without breaking the NDA, you can go to the website and look at all the classes. Yes the classes share an archtype, but all classes in every MMO share an archtype. The shaman and the inquistor are both 'clerics' but they have completely different skills and totally different play styles. In WoW (For lack of a better comparison) the talent trees dont change the class just empower certain skills you use and you adjust your tactics from there, but in Rift if you invest in Shaman, you won't have any inquistor skills and vice versa. Not only that if you roll a cleric there is a chance you won't even be able to use anything inquisitor wise unless you pick that class and pass up other classes. I would call this more along the lines of EQ 2 when it first came out and you had to get to a certain level and do certain quests before you could progress from an archtype class to a higher level class.
Yes and no.
Sure, you have 8 trees instead of 3. The favt that you need to pick 3 trees is irrelevant, it whold propobly be detrimental to your build to invest in more then 3 trees anyway.
I have to somewhat dissagree that talant trees in WoW "Just empower skills". You actualy gain essential skill to your role deep in every talent tree, just like in Rift, making Fereal and Resto druids eqivalent to Shaman and Inqisitor clerics. Sure a Fereal can heal but he will be very bad at it. I will not be suprised if even the most dps oriented Cleric soul has a heal.
I have to dissagee again, because you missed the point I was trying to make. You can respec your souls just like talants in WoW. That means that essentialy you level up and equip 1 Charecter that can be Shaman today and Inquisitor tomorrow. Meaning that if Shamans are gimped by a patch you can just respec to Inquisitor and be fine. The point of the discussion is BALANCE, remember?
Okay, out of the 5 pages of this thread that I have read, there is not many people that I agree with on this subject.
While I do see where you're coming from, I think you're looking at it from a reversed angle from what the developers are. I do agree that balancing a game can be hard. However, there are extreme cases on both sides of the "customizationscale" where this doesn't really apply.
I guess you all agree that if you have one race, one class, with no customization whatsoever. You gain your skills through leveling and not by choice. It's clear that the only advantage you could possibly have would be actual player skills or a level advantage. For the sake of this discussion, let's say that two players, equal in level and gear, would encounter eachother on a battleground. This would be perfectly balanced. The only thing that separates the two players is their actual skill in the game. The same applies to group PvP. This scenario would be perfectly balanced.
Now the other extreme case on the customizationscale would be infinite amount of choices in customization. You could choose from endless amounts of skills and could mix it all together in anyway you'd like, with the sole limitation being the amount of skillpoints. While this is an impossible scenario, lets for the sake of this discussion use this, and i'll make my point brief at the end of this post. Now, if you could choose any skills you'd like for any class etc. there are unlimited possibilities there are also unlimited amount of counters for each possibility, hence it would be perfectly balanced.
Now we all know there wont be an unlimited amount of possibilities, but the more options you have, the more ways there'd be to counter each option as well.
All mmorpgs now that has any kind of PvP in it are attempting balance for group PvP (at least all of the ones I have played) and most of them are failed in the balance section. Why? Simply because there are too many options for it to be easy to balance, but too few for "the players to balance it out themselves"
While balancing something for group pvp certainly can be harder than balancing pvp for 1v1, that's not necessarily always true. Let's discuss 10v10 just to keep it simple. If each character has lets say 150 different options (different soulsets and different skills), then that group would have 150^10 different combinations of options. And the other group would have 150^10 different combinations of counters. The more options you have, the more counters there'll be.
While not all of these combination will be effective at all. Let's say that (like someone said earlier in this topic) 90% of them are useless, there'd still be 576650390625000000000 that were effective, and i'm pretty sure that would be enough to include something that would be better than what the opponent uses.
I'm pretty sure that this is what the developer meant when he said that "the players will balance it out themselves"
The options still only boil down to about 6 basic damage offence
Burst Damage
Damage Over Time
Roots
Slows
SMall Fast DPS
Big Slower DPS
Options for Defense will be about 6 basic defense
Blink away
Run away fast
Heal over time
Burst Heal
Heal with DPS
Group Heal
Sure there will be tactics thrown in to make it more interesting like damage coats and pet damage and mounts to ride away on, and stun, but the basic structure stays the same.
So in the end, even though you can build all these fancy ways you really only are focusing on doing 6 different kinds of damage or defending with 6 different ways of defense.
