Eliminate T1/T2 DPS - Just have DPS

What is "your" reason for thinking summoner/rogue should not be t1? I ask because if you think summoners in particular have as much utility or the versatility of a predator - specifically BL....please explain. Don't give me the baloney about having a tank pet because congy's don't raid with their tank pets.....I think what a toon can do solo should not be how they are defined in a raid.

The reason why there is a differe

1. Sin/Ranger/Wiz/Lock/Necro/Cong/BL are all designed to be glass canons, they are the most selfish classes and for a reason, what they lack in utility they show in raw numbers
2. Rogues were t2 dps because they had moderate damage that also included tons of debuffs
3. Bards/Chanters Small damage with extreme amounts of debuffs, buffs, and control effects to help stabilize a group and produce a higher result overall
4. Guards/Paladins were made to be complete aggro monster meat sheilds with higher mit and block and stronger taunts but less dps
5. Zerker/Sk dps tanks lower mit/block and taunts with a lot higher amounts of dps
6. Bruiser/Monk designed to be off tanks, which is why they were first granted temp abilities to stop all damage intake for a short duration, because in that duration that were originally suppose to sustain a mob until it got back to main tank
7. Templars/Warden/Mystics, original job was to be the idea of the strongest healers without good dps and less debuffs they were first put in as pretty much great healers
8. Fury/Chann were designed to to moderate heals while able to do pretty decent dps
9. Inq/Defiler was not as strong as the above on heals but offered a lot of debuffs mixed with their heals and inq if played right always had decent dps

Your first bulletin was spot on. Then the rest well, GJ on first bulletin.

I just don't see how we've gotten so damn far from original class roles. When did we even ACTUALLY develop the term T1/T2 DPS, because those sure as hell didn't exist in 2008 when CC, Buffs, and Debuffs were perfectly viable explanations for why there was still a Swash, Dirge, or Coercer in your group instead of simply loading up three wizards for DPS with a Templar healer and Guardian tank to ensure maximum killage and healing.

There are a couple in KA that are decent DPS, but there are some zones that you can't charm at all. I would just love some consistency on how they handle the coercer, and I hate relying on Mimic for all my dps other than ascensions. I hate that taking away my autoattack basically did away with how a coercer was played. I don't mind pushing buttons, but our spells are mostly weak because we were suppose to be a melee caster, but coercers got hit harder than most with the change. But buying ascensions are the only way to get back up to good dps

The original tiers were stated by the original Devs way way back. Classes have changed and morphed a lot over the years though and much seems to have been abandoned. I believe in the original design intentions, both utility and strength at solo were factors in who had the highest dps. Therefore, rogues were T2 because of debuffs/util and summoners were T2 because of their ability to solo well with their pets. I do think that the relative ability to solo well has mostly been factored out of dps tiers now since it is not something that helps with raiding or even grouping. Bards and chanters have always been considered support classes which is why they have been placed at T3. One reason I think that Errorrr makes a good point is that "utility" seems to be more difficult for the team to manage and keep up to date over time where as dps is easily measured and straight forward to parse and compare.

I would love to be wrong about this but am guessing that the upcoming server chats will not really get us any more elaboration on the following from Kandor:

Class Balance Updates

In the upcoming expansion, we’ll be doing a major revamp of class balance focusing on bringing each class back into line with their intended roles. Specific areas of focus will be tier 1 DPS classes that are not performing as well as desired, and more support buffs and debuffs for several healer classes and expanded support for enchanters and bards.

It would be nice to know precisely how the current devs are defining T1 since I really hadn't seen a red name use that term in years.

Edit to Add: Regardless of what we learn in the server chat, if I were a betting man I'd lay down some $$ on the wager that sorcerors will be strong next expac since they seem to overtune when they make fixes just like they frequently overnerf when that is needed.

I found this kind of fun blast from the past. This was posted back in 2006 regarding the post calling out the DPS tiers, by a dev. Of course, nowadays ascension spells are a large way to do dps, especially in the heroic spectrum of play.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/dev-view-of-the-dps-tier-tree.184550/

I said as much on a panel at FanFaire. While meant to be generally helpful, that post ended up being unintentionally misleading and has been used as evidence in all kinds of arguments when it absolutely shouldn't be.

