Producer's Letter: Class Changes on Beta

Anyways...

The major problem that allot of tanks have faced and some classes more then others, isn't the lack of potency on gear, its the amount of stats we have to Min/Max compared to other classes. Going through and adding Potency to all the tank gear is great, dont get me wrong, BUT, you could have kept the potency and added a second Blue Stat to armor for reforging purposes and it would have alleviated allot of the issues at hand. Currently with the Mitigation/Block % Armor, you are lacking in the second "viable" reforge stat on said gear to Min/Max. You can only reforge 1 stat on said armor as it stands but when your trying to Hit :85% Cast / 85% Reuse / 120 Haste / 600 DPS / 100% ST / 120 MA Just for your base stats. Then you through in : Accuracy / Hate Gain / Ability Mod / AE Auto .. its ALOT of stats to juggle around. The addition of Potency again is great but does nothing to address these problems.


X: 85% Cast / 85% Reuse is for the use of Forerunners to hit 100% Solo, and yes I know we have group buffs but not everyone has the same group setup every night or in every run so yes, I min/max my stats to be self sufficient. Even if I allocated the extra 15 to 20% Casting / Reuse for reforging, it still isn't enough to make a noticeable difference " tried already ".

Hmm... i see nobody saying anything about us rangers (the supposed equal counterparts to assassins) being able to keep up with their DPS. Sure we have our spikes and will top the parse for awhile on SOME fights, but inevitably we get crushed in the end as it always has been. Maybe if we had out base reuse / cast times reduced to more match that of assassins that would fix the class.

I'd also love to see my zerker be able to get up around 600 DPS, that alone would help WAY more with maintaining hate than adding potency to CA's. The potency return by itself just isn't there.

Be curious where your stats come from on this. Please do explain

I would like to know that as well seems to me ur talking out your a.. on this

LOL!!!!!!! My maths is not the goodest (as you've previously pointed out), but the calculator machine did some figgerin' and told me that outparsing the assassin by 49,992,986 might undercut the credibility of your statement. (See below.) "And it isn't really that close" - Phenomenal! Keep 'em coming! Oh, and SHOCKER!, proposal to boost scout DPS and you chime in claiming it is unnecessary.

From your post today on Flames:

350mil Raidwide.

(05:30) Morin the Swindler: 353435286 Wizard -Fiery Blast-354567829
[warlock's name edited, but might be the OP to whom I am replying] | 73317394
Wizard | 39431924
Illy | 25126002
Brig | 24543196
Sin | 23324408
Dirge | 19763404
Necro | 19636298
Coercer | 17626178
Lock2 | 17438796
Illy2 | 17108197
Conj | 15427771
Fury | 12814258
Troub | 11511757
Coercer | 11274852
Monk | 7551946
Chan | 5799392
Zerker | 3204939
Defiler | 2512024
Templar | 2364129
Mystic | 1683568
Temp2 | 821185
Inq | 796171
AppMystic| 357498

I need to explain why I set up my monk to dps and not tank. I didn't do this by choice, more of necessity to keep playing my monk in raid. I have 2 sets of gear. Tanking gear and dps gear. I have 2 AA specs to correspond to each set. When I dps, I cannot tank at all. No spot tanking either. I am for all purposes, a dps class. The reason I did this is because my raid force wanted 3 tanks. 2 plate tanks for main and secondary, and me for the off chance that require 3 tanks (usually only one or two encounters per expansion). This made my monk as a tank pointless for most fights. Since leather armor was so plentiful, I built my monk to dps when I didn't have to tank (most of the time).

The idea of clearly defined classes is great, but how raid encounters are set up, either you figure out how make yourself useful or get replaced. Either I gear out two toons, and swap per encounter, or get two sets of gear on one toon and just swap gear and aa specs per encounter. I chose the latter to keep playing my monk. I will now be playing my assassin in raid, but I still am required to keep my monk for those odd raid encounters that require more than 2 tanks, where I will be once again on my monk to tank.

I did not intend to blur the lines of defined roles, I just worked with what I had for the given situation. Granted it was fun to make scouts cry. But I understand why this change is happening. I just will miss what I was able to do while we still had reckless stance.

If it's any consolation, I totally get what you're saying. I'd love nothing more than to play my SK exclusively whether he be in a tank capacity or DPS (so I can earn the amazing gear I'd love to wear). But, as you mention, this is probably the thing they're trying to get rid of. I've always had a bittersweet love for the monks as my wife LOVES to play her monk. I love supporting that she does, but she'd often get passed up and asked to play other classes because, at the time, recklessness wasn't a thing. Now, with it being around, I'd love for her to play the class she wanted and still come along on raids and groups.

My SK has never had that opportunity. I always wanted to bring him along in recklessness stance, but was always passed up over my DPS hearty classes or my Inquisitor. I'm sorry if I sounded a bit robotic on my post, but it was more support for the class you want to play+if Monks can do it now, let's make sure everyone has that bliss that you currently feel.

So, for the interim... huzzah for you. I hope you can still love your monk after this all goes down, but it's not looking good with the loss of recklessness.

Tog.

