"Overpowered" classes and player skill levels

[jenx]

I'd rather you list all the talents you find lacking than throw a blanket "some are bad"
Talents are constantly being monitored for fun & usefulness and your feedback as a "noob" is invaluable.

Thanks

Discharge tree I think is the least used and least useful tree in the game,.

[Velorien]

Discharge tree I think is the least used and least useful tree in the game,.

The one centred around a technique that breaks if you do anything other than stand still and let things hit you? Seconded.

I really wanted to like that tree, but it has so little to offer in exchange for being unable to move, attack or use any of your other skills.

[SageAcrin]

Oh, yeah.

I suggested that the tree allow Dream Hammer skills and movement, and edge liked the idea, but I think he's been too busy to implement it.

Basically, some things aren't balanced because real life sucks. Code things for people if you want them done faster!

[ohioastro]

One useful approach is to see what skills are used by actual players, especially those who win. You'll see certain skills always developed and others never used.

[darkgod]

Yes and no, this is a dangerous road to follow blindly.
It serves an important purpose but it's be silly to declare other skills as not good. People may not have found how to combine/use them yet.
Tigereye made lots of very very weird builds that ended up working quite well.

Also winning is not a good measure, lots of characters die not because of selecting "wrong" skills but simply because the player screwed up

[XLambda]

Also winning is not a good measure, lots of characters die not because of selecting "wrong" skills but simply because the player screwed up

I agree. My personal experience ( ) has shown that a bad player can ruin even an awesome build.

[darkgod]

lol

[SageAcrin]

It's good to look at who wins with what skills, but players tend to follow some build orders-such as builds on the forums/wiki, or focusing heavily on one skillset for offense-rather blindly. (You can't blame people, it is a complex game.)

My favorite example; Check out the people that 5/5/5/5 Flame/Wildfire and win. Sounds like a good setup, right? It wins fairly often.

Actually, no...good players pretty much consider Inferno okay but not special, from what I've seen, and several of the other skills are far less powerful than other skills in other categories. But it's easy and it can work, and half the skills in it are really good... so it wins.

But those same players could skim some points off some skills and invest in Storm or Meta, or utility skills like Illuminate and Blur Sight, and do much better.

Ease of use will often make some skills more used than others. I actually was juggling points after I cleared my Paradox Mage, messing around randomly, only to find out that Paradox Clone-a skill I had ignored because it confused the hell out of me-actually seemed pretty good. I had ignored it because, as it turns out, it's indescribably weird, but I'm pretty sure it's a good skill.

(I'm reminded of something in DoomRL when talking about this; There's challenges there that limit you to only one weapon. Despite, by and large, these giving you few to no benefits to counteract this, and there being tons of niche uses for specific weapons even on a heavily dedicated build... I've heard people call them easier for them to play than the normal game. Decision paralysis really can hurt people.)

[ohioastro]

A successful run actually requires luck as well as skill. If you don't get the right drops, the right escorts, and have some bad luck on rares and random bosses you can struggle to a mediocre finish.

The point on the online guides is a good one. But if you look across builds you'll tend to see that the truly essential skills are reliably maxxed and the fluff is more variable.

As an example of what I'm talking about, Anorithils (a class that I like and play with) have two locked trees: Circles and Glyphs. People appear to almost always choose circles and rarely glyphs. Among the circles there is a fair variety in emphasis, although people tend (for cause) to really like silence. For the chants and hymns there are 8 potential choices; people ignore all but 2 of the hymns and most of the chants. These probably do really reflect some being just plain worse than others.

Corruptors systematically neglect hexes and curses, again for cause. They also tend to ignore diseases, which puzzles me a bit - probably because they kill opponents so fast that they're just redundant.

These sorts of exercises can actually be useful for balancing purposes.

[SageAcrin]

Well, there's a difference between making all skills evenly good and making skills balanced, too.

Hexes/Curses are a good example of this. Yes, they're underused, but if you look, the Defilers both have questionable Generic skillsets on the whole, with moderate impact at best.

It's an overall class issue. Yes, they can somewhat make up for it with escorts(and do), but Celestial/Light at 0.8 still isn't as impressive as, say, Conveyance at a decent value, overall. (Well, that's subjective. I'm sure someone would take Celestial/Light.)

Within that light, it's somewhat more balanced, though having said that Empathic Hex is really quite bad. (I keep forgetting about that one, because it's one of the ones I suggested buffs for but didn't get any.) >_>

But yeah, you get what I mean in general. Hymns and Chants suffer strongly from people tending to prefer certain things in characters, too(There's nothing really wrong with any of the chants barring maybe Light, which is strictly a Sun Paladin thing and mostly just boosts their damage a bit, which is a little iffy on a tank, but building more than one Chant is pointless and the first one happens to be quite good, so why waste points getting another? Hymns...actually isn't all that badly balanced, I'd say, though I really need to run an Anorithil through, but people tend to prefer the first one there for similar reasons too, I'm willing to bet.).

[Niegy]

Well, there's a difference between making all skills evenly good and making skills balanced, too...

I honestly don't understand the difference even after to have read and re read your post. My only guess would be that "balanced" means "used as much".

For me the first point that seems obvious but I wonder, is if all skills are enough useful. I'm pretty sure it's the initial goal of designers, but I wonder.

A probably false example is light. I got the feeling that at lower level it was to light a short area during only one turn, is this really useful? This lead to the point that some skills will be useful only at higher level and that's perhaps ok, but it brings the question that it can lead players to conclude it's pointless without to have tried the higher level of the skill, he will do it in faith or to test or to follow a guide. For me a typical example are skills related to Stealth, pointless during a long time but still used because it's a known very popular skill, or to follow guides.

I don't have the answer, I mean a skill could be pointless at lower level and if it's useful at higher level then this could be enough and considered ok, or it's not and improves this would be better.

[tylor]

Berserkers has FOUR trees that pretty much nobody unlocks (Shield Defense, Archery Training, Archery Training, Mobility)

[darkgod]

They are there to allow weird builds; that most berserker not use them is *normal* and says nothing about the validity of the trees themselves (ask any bulwark if shield offense is bad )

[SageAcrin]

I honestly don't understand the difference even after to have read and re read your post. My only guess would be that "balanced" means "used as much".

I explained it, but let me break it down farther.

Let's take Bulwark.

Bulwark has a balanced skillset.

However, it has bad ranged options. This is because Bulwark is not a ranged oriented class-it is given strong defensive options to compensate.

However, if you were comparing Bulwark's ranged options to a ranged class, they are bad and they clearly would need, say, Slings for Sling Mastery at the very least to shore them up as a ranged class. Probably another Archery tree, too.

But, they're not a ranged class and giving them that kind of heavy ranged focus would make them better than Archer. Since they have those strong defensive options as well. So that would obsolete a class. Not good design.

Bulwarks have actually ran their ranged options and cleared with them, though. Because it's the only ranged option they have, and it can be used as better than nothing to great effect. Not just ranged damage, of course, because they do much more damage close up, but it allows them to soften enemies first. That's good design-making a lesser option still valid due to the design of the class.

Another good example is Archmage, which is simple about this; They tend to get one of the best sets of skills and a huge, deep mass of synergies...and then they have -4 HP Modifier to compensate. If you put all of those skills directly onto a higher HP class, with no changes, it would run away with the game. That's why, say, Arcane Blade doesn't get Wildfire.

Balance within a class' design is different from balancing all skills against one another. The latter leads to an overly homogenized system where classes play very similarly. Creating flaws allows you to create strong advantages without breaking the game.

[Niegy]

Ok I get it, you mean that skills of a class should be balanced but not the overall skills through all classes.