Why? Because there are simply far too many variables when it comes to DPS to ever produce an accurate list that would be applicable all the time. Consider just some of the factors that can and do have a major influence on the DPS a character can do:

• Level
• Spell/art quality
• Gear
• Which other classes you're grouped with
• Type of mob you're fighting
• Level of mob you're fighting
• Tier of mob you're fighting
• Player skill
• Player attentiveness
• Whether or not spells/arts have refreshed
• When you receive a major spell/art upgrade as opposed to another class
• Random luck

As we have said before, we have server logs every day on the actual DPS that players do. It breaks it down for us into charts by class, level, and group size. Some of you are probably working under the assumption that classes maintain their relative position most of the time, believing that necros might go down a notch or two at some levels while another class goes up, but overall staying much the same.
That is a completely incorrect assumption. There can be major swings by the same class from level to level and from soloing to a full group. That's not an indication that anything is wrong; rather, it shows how much everyone around you can affect the DPS you do.
We didn't set out to fit classes into DPS tiers based only on solo play or only on group play or only on raid play. The tiers I listed were meant to give a general, overall, gamewide kind of overview of how the classes compared. Instead, some people parse how they did in very specific situations and use my post as proof that something is wrong.
It doesn't work that way. Because if you had been grouped with characters A, B, and C instead of X and Y, your results could have been quite different.
It is natural for people to try to eliminate as many variables as possible to accumulate data, and thus many people post solo parses as proof of one thing or another. But I never claimed that my original post was about how well each class could solo, just as it wasn't about how well each one does in a group. It was meant to illustrate in general how classes compare in potential DPS across the course of the game so that people could use that information as part (and only part) of their character development process.
I'd take the post back if I could, if only because it presents a very, very general picture when what many of the people on this board want is specifics. Sorry, but we don't plan on releasing the amount of data that would be required for everyone to be able to prove their point in every possible situation.
EverQuest II isn't a spreadsheet; it is a game played by a wide variety of individuals who play in a myriad of different ways. To say "class X will always be thus" would be far, far too limiting and would vainly try to remove the most important variable of all: the players themselves.
”

No saying how they should be just saying how they ranked back in time than world was young and EQ2 was in its vanilla age

Good Find Char. I would have guessed the original was from Moorguard or Blackguard but was too lazy to look. After your post, I did do some searching. I can't find the original post referred to in your find but did find what I believe is a copy/past of Moorguards original response (which he walked back or clarified in the thread you linked.)

Sassee: Part of the changes coming to spells and combat arts is to adjust how much damage the various classes do in relation to each other. Can you tell us how the different subclasses will rank in relative damage potential? Steve "Moorgard" Danuser: Without giving the precise DPS numbers we intend each class to have, I can list how the classes will relate to one another in damage output. There are basically five groupings that classes fall into, from highest amount of damage output to the lowest.

First group:

• Wizard/Warlock
• Assassin/Ranger

Second group:

• Conjurer/Necromancer (using damage pet)
• Brigand/Swashbuckler

Third group:

• Coercer/Illusionist, Conjurer/Necromancer (using tank pet)
• Troubador/Dirge
• Bruiser/Monk

Fourth group:

• Berserker/Shadowknight
• Paladin/Guardian

Fifth group:

• Fury/Warden
• Defiler/Mystic
• Inquisitor/Templar

I mooched that copy/paste from https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/regarding-moorgards-dps-tiers.175413/

I like how you referred to this as a blast from the past too. It's all kind of academic at this point.

Those were the roles the classes were made for when this game launched, and even when bl and chan were added.
Name one that wasn't right lol

Do you realize how much DPS we lose when switching stances? It's substantial. We also don't get any of the great heal utility spells that real healers bring - it's one ward (with near 100% bleedthrough in KA in my experience) and some HoTs.

There isn't really a situation where you'd be doing that mid-combat on a raid anyway... if the fight is difficult enough where you need the BL to be an auxiliary healer, they are going into the encounter in Spiritual stance to start. You're usually better off bringing in a real healer into that spot for that fight if it's a heal-check encounter.

People like to tout Spiritual BLs but with the wards being mostly useless in current content (high bleedthrough on harder raid mobs, plus our main ward being broken for years and not scaling) you're really sacrificing a ton to go into that stance with little benefit.

Can I easily solo most pre-KA raid content with Spiritual? Yeah. Great. So what?

Bleedthrough is the same for all wards (based on the mob) it doesn't vary by ward or class. And, before you claim your ward is 'useless' try keeping a group alive on a druid, lacking that group ward you're calling 'useless'...

I feel the only tiers of dps should be Dps, utility/ tank or healer classes in offensive stance, tanks, healers, with tanks having high threat generation in order to keep threat. This is how the game felt up until ascension, and on longer fights, it is how it still feels for the most part.