That being said the game becomes much easier to balance out. Especially considering the team play concept. I mean if you have a nuker that does burst damage you might kill someone but be out of energy and need to be protected or face death. If you are a stun locker with damage over time stuff then you need to watch out for the Heal with DPS and big slow dps.
All will balance out in the end. One character can't be super omni-character that destroys worlds....there just aren't enuff points to spread around.
Now that is strictly speaking character point distribution. They can still have an over the top insane character due to gears....and that would be a bit scary...run for the hills!!!
The classes is good at different things.
Actually, they do work together. As for your cookie-cutter comment, I agree that there will be min/maxing in this game but that doesn't mean it's always the best way to spec either.
This game, so far, is looking like one that you can play how you want and are far more free in how you choose to play. There will likely be soul combinations that are very strong and others that are pretty useless for certain parts of the game, but at least having all of this freedom should feel nice for a change compared to many MMOs that give you 3 talent trees per class.
I played WAR for quite some time, and using that game as an example, in Rift I can make a Rogue that feels like a mix of a Witch Hunter and an Engineer if I want. I can make a Cleric that feels like a mix of an Archmage and a DPS Warrior Priest if I want too. WoW couldn't do that.
Balancing is very simple , when there is no balance , players have to learn to accept that or move on .
PvP balancing is easy , simply put every month another FOTM
But what happens when there are 100 FOTM then pvp players will cry , since there class is not meant to be killing all .
Thats there problem .
Will there be a combination thats able to beat all other FOTM .
In a complicated system like RIFT , no way in hell , since you cannot cover your but in all .
In a simple player system like WoW , yes you can easily calculate what you need to cover , thats incoming damage versus outgoing burst .
When you have complicated class mechancis , that breaks those simple logic .
You cannot have a easy FOTM class , since that easy FOTM class can be easily countered by another build .
Thats why i adore class or talent diversity , the more options the more likely you can find something thats out of the box .
Just its frustrating to hear from people your build is gimped , cause they only can think inside the box .
Often too late realise there cookie cutter build is flawed .
When u have a lot of customization options (many,many possible builds u could try),combined souls and stuff its great for the gameplay. Now i dont understand what are these horshit ppl complaining about balance. If u want by any means to build a good dps specc u have the tools to make it. If by any means u want to make a build that offers great survivalability for pvp u can experiment. U want cc build? u want mix of cc +dps? u want cc+survival? EVERYTHING ppl want to try they are free to do so. Now if some class combinations that doing similar jobs to yours work better only u have to do is pick some other talents maybe????
Seriously all these complains are meaningless about balance. When i play an rpg my goal isa to make a smart build that works well and do the things i have in mind and provides things,skills talents that suit my combat style. Rift and any game that gives many options for my characters customization is welcomed.
Now about balance in pvp, if there a justicar with x build that beats a paladin with x build,there will come a mage with x build that will beat the justicar,and a warrior with x build will beat the mage etc etc etc it will be impossible for the wow braindead kids to go at x riftjunkies arena site to see the best build..LOL..And all these complains about balance focus on this thing!
NO SIRS there is not going to be best build for pvp so u can go check in x site and copy paste!
U SIR are goin to have to use your brain to determine a good build xD xD and that thing is terryfying them xD xD
And tbh thats the best thing in a good mmorpg. Discover and speculate whats best for u. From theory to reality there is going to a long way of experiments so each player dtermines for himself if his build is strong and suits him for the things he wants to do.
As Morpheus said: There is a diference between knowing the path and following the path!
I think balance will likely be an issue, and there will undoubtably be FOTM builds based on the patch of the day, but I think giving the player options and customization is worth the cost.
I think most will agree that Rift is following the traditional mmorpg formula, so one of the few things it has going for it is the diverse classes. There is nothing more boring than having every warrior be a clone, and everyone grinding to get to the exact same place as everyone else within a class.
Quit worrying about complete balance. Let the players balance the specs themselves. Balance the 10 classes decently and then let the players experiment on builds. They will find the right combinations.
Souls and combos may balance out at level 50, we just don't know yet.
As it stands at level 20, you may as well grab as many clerics as you can, because everything else is sub par.
According to the Scott Hartsman interview at Riftjunkies, they'll be making souls available at lower levels and increasing points available for allocation. This may change everything.
wow, so instead of balancing their game they will leave in the OP and fail builds.
Good joke.
Collector's editions are scams.