Slashdot Mirror
The Lost Art of Class Balancing
GamePro has a look at the delicate touch needed when balancing classes in a Massive title. From the article: "Bad class balancing has been an endemic problem to MMORPGs--unfortunately especially in games where PvP is a major component. Dark Age of Camelot tanked the usability of the original classes with the emergence of Vampiirs in the ill-reputed Catacombs expansion. Users were incensed when Creature Handlers ruled the universe in Star Wars Galaxies--then angered even more when the class was beat down with the nerf bat in subsequent patches."
It's just a matter of a little going a long, long, long way. Changes that seem to resolve an immediate problem can have drastic effects long term. Look at it from a gameplay mechanic instead of a balance mechanic. When the level cap is raised in World of Warcraft, it most likely will be five levels, to a maximum of 65. Perhaps it will be more, but that remains to be seen. Level 65 doesn't make much difference for one person in many situations; most NPCs at the current max level, 60, will just be soloable by most players without uber gear. Large encounters, however, will be completely changed. Players will be able to kill Onyxia and Ragnaros (a big bad nasty dragon and a big bad nasty lava giant, respectively) quickly and easily if they plan ahead and execute well.
It's this kind of ripple effect - where one small change suddenly becomes very drastic when multiplied by larger numbers - that makes class balance so difficult. After all, it's easier to multiply by 1.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Nerf Shamans!! (or rogues, if that's your thing)
and realize that no game is perfect, and while many could be a hell of a lot better, designers are usually under a deadline, and while they may want to create a nice, balanced game, they can't. The only way for them to balance it out, is to later release patchs, which, if they haven't been properly tested, may just make things worse.
the only problem with over-specialized character classes comes with 'support' classes, such as CoH's "Controller" class. Without "offensive" skills, the Controller is nothing but a button-pusher: "Oh, look, another battle. Target our Tank. Heal. Heal. Heal. Clear mind. Heal. Heal. Recovery Aura. Heal. Until they readjusted the characters (and gave out free respecs) I hated playing my 'starting' character because I would just sit in battles pressing 1. 2. 3. 1. 2. 3. 1. 2. 3.... without any accomplishment. I considered turning on "Follow" and leaving a stack of quarters on the "Heal" key.
/quit.
Specialized characters may make sense, but part of the fun of playing is the sense of personal accomplishment. If all I do is stand around glowing while everyone one else fulfills the mission goals, there's no point in playing that class.
And God help me if PvP were part of general gameplay. I'd never get anywhere as a Controller. Sure--I can stun your ass. But then I spend an hour punching you to death, and long before that, you
No, the key is making sure every class has weakness that can be exploited. A very powerful class that just barely moves is easily defeated by lesser classes if they can attack and then move off to heal, knowing they are too far away for the powerful class to attack latter.
Powerful classes should also be more expensive in some way. That is you can have this powerful figure, but he will demand a lot more wages, and a lot more training, so you loose the ability to have many weak fighters to get him. Once that powerful class is down you may not have enough money left over to hire a replacement. It is worse if you have to train up a new one - all the time spent training the new hero while the enemy attacks, perhaps bringing it down before you are done with training...
That is just one way to balance a powerful class. You could make the powerful class weak to poison (holy water), magic, or some such. Perhaps he is powerful with a sword, but has no defense against arrows.
The most classes you add the harder this is though. However getting it right makes things interesting. Instead of my 3d4 "elf" fighers and 2d6 "elf" archers against your 3d4 "orc" fighters and 2d6 "orc" archers you can have my 1d4 elf fighters who breed like rabbits (cheap) against your 2d12 orcs that are hard to replace. Thus you need to watch out for my swarms while picking off my players one by one. (Note, I just picked some race names at random by the traditional literature the stats I picked do not match)
World of Warcraft does have some pretty bad class balance issues, and just some gimped classes. Some examples of blizzards incompentency:
1. As mentioned, Paladins were reworked two weeks before release the class had it's whole combat system changed (Read nerfed). While the class is described to this day as a 'melee based hybrid' it puts out less damage per second than any other class (including priests). It also has no long ranged attack, and only one stun. On the healing side of it, the Paladin in the fourth best healer in the game, behind Priests, Druids and Shamans. What it all adds up to is a class that is poor at PvP. Instead of keeping an eye on the paladin since they were changed 2 weeks before launch, blizzard has chosen to ignore them.
