- Red Wizards currently out Melee-DPS Ninjas, and White Wizards can do about the same damage as a Ninja.

- Masters have terrible magic resistance and health (Instant death from Xmagic or 2 D2s) and no way to reach a Mage in PvP.

- Knights are actually pretty good, but still are left almost dead after a few tier 2s.


How this effects PvP:

- Ninjas run out of thirst before any mage they fight (except WWs, in some cases) leaving them to lose, or run. Their damage is too low to put a dent into whoever they are fighting, because their weak attacks is all they can do. A WW or a RW can cast, and heal, no problem.

- Masters die before even reaching their opponent, and if they do (Kick), die soonafter. HiPot->get P2'd for the same amoutn they were just healed for. Cycle continues until Master gives up since all hes doing is wasting potions that eventually wont heal them.

- Knight gets hit for 1/3rd of their health, charges, has a chance of getting blocked, missing, or not hitting becuase of charge at all. If it hits, deals minimal damage since WWs have Fog and RWs can viably use heavy. BWs might lose a third of their health, but the Knight is still behind recoil-wise, and will not hit their opponent if they are moving because of ready states, but a targeted cast will always hit an opponent within their huge range.



My suggestions:

- Ninjas can learn Black Magic. Allow them to learn 1 element, along with its status spell, but no tier 2/3, or special spell, and Dark.
WHAT THIS WILL DO: Allow Ninjas to rely on magic if their opponent is wearing heavy. Opponents with Heavy armor end up taking a whopping 20-50 damage from a Ninja's attack. I have a Masterwork Dark Stilletto, I know. This will also allow them to use a status spell offensively (Hold, zerk, fear, sleep) becuase of their already low damage, this will give them a chance in PvP outside of re-adding guns, which isn't happening.


- Master STR buffed by 15%. Yes, that is a large amount, but they get the LEAST amount of love out of every class, and its been this way ever since Unarmed was nerved in early 4.0. There is currently no point to play a master because a Knight with beefup and a claymore will do more damage, and take more damage.
WHAT THIS WILL DO: Make them a threat against mages, which are their own biggest threat. If a Master, even feared or zerked, can fight back against a mage, it would make it actually viable to pvp a mage as a Master. Right now, you just die. That's it. Because you cant deal enough damage to be a threat. Your spike damage is not as high as a Knight's.


- Knight: I'm tempted to not suggest a change for them at all, because they're already fine and really don't need any help. If anything: Change the charge mechanic.
WHAT THIS WILL DO: Allow them to actually hit **** with charge other than mobs.

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Ninjas: No complaints about them having black magic. But if anything just give them poison, and nothing else. Just the thought of a ninja sleep/stealing from people without needing any help isn't really a balanced one.

Masters: In theory that sounds reasonable but there's 2 glaring issues with that. Firstly, it'll end up making masters hugely overpowered in pve, especially with the buff to unarmed. Secondly, it'll make them overly powerful against other classes. WW's, who can't really stop a Master. Sure you can fear and disable kick but thats not really stopping a master per se. 15% is ridiculous...they don't need any help. What your seeing is people that are misusing the class for pvp.

Imagine if people like Gene, Zekion, Iwamori, and Ezao got their hands on masters with 15% damage and knew what they were doing. You'd need to re-nerf them all over again.


Knights: Yeah...charge is wonky.

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Judging by Gaku's reply to this topic: http://www.terulia.com/?t=1470#unread there is no reason to discuss this. Even if we could figure out a way to balance the classes, it wouldn't happen. Don't worry though, if I recall right, this is part of the reason Terulia is being developed. The FFO classes are nearly impossible to properly balance, but we've been assured this will be a lot different with the jobs in Terulia.

Regardless, even though the game isn't really balanced, each class does have its weaknesses. Mages rely heavily on mana and elemental damage. Sometimes wearing armor of the proper element is all it takes to stop a mage. For instance, if you're wearing dark gear, and a Black Wizard hits you with dark 2, he will do no damage and that gives you time to attack him and probably kill him, since Black Wizards have so little health.

