Clearly losing to greens was overpowered...

If the game wasn't 3/8 archers and 3/8 mages, I'd totally agree. The problem is these things swarm and there really isn't anything you can to to keep them in front of you (other then being an archer or mage).

Again, let me repeat my self, I've been playing this build since before persistence, it has always been viable before this change. Not awesome, but viable.You guys keep saying I should add lists of abilities. The reality is, you're asking me to gut my entire build on a level 82. At the vary least if I'm going to get my entire build screwed this long after persistence, I need to be able to 100% unlearn so I can just go with one of the couple of viable builds they are pushing everyone to.

And no, you're not counting that those aren't bottom level abilities. I have to get all the prior ones first.

 

It's peanuts to get the abilities to level 40. 3882 experience for something that takes 1.2m to GM. Everything I listed AND those that you would need to get to unlock them fall into this category. Please stop trying to justify your build by saying it worked before. We're IN development. That means the game is changing... so YOU need to be able to change as well.

Edit: Adding a few defensive abilities is FAR from what I'd call gutting a build btw. Forcing you to go archer, gutting. Adding 2 abilities to otherwise do the same things you're doing... Nope.

 

Also as far as the game being mostly ranged things... That makes it SO easy if there's ANY sort of cover nearby. Playing ring around the rosie with a tree/pillar/wall/etc. makes 90+% of their attacks do jack diddly squat and 90+% of the scenes have some sort of structures that you can play ring around the rosie with. At some point you have to get creative. The mobs will move, so you move as well; find some cover and force them all in front again. I have yet to encounter any area where this was impossible.

If you're not willing to do all the things that you can do to make yourself better... well the game balance isn't the problem.

How could the game be balanced if you're fine WITHOUT those skills, especially the ones I listed that are so readily available..? Does that make anyone with them just un-killable gods then lol?

I understand the annoyance that you can't do what you've been doing, but at the same time you need to own up that you're missing key abilities designed for melee players and need to spend the hour or two to get them.

 

Ok I'll just change to adapt them screwing me over... OH WAIT, I CAN'T BECAUSE I CAN'T COMPLETELY UNLEARN. Please stop trying to justify an AWFUL change that did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to accomplish the alleged goal.

I have a number of defensive abilities in here. Well, it's good to know you're a supporter of a lower number viable builds. Because that's what a classless system should have, a lower number of viable builds. And it's NOT adding two abilities, it's 8, hell, I could take almost the entire Ranged Tree for what you're proposing.

Yes, because never getting close enough to actually attack is SOO EFFECTIVE.

Are you seriously arguing that it's balanced for a melee user to ABSOLUTELY HAVE to have water magic? That water MAGIC is designed for MELEE players? seriously?

The FACT remains, this DID NOTHING TO AFFECT even MY ability against melee. It ONLY hurt my ability against RANGED. That's the EXACT OPPOSITE of what what the goal of the change was. Tell me, how is this a good change?

 

So you're barking up the wrong tree entirely. The change was to make melee more viable in PvP. Zero to do with you vs melee mobs or NPC mobs in general.

The two skills was in reference to what would be in your deck. There is literally no cost whatsoever to you for grinding up a skill to 40 aside from 4k experience. It has no decay at that point and it doesn't dilute your deck either. You're completely off base here. Hell the welfare experience for logging in for 2 days would be enough experience to unlock all the skills I'm talking about. Why do you need to unlearn anything..? Like really, you need to seriously calm down and think this through.

And yes, I'm arguing that there are clearly low fizzle/no fizzle skills you do not have that are perfectly ideal for melee players. Even more so considering you're in light armor. Lets face it that the main difference between it and heavy armor is lower fizzle rate vs higher protection. If you're wearing light armor and completely against spells... well to each their own I guess. You have to own up that you're not using the tool-kit available to the fullest extent and can't expect balance to be made on that metric. You really need to accept that there are things you can do and aren't doing, for reasons beyond me.

It hurt YOUR play-style against ranged. Let's be specific. It matters. If you're not going to adapt to their movements and don't do anything about stuff getting behind you... well that's on you. I explained how you can go about having a better time with this. Try it, they will run right up to where you're hiding most the time or pretty close to it. I know it works. I've been doing it since the first archer I saw because line of sight/pillar kiting has been ingrained in me since WoW days.

 

Why should any skill be near GM for it to be useful?

I'm well aware of this; that's why I run a Subterfuge build. I am telling you this as someone who uses stealth to choose my targets, when and how to attack. The issue is that, when I start the fight, there is very little to do to keep me alive.

