EQ2 and Class Balance

By now I’m certain that anyone following EQ2 has read a lot of the information that came out of the class balance panel at SOE’s Fan Faire this year. Feldon did an exceptional job of doing live updates during the panel and I’m not going to report the same information again. I am late to the party after all. I thought I would take a moment and comment on a few of the questions and the feeling I got in general from the event.

It needs to be said immediately that this panel quite clearly had the highest attendance of any of the ones I attended. This just further reinforces my opinion that players do still care very much about class balance. It is alive, well, and something everyone should be paying attention to. Everyone was passionate, loud and in some cases rude about it! God help you if you asked a question that generally went against the player consensus too!

As an example one poor gentlemen asked if there were any plans to improve berserkers since they did the least DPS of all fighters and were the least survivable. Now mind you I agree with the crowd. The guy must not fully understand his class. I would have been more polite though. It got ugly and fast!

You can’t talk about EQ2 and class balance without talking about Rangers. Before the questions even opened up we got a small speech about them. The general fix is that bows will be improved and then SOE will sit back and “see how it goes.” I know our ranger wasn’t thrilled but at least it was a bone.

The issue of the brawler classes being on the weak side was brought up as well. In my eyes both of these classes have been under powered and easily replaceable for a long time. Unfortunately the answer wasn’t promising. No immediate plans for making them more desirable.

Fighters and critical healing was brought up. I am extremely concerned about the fact that Paladin heals were included. To me there is no justification behind nerfing the heals of the hybrid healing tank. Healing is a traditional paladin role and they were simply lumped in with the other fighters to “ensure every group needed a healer.” The question was asked a few times and the answer we got was that “potency will make up for it.” That seems to come up as the answer to a lot of questions and I don’t buy it, neither do parses. At least the concern was voiced but I can’t help but think that anyone who wants to focus on DPS and healing will be deeply effected.

Someone was also brave enough to say druids were not powerful enough in raids. Once more the crowd dissented and once more I have to ask, “really?” Druids aren’t powerful enough? From what I’ve seen on parses (DPS and healing at the same time) I think they’re just fine. I also think the rest of us healers could stand to be that fine too!

Cure curse came up and I really liked the answer here. Everyone was fairly clear that we’re sick of curse being used as a difficulty crutch in raid design. There are simply too many curses. The question was very pointed. The player was tired of having two cure curses burned when two healers cast it on the same person. We got a double answer. The crutch will be reduced and SOE will consider not burning your timer if there is no curse.

The panel went decently well but from what I’ve heard the forums are none to thrilled about the information that came out. The major reason behind this was that a lot of answers, and I mean a lot, were simply, “We’ll look at it.” The panel of SOE developers appeared to lack confidence. That was a bit of a surprise to me. Did we make progress here? Probably so but even I did not feel as confident with the outcome as I have in past years. EQ2 really needs to make balance a priority and that starts with the defining of the classes once more. Let’s all hope we see it soon.