(02-10-2014, 03:10 PM)LiadansWhisper Wrote: But Rift isn't really "balanced." One of the complaints I constantly hear, for instance, is about how unbalanced PvP is.
If there isn't balance in the game, then you're going to end up with raids that class stack. Â When that happens in WoW, for instance, it's a sign that a class is not balanced and nerfs normally follow. Â The difference between balancing for 8 classes vs 15 classes is massive.
Ah, sorry, I meant to say "well-balanced" with quotes around it. I know RIFT's balance is balls, and it doesn't really matter. Class stacking does happen, sure, it's even happening in XIV now even with how restrictive and samey our classes are.
Garuda EX is an absolute joke if you take a bard and four black mages. A boring slog through her massive HP pool if you don't. Titan EX is far easier with more melee than casters. The ADS in Turn 2 is easier with two bards. Class stacking happens; theorycrafters will always reduce everything down to one and there's no way to stop them short of using a zero-sum/incomparables system (which are really hard to design well and keep fun).
PvE doesn't really need to be balanced. You can use mechanics to stop class stacking; Turn 4 does it by having two enemy types that can only be damaged by either physical or magical damage dealers. This forces you to diversify your party. There are loads of other ways to design encounters to keep any one class from being preferred over the other... without nerfing the class directly and making your players feel slighted. It's still technically a nerf, but it's an invisible one. If you can, buff rather than nerf. Make the enemies stronger if the players feel too powerful. Raise the other classes up if one class sticks out as being stronger in all situations. Design encounters that forbid class stacking or at least make it harder to stack the flavor-of-the-month than to approach the encounter with a diverse party composition.
PvP is easy, just as Naunet mentioned: completely disjoin PvE and PvP. Do it one hundred percent. Any PvP nerfs, adjustments or changes to actions should only ever take effect when those actions are used against another player. Yoshida claimed that this is what his team would do with XIV, and it turns out they did not do this; several PvP-related changes affected PvE to a considerable degree--Rain of Death, Scathe, taking Thunder away from SMN and giving them the PvE-useless Blizzard II, the diminishing returns adjustment that was intended to make PvP stunlocking more difficult making encounters designed to be stunned using the old DR rules more annoying... I could go on.
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