YOU may not have a problem with it, but accept the fact that there are quite a few of us who have issues with how the game handles combat balance.

If a hundred people have a problem and two thousand thinks it's okay, at the end of the day, you still have a problem worth looking into. The worst thing the dev could do is agree with your sentiments and ignore the issue completely. If they check it and it turns out that we're wrong, nothing happens. If they ignore it and you guys are wrong...

Having an easier time doesn't make it less of a problem. Your explanation isn't a solution either.

- "Doctor, my legs hurt when I try to walk"
- "No they don't! You can use pills to relieve the pain!"

I really hate the notion of people not believing that a problem exists just because they don't experiencing it first hand.

 

You don't need to have the skill at 80 to make it useful. It was merely meant as "It's not very difficult to get the skill to this level" type of argument. The skills I mentioned are useful from level 1 and simply get better.

I sympathize with you in the subt tree. Stealth sucks, horribly. I have no particular advice for you on that front if the assassin route is what you want to go for. 100% agree this needs some serious work.

Explaining how to combat a mechanic is more analogous to a physical therapy routine than prescribing medicine IMO. In the end, it does actually fix the problem of you getting destroyed by ranged things once you figure out how to do it. Medicine would be like me telling you to get a full set of plate armor and play that way =P.

In the end, a PLAY-STYLE not working vs a BUILD not working are entirely different concepts. I confess archers are assholes until you get some pretty decent avoidance stats going and even then you'll still get pot-shot crits for >100 damage. Right now it's a matter of maximizing defensive skills and either then being able to burn the thing to the ground ASAP, healing through whatever damage it does, or a mixture of the two. If you guys would just try taking the abilities I suggested and stopped telling me how you should never need some skill because it's in some blah blah blah tree... hell from the time of the start of this argument til now you could have all the skills I recommended AND they'd likely be ~40 skill level.

 

Then either make the change only affect PvP or they need to ACTUALLY PUT SOME THOUGHT into how it will affect PvE.

If I have to take an entire tree to get them, I might as well just switch what weapon tree (or armor tree) I'm using and be done with it. I'd be coming out ahead. The only thing prevent me from doing that is they won't let me. I think is awful that the number of viable builds is decreasing, but that seems to be the goal.

It's clear they think of this as 3 classes, rather then a truly classes system. That's why they are balancing their conception of classes, rather then balancing individual skills. You can see it in what they wrote: "as we believe it will provide greater opportunities for melee players," they didn't nerf it because it was too powerful, they nerfed it because one of their idealized classes was too powerful. At worst if there're going to screw people over by breaking their characters when they deviate too far from their preconceived classes, we need the ability to respec ourselves when we find they've completely broken us.

 

Not that I don't agree with a lot of what you're saying there, but in reality you're limiting yourself to a "class" system when you found it hard to swallow getting a buff just because it was in a magic tree. The fact that we're able to get buffs and mix/match how we achieve success across all the skill trees IMO is the essence of the classless system. I don't think it's such a terrible thing that there's a few "requisite" abilities for each kind of play style. I think that provides a solid baseline for the dev's to balance things. At the same time I sympathize with your plight that life just sucks donkey balls without those skills and I equally empathize the miserable feeling of getting **** on by green mobs. I went to heavy armor when I found myself in your position, but that doesn't mean you can't make light armor work. Plenty of people have and I probably could have too if I'd understood the buffs better back then.

Dodge was simply too good of a counter against melee characters because it was omni-directional (vs parry and block which are frontal only). Light armor in general was the problem being a bit too good in PvP, not a class so to speak as basically anyone (melee, archer, mage, mix) could have fallen under this category.

Please give the line of sight a serious try. It really does work, but it is most definitely a "softer" approach. Light armor is squish and a hard *in-your-face* approach that would work with heavy armor doesn't work as well. Light armor has a distinct advantage in the move speed aspect though so you're very easily able to re-position the field to your liking if things start to go south.

 

The problem is dodge isn't the only counter for melee, I have a list of other skills for defense, but they apply only to melee. The ONE they nerfed was the ONE that I could use against archery. Nerf something else. Nerf it only against melee. Give parry an ability to block ranged. There where a list of options that wouldn't have completely screwed me, and would have done MUCH better at what they claim to have wanted.

