How will you deal with class population imbalance?

ArchivedUser

People don't often play tanks or healers in most games I've experienced. The ones who do play those characters get massive perks in their queue times and are valued over general dps. How will you handle these imbalances when people will naturally want to be more of one thing and less of another?

ArchivedUser

I actually find nowadays that healers are over populated because so many recent games have no healer class, and us poor deprived healers flock to games that offer them ^^
As for tanks, I hope that the diversity of secondary augments will allow players to enjoy the various types of tanks that can be created to keep the population up.
In saying that - I hope everyone enjoys all the classes because you can make them suitable to your own play style ^^

ArchivedUser

I'm personally a bit more worried about same/same class vs hybrids. Especially in leiu of the fact encounters will be built around the 8 classes.

Traditionally hybrids are either too strong (being able to perform multiple roles equally well) or too weak (being able to perform no role as well as a pure class). Straddling that line will be very tricky but I hope they can pull it off else hybrid classes will be played only for the novelty and challenge.

ArchivedUser

I'll do what I typically do... solo.

ArchivedUser

Dygz said:

I'll do what I typically do... solo.

/waves a single taloned finger @Dygz

Bad Dygz......you come play with the rest of us dammit!

ArchivedUser

Also, as far as we have read there are not going to be "queue times" as you have traditionally seen them. If you are looking for a groupfinder where you put in your role and click a button, group is formed, and you are teleported to content I think you are going to be disappointed. Any groupfinder is most likely going to be a local search affair that links you with people near you. Remember there is going to be very limited fast travel. So if a dungeon is 4 nodes away from you, you are most likely going to have to ride over to it with all the inherent dangers that provides.

ArchivedUser

There should be different builds available for every class.

Lets overly simplify and put it like this:

TANK build 1 - Tanking
TANK build 2 - DPS

HEALER build 1 - Healing
HEALER build 2 - DPS

DPS build 1 - DPS
DPS build 2 - Utility / Support


So in this scenario every class could do DPS. Tanks could additionally tank, healers could additionally heal, and DPSers would additionally have some utility aspects.

ArchivedUser

I'll deal with it by using alts

ArchivedUser

I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue.

ArchivedUser

ArchivedUser

PlagueMonk said:

I'm personally a bit more worried about same/same class vs hybrids. Especially in leiu of the fact encounters will be built around the 8 classes.

Traditionally hybrids are either too strong (being able to perform multiple roles equally well) or too weak (being able to perform no role as well as a pure class). Straddling that line will be very tricky but I hope they can pull it off else hybrid classes will be played only for the novelty and challenge.

For the most part; I understand what you are getting across as many games have hybrids that pool from either 2-3 classes or their playstyle is such.

From my understanding something like the confirmed class, Paladin, is not a pool of tank and cleric abilities but tank abilities augmented by cleric abilities . A tank is still a tank, but its play style and utility is different depending on its secondary class. I don't think Tank - Cleric or Tank - Bard or Tank - X will be too different from each other, but enough to have a niche and something to bring to a group or party to set them apart.

ArchivedUser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqsybteR44Q&feature=youtu.be&t=19m15s

ArchivedUser

Alistair said:

PlagueMonk said:

I'm personally a bit more worried about same/same class vs hybrids. Especially in leiu of the fact encounters will be built around the 8 classes.

Traditionally hybrids are either too strong (being able to perform multiple roles equally well) or too weak (being able to perform no role as well as a pure class). Straddling that line will be very tricky but I hope they can pull it off else hybrid classes will be played only for the novelty and challenge.

For the most part; I understand what you are getting across as many games have hybrids that pool from either 2-3 classes or their playstyle is such.

From my understanding something like the confirmed class, Paladin, is not a pool of tank and cleric abilities but tank abilities augmented by cleric abilities . A tank is still a tank, but its play style and utility is different depending on its secondary class. I don't think Tank - Cleric or Tank - Bard or Tank - X will be too different from each other, but enough to have a niche and something to bring to a group or party to set them apart.

Yes I understand that.

What I am talking about however is a tank / tank being more "tanky" than say a tank/rogue. It would seem logical that augmenting your tank abilities with MORE tank instead of tank/x would make the pure class the best at their role and hence being more desired as a tank than a hybrid tank.

Also "augmenting" your main classes abilities is not quite as cut/dry as they have made it seem.  When they talked about x/cleric they mentioned this would give that combo self healing but not the ability to heal others apparently. Not sure that self healing directly augments the Paladin's current skills themselves but more augments the primary class with a new skill. So there is some gray in there.

ArchivedUser

All of this is pure speculation until they actually let us in to play with what they have come up with. The youtube link I posted above is from ages ago and much may have changed. @Rabbit_Games spent some time and effort to write a compilation post over in system and mechanics that explains what is known so far. I choose to understand it as you will always have your Archetype abilities and will modify them with your class(secondary). So your Tank/Tank will have a subset of abilities gleaned from the tank line to modify. So Tank has a taunt...he can choose to modify it to make it a taunt/taunt to make it more effective. Your Mage/Mage might be able to modify the fireball to make it do more damage or possibly limited aoe. Until we actually know what and how many sub modifiers from class there are that affect which abilities it is all just people theorycrafting without any actual data.

ArchivedUser

PlagueMonk said:

Dygz said:

I'll do what I typically do... solo.

/waves a single taloned finger @Dygz

Bad Dygz......you come play with the rest of us dammit!

I'll play with you. I just won't group with you.

ArchivedUser

I'm hoping to be a mixture between dps and utility. 

ArchivedUser

How will I deal with class population imbalance?

The same way I deal with life...


  

ArchivedUser

I mean its a game that they have stated they would do patches regularly. Meaning if they see a huge population balance they might increase dmg or utility of a certain class for ex. Bard/Summoner so people who are flavor of the month players chase that class. Or by doing so give more exposure to that class for people to try out.

I can only speculate that this might be a possibility in increasing the population of a particular class. But keep in mind this has been a challenge in every MMO the Tanks/healers and Utility are high priority for getting into good raid guilds while the dime a dozen DPS have to prove that they are better than one another. So it will be interesting on how they will "patch" classes.

But if your fear of being a unique class is troublesome you are more likely to be an asset because of future buffs to your class, or rarity that guilds would compete over. This is why guild leaders like myself, look out for utility, tanks, healers, and Crafters because I know they are valuable assets and I try to make sure they are happy with the guild.

ArchivedUser

The best way to get groups is to make friends. I play a healer, so usually I don't have a major issue, but for DPS, make fiends.

The biggest issues I have seen in other MMOs have been when a patch invalidates a class. For example, fighter and rogue are probably melee DPS. If a patch cripples a rouge under certain circumstance, you may be out of luck until a new patch.

The above happened to me in vanilla Rift. I started playing a mage healer. One patch mages were made OP, the next they were nerfed, not only was it no longer possible to main heal, but DPS was so low that no one would group with a mage. Most of my guildies had to re-roll.