Its also important to remember that FFO is designed as a team game, meaning you are intended to work together, not fight someone else 1v1. Most classes would have difficulty killing an equally leveled, skilled, and proffed opponent 1v1, depending on the matchup. They also each have a role. For example, Knights are hard-hitting tanks and Ninja are good at robbing the enemy blind, dodging hits, and spying on other players. Personally, I'm not sure where Masters fall into this, but I'm sure someone else could help you with a viable strategy for them. The best thing to do if you are having trouble with one particular player is to get a friend to help you fight them. Even the best solo class is going to have trouble against more than one or two opponents, especially with the low level cap.

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If there were any new "abilities" added into the game then there would have to be a reworking of the skill trees. If the suggestion is easy to be implemented somewhat balanced and fair then it would be considered im sure. No game is "balanced" to the point where it is even 100%. Some classes are just better than others if it was a 1 on 1 fight. As Locke said FFO is a PvP game, but it is meant to be done so in groups. Then you have other factors that play out, such as how epic people's gear is, elemental armors, their PvP tactics....so on and so forth.

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LockeSonjie wrote:

Judging by Gaku's reply to this topic: http://www.terulia.com/?t=1470#unread there is no reason to discuss this. Even if we could figure out a way to balance the classes, it wouldn't happen. Don't worry though, if I recall right, this is part of the reason Terulia is being developed. The FFO classes are nearly impossible to properly balance, but we've been assured this will be a lot different with the jobs in Terulia.

Then why was the level cap reduced/million other changes made to try to balance for the pwipe? In my opinion, it seems like it made more problems, therefore taking more of Gaku's time meant working on Terulia.

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The pwipe occurred because it's to hold people's interest until Terulia comes out. If you remember at the end of last server there were I'd say a max of 12+ people online at peak times. Now there's what 35+.



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You got me all wrong sir. The pwipe was justified. The re-updating was justified. I'm talking about the other updates that were added to "balance" FFO when clearly it can't happen, and that it should be left for Terulia, which is now/was being delayed by this.

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I think Terulia is being delayed by the forum updates, not FFO. Gaku probably didn't have to put hardly any work into the FFO changes.

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Terulia was supposedly supposed to supposta be supposineed be here like months ago. I don't think a week working on FFO to keep us occupied is stalling it's development that much.

EDIT: What Locke said. He also did the forum linkage which is nice to combine the forum and game together. Keeps the community even more up to date by the second with what's going on.

=p

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My main point was that according to you guys, FFO can't be balanced, so WHY BOTHER TRYING MORE when it usually makes it worse. =(

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It can be fixed somewhat, but it will never be anywhere near perfectly in tune. Certain things can be fixed, though. Like nerfing an overpowered spell or buffing a useless ability. The thing is, unless its a really serious problem, Gaku isn't likely to want to do it.

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Decreasing the cap to 20 while making it so they can cap out at 55 has totally thrown everything off balance. Hopefully I'm not the only one that's seen this.. any BW with capped spells will be able to one hit anything pretty much. It was bad before; they were able to almost two shot capped knights if they had max proficiencies (which was sort of reasonable, it takes a LOT of experience to cap out tier 3's), but now it'll just be insane. I think things should have been changed with the cap, but doing it like this was a mistake.

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Taste my Rainbow wrote:

Decreasing the cap to 20 while making it so they can cap out at 55 has totally thrown everything off balance. Hopefully I'm not the only one that's seen this.. any BW with capped spells will be able to one hit anything pretty much. It was bad before; they were able to almost two shot capped knights if they had max proficiencies (which was sort of reasonable, it takes a LOT of experience to cap out tier 3's), but now it'll just be insane. I think things should have been changed with the cap, but doing it like this was a mistake.

Yeah, because the damage of a Melee is determined largely by level and gear, whereas Mage damage is prof and gear.