FTR: I actually DO have magic. Quite a lot of it, in fact (hell, my forum avatar is me back-to-back with my fire elemental), I just don't think it's reasonable that I should have to take EVERY magic tree to be viable with my dual-swords build which has been working moderately well for years. That's not balance. I'm not the one limiting myself, my build is just getting screwed. If they are going to screw me for not being their preconceived classes, at this point I might as well take one.

I HAVE been using lines of site. Did I mention that I've been running this build since before persistence? I'm fully aware of it's weaknesses, and I had a combination that was viable. Trying to stay out of line of site has serious issues in areas with long lines of site and high re-spawn rates. While there are places it can work, it doesn't work everywhere (unless you're an archer). The reality is, and remains, I got screwed. I was not that powerful to begin with and using tactics like that where possible was enough, but after this I'm ready to give up, I'll just go to one of their 3 classes, if they'll JUST LET ME DO IT.

 

I agree with you on this point. Your/our build should be viable of course. When the dodge change was announced, I posted that I was skeptical in the Chris blog commentary post. I also think the dodge change don't help melee at all, heavy build included. The only difference is that the light armor largely depends on dodge and I think that it's the main issue here. I'm not sure about all of this through. I didn't test for a long time.

As for your case specificaly, it's even harder to tell. I don't even know if you trained all the defensive passive skills.

 

I may not be specifically running [Ice Shield] and [Fortify Defense] but I AM using defensive skills! Quite a few actually. I even went as far as running around with heavy armour for a while and I roll my eyes at the idea of role-playing a stealthy rogue in plate mail (you already agree that subterfuge is whack so I'll leave you alone on that). Don't you think that requiring those specific skills to have as any sort of reliable defence just highlights the balance issues that this game has?

You say that those skills "can help" but why aren't my other skills doing enough? ANYTHING, really... I literally do NOT see a difference between fighting with or without some of these skills (at level 60, no less). How much (optional) food am I supposed to consume for me to survive encounters that are supposed to be "easy" at my level? How many buffs am I supposed to stack for it to be "enough"?

Are we supposed to run around with 3 attack skills and 10 different defensive (mildly effective) skills? Because that's how it looks like to me right about now.

That's highly unlikely because I still have plenty of skills that have yet to cross the level 40 and I would probably require to spam the skills like a lunatic for them to be high enough to be worth using.

[Dodge] at level 66 (yes, I've been leveling it up since persistence) doesn't even feel like it works at all...

At what level will [Dodge] ever start feeling like a defensive skill? The only reason why I like using [Dodge] is because of [Opportunity Strike]... THAT's a skill that actually does something!

Look, I appreciate that you're trying to help those who are having issues but, if people are having problems, it's probably for a good reason.

@Tiina Onir The only thing I can say is that I've noticed a huge discrepancy between playing the game in Auto-Attack mode and Free-Attack mode. That needs some major adjustments too.

This is where our views will most likely never come to an agreement. To me, a "classless system" just means that the user is free to use whatever skill they want to use. If I am required a set of specific skills to achieve my goals and that those skills are not the flavour that I want, or that there are multiple ways of building a character "wrong", then the classless system has failed and it might as well just feature a class system.

 

I'm going to disagree in one place, @Gix, It's pretty clear from this latest batch of changes that dodge was doing something.

Part of my frustration here is I've been running this character for a long time, and I've seen and adapted to a number of nerfs in a number of the trees I use.

When immolation took a nerf to drastically decrease it's range, I was okay with that because fire WAS a bit OP.
When banish took a nerf I could see the point about it being too strong for an AoE against undead (of course, now searing ray is hits the same number, harder... wee balance)
When root took a nerf, well rooting boss-fights was probably a bit much.

A lot of the nerfs I've taken where before persistence, so it really didn't bother me too much. Just take the differences into account when doing the mandatory recreation. Also, none of them made my build completely useless. At worst I could at least hold my own against a couple of greens, but that's not what's this is. This puts me at "if I don't isolate the green archers, 2-3 will walk all over me," combine that with the swarming and the respawning rate (usually such that they have line of sight to you) and it's just not fun. That's the time to hang it up; try something new. It's pretty clear to me they are balancing based on their notion of what classes should be, so let's try that.

 

@Gix
All you need to do to level those skills is just sit in town and use them. You don't actually need to do anything special except use them on CD for a while. I'm not particularly familiar with dodge, but the "tick" size for each time you use the skills I'm promoting and those under them are fairly large and they level fast. There's a training target that you can train things that need a target in the Brittany Estates bsmith shop (first shop on your right as you enter). I had no trouble leveling skills up once I had pooled experience and with the 10k exp a day now that really should be completely non-issue.

