At the moment, the balancing seems very odd to me.
First of all, balance is always more of a PvP issue - I prefer a well balanced PvE gameplay too, but I don’t care as much if my char is 30% weaker if it is not a matter of losing all my gear to a PvP opponent but having a higher difficulty in a dungeon.
For example, you try to balance out the light and heavy armor through resource cost and mobility. Light is less expensive and more mobile - heavy is better protection. But this does simply not work out for three reasons.
- I don’t care if I am not mobile enough to dodge an attack because I don’t want to stop my combo anyways. If the enemy is in weaker armor and we both do the full combo - guess who wins. Thus, not having to stop my attack for a dodge-roll actually is the bigger advantage than being able to do 2 more rolls. To fix this, you could consider integrating rolls into combos. C1-C2-dodge-C4. Also, the difference probably should be much more than 2 more rolls. More like 20 rolls in light armor. Even more with agility.
- Most people ride into PvP on horseback. And at this point, there is no benefit for light and medium armor at all. You are as mobile as your horse is. To fix this, Armor weight should influence horse speed or stamina. Light cavalry should outrun the heavy one though be weaker once caught. Also being able to dodge more often would help light fighters on the ground to deal with riders.
- Well, no PvP player I ever talked to builds a considerably weaker armor just because it is cheaper. We go for the good stuff. Always and ever. It would help if you would ban the idea completely from your mind, that minor differences in cost had an influence on players picking their gear. Well if two items are the same, I pick the cheaper, yes. But in any other case, I pick the best gear I can get.
To fix this, please consider raising the cost of light and medium armor to the same level as heavy but at the same time also raise the benefit of it.
Another example is the attributes. Well, we have 7 of them, you know. There should be a role for each of them set to 50. If you don’t have a role for each of them, get rid of it. (There is really no damage to the game if you remove useless stuff. Or merge 2 attributes to one like grit and agility, or strength and accuracy.) If you have them in the game, just make them useful. What is the role of a survival char? Other than double farming you get halfway into it. It doesn’t make you tankier than vitality. What is the point of 50 agility? The armor doesn’t help a lot when you are in black knight gear already. All for jumping over the one wall in the game? Come on, it’s faster to just blow it up than reskilling back and forth just to see what is behind.
Make a niche where an attribute is the best way to go, even if you skill it to 50, or get rid of the attribute. Instead of armor, maybe let agility chars run slightly faster. There are many possible tweaks I can think of.
Yet other examples are archers losing archery battles against melees in Siptah gear, as already mentioned in another thread, or Katanas just doing no combo damage to heavy attacks as mentioned as well.
Very obvious is the miss balancing if you checkout the Siptah gear. You get three different heavy armors for strength/vitality in heavy armor meta + 2 dungeon items that raise strength by 17 points together. While there is not a single heavy armor for the accuracy or a single accuracy armor in dungeons. The further you go away from the meta, the thinner the air gets. No heavy armor for survival, for agility, or encumbrance in Siptah. In Exiled Lands, there has always been gear for every build.
I understand, that you please the most people by adding options for meta builds.
But I don’t think a game developer should create a meta in the first place and should instead encourage a diversity of builds.
Even if I get crucified like a true exile for this - if something becomes meta, it is a distinct sign, it should be nerfed.
Thank you for reading!