Rohan Balance Patch

[shannon11]

THIS IS NOT THE REAL BALANCE PATCH, THIS PATCH IS COMPILED BY ME AS ADVICE FOR THE GMS

ROHAN Class balancing

For Albreiker:

You told me to deliver a high quality post/advice, after which you’d assess if it’s worthy to give out a reward for the effort. So this is my reply to you.
I do have 2 terms if you wish for me to continue this work:

1. I demand a feedback loop from your team, in which you tell me/everyone what’s discussed and what decisions were made and why. I want to see this posted on the forums so everyone can read what’s going on and can formulate an opinion about it.
2. I’ve put a lot of hours in gathering the information for this post, not to mention almost writing/copying 10k words for the complete balance of all classes. If you want reports like this more often, I want a monthly fee payed in RPs to compensate for the work done.

Prefase:
This balance post will be based on the balance patch from Korea. I have however made many small or big adjustments to make it a better fit for our server.
This balance patch focuses ONLY on balancing things and is thus only part of phase 1. For a complete make-over of skills/buffs see phase 1 & 2

Phase 1: Balance patch for all classes, adjusting current buffs and skills accordingly for PVP & PVE. Some major changes
Phase 2: Revamp skills (Think about premium shot and such) from classes that are currently not used/useless, fine-tune phase 1 results (minor changes).

Overall Balance
Balancing classes is one of the hardest things to do in any MMORPG. Especially if the game is older, 5+ years the balancing is usually done by people who didn’t develop the game but joined in later. They do not have the core knowledge to balance every class and take in all the parameters that are directly paired with the change in skills/buffs.

To balance ROHAN one has to take in account all the items that are in the game, all the different classes strong & weak points, the general ‘’vision’’ the game creators have/had and the difference between veteran and new players. Especially the ‘’items’’ section is complicated because future patches might add items which will unbalance a class that is currently balanced. Another major problem is the difference between PVP and PVE. A change can be really good for PVP but not work at all in PVE, or be quite balanced in PVE but totally overpowered in PVP.

To get a good ‘’balance’’ between all these things, it’s not just required to change skills and buffs. Changing skills & buffs is the most important step, but with it, some itemization will also have to be changed in order to make up for the differences in PVP & PVE as well as the difference in players (veterans vs. new players).

Balance Focus
The general focus of this suggested balance patch will be on PVP & PVE while keeping the strong & weak points of every class in account as well as to minimize the difference between new and veteran players (by some itemization changes).

*Remark*
I’m not responsible for misinterpretation of players/staff, I’m also not responsible for the release of others items or changes that might have a negative effect on my suggestions. Everything I say is based on the current status of the game with my main vison that every class should be able to participate and excel in either PVP or PVE (or both for some) at endgame lvl with endgame gear.

General Philosophy
As most veteran players know, there were some drastic changes in classes their skills/buffs for the past few years.

The most important change was that you couldn’t give buffs away anymore (except for the m.kill buff from dekans and the mana regen buff from white mage, which are probably bugged or forgotten). Either way, the general vision from the Korean devs is to make PVP and PVE more group oriented, meaning players have to work together in partys to defeat their opponents. The updates for the mirror dungeons are done for similar reasons (strong monsters and larger groups require you to party up). I support this philosophy and you will see some of that back in my post.

Another very important change is the cooldown reduction on lots of skills/buffs but with it also the duration of the buff is cut back. This makes a person able to cast it more often and thus use a certain combo more often but for a shorter time. This should improve PVP experience since fights often last no more than 20-30 seconds. Having shorter cooldowns makes people able to have more fights in a shorter timeframe, with longer cooldowns people have to wait for their cooldowns to be back up.