I'm not sure which defensive skills you're using, but let me suggest 5: Parry, Shield of Ice, Fortify Defense, Defensive Stance, and Glancing Blow/Evasion (same thing just glancing blow is way more potent). You can only have one shield spell active at any given time. The way I do it is I have D-stance, fort D, and Glancing blow locked with shield of ice and parry as drawn cards in their own slot. Keeps me to 4 slots designated for defensive things and my most important things are always available. With light armor I'd probably lock dodge over Evasion and make evasion a third drawn card.

My mining deck is like this:
1 - Locked Thrust
2-3 Drawn Double Slash, Whirling Blades
4 - Locked Rend (might change this out, haven't messed with it in 44 yet, but if the DoT can't crit it's gone)
5 - Drawn Healing Touch/Ray with a single Healing Grace
6 - Locked Body Slam
7 - Drawn Parry/Shield of Ice
8/9/10 Locked Glancing Blow, Fortify Defense, Defensive Stance.

If I'm fighting undead just extend 2-3 to 4 as well. This is by no means a "catch-all" - Just a quick example of something I found that works and might give you guys some ideas as to how to organize your decks. Best advice I can give you is to try your best to keep it small.

Food is cheap. Use it. No reason not to.

Under your version of a classless system where basically anything goes... How do you balance that? Specifically, how do you avoid having a game so completely void of difficulty when someone min/max's the system? My personal opinion is that you, by definition, can't so I am legitimately curious.

@Tiina Onir
Nobody told you that you needed EVERY magic. I suggested one water buff as a highly useful and effective physical damage defense, especially when you're not liking archers. Forgive me, but I just don't see how not letting you dodge with your back turned to things has destroyed everything. God only knows I NEVER let something pot shot me from behind because the odds of death increase crazily with the added crit chance.

The 200/290 depending HP Hardened Skeleton Archers that I think you're referring to (pretty sure they were the only archers green to me at 82)... How long does it take you to kill one? I know for a fact not having a stun is a severe handicap for melee damage. I could pretty much stun and 2 shot one of those when they were yellow or sit and swing at the bastard for quite a while if I was in front of it.

 

Scanning the pages I still don't know what happened beside you got killed and one or more archers were involved.
So, what actually happened?
Is this a l2p thing or is this missbalancing?
We won't know until you tell us what happened. Until then it's just another skill rant that is easy to ignore.

 

Where I'm sitting, the math isn't what I care about. I don't really care about something being 10% more effective than it should or whatever. I'll let the number-crunchers worry about that. When I press that ([Dodge], or any other skill) button, I want to feel the usefulness of that skill without having the game telling me it's good in a combat log.

What frustrates me is when there are skills that are visibly effective and then there are others that are so... subtle... that you can't make head or tails of their use until you level the bejeezus out of it.
When you first try out [Thrust] at level 1, for example, you can take out a third of the health of an enemy (at your level) without seeing any numbers flying on the screen. The numeric value of the output isn't important; when I stab stuff with it, I know that stuff is going to die pretty quickly. With [Dodge], I don't see myself taking less hits and I still die at a very similar to pace; if it wasn't for the combat text telling me that I dodged, I wouldn't know when to activate [Opportunity Strike]. I wouldn't know that Dodge is actually doing anything; it barely does.

"dodge was doing something" you say... yeah, but at WHAT level?

They're so afraid of making a few skills too strong that you end up HAVING to stack multiple buffs (whenever magic or from a consumable) just to do the content the game is telling you that you should have no issues tackling... Of course I'm going to have problems when someone is telling me that EVERYTHING that I'm doing to keep myself alive isn't "enough" and that I should stack more defensive skills.

And you don't see anything inherently wrong with that? This isn't a solution, this is a bandaid and a pretty anti-gamer one at that.

What do you mean? SotA's not the first game to feature a classless system. SotA even has the perfect setup for it considering that the amount of Focus you have is tied to a skill. A specialist is a one-trick pony, he should be able to do that one thing VERY well and he should suck at others things. A jack-of-all-trades has the advantage of using every ability but either lacks resources or power. Someone with more defensive abilities should be good at defence and lack attack power, vice-versa.

None of this is applied in SotA. The "meta game" is to min-max just to get even with the game; you even need to manage how and when you train your skills. It's devoid of flavour because everyone is using roughly the same skills... especially the defensive ones. The only real variant is people might have the same skills at different levels, but when you consider the fact that a skill's "usefulness" only comes into play at particular levels... it doesn't really matter.