2. Warlocks, along with having to deal with Will of the Forsaken going through their only decent crowd control spell (fear) also have to put up with farming soul shards to PvP. Basically, a warlock must PvE for a good 20-30 minutes to PvP for an hour since they need soul shards to preform some of their better spells/abilities. No other class has to put up with this sort of thing. To top it off, the shards are not stackable, meaning each one takes up one spot in your inventory, thus limiting other things a warlock could take for PvP from his or her bank.
3. Hunters have some kind of "Dead Zone" inbetween Melee range and their ranged attacks where from what I understand they can be attack but they can not attack others. Since hunter is one of the few classes I don't play, I'm taking the word of the 1000 hunters whining about it on the forums.
4. All of the racial traits for one faction (The horde) vastly overpower those of the other (alliance).
5. Instead of improving classes, Blizzard has shown that they would rather swing the nerf bat. This is the wrong way to go about balancing a MMO.
You can't have balanced classes and have PvP and PvE. You have to make each character unique and bring something different to a group when you fight together. This does not lend itself to being even in PvP because some classes will be designed to be in a support role. It is more important that every class feels like it brings something special and useful to a group. One on one PvP is over-rated. There will always be one "best" class for it. Group PvP makes things much more interesting...and as long as you are a good player, you should be able to play any class and contribute significantly. If you can't, then there really is a class imbalance.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Is having all the classes balanced really that essential? I don't think so. I believe it is important to have most classes well balanced, but having one or two classes that are "weaker" isn't such a bad thing. I personally like a challenge of playing a slightly weaker class. When you beat an opponent with the weaker class, there is a greater since of accomplishment.
I'll agree that playing against the overpowered class can be frustrating, but it just forces me to do something out of the ordinary to win. People complain about Shamans being overpowered. I agree, they have some advantages, but they aren't big enough to ruin the game. I have a 60 Warrior and I have killed shamans lots of times. Granted, in a duel, I'll only win about 35% of the time, but those wins sure do feel good.
The problems with the Paladin, Warlock, and Hunter classes is that people are trying to use the class incorrectly. These three classes are very passive/solo classes. Yet people wonder why they don't do well in group settings. This is because the class is meant to be more solo friendly. Problem is, everyone wants every class to be how THEY want it. This is impossible, since some like to solo, some like PvE, some like PvP. If people are so worried about being the best, then simply play the class that suits your needs.
The only valid complaint people can have I think is that they have already put tons of time into their class and don't want to go back. Well, guess what, people of been complaining about the same stuff since launch. It's the players fault for not doing a little research on a class before putting tons of time into it. I hope they don't nerf any of the classes. I don't want to lose that extra since of accomplishment when I kill a shaman and I enjoy PvE with my Warlock when I get burnt out playing with my warrior.
I couldn't think of anything witty to say, so...you're stuck with this.
1. Make small, incremental changes, and measure the effects for a few weeks before determining if they've solved any problems.
2. Don't listen to the loudest and most frequent complainsers. It's the guy who never says anything and then one day pens a detialed analysis of your classes who is most likely to have some good insight.
3. Play your classes yourself and understand what your players are bitching about.
4. Understanding that somebody is ALWAYS going to be bitching about class balance, and just beacuse people are still bitching doesn't mean it's not well-balanced.
5. Classes and zones you design early on tend to be much less powerful (and the zones much more difficult) than those that are designed late in the process. Your early classes tend to be moderately powerful with strong checks and balances in their best abilities. The later work tends to be moderately powerful but without the checks and balances. Just look at Warlocks in WoW, compared with Paladins or Shamans. Look at any game, really, and how many of the add-on classes or races were MUCH MUCH better than the stock stuff? They have to be. If they're not any better, nobody buys the expansion to play them.