The reason there should NOT be a separation of the top tier of dps into sub categories is as simple as low server populations. Try getting a pug group for an expert dungeon right now. Tell me how long it takes you to form that group and who shows up. especially if you are starting out as an unknown dps player. Joeshmoe necro LF expert group. Then tell me who actually performed well at their job or whether you were carried by a small number of people. In my experience for pretty much the majority of this expansion, pug groups take forever to form and it is a total crapshoot in terms of what you get. Sometimes you get that person with 30kpotency who is then backed up by people like me with 25k and things go quickly. Sometimes you have the person with 25k potency at the top and it gets done but a little more slowly. And many times you sit there waiting for people to fill the group. And god forbid if the class you need is a tank or a healer.

So, to then make certain dps classes less effective than others by design (and not by them just being neglected like what we have now for some people--for example my raidforce currently has no sorcerers because there are so few people playing them anymore) it is a bad idea. The balance they are referring to for the next expansion should do nothing other than put all dps classes in line with each other. That means summoner, sorc, BL, predator, and rogue are t1. With the caveat here that you understand that a swash would beat a brigand zone wide, but a brigand would beat a swash single target, as one example of diversity that doesn't diminish their primary role. Swash should still beat ANY other tier on single target, however, which still means they are t1 dps, just situationally king of the t1 and situationally 'good' t1.

Then, Chanter and troub with offensive tanks in offensive stance trying to play a dps role and perhaps very well played offensive healers are t2 and then tanks would have an advantage over healers in t3. If you want to make 4 tiers, then tanks would be t3 and healers t4.

The point is, when you pick your role to start the game, that role should be clear and rewarding if played well. And when we start getting into breaking the DPS classes down into different tiers of dps, well you set yourself up to feel aggravated that you picked the 'wrong' class. We have that right now with how the sorcs and potentially rogues are being treated, and how many of them feel, and it just shouldn't be the case at all.

Because we want to keep people active in this game, we need to keep it simple in terms of your core role. Dps, support, tank, healing. Give the support better debuffs and something more interesting to do to help the tanks, dps, and healers. Give the tanks better taunts and ways to keep themselves alive when the fit hits the shan. Give all healers a more balanced dynamic so that a few don't greatly outshine the others. And allow anyone who picked a dps class to shine at their role with similar results to any other dps class as long as gear and skill are similar with some situational diversity but never a drop from t1 compared to other tiers.

There just aren't enough players right now to start getting even more picky about who to bring for a group or raid. So if you look for dps to fill your raid, you know that a conj, necro, wizard, warlock, ranger, assassin, bl, brigand, and swash will suit your needs as well as the others while bringing their own bag of tricks to the table. They may not be exactly the same, but they will all be a substantially better option than a support class or tank/healer trying to dps in that same spot. And they all have the ability to outperform the other classes or match them depending on the situation.

Final note. ACT has done so much to help us perfect our classes. But it also does a TON to skew these dps numbers and tiers. Combined with the fact that most bosses are single target encounters, the game and our reliance on ACT has put us in a position to devalue some of the tools that certain classes bring to the table. For example, a similar geared swash or wizard always hangs with me or beats me on aoe fights or trash pulls. It is only during the single target boss fights that I pull way ahead of them--as long as the fight is long enough to not solely be an ascension race. So zone wide, those more aoe friendly classes are still the most effective at their job over the other classes. But where do people post parses? Mostly the boss fights. So perhaps, along with all of this class balance, some of which is still in desperate need of a fix, we also need to re-evaluate how we judge a t1 dps and how well they did their job. Of course it also doesn't help that so much of the dungeon is spent fighting the boss and learning the boss strategies to the point where the trash doesn't matter. Anyway, point here is it's not just the classes that are borked for balance but the mechanics of the game itself favoring certain class mechanics over others.

Mystics are t1 dps buffers.

Therefore I'm t1 dps

Therefore, I get Tetris 2k+ potency wrist because I'm t1.

End of discussion.

except the original breakdown was due to the fact that Brigs and Swashies bring a huge amount of debuffs/buffs, and in return for that, they lose out on DPS. the summoner 'lost out' on DPS because of the survivability they had with their tanking pets, bards and chanters lost out on dps even more so because of the HUGE amount of buffs/crowd control/debuffs they got. that was the trade off. the less utility/survivability you had, the more damage you dealt.

I don't like the idea of making every single scout just a slightly different looking Assassin, and every mage just a slightly different looking Wizard, and then throwing all the buffing and debuffing onto the bards and chanters. why should I be a brig, when all I really am is just an assassin with a chance to get a hamburglar hat or a different looking epic.

