Rift’s “Ascended System” for classes provides each class with a near-limitless number of combinations (There are 56 possible combinations of Souls within each class to form a Role, and each Role gets a certain number of points to spend within its three Souls in a manner similar to WoW’s ability trees). This sounds, on paper, like a beautiful thing for those of us who want to customize our avatars to be unique, but it presents a bigger version of a challenge familiar to all MMOs: balance.
When gamers talk about class balance in MMOs, they normally mean that if two classes were to square off together in PvP combat, the determination of who wins should come down to who has more skill in reading the situation and using the right abilities at the right times; or, in terms of PvE class roles, each person within a party should feel like a necessary part of that party, able to perform a function throughout an instance and have that function be an integral part of the party’s success.
This is a challenge for any MMO largely because every time the developers make changes to a class, the massive community of players will begin testing out those changes to find new and more powerful combinations – often using skills in ways the developers hadn’t been able to identify or prepare for. In the early days of Age of Conan, for instance, there were many people complaining about the Bear Shaman class because it could not only do decent DPS while wearing decent armor, but it was also able to self-heal. I’ll never forget being attacked by a level 56 Bear Shaman on my level 80 polearm-based Guardian and losing because the Bear Shaman seemed to have infinite self-healing that I simply couldn’t DPS through.
Rift’s plan in some ways bypasses the balance issues and in other ways makes them worse, and we can already see evidence of it in beta testing. I now have two characters of high-enough level to where I feel comfortable talking about them. The first is a level 35 Paragon/Champion/Riftblade, a Warrior Soul Role that I designed as much as possible to be able to produce a lot of DPS, and functioning as DPS in a group I do fairly well. My greatest problem – and I heard this echoed by other Warriors both across my server and outside of game – was that my armor seemed to do absolutely nothing. When playing solo through content, I had to be careful to draw only one mob at a time. If I drew two, I could handle them only so long as they were two levels above me or less. After any such combat, I had to stop for a while to regenerate health using OOC health regen drinks. If I drew 3 or more mobs, my only hope was to run away (and because of abilities most mobs have to slow a person running away, I would often not make it). When in a group of people, I had to desperately hope that I didn’t draw aggro, because I could not handle it for long. Fortunately, my DPS (even though my Souls were specifically designed for DPS) was not often enough to draw and hold aggro. Unfortunately, there were many times where I was called upon to off-tank, and I simply didn’t have enough survivability to do so (such as in the last battle of Foul Cascade).
My second character is a level 21 Bard/Ranger/Riftstalker. Because of a Bard trait that makes my main attack also do healing to every character in the party, and because Ranger and Riftstalker are fairly durable classes, I was effectively invincible. When soloing through PvE content, my Ranger pet would tank mobs and I could keep the pet at full health with even 3 mobs attacking it. I decided to take on a group instance at one point with two DPSers, a tank, and a healer. I was able to put out so much healing in the group that the healer only occasionally had to toss a heal on the tank, and otherwise just stood around. And, on a few rare occasions where the tank fell, I immediately had aggro on me and was able to hold it reasonably well (far better than my Warrior ever could). Talking with others later, most people hadn’t seen the awesome power of the Bard, but many were saying how much the Ranger’s pet needed to be toned down, as it was simply too good.
Back on my Warrior, I decided to take a group of friends deep into Defiant territory (we were Guardians) chasing after some good loot we heard about. We ran through the area first with our regular traiting, and I got one-shotted by guards at the entrance to the zone. Realizing this wouldn’t work, I switched Roles (something that is, thankfully, easy to do in Rift) and became a Paladin/Reaver/Warlord. In this setup, I had much more health and armor, and more traits to absorb or avoid damage. As such, I was able to lead my friends successfully through the area and we obtained our much-sought-after loot.
My first point about all of this is simple: in the current iteration of the game, DPS Warriors aren’t really that capable (though we can put out a decent amount of DPS, it’s still not as much as some other DPS classes, based on the aggro draw I saw), and even tanking Warriors only just barely do their jobs. The main healing classes seem to be a little under-powered and slow to react (due, I suspect, in large part to the tanking Warrior’s inability to deal with incoming damage), while the Bard class, which is supposed to be there for support healing, seems to completely dominate. These are all simply balance issues, ones which I have no doubt Rift will be tweaking over the next month.
To complicate matters, though, we have the Ascended system. One of the reasons I was able to do so well on my Bard was because of the classes I chose to go with it – Ranger and Riftstalker. These classes provided me with additional tools to increase my health and damage resistance and also increase my DPS. Most impressively, the Riftstalker increased the DPS of my main attack (the one that heals everyone for an equal amount of health as the damage it outputs), meaning that by incorporating that, I was able to not only do more DPS but also keep myself alive better. This singular combination was far better than other combinations I tried. If, however, any or all of these classes get tweaked so that their combination is less dominant, I can simply switch my Souls out with others I’ve acquired. Thus, if any Rogue build is more powerful than my current one, I can simply swap over to it. This is good, in a way, as no one ever has to feel like the game has gimped them; but it is also bad in a way, because of the expectations of other gamers.
In LotRO alone out of all the games I’ve played is there a concept that people can play what they want to play. In most other games (and even in raiding groups in LotRO), people are expected to trait not based on how they want (ie, trying to build around a singular character concept), but rather based on the needs of the group. If Warriors are only desired for their tanking abilities and not for their DPS, then people building DPS Warriors will be marginalized and kept out of most group content. If Rogues are expected to all be healing Bards, then stealthy Assassins or ranged-DPS Marksmen won’t be useful.
This is a bad thing from the standpoint that the entire system is based around being able to play a customized character. If your customized character isn’t considered “valid” because it doesn’t take advantage of the flavor-of-the-week to dominate at some aspect of the game, then you won’t really get to play as a custom character. People whose sole reason for playing is the customization will leave in droves. This means that the Rift team will have a huge task on their hands, trying to predict what Soul combinations will be abused next and shoring up those holes before they can form. If they can manage to do that, they will accomplish what dungeon masters in D&D have been trying to do for decades and failing miserably – successfully planning content that cannot be broken by the first stubborn and crafty player who encounters it.
MMORPG.com writes:
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