6. That leads me to my next point - you want to keep classes balanced, look at races. In a perfect game, you'd have 1 race. Barring that, races with minor stat variations and a few tricks, but no major differences are key.
7. Design the game (the mechanics, the zones, the quests, etc) with your classes in mind and then DO NOT ADD CLASSES. The new classes invariably will rip through the "old world" and only be challenged in the new zones designed with that class in mind. I think my #1 advice to any MMORPG is to never add additional classes beyond your starting crop. I'm sure people will point out countless examples of this being done successfully, but I think it's a major disaster waiting to happen most of the time.
8. Even better than all this - DON'T HAVE CLASSES in the first place.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
As a rogue, all I have to say is that he should be putting up his freakin paranoia pet and dotting folks and casting hellfire on a whim. rogues would stay away from him. I certainly would. It's that whole thing: would I rather kill the easy target or the hard target. with his paranoia pet and random pbae attacks I'd rather go for the shaman over near him. Also I'm not sure why he keeps saying shaman rule the BG: I rarely think twice before killing a shaman. easy target.
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
As a sidenote: the article writer is most definitely a human paladin. I'll get to that in a second.
You can't make every class an even match with every other class. There will always be classes which are built to take out other classes. WoW examples: warriors > rogues, rogues > mages. Although I dislike RPS systems on principle, on some level you end up with that.
I play a priest in WoW. Like most priests, I was shadow until about 57, then changed to a PvE spec. I still PvP. I do fairly well in it, although I don't put out nearly the damage I did as a shadow priest. In return, I have vastly better mana efficiency when I'm healing, which believe it or not is quite a bit, especially in Battlegrounds. My main problem with PvP balance as it currently stands is that I'm always - always - the first one to die, because the idea of tanking doesn't exist in PvP. If I was shadow it'd be the same way, so that's not a solution.
So basically I disagree with parent. The problem is not that PvP and PvE CAN'T coexist, just that Blizzard has added a number of PvP only workarounds. Example: the PvP reward trinket, which turned priest vs. rogue matchups from somewhat interesting to nothing more than a time trial for the rogue. (Unless the rogue is undead, of course, in which case I pity you even more.) Example: all forms of aggro control don't work at all in PvP. Why? "Players don't like losing control." This when the entire point of the rogue class is to do just that.
Also, as a WoW player you should know that as of this patch, there's not a whole lot of difference between PvP and PvE servers...
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
usually, there is one area in which a class outshines all others, for example in Everquest:
Clerics:Rezzing, Druids:Travel, Shamans: Debuffing
Wizards:Burst damage, Enchanters:Crowd Control, Magicians:Pets, Necromancers:damage-over-time spells
Warriors:Taking hits, Rogues:Traps/Sneak, Monk:Melee damage
Bards:mana regen, Rangers:Archery/Tracking, Paladins:Undead slaying, Shadowknights:Holding aggro
Then they added Beastlords and Berzerkers... since they didn't want to displace any existing class, Beastlords ended up a jack-of-all-trades; while they tried (and failed) to add a new reation based combat system around when they introduced 'zerkers (iirc)
the problem comes in that people want to pick the best characters for the situation; If there are no undead in the area, why have a Pally? mosters dying fast, so why have a Necro?
the next problem was balancing a group with a shaman that can cut a monsters damage output by 75%, with one without. or one with a cleric, who can heal 10000 hp in a shot, vs. other healers that can't do more than 1000. In order for content to be a challange to a group with a Shaman AND and Cleric the monsters have to be able to rip through groups that lack them in a couple seconds, making a Cleric and a Shaman almost mandatory for grouping in most players eyes.
(I have 3 accounts, my Mage, then a Cleric and a Shaman set up on hotkeys to Heal and Slow)
my thought for a design...
First, decide on the 'ideal' group size, I think 5 is a good number.
then come up with a adventuring system that requires that number of distict abilities.
Healing, Melee Damage, Magic Damage, Melee Protection, Magic Protection.
then, create classes that each can fill MOST jobs, instead of a few.