So no I don't like the idea of 'lets just make everyone equal DPS'. variety is the spice of life, and that variety as to be meaningful. I mean if you want all the dps classes to be in essence equal, why not just eliminate all of the them and replace with Damageman class.

you shouldn't consider it a 'wrong' class. if you in it JUST for the dps, then the Wiz/Lock/Assa/Ranger should be your choice. if you want to have good damage but also be a debuffer for the flavor of it, then Swash/Rogue. if you don't care about DPS and want to be support, there should be Chanter/Bard. if you want to be able to hop between Ultity and DPS depending on your group makeup/situation, the BL should be for you.

it shouldn't be, if you want to DPS, just pick any one of these 9, and if you want utility, one of these 4, and if you want to tank, one of these 6, and if you want to heal, one of these 7. doesn't matter which one you pick, cause they are all equal.

You lost me at "I feel..." holy cow that was long rofl...

My raid group is solo healed by a fury, and he's been solo healing that group for many years. We very rarely have to bring in a second healer. On Vhaksiz, I will sometimes go Spiritual to help him, but lately have stayed in offensive stance. It's a bit hairier but he can do it; because he's a beast of a player. If he can go Beastmode Druid, then logically speaking any Druid can copy that. Just have to bridge the gap between "good" and "great" player.... and EQ2 is hilariously full of people who think they're Great but are merely Good. Most guilds will settle on Good, because there isn't a huge population of skilled free agents floating around the raid scene.

Rhetorical question: how many healers do you think are actively tracking AE timers and major script change thresholds in an encounter and transform their healing around that? Not many that I've seen - "Good" healers know which button to hit next - "Great" ones know which button they will need to hit in 5, 10, or 20 seconds.

Edit: to clarify, I don't mean having a raid leader call "AE incoming" in Ventrilo; I find that to be an annoying concession given to lazy people, healers and DPS alike. I mean personally tracking major aspects of the fight as a healer and not needing to be told when to do things.

I feel that the classes all play differently enough and bring different elements to the table to keep the game diverse. Where I want to see less diversity is in how far apart the classes are spread from each other.

For example, some major areas of concern right now are in the sorcerers and assassin. As far as I'm concerned, the problem with sorcerers is that they haven't been given the right tools to keep up with the tools the summoners have been given. But those 4 mage classes should all compete with each other and be better in certain situations. Wizard and Warlock should be spike masters with one over the other having an advantage if adds show up. Conj and Necro should be more consistent dps with one being more spikey than the other while the other is more consistent. But at the end of the day, they should fall pretty close to each other after a 5 minute fight.

Then look at the predators. Assassin should be a single target monster. Nothing should be able to touch an assassin on single target spike damage. And those spikes should come back quickly enough to keep up with a ranger's more consistent damage. On the same note, a ranger should be able to beat an assassin in an aoe fight.

And all of the classes I just mentioned should all compete with each other, depending on encounter, lenght/adds/script for the top spot on a dps chart.

But you know the real problem? The game stopped (if it ever did. i'm not sure. only been here 2 years) providing opportunities for different styles of dps to shine. Think of it this way. Rather than what we have right now, which is some 'STOP DPS' type scripts or DPS YOUR FACE OFF scripts that are pointless and simple. OR scripts that are so one shot fail mechanic happy that it's stressful and not even really that fun sometimes. What if we had more scripts where you had to take advantage of your class strengths. The Kly is one example of where a necromancer does very well without giving a crap about the parse. Since I can keep myself alive if things go weird, I'm the perfect class to go after the colors. (edited to be more vague) But the fights like this are so lacking. Where's the fight where a ton of adds show up during a boss that a true AOE monster class like a swash could shine? Where are the fights that a single add showed up that needed to be dispatched quickly--and it needs to not see the person coming! where an assassin could be a real assassin and make that kind of difference?

However...we come back to not enough people playing. If the raids and encounters required that type of specific class requirement to perform it best...well, we just don't have enough people playing the game to make that fun. What happens when you don't have that class to use? So what we get are more generic fights and everyone staring at their ACT parse.

So with just those examples, I do believe that the dps classes should have diversity, but I feel that the playstyle and role play aspects of each class keep them interesting enough to not have to start separating them on the dps tier chart other than making it clear that dps means you have a reasonable shot at being the best at your primary job. dps. And the playerbase of the game just wouldn't allow for huge diversity in how the classes play.

Thanks. I don't get to hear that often. Made my day.

Given amount of damage it can ward - yeah its next to useless, AoE heals that more like HoT because they don't heal much but can be spammed is different story