I mean, how long do you think it would realistically take to go back and update the base spell damage values, it's what, maybe 100 spells per expansion if we account for rk1 rk2 rk 3 etc? an afternoon? Seems like time isn't the bottleneck here, so I say at least TDS, that's around where the level 100 heroic kicks in right?
When you account for testing to make sure that they didn't break balance the time starts adding up quickly. It isn't just a matter of changing a few numbers and calling it good and when you have to do it for every spell the time for the changes alone add up.
I don't know what needs to change exactly. I'm just wondering when people think the problem starts and how bad the problem is during certain time periods. The past few years are the worst for sure but maybe it's not too bad during RoF while being somewhere in the middle during EoK. But that's just my guess.
They may not be able to go back, but it's important fixes aren't buried under 100s or 1,000s of AAs. The spell/ability specifc nothing at all until near max rank focus abilities are problematic as is.
Obviously the dev team is lacking a good spell management system that does show spell damage and spell efficiency for a better comparability between the classes. The spells would then have to be compared to the DPS of the melee classes which is very variable dependant on the used weapons. The AA system and other factors like heroic stats and item bonuses do make balance even more complicated. The sheer amount of factors does make it impossbile to balance the classes anywhere close to accuracy. My suggestion would be to use MS Excel spreadsheets for that. Completely revamped class balance won't be possible without such helpers.
Ideally? As far back as the problem exists, which they have the data for - I assume they keep the raid reports. Practically? Probably 100, the current heroic cut off. As that's where you'd expect a lot of players who decide to roll new characters will now start.
I'm pretty sure they're relying on player feedback. Ideally, we'd have some good players who've played during those expansions recently. There's been too many changes since I've played them. A lot of the AA consolidations after all did get applied backwards. Merging all the familiars, the fury lines and changing the re-use times. Combining and increasing mancy procs. Combining our spires into one. Preventing vortex from working on weapon procs. Adding mana costs to AA nukes. Merging Prolonged/Sustained into Frenzied. The rain crit chance cap. Changing how procs work entirely. Removing a lot of stacking issues we used to deal with between FE/IoG/spires, etc. There's a ton of differences between CoTF/TDS at release vs now when you think about it. I could estimate things for Wizards but I also don't have any idea how other classes compare now. I suppose I could play on TLP to get a better idea... Soloing is still fun in that time frame so leveling wouldn't be a problem...
Level 85 heroic is still available and there are progression servers. But I think that the class balance is ok until CotF for most classes. NEC and SHD are definetly OPed much earlier, maybe since HoT or even before.
spells that increase the target's direct damage from spellcasts. I think wizards should also get resist spells / wards. circles of protection from fire / cold etc.
i dont think wizzys needs a buff that whould mean the guild lose more dps when we ask them for lev. pretty sure wizzys(also known as lev,invis and port npcs) are fine as is :Thumps Up:
One thing other games have is quantification of class popularity that can answer this. The below image is from Guild Wars 2 https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity and shows class popularity through major patches. There are other ways to quantify this, of course. https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks shows DPS benchmarks in controlled, though arguably contrived, circumstances. Other "meta" rankings exist too, but the DPS benchmarks and class popularity are nicely measurable. I mained an elementalist (bright red in the image) and seeing it diminish from being a popular (but generally not OP) class to the least played class, for good reason, is depressing. In the last expansion I played the most popular class (engineer/mechanist, brown in the image) and was beyond bored with how easy it was to faceroll everything. If it's consolation to anyone, class balance issues aren't unique to life-support games like EQ where the spell incrementor (would be hard to call anyone a spell designer in EQ) spends more time looking for dumb words in a thesaurus than looking at class balance. One person gets two months to fix broken spell scripts, come up with names, fix bugs in the spell scripts and then release an expansion before getting moved off to a different game and disappearing in the EQ space until two months before the next expansion. ArenaNet (who make GW2) has a massive budget and still has screwed up balance for a decade now. I'd like to say that the creation of a shared pool of DPS benchmarks would help with balance, but class balance in EQ is so egregious I doubt it'd matter. Right now the "meta" of EQ is to switch mains to the current flavor of the month, because that flavor might last a decade.
It sounds like they don't actually have reliable simulation tools. There is a TLP server on Rain of Fear and a TLP server on TDS currently. So the data does exist, assuming they're logging it. The more interesting problem is how you extend testing to expansions beyond that, since TLP servers aren't on those expansions yet and Live has been off them for a while. I don't think going off of memory will work. Parsing with in-expansion beta characters is probably the best way to do it now, if they have nothing else. But yeah, I'm surprised they don't have simulation tools for this.
The issue with memory is that it doesn't control for all the changes that happened later. For instance, shadow knights were definitely over powered back then but a large aspect of that was because of swarming. Which was changed a few years ago so they no longer get life back from everything that's hitting them. So I wouldn't expect a shadow knight in the same expansion to be as over powered today. Going off of memory, I also don't remember necromancers being over powered until the damage over time consolidation. Yeah, there was a period of time when they could abuse their skeleton swarm being on different cool down to take down monsters they shouldn't be able to. But damage wise, before the damage over time consolidation, they were extremely limited by the lack of slots and couldn't really compete. I do remember wizards being fairly competitive back then, although berserkers were almost always considered better. If we use berserkers as a comparison base, that could be an easy target to use for where wizards should be.
There are already spell lines for that but they are very outdated. At lvl 70 and above Wizards do receive nearly only damage, shield, rune and port spells and most buff support spell lines have been abandoned. It would be a good start to reactivate those lines and making wizards more versatile and usefull for groups. They should be able to cast a short duration advanced invisibility (like SoS) onto a group and being able to debuff AC (melt/freeze) and fire/cold resistances. Dunno if they got something like that already from AAs. O'Keil's Radiation = DS/fire resist buff Elemental Shield = fire/cold resist buff Wizards have much more to offer. Here just a few spells; auras and AAs not included: Stun spells Snare spells Root spells Gate, Portal and Translocate spells Evacuate spells Eye of Zomm DD and AoE DD spells Shielding AC HP buff Shieldskin rune buff O'Keils Radiation DS/fire resist buff Elemental Shield cold/fire resist buff Invisibility and See Invisibility buffs Levitate buff Cancel Magic debuff
EQ stacking and ADPS is outrageously complex. I'm sure it's extremely difficult. The hard nerfs route isn't the way to go though. I'm not saying that's the plan; it's just happened way too often.