What are your plans regarding the aggro management aspects of Recklessness?


kono

Shouldn't we learn from history? The last time the Devs in this game decided to "balance" the classes half the population of the game left! Many of you could care less, but as a few commenters have already stated, many if not most of us couldn't tell you how or even why certain things work. This is supposed to be a game not a job! A really small percentage of you care about the minutiae of this game. If the Devs are going to cater to these players then you will just see another mass exodus of players as we did last time.
I log in to PLAY and relax not worry about if I cast in the right sequence or hit the right ability at the right time. I am surely not worried if my characters are the top or bottom of their respective classes. There is already huge chunks of this game a paying player will never see unless you are part of the guilds that do worry about how you cast and what gear you wear! Just from the content of this release I see even bigger chunks of the game being made inaccessible. If that is the goal then fire ahead, just remember what the end result really will be.

Hold on, does it mean clerics won't be able to use the tank armor? I'm building the second, mitigation, set right now and if not for the lack of potency, I would make it the first one.
Versality and stability are the things that make eq2 unic, that makes the game differ from WoW and it's clones. Should you change it, should you apply armor or abilities\stances restrictions, it will be another game, much much worse game.

Nailed it

Exactly my point. DoF changes, consolidation of stats, DoV "balance" and so on...all these have made lots of people quit. Yes, you can't make everyone happy, but you could at least listen to your players.

And all that while standing safely behind the mobs not having to worry about stupid KB/knock back/stun/death. Warlock life is hard

To reply to a lot of ignorance up above

Using rankings from http://progress.eq-raiders.com/

1) Мушкетеры: Top dps is their assassin
2) Revelations: Heza is up there, wins tons of parses, don't see all of them so I don't know if Veta/Zind/Daray win more than he does, but from what I've heard in tells from their mages, Heza is winning a plurality, at least.
3) Fatality: Me. Our recently retired Assassin was generally second, often close to me on fights that lasted over 5 minutes.
4) Дрэд Арми: From what I've seen its the Assassin and Wizard here. Haven't seen recent parses but everything I saw from a few months ago was Assassin/Wizard
5) Attrition X: I see Mattx (Assassin) on top of more parses they post than any other player.
6) Utopia: Storms sever is secretive, I don't know.
7) Unreal: Warlock, Assassin generally second from the parses I've seen.
8) Тао Дзен: Also Assassin. That or it is 10) ДКПЮ (Исход) that has the Assassin. One of these two guilds I've never seen parses from, the other of the two I see an Assassin on top all the time.
9) The Covenant: I think they're defunct now.
11) Sovin Nai: Assassin/Conj fight for top spot. with 2 Warlocks nipping at their toes, generally.

Obviously this is based on the parses I see, but even if I am wrong about 1 or 2 above guilds, the fact remains that at the top end, Assassins are winning more parses than Warlocks.

Now in regards to a few other comments, along with my post.

To the individual who copy pasted my post on flames.
A) Are you unfamiliar with that fight? The entire fight is waves of linked encounters (A Warlock's specialty)
B) This is a case of thinking the posting an exception to the rule somehow disproves the rule entirely.
C) The fact also remains, that if you look at that parse, you'll notice 1 dirge in raid. And guess what? The Assassin wasn't grouped with that dirge. So you just quoted a parse for evidence where my entire group was online and that Assassin had a patched together group and somehow you think it is actual evidence. And you used that single, poorly interpreted anecdotal piece of evidence as if it established a broad worldwide trend.

Based on A/B/C, I really hope those with a strong working knowledge of this game and mechanics will drown out such poorly informed logic.

Now, to address some other misinformation:

Read my original post. I said Assassins do not need any love unless poisons are fixed. I'm not saying other scouts (specifically Swashbucklers and Beastlords) don't need some love. They do. I support loving the scouts who need love.
Frankly, if poisons are fixed, Assassins become roughly even with other top-end t1 dps, so boosting them after "fixing" poisons probably pushes them back to being the alpha class again.

Lastly: Priority. Check the size of my Unda hits. I wasn't standing outside the raid, and I certainly WAS being hit with knockbacks.

And what about that perador parse? Lasted 40s and nearly doubled my parse while I had CM/dirge. That's a single target mob. Fact remains that you're hands and feet above warlocks in other guilds on the parse, you destroy our parses, regularly laugh about how ridiculously OP your class is, and if any other assassin can come in here with an 84 million perador, please link it. Maybe then I'll get on board with your claims about assassins being able to compete with a properly geared/played warlock.

So I guess this brings up a quick side point.

Sorcerers do not play as simple as "just stand outside the raid safe and dps". This belief is based on a very antiquated view of the game.

Warlocks are constantly toggling their myth on and off, jousting in for T-clap triple hit and then back out for Unda. On some fights/pull styles make this is impossible, and you end up just accepting that one of those two spells is going to suck for the entire fight.

Wizards have the same t-clap/unda balance, along with also being extremely flow dependent on a perfectly lined up FB rotation that requires significant knowledge of the flow of the fight.

Just to clarify/educate.

Oh, if that is all you want, Read the last 10 pages of http://www.eq2flames.com/assassins/25690-assassin-parse-thread.html.

Assassin parses posted here are roughly 10-20% better than mine across the board, with a few exceptions.

Lol, dude. You're posting parses of the assassin that is supposedly suspended for exploiting poisons? I suppose its only right you compare yourself to him.

He wasn't suspended.

So a private beta test then to release without time on test?