Lv 20 cap with prof cap of 55? Dayum. Mages can still be as strong as last hosting but melee is just left in the dust.

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Taste my Rainbow wrote:

Decreasing the cap to 20 while making it so they can cap out at 55 has totally thrown everything off balance. Hopefully I'm not the only one that's seen this.. any BW with capped spells will be able to one hit anything pretty much. It was bad before; they were able to almost two shot capped knights if they had max proficiencies (which was sort of reasonable, it takes a LOT of experience to cap out tier 3's), but now it'll just be insane. I think things should have been changed with the cap, but doing it like this was a mistake.

You might be right to some extent Haze. The thing here is that decreasing the level cap to 20 is a good thing in a certain way depending on how you look at it.

From every version I've played so far "death" has always been a turn off for casual players to the game. If you were to kill someone last version it would usually take about 30 mins to regain that experience which makes people unhappy. Now when you die it's like 5 mins to regain that lost experience so it's not as big of an issue.

So people who like to PK, (and people will start to masskill later on when they are capped and have epic gear and are bored) won't be "griefing" the casual or newbie player as much when they do die.

If we are talking about balancing and such Haze, yes you are right that once people get the really good gear and with mages that means better staves, people will be able to one shot things and will be able to in your mind "throw the game off balance". You know and I know that BW's were already able to "One" shot things in Irendi last version as well, so I don't know how that really affects things in that regard, it's just now we will see more people able to do so. That's all just depending on how "Harcore" a player is in the game and if they are willing to get that moon or wizards staff.

The reason why Gaku didn't "fine" tweak the game is as I've said before in other posts is that he wanted to just revive the game and not cater to the "few" who still enjoyed the game. Have you noticed how stagnant and stale thelast sever became? If there is no growth, or if growth is limited then why not have a change? We both knew it would happen and the last server was up for what 2 years? I'd say that was more than enough time for people to do what they pleased in that time span, and now it's time to move on.



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I think Haze's point is that now nobody can level up to the point where their defensive stats or health will be high enough to shrug off a well-proffed spell. Additionally, melee classes are at a significant disadvantage since their damage does depend a lot more on level than a mage's.

Maybe putting the level cap back up to 35 is a good idea? Otherwise I think you'd have to dumb down spells a lot, and I'm not sure how well that would work.

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It's probably too late to lower the prof cap limit (why this was made higher when levels were lowered, I can't understand), so increasing level cap may be a solution. I don't know if the prof cap formula can be edited now without another p-wipe though, so I wouldn't know the consequences of making the world cap 35 and having profs get insanely high. Mages may still be incredibly deadly by getting spells in the 70's or something, and with the health they get from levels plus the boosted mana gain... I don't even know where to start imagining this hypothesis.

Good luck with this everyone. Hope there's a fix somewhere for ya.

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A level 35 character will have a prof cap of 91... By that time the increase in experience requirements will be so unrealistic nobody will ever cap anything out for a level 35 character.

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I'm not sure why the prof cap was set so high as I haven't had anything to do with FFO updates.

The prof cap should at least remained at 35 which is the cap for a level 20 character going off of the old prof cap formula.



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It was made higher so mages could learn all of their spells. Good idea to let us proff so high? Probably not. If I remember right, magic power mostly comes from proffs.

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Easy way to fix OP magic? Remove moon and wizard staves.

That way you can proff to your hearts content.

As it is now magic aint so bad, it's just that eventually when people get better staves such as and moon and wizard, it will be unbalanced.

Wizard staves are the worst though because they give the biggest jump in magic damage damage from the previous staff which is moon.

RW's still have less magic output than BW's and BW's and WW's will still outcure and outdamage most RW's who are at a equal playing skill level.

Stellarific wrote:

If I remember right, magic power mostly comes from proffs.

Actually most people's magic power is directly influenced by what staff they wield. Mage gear and rings are just fillers to boost it, even though it's a much smaller boost. It's also not as unbalanced because Mage gear is the most expensive, has less defense, and is easier to break.





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