Whenever someone is having problems with the game, the majority of the people in the forums are going to say "Well, you're just not using enough. You need to grind this skill or that skill"... So, you need all of these skills to make your character work because "Classless! Use everything!" yet the game explicitly tells you to only train one or two skills at a time.

There is no purpose for anyone to run around with (and use) the [Dodge] skill at level 20 or 40, for example.

... so "use everything" but "don't level all of them at once" and "most are pretty useless before level 40-60". Do you not see how massively backwards this is?

I would even argue that class systems like the one in D&D (3.1E, I'm not familiar with 5E just yet) can be so flexible that you might as well call it classless. Hardly any skill is really locked to any particular class (except a rare few like [Perform]). You can build ANY type of character you can think of (with any sort of flavour) and, unless you mess up royally, the character is going to be able to perform relatively well.

Other games, like Albion Online, assigns your role (and flavour) based on your equipment. If you wield a dagger and wear leather, your abilities are all related to stabbing and getting out of the way. Different daggers and different leather suits will give you different abilities... like having stealth instead of sprint, bleeds and AoE instead of stabs, etc. A bit more restrictive but there are no classes, still. This game "levels up" your combat proficiency on a "per item" basis like getting better at using maces by using maces, etc... but the moment you equip a mace at level 1, you immediately feel it's practicality.

Also, I'm not this game's game designer; it ain't my job to tell them how to fix it. I see a flaw, I point it out. They either fix the problem, or they leave it as is and I will play the game if I enjoy it.

 

This is what I was referring to. If you're free to do whatever you want and expect success, how do you balance that?

There are basically zero skills that are *only* useful at higher skill levels. This is your misconceived notion as they simply get better as you level them up. What do you suggest otherwise? Seems that, like with anything, you'd expect more benefit from something as it grows so I'm at a loss as to why you're unhappy that a low level skill (and anything below 40 is low level) isn't providing this serendipitous difference. The fact is that the base whatever avoidance fortify defense adds at level 1 is still good, it's just not nearly as good as the however much the level 80 version adds AND as with any avoidance based system, the more you have the more you notice the effect. Has nothing to do with the skill being "unusable" or "useless" at lower levels.

I'm just as much of a "fan" as you are of the pooled experience system and having to turn off leveling of skills and then level up a bunch of completely useless **** or things that I can't otherwise level while I'm out and about in town. I hear you 100% loud and clear BUT this is what we've got and it's not going to change this close to release.

Now I'm not sure what the tutorials have been shifted to describe lately, but you do not need to only level 1-2 skills at a time, ESPECIALLY at the low end. It takes 4k experience for most skills to get a skill to 40, with the stat skills being the worst at 40k. That is peanuts to even the day 1 player. Level up EVERYTHING you might even ever consider wanting to 40 without batting an eye. Quite frankly as long as you have some semblance of an idea how to play video games, a full toolkit (all skills you need unlocked) and everything minimally at 40, you should have no problems in this game before 4-5 star areas. Eat 2 different food, get your 2 10 hour blessings, and you're off to the races. The oracle's welfare 500 gold is more than enough to accomplish this.

At this point I've said what you can do to get past this admittedly annoying stage of the game. Balls in your court to do it or fold. It's a fairly enjoyable game once you get rolling.

 

Did you read any of the thread at all? I'm getting completely destroyed by GREEN archers all the sudden using a melee build that I've been using for years because... they want to give melee more opportunities against archers. Brilliant.

Clearly, you've got a build you like. Good for you. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

No this is not enjoyable. It WAS enjoyable, it's not now (hence starting a thread in the "feedback" section). I had the ball rolling reasonably, but I got curb-stomped "balanced". Rather then continue to play a game they've made unenjoyable, I'll just move on. The ball is in their court, because I won't keep spending my money on a game isn't fun.

 

I just soloed 2 of the Skeleton Archers in The Rise Lich room which were red to me with out going less then 3/4 health. This is while wearing leather and no shield. I probably could of soloed three at once but one will always try to run behind you and a tactical retreat makes life easier.

Getting a high avoidance is very easy to do and your dodge stacks on top of that. Both of those allow you to almost completely mitigate archers. All the skills that I use to make light armor effective are listed in this thread and every other "Archers are OP" threads out there.

SOTA is not a class system. If you choose to not go outside your "class" and fail, that is on you. As mentioned in this thread, it is very cheap and easy to level a few additional skills.

 

Yes. But green archers aren't = green archers. More context would be needed here.