Heal, MeleeD, MagicD:
Heal, MeleeD, MeleeP: Paladin type
Heal, MeleeD, MagicP: Ranger type
Heal, MagicD, MeleeP: Shaman type
Heal, MagicD, MagicP: Druid type
Heal, MeleeP, MagicP: Cleric Type
MeleeD, MagicD, MeleeP: Shadowknight type
MeleeD, MagicD, MagicP:
MeleeD, MeleeP, MagicP:
MagicD, MeleeP, MagicP:
well, obviously they don't all correlate to EQ classes, as that's the point. Everyone with a base ability should have the same level of power, just with different 'flavor'; which will lead to some situational advantages, but if, for example, the particular types of magic damage available to a druid-type class are ineffective in an area, he'd still be able to fully function as a Healer and protector vs. magic.
Every single game I've been in, has basically bungled horribly through class balance, making seemingly random changes and then waiting to see the result. COH, yes, too. Horrible balance issues and swings. And if you hate the changes to your character so far, you'll probably hate Issue 5, already known affectionately as The Nerf.
The problem IMHO is the strong dichotomy between creative types and some of us "accountant types", for lack of a better name.
The creative guys are able to come up with _interesting_ ideas like "I know, let's have a hero that fights with a bent spork and catches bullets with his toes". That's what makes a comic book or a game _interesting_. It's what gives you unique characters, missions, story arcs, etc.
Us accountant types however, then just come, put all those "Spork Thrust", "Spork Slash" and "Toe Wiggle" powers in a big spreadsheet and run a min-max simulation through them. We calculate _exact_ damage-per-second, damage-per-endurance and such, and invariably it turns out that the game is utterly unbalanced and there's some utterly ludicrious winning combination.
The problem is that the two groups are distinct groups. In fact they're pretty much natural enemies. The creative types usually throw a fit and call you a "numberchaser" or such if you even mention soiling their grand vision with such profane maths. (Try even mentioning numbers on some MUDs and you'll see what I mean.) And conversely us maths types treat those designers as the antichrist when they do those broad-sweeping random balance changes, and cause everyone's characters to bounce randomly between uber-slayer-of-everything-in-god-mode and utter-total-wimp.
That dichotomy is what's really the problem. Most balance issues could be foreseen and corrected before release, by simply running the same simulations and maths. The _massive_ kinds of balance problems some games have shouldn't have even made it into testing, much less be there after a year of being live.
There is nothing utterly unforeseeable about most of those min-maxed combination. It's not like "but you can't know what arcane non-obvious thing the players will abuse." You can. Maths is where it's at, because that's what the players will use to find those uber-combos. And the devs could do the exact same maths before the game is released.
But, alas, it would need some of the creative types to put down the crack pipe, get over the ego trip, and let their grand vision be run through a spreadsheet. Not that I expect it to happen any time soon.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't see how balancing is a problem at all. I wish everyone would just ignore completely the relative strengths and weaknesses of a class when choosing it, and just choose a class because it suits their personality or whatever. Basically choose ideologically if you know what i mean. But instead the "pro" (wow they're soooo cool!) players go off and all choose a class that in general may be better than others in whatever situation and the people who loose to them start crying because all everyone wants to be is the winner, the boy on top of the sandcatle. I remember when i first started playing online games I had great fun ever when loosing, which happened most of the time and still does, though I win sometimes (!), because I loved saying "well at least i fought hard and it was such an epic battle and what glory!" etc. I won sometimes and obviously felt great about those. But i was shocked the way nearly everyone else, with the exception of a few magnificent people, were all like "omg we're loosing lets surrender" or "this is so shit I'm joining their team". I really cannot understand how winning is the only way people get enjoyment out of the games. And i think, so what if an enemy mage/kingdom/team is really powerful, we'll go out there and throw ourselves into battle and not give up and give it our all. And we'll do loads of damage and the enemy will certainly have been worse off than they were before they faced our brave onslaught. And we'd tell tales of the battle and talk all day and night with our friends and it would be such fun!
Alas most people are but little boys who have to be on the winning team.